>> Welcome back to The Cube's coverage of HPE's GreenLake announcements. My name is Dave Vellante and you're watching the Cube. I'm here with Holger Mueller, who is an analyst at Constellation Research. And Matt Maccaux is the global field CTO of Ezmeral software at HPE. We're going to talk data. Gents, great to see you. >> Holger: Great to be here. >> So, Holger, what do you see happening in the data market? Obviously data's hot, you know, digital, I call it the force marks to digital. Everybody realizes wow, digital business, that's a data business. We've got to get our data act together. What do you see in the market is the big trends, the big waves? >> We are all young enough or old enough to remember when people were saying data is the new oil, right? Nothing has changed, right? Data is the key ingredient, which matters to enterprise, which they have to store, which they have to enrich, which they have to use for their decision-making. It's the foundation of everything. If you want to go into machine learning or (indistinct) It's growing very fast, right? We have the capability now to look at all the data in enterprise, which weren't able 10 years ago to do that. So data is main center to everything. >> Yeah, it's even more valuable than oil, I think, right? 'Cause with oil, you can only use once. Data, you can, it's kind of polyglot. I can go in different directions and it's amazing, right? >> It's the beauty of digital products, right? They don't get consumed, right? They don't get fired up, right? And no carbon footprint, right? "Oh wait, wait, we have to think about carbon footprint." Different story, right? So to get to the data, you have to spend some energy. >> So it's that simple, right? I mean, it really is. Data is fundamental. It's got to be at the core. And so Matt, what are you guys announcing today, and how does that play into what Holger just said? >> What we're announcing today is that organizations no longer need to make a difficult choice. Prior to today, organizations were thinking if I'm going to do advanced machine learning and really exploit my data, I have to go to the cloud. But all my data's still on premises because of privacy rules, industry rules. And so what we're announcing today, through GreenLake Services, is a cloud services way to deliver that same cloud-based analytical capability. Machine learning, data engineering, through hybrid analytics. It's a unified platform to tie together everything from data engineering to advance data science. And we're also announcing the world's first Kubernetes native object store, that is hybrid cloud enabled. Which means you can keep your data connected across clouds in a data fabric, or Dave, as you say, mesh. >> Okay, can we dig into that a little bit? So, you're essentially saying that, so you're going to have data in both places, right? Public cloud, edge, on-prem, and you're saying, HPE is announcing a capability to connect them, I think you used the term fabric. I'm cool, by the way, with the term fabric, we can, we'll parse that out another time. >> I love for you to discuss textiles. Fabrics vs. mesh. For me, every fabric breaks down to mesh if you put it on a microscope. It's the same thing. >> Oh wow, now that's really, that's too detailed for my brain, right this moment. But, you're saying you can connect all those different estates because data by its very nature is everywhere. You're going to unify that, and what, that can manage that through sort of a single view? >> That's right. So, the management is centralized. We need to be able to know where our data is being provisioned. But again, we don't want organizations to feel like they have to make the trade off. If they want to use cloud surface A in Azure, and cloud surface B in GCP, why not connect them together? Why not allow the data to remain in sync or not, through a distributed fabric? Because we use that term fabric over and over again. But the idea is let the data be where it most naturally makes sense, and exploit it. Monetization is an old tool, but exploit it in a way that works best for your users and applications. >> In sync or not, that's interesting. So it's my choice? >> That's right. Because the back of an automobile could be a teeny tiny, small edge location. It's not always going to be in sync until it connects back up with a training facility. But we still need to be able to manage that. And maybe that data gets persisted to a core data center. Maybe it gets pushed to the cloud, but we still need to know where that data is, where it came from, its lineage, what quality it has, what security we're going to wrap around that, that all should be part of this fabric. >> Okay. So, you've got essentially a governance model, at least maybe you're working toward that, and maybe it's not all baked today, but that's the north star. Is this fabric connect, single management view, governed in a federated fashion? >> Right. And it's available through the most common API's that these applications are already written in. So, everybody today's talking S3. I've got to get all of my data, I need to put it into an object store, it needs to be S3 compatible. So, we are extending this capability to be S3 native. But it's optimized for performance. Today, when you put data in an object store, it's kind of one size fits all. Well, we know for those streaming analytical capabilities, those high performance workloads, it needs to be tuned for that. So, how about I give you a very small object on the very fastest disk in your data center and maybe that cheaper location somewhere else. And so we're giving you that balance as part of the overall management estate. >> Holger, what's your take on this? I mean, Frank Slootman says we'll never, we're not going halfway house. We're never going to do on-prem, we're only in the cloud. So that basically says, okay, he's ignoring a pretty large market by choice. You're not, Matt, you must love those words. But what do you see as the public cloud players, kind of the moves on-prem, particularly in this realm? >> Well, we've seen lots of cloud players who were only cloud coming back towards on-premise, right? We call it the next generation compute platform where I can move data and workloads between on-premise and ideally, multiple clouds, right? Because I don't want to be logged into public cloud vendors. And we see two trends, right? One trend is the traditional hardware supplier of on-premise has not scaled to cloud technology in terms of big data analytics. They just missed the boat for that in the past, this is changing. You guys are a traditional player and changing this, so congratulations. The other thing, is there's been no innovation for the on-premise tech stack, right? The only technology stack to run modern application has been invested for a long time in the cloud. So what we see since two, three years, right? With the first one being Google with Kubernetes, that are good at GKE on-premise, then onto us, right? Bringing their tech stack with compromises to on-premises, right? Acknowledging exactly what we're talking about, the data is everywhere, data is important. Data gravity is there, right? It's just the network's fault, where the networks are too slow, right? If you could just move everything anywhere we want like juggling two balls, then we'd be in different place. But that's the not enough investment for the traditional IT players for that stack, and the modern stack being there. And now every public cloud player has an on-premise offering with different flavors, different capabilities. >> I want to give you guys Dave's story of kind of history and you can kind of course correct, and tell me how this, Matt, maybe fits into what's happened with customers. So, you know, before Hadoop, obviously you had to buy a big Oracle database and you know, you running Unix, and you buy some big storage subsystem if you had any money left over, you know, you maybe, you know, do some actual analytics. But then Hadoop comes in, lowers the cost, and then S3 kneecaps the entire Hadoop market, right? >> I wouldn't say that, I wouldn't agree. Sorry to jump on your history. Because the fascinating thing, what Hadoop brought to the enterprise for the first time, you're absolutely right, affordable, right, to do that. But it's not only about affordability because S3 as the affordability. The big thing is you can store information without knowing how to analyze it, right? So, you mentioned Snowflake, right? Before, it was like an Oracle database. It was Starschema for data warehouse, and so on. You had to make decisions how to store that data because compute capabilities, storage capabilities, were too limited, right? That's what Hadoop blew away. >> I agree, no schema on, right. But then that created data lakes, which create a data swamps, and that whole mess, and then Spark comes in and help clean it out, okay, fine. So, we're cool with that. But the early days of Hadoop, you had, companies would have a Hadoop monolith, they probably had their data catalog in Excel or Google sheets, right? And so now, my question to you, Matt, is there's a lot of customers that are still in that world. What do they do? They got an option to go to the cloud. I'm hearing that you're giving them another option? >> That's right. So we know that data is going to move to the cloud, as I mentioned. So let's keep that data in sync, and governed, and secured, like you expect. But for the data that can't move, let's bring those cloud native services to your data center. And so that's a big part of this announcement is this unified analytics. So that you can continue to run the tools that you want to today while bringing those next generation tools based on Apache Spark, using libraries like Delta Lake so you can go anything from Tableaux through Presto sequel, to advance machine learning in your Jupiter notebooks on-premises where you know your data is secured. And if it happens to sit in existing Hadoop data lake, that's fine too. We don't want our customers to have to make that trade off as they go from one to the other. Let's give you the best of both worlds, or as they say, you can eat your cake and have it too. >> Okay, so. Now let's talk about sort of developers on-prem, right? They've been kind of... If they really wanted to go cloud native, they had to go to the cloud. Do you feel like this changes the game? Do on-prem developers, do they want that capability? Will they lean into that capability? Or will they say no, no, the cloud is cool. What's your take? >> I love developers, right? But it's about who makes the decision, who pays the developers, right? So the CXOs in the enterprises, they need exactly, this is why we call the next-gen computing platform, that you can move your code assets. It's very hard to build software, so it's very valuable to an enterprise. I don't want to have limited to one single location or certain computing infrastructure, right? Luckily, we have Kubernetes to be able to move that, but I want to be able to deploy it on-premise if I have to. I want to deploy it, would be able to deploy in the multiple clouds which are available. And that's the key part. And that makes developers happy too, because the code you write has got to run multiple places. So you can build more code, better code, instead of building the same thing multiple places, because a little compiler change here, a little compiler change there. Nobody wants to do portability testing and rewriting, recertified for certain platforms. >> The head of application development or application architecture and the business are ultimately going to dictate that, number one. Number two, you're saying that developers shouldn't care because it can write once, run anywhere. >> That is the promise, and that's the interesting thing which is available now, 'cause people know, thanks to Kubernetes as a container platform and the abstraction which containers provide, and that makes everybody's life easier. But it goes much more higher than the Head of Apps, right? This is the digital transformation strategy, the next generation application the company has to build as a response to a pandemic, as a pivot, as digital transformation, as digital disruption capability. >> I mean, I see a lot of organizations basically modernizing by building some kind of abstraction to their backend systems, modernizing it through cloud native, and then saying, hey, as you were saying Holger, run it anywhere you want, or connect to those cloud apps, or connect across clouds, connect to other on-prem apps, and eventually out to the edge. Is that what you see? >> It's so much easier said than done though. Organizations have struggled so much with this, especially as we start talking about those data intensive app and workloads. Kubernetes and Hadoop? Up until now, organizations haven't been able to deploy those services. So, what we're offering as part of these GreenLake unified analytics services, a Kubernetes runtime. It's not ours. It's top of branch open source. And open source operators like Apache Spark, bringing in Delta Lake libraries, so that if your developer does want to use cloud native tools to build those next generation advanced analytics applications, but prod is still on-premises, they should just be able to pick that code up, and because we are deploying 100% open-source frameworks, the code should run as is. >> So, it seems like the strategy is to basically build, now that's what GreenLake is, right? It's a cloud. It's like, hey, here's your options, use whatever you want. >> Well, and it's your cloud. That's, what's so important about GreenLake, is it's your cloud, in your data center or co-lo, with your data, your tools, and your code. And again, we know that organizations are going to go to a multi or hybrid cloud location and through our management capabilities, we can reach out if you don't want us to control those, not necessarily, that's okay, but we should at least be able to monitor and audit the data that sits in those other locations, the applications that are running, maybe I register your GKE cluster. I don't manage it, but at least through a central pane of glass, I can tell the Head of Applications, what that person's utilization is across these environments. >> You know, and you said something, Matt, that struck, resonated with me, which is this is not trivial. I mean, not as simple to do. I mean what you see, you see a lot of customers or companies, what they're doing, vendors, they'll wrap their stack in Kubernetes, shove it in the cloud, it's essentially hosted stack, right? And, you're kind of taking a different approach. You're saying, hey, we're essentially building a cloud that's going to connect all these estates. And the key is you're going to have to keep, and you are, I think that's probably part of the reason why we're here, announcing stuff very quickly. A lot of innovation has to come out to satisfy that demand that you're essentially talking about. >> Because we've oversimplified things with containers, right? Because containers don't have what matters for data, and what matters for enterprise, which is persistence, right? I have to be able to turn my systems down, or I don't know when I'm going to use that data, but it has to stay there. And that's not solved in the container world by itself. And that's what's coming now, the heavy lifting is done by people like HPE, to provide that persistence of the data across the different deployment platforms. And then, there's just a need to modernize my on-premise platforms. Right? I can't run on a server which is two, three years old, right? It's no longer safe, it doesn't have trusted identity, all the good stuff that you need these days, right? It cannot be operated remotely, or whatever happens there, where there's two, three years, is long enough for a server to have run their course, right? >> Well you're a software guy, you hate hardware anyway, so just abstract that hardware complexity away from you. >> Hardware is the necessary evil, right? It's like TSA. I want to go somewhere, but I have to go through TSA. >> But that's a key point, let me buy a service, if I need compute, give it to me. And if I don't, I don't want to hear about it, right? And that's kind of the direction that you're headed. >> That's right. >> Holger: That's what you're offering. >> That's right, and specifically the services. So GreenLake's been offering infrastructure, virtual machines, IaaS, as a service. And we want to stop talking about that underlying capability because it's a dial tone now. What organizations and these developers want is the service. Give me a service or a function, like I get in the cloud, but I need to get going today. I need it within my security parameters, access to my data, my tools, so I can get going as quickly as possible. And then beyond that, we're going to give you that cloud billing practices. Because, just because you're deploying a cloud native service, if you're still still being deployed via CapEx, you're not solving a lot of problems. So we also need to have that cloud billing model. >> Great. Well Holger, we'll give you the last word, bring us home. >> It's very interesting to have the cloud qualities of subscription-based pricing maintained by HPE as the cloud vendor from somewhere else. And that gives you that flexibility. And that's very important because data is essential to enterprise processes. And there's three reasons why data doesn't go to the cloud, right? We know that. It's privacy residency requirement, there is no cloud infrastructure in the country. It's performance, because network latency plays a role, right? Especially for critical appraisal. And then there's not invented here, right? Remember Charles Phillips saying how old the CIO is? I know if they're going to go to the cloud or not, right? So, it was not invented here. These are the things which keep data on-premise. You know that load, and HP is coming on with a very interesting offering. >> It's physics, it's laws, it's politics, and sometimes it's cost, right? Sometimes it's too expensive to move and migrate. Guys, thanks so much. Great to see you both. >> Matt: Dave, it's always a pleasure. All right, and thank you for watching the Cubes continuous coverage of HPE's big GreenLake announcements. Keep it right there for more great content. (calm music begins)

(upbeat music) >> Welcome back to theCUBE's coverage of HPE GreenLake announcements. We're seeing the transition of Hewlett Packard Enterprise as a company, yes they're going all in for as a service, but we're also seeing a transition from a hardware company to what I look at increasingly as a data management company. We're going to talk today to Vishal Lall who's GreenLake cloud services solutions at HPE and Matt Maccaux who's a global field CTO, Ezmeral Software at HPE. Gents welcome back to theCube. Good to see you again. >> Thank you for having us here. >> Thanks Dave. >> So Vishal let's start with you. What are the big mega trends that you're seeing in data? When you talk to customers, when you talk to partners, what are they telling you? What's your optic say? >> Yeah, I mean, I would say the first thing is data is getting even more important. It's not that data hasn't been important for enterprises, but as you look at the last, I would say 24 to 36 months has become really important, right? And it's become important because customers look at data and they're trying to stitch data together across different sources, whether it's marketing data, it's supply chain data, it's financial data. And they're looking at that as a source of competitive advantage. So, customers were able to make sense out of the data, enterprises that are able to make sense out of that data, really do have a competitive advantage, right? And they actually get better business outcomes. So that's really important, right? If you start looking at, where we are from an analytics perspective, I would argue we are in maybe the third generation of data analytics. Kind of the first one was in the 80's and 90's with data warehousing kind of EDW. A lot of companies still have that, but think of Teradata, right? The second generation more in the 2000's was around data lakes, right? And that was all about Hadoop and others, and really the difference between the first and the second generation was the first generation was more around structured data, right? Second became more about unstructured data, but you really couldn't run transactions on that data. And I would say, now we are entering this third generation, which is about data lake houses, right? Customers what they want really is, or enterprises, what they want really is they want structured data. They want unstructured data altogether. They want to run transactions on them, right? They want to use the data to mine it for machine learning purposes, right? Use it for SQL as well as non-SQL, right? And that's kind of where we are today. So, that's really what we are hearing from our customers in terms of at least the top trends. And that's how we are thinking about our strategy in context of those trends. >> So lake house use that term. It's an increasing popular term. It connotes, "Okay, I've got the best of data warehouse "and I've got the best of data lake. "I'm going to try to simplify the data warehouse. "And I'm going to try to clean up the data swamp "if you will." Matt, so, talk a little bit more about what you guys are doing specifically and what that means for your customers. >> Well, what we think is important is that there has to be a hybrid solution, that organizations are going to build their analytics. They're going to deploy algorithms, where the data either is being produced or where it's going to be stored. And that could be anywhere. That could be in the trunk of a vehicle. It could be in a public cloud or in many cases, it's on-premises in the data center. And where organizations struggle is they feel like they have to make a choice and a trade-off going from one to the other. And so what HPE is offering is a way to unify the experiences of these different applications, workloads, and algorithms, while connecting them together through a fabric so that the experience is tied together with consistent, security policies, not having to refactor your applications and deploying tools like Delta lake to ensure that the organization that needs to build a data product in one cloud or deploy another data product in the trunk of an automobile can do so. >> So, Vishal I wonder if we could talk about some of the patterns that you're seeing with customers as you go to deploy solutions. Are there other industry patterns? Are there any sort of things you can share that you're discerning? >> Yeah, no, absolutely. As we kind of hear back from our customers across industries, I think the problem sets are very similar, right? Whether you look at healthcare customers. You look at telco customers, you look at consumer goods, financial services, they're all quite similar. I mean, what are they looking for? They're looking for making sense, making business value from the data, breaking down the silos that I think Matt spoke about just now, right? How do I stitch intelligence across my data silos to get more business intelligence out of it. They're looking for openness. I think the problem that's happened is over time, people have realized that they are locked in with certain vendors or certain technologies. So, they're looking for openness and choice. So that's an important one that we've at least heard back from our customers. The other one is just being able to run machine learning on algorithms on the data. I think that's another important one for them as well. And I think the last one I would say is, TCO is important as customers over the last few years have realized going to public cloud is starting to become quite expensive, to run really large workloads on public cloud, especially as they want to egress data. So, cost performance, trade offs are starting to become really important and starting to enter into the conversation now. So, I would say those are some of the key things and themes that we are hearing from customers cutting across industries. >> And you talked to Matt about basically being able to essentially leave the data where it belongs, bring the compute to data. We talk about that all the time. And so that has to include on-prem, it's got to include the cloud. And I'm kind of curious on the edge, where you see that 'cause that's... Is that an eventual piece? Is that something that's actually moving in parallel? There's lot of fuzziness as an observer in the edge. >> I think the edge is driving the most interesting use cases. The challenge up until recently has been, well, I think it's always been connectivity, right? Whether we have poor connection, little connection or no connection, being able to asynchronously deploy machine learning jobs into some sort of remote location. Whether it's a very tiny edge or it's a very large edge, like a factory floor, the challenge as Vishal mentioned is that if we're going to deploy machine learning, we need some sort of consistency of runtime to be able to execute those machine learning models. Yes, we need consistent access to data, but consistent access in terms of runtime is so important. And I think Hadoop got us started down this path, the ability to very efficiently and cost-effectively run large data jobs against large data sets. And it attempted to work into the source ecosystem, but because of the monolithic deployment, the tightly coupling of the compute and the data, it never achieved that cloud native vision. And so what as role in HPE through GreenLake services is delivering with open source-based Kubernetes, open source Apache Spark, open source Delta lake libraries, those same cloud native services that you can develop on your workstation, deploy in your data center in the same way you deploy through automation out at the edge. And I think that is what's so critical about what we're going to see over the next couple of years. The edge is driving these use cases, but it's consistency to build and deploy those machine learning models and connect it consistently with data that's what's going to drive organizations to success. >> So you're saying you're able to decouple, to compute from the storage. >> Absolutely. You wouldn't have a cloud if you didn't decouple compute from storage. And I think this is sort of the demise of Hadoop was forcing that coupling. We have high-speed networks now. Whether I'm in a cloud or in my data center, even at the edge, I have high-performance networks, I can now do distributed computing and separate compute from storage. And so if I want to, I can have high-performance compute for my really data intensive applications and I can have cost-effective storage where I need to. And by separating that off, I can now innovate at the pace of those individual tools in that opensource ecosystem. >> So, can I stay on this for a second 'cause you certainly saw Snowflake popularize that, they were kind of early on. I don't know if they're the first, but they certainly one of the most successful. And you saw Amazon Redshift copied it. And Redshift was kind of a bolt on. What essentially they did is they teared off. You could never turn off the compute. You still had to pay for a little bit compute, that's kind of interesting. Snowflakes at the t-shirt sizes, so there's trade offs there. There's a lot of ways to skin the cat. How did you guys skin the cat? >> What we believe we're doing is we're taking the best of those worlds. Through GreenLake cloud services, the ability to pay for and provision on demand the computational services you need. So, if someone needs to spin up a Delta lake job to execute a machine learning model, you spin up that. We're of course spinning that up behind the scenes. The job executes, it spins down, and you only pay for what you need. And we've got reserve capacity there. So you, of course, just like you would in the public cloud. But more importantly, being able to then extend that through a fabric across clouds and edge locations, so that if a customer wants to deploy in some public cloud service, like we know we're going to, again, we're giving that consistency across that, and exposing it through an S3 API. >> So, Vishal at the end of the day, I mean, I love to talk about the plumbing and the tech, but the customer doesn't care, right? They want the lowest cost. They want the fastest outcome. They want the greatest value. My question is, how are you seeing data organizations evolve to sort of accommodate this third era of this next generation? >> Yeah. I mean, the way at least, kind of look at, from a customer perspective, what they're trying to do is first of all, I think Matt addressed it somewhat. They're looking at a consistent experience across the different groups of people within the company that do something to data, right? It could be a SQL users. People who's just writing a SQL code. It could be people who are writing machine learning models and running them. It could be people who are writing code in Spark. Right now they are, you know the experience is completely disjointed across them, across the three types of users or more. And so that's one thing that they trying to do, is just try to get that consistency. We spoke about performance. I mean the disjointedness between compute and storage does provide the agility, because there customers are looking for elasticity. How can I have an elastic environment? So, that's kind of the other thing they're looking at. And performance and DCU, I think a big deal now. So, I think that that's definitely on a customer's mind. So, as enterprises are looking at their data journey, those are the at least the attributes that they are trying to hit as they organize themselves to make the most out of the data. >> Matt, you and I have talked about this sort of trend to the decentralized future. We're sort of hitting on that. And whether it's in a first gen data warehouse, second gen data lake, data hub, bucket, whatever, that essentially should ideally stay where it is, wherever it should be from a performance standpoint, from a governance standpoint and a cost perspective, and just be a node on this, I like the term data mesh, but be a node on that, and essentially allow the business owners, those with domain context to you've mentioned data products before to actually build data products, maybe air quotes, but a data product is something that can be monetized. Maybe it cuts costs. Maybe it adds value in other ways. How do you see HPE fitting into that long-term vision which we know is going to take some time to play out? >> I think what's important for organizations to realize is that they don't have to go to the public cloud to get that experience they're looking for. Many organizations are still reluctant to push all of their data, their critical data, that is going to be the next way to monetize business into the public cloud. And so what HPE is doing is bringing the cloud to them. Bringing that cloud from the infrastructure, the virtualization, the containerization, and most importantly, those cloud native services. So, they can do that development rapidly, test it, using those open source tools and frameworks we spoke about. And if that model ends up being deployed on a factory floor, on some common X86 infrastructure, that's okay, because the lingua franca is Kubernetes. And as Vishal mentioned, Apache Spark, these are the common tools and frameworks. And so I want organizations to think about this unified analytics experience, where they don't have to trade off security for cost, efficiency for reliability. HPE through GreenLake cloud services is delivering all of that where they need to do it. >> And what about the speed to quality trade-off? Have you seen that pop up in customer conversations, and how are organizations dealing with that? >> Like I said, it depends on what you mean by speed. Do you mean a computational speed? >> No, accelerating the time to insights, if you will. We've got to go faster, faster, agile to the data. And it's like, "Whoa, move fast break things. "Whoa, whoa. "What about data quality and governance and, right?" They seem to be at odds. >> Yeah, well, because the processes are fundamentally broken. You've got a developer who maybe is able to spin up an instance in the public cloud to do their development, but then to actually do model training, they bring it back on-premises, but they're waiting for a data engineer to get them the data available. And then the tools to be provisioned, which is some esoteric stack. And then runtime is somewhere else. The entire process is broken. So again, by using consistent frameworks and tools, and bringing that computation to where the data is, and sort of blowing this construct of pipelines out of the water, I think is what is going to drive that success in the future. A lot of organizations are not there yet, but that's I think aspirationally where they want to be. >> Yeah, I think you're right. I think that is potentially an answer as to how you, not incrementally, but revolutionized sort of the data business. Last question, is talking about GreenLake, how this all fits in. Why GreenLake? Why do you guys feel as though it's differentiable in the market place? >> So, I mean, something that you asked earlier as well, time to value, right? I think that's a very important attribute and kind of a design factor as we look at GreenLake. If you look at GreenLake overall, kind of what does it stand for? It stands for experience. How do we make sure that we have the right experience for the users, right? We spoke about it in context of data. How do we have a similar experience for different users of data, but just broadly across an enterprise? So, it's all about experience. How do you automate it, right? How do you automate the workloads? How do you provision fast? How do you give folks a cloud... An experience that they have been used to in the public cloud, on using an Apple iPhone? So it's all about experience, I think that's number one. Number two is about choice and openness. I mean, as we look at GreenLake is not a proprietary platform. We are very, very clear that the design, one of the important design principles is about choice and openness. And that's the reason we are, you hear us talk about Kubernetes, about Apaches Spark, about Delta lake et cetera, et cetera, right? We're using kind of those open source models where customers have a choice. If they don't want to be on GreenLake, they can go to public cloud tomorrow. Or they can run in our Holos if they want to do it that way or in their Holos, if they want to do it. So they should have the choice. Third is about performance. I mean, what we've done is it's not just about the software, but we as a company know how to configure infrastructure for that workload. And that's an important part of it. I mean if you think about the machine learning workloads, we have the right Nvidia chips that accelerate those transactions. So, that's kind of the last, the third one, and the last one, I think, as I spoke about earlier is cost. We are very focused on TCO, but from a customer perspective, we want to make sure that we are giving a value proposition, which is just not about experience and performance and openness, but also about costs. So if you think about GreenLake, that's kind of the value proposition that we bring to our customers across those four dimensions. >> Guys, great conversation. Thanks so much, really appreciate your time and insights. >> Matt: Thanks for having us here, David. >> All right, you're welcome. And thank you for watching everybody. Keep it right there for more great content from HPE GreenLake announcements. You're watching theCUBE. (upbeat music)

>>mhm >>mm >>Hello and welcome back to HPD discovered 2021. My name is Dave Volonte and we're going to dig into H P E. Green Lake, we've heard a lot about this, we want to find out how real it is and test a little bit of how how can help solve your business problems. We also want to understand Green Lake relative to the competition. HPV was the first, as you probably know to declare it all in with an as a service model and virtually every major infrastructure player has now followed suit. So we want to hear from HP directly how it's different from the competition, where it's innovating and that means we're gonna poke a little bit of customer examples and how the partner ecosystem is adopting and responding to Green Lake and with me is the right person to do this is keith White, who is the senior Vice President General Manager of the Green Lake cloud services business unit at HP, keith, great to see you, thanks for coming back to the cube. >>Okay, fantastic to see you as always. So thanks so much for having me. >>Yeah, it's our pleasure. So look, we're hearing a lot leading up to discover and at this event about Green Lake you got momentum now, everybody's excited about it. What's driving demand? Where's the excitement coming from? >>No, it's a great question. And you know, the reality is customers are expecting this cloud experience, right? So they they've been using the public cloud, they've been engaging on that front and this cloud experience is really driven, a pretty high amount of customer expectations, make itself served, make it automated, make it easy to consume, only want to pay for what I'm using and then manage it all for me on the back end. But 60 to 70% of apps and data will stay on prem per Gardner and I D. C. And so give me that experience on prem. And so that's why I think Green Lake has gotten so much interest, so much positive growth and momentum is because we're bringing that cloud experience to our customers in their data center, in their Coehlo or at the edge and that's where they want to see it just as much. And so since the world is now hybrid, we have a fantastic solution for folks. >>So you, you were first in this game and so you took some arrows and I'm interested in how Green Lake has evolved, Take us through the journey maybe what were some of the bumps in the road that you had to overcome? Maybe how it compares with the competition. Maybe some of the things that they're going to have to go through as well to get to the point where you are. >>No, it's true. And you know, the great thing is HP as a company is really moving to be much more of a cloud services and software company. And you know, we're seeing this from our competition, as you mentioned, have followed suit. But in essence, you know, you have to move from just sort of providing lease type financing type scenarios for our customers into truly delivering that cloud experience. And that's what's been so exciting over this last year is we've gone from just the basic cloud services, compute storage, networking and VMS to really providing containers as a service, bare metal as a service. Uh, machine learning ops, S. A P V. D I. You know, we've now created a set of workloads and as you heard it discover we're now delivering industry solutions, so electronic medical records for hospitals or high delivery payment transaction processing for, for financial, so that the challenge of moving from just sort of leasing basic capabilities to a true cloud experience that again pay as I go, fully automated self serve, all managed for me has really been a challenge and it's exciting, it's exciting to see customers jump on and really sort of lean in and see the business value that comes from having that level of solution >>keith, am I correct in that pretty much every large tech company has a services arm and they could, they could sort of brute force, some kind of cloud like experience and that's kind of what people have done historically the layer in a financial like leasing financial as you said and and but every situation was unique, it was kind of a snowflake if you will and you guys are probably there a few years ago as well and so I'm interested in sort of how you evolved beyond that. Was it a mindset was a technology, was it sort of cultural? You know, it came from the top as well, but maybe you could describe that a little bit. >>Yeah, the ship comes from our customers because what's happening is customers no longer trying to buy component parts. They're saying it's really about Tesla's like, hey, I want you to deliver this for me. In essence, we're running the data center for them now. We're running their machine learning operations environment for them. Now, you know, we're migrating their mainframe over now. And so what's happening is these sls are really, what matters to customers like that? It's not so much about, hey, what are the speeds and feeds and this and that? And so yes, you can sort of brute force that piece of it. But what you really are having to do is create this deep partnership and relationship with your customer to truly understand their business challenges and then provide them with that capability. Now I think the things that's exciting is yes, the public cloud gives you some some significant benefits for certain workloads and certain capabilities. But what we're hearing from customers is hey, I want to have much more control over my data center. I want to ensure that it has the security required. I want to make sure that I can make the adjustments necessary and so you're doing all that at a lower cost with open platform that I can use a variety of tools and other applications just makes it that much more powerful. So I think that's what we're seeing is we're getting into what our customers really requiring and then you know the most interesting thing is how do you make it work with my entire environment because I am running Azure and I am running A W. S. And I am running google and I'm running some other things. And so how does this cloud really helped me bring all those together to really govern that hybrid estate? And that's where I think Green Lake has really shine. >>So it kind of part of the secret sauce is automation because you've got to be, you still have, you have to be competitive, you know, at least within reason to cloud cost, sometimes it's going to be less expensive, maybe sometimes it can be more expensive. You've got some advantages in certain cases where, you know, there's government governance things and and you know, we don't have to go through all that, but there's the automation but you've got to be profitable at this too. So there's the automation, there's the tooling, there's the openness. So, so that was really a key part of it. Is it not that sort of automating? >>That's right. Automation is key as is really understanding what that customer environment is and optimizing for that piece of it. And so as you heard, we're really excited to announce our Green Lake Lighthouse, which is really providing workload optimized systems that are fully managed for them that provide that capability to run multiple workloads for that customer. But at the same time, to your point, there's a lot of charges that happened on the public cloud side. So, you know, data is the new, you know, gold if you will right, everyone's trying to monetize their data, trying to use it to make decisions and really understand what's happening across their environment and in the cloud. You know, if you put it up in the cloud, you have to pay to get it out. The egress charges can be significant and it's also a bit slower at times because of the latency that happens across that that that connection. And so we are now in a situation where we're seeing a lot of customers that are really trying to analyze their data, leveraging our HPC systems, leveraging our machine learning operation systems in order to really get that data happening, Getting the dancers out much, much faster and a much lower cost than what it would cost them to do that in the cloud. >>So you have some experience at this now. I wonder if we could dig into the customers how customers are using Green Lake. Maybe you can give some examples of success. >>Yeah. Yeah, no. You know it's exciting because you know first off everyone's looking at their digital transformation and that means something different for every single customer, so really understanding what they're trying to do from a transformation standpoint and then saying, okay, well how can we bring a solution to help accelerate that? To help be uh, you know, more connected to your customers to help improve your product delivery. We went to Lyondellbasell for example, one of the largest manufacturers in the world. And you know, they said, hey look, we don't want to run our data center anymore. Most most customers are trying to get out of the data center management business and they're saying, hey, run this for me, uh let me free up resources to go focus on things that really can drive additional value for our customers instead of keeping the lights on patching, blah blah blah. So we have taken their entire environment and moved it to a Coehlo and we're managing it now for them. And so in essence we freed up not just a ton of resources, but they have also been able to drop their carbon footprint, which is also this whole sustainability push is significant as well. And then you look at a customer like care stream, one of the largest medical diagnostic companies in the world, saying hey we gotta be able to allow our doctors to be able to um analyze and diagnose things much much faster through our X ray systems and through our diagnostic machines. And so they have implemented our machine learning operations scenario to dramatically speed up those types of capabilities. So as you go down the list and you start to see these customers really um leveraging technology to meet that digital transformation, saving costs, moving their business forward, creating new business models. It's just, it's really exciting. >>What about partners keith? How how have they responded? I mean, on the one hand, you know, that's great opportunities for them, you know, they're they're transforming their own business model. On the other hand, you know, maybe they were comfortable with the old model, they got a big house, nice, nice boat, you >>know? >>But how are they changing their their their business and how are they leaning in >>similar to what we're seeing? The opportunity for partners is dramatic, right? Because what happens is you have to have a very different relationship with your customer to truly understand their digital transformation. Their business challenges the problems that they're having to address. And so where we're seeing partners really, really sort of the opportunity is where there's the services and that sort of deeper relationship piece of it. So in essence, it's creating much more opportunity because the white spaces dramatic we're seeing, I want to say it's in the 30 to $40 billion worth of market opportunity as we move into an as a service on prem world. So they're seeing that opportunity. They're seeing the ability to add services on top of that and deepen the relationship with our customers. And you know, it's it's from my SVS. We're working closely with S. A. P. For example, to deliver their new rise private cloud customer edition. We're working closely with loosest, for example, who is doing a lot of payment processing type scenarios Nutanix and their database as a service scenario and Splunk because again, we went back to the data piece and these guys are doing so much big data type implementations for risk analytics and and regulatory type scenarios. It's just significant. And so because there's such a push to keep things on prem to have the security to reduce the latency to get rid of the egress charges and everything else. There's just a significant white space for both our partners and then from our distributors and resellers, they're getting to change their business model again, to get much deeper in that relationship with our customers >>to be Green Lake is, I mean it's H. P. E. As a service, it's your platform. And so I wonder if you can think about how you're thinking about uh, share with us, How you think about platform innovation? Um, you've got the pricing model, you know, flex up, flex down. Is there other technology we should know about and other things that are going to move you forward in this battle for the next great hybrid cloud and edge platform? >>Yeah, it's a great push because if you think about it, we are Green Lake is the edge to cloud platform And in essence because we have such a strong edge capability with the arab acquisition we made a few years back. That's really significant momentum with the Silver Peak acquisition to give us SD when you've got that edge connectivity all the way up to our high performance computing. And so you'll see us deliver high performance computing as a service. We're announcing that here at discover um you'll see us announced, you know, machine learning ops I mentioned ASAP, but also a virtual desktops. I think the pandemic has brought a lot more work from home type scenarios and customers really want to have that secure desktop. And so, working with partners like Citrix and Nutanix and and VM ware and Crew were able to provide that again, unique scenario for our customers. And so, um, yeah, the innovation is going to keep coming. You know, I mentioned bare metal as a service because many people are starting to really leverage the metal that's out there. You're seeing us also engaged with folks like intel on our silicon on demand. So this is a really exciting technology because what it allows us to do is turn on cores when we need them. So hey, I need additional capacity. I need some power. Let's turn on some cores. But then I turn off those cores when I'm not using them. You go to a software core based software pricing model, like an oracle or a sequel server. I'm saving dramatic cost now because I don't have to pay for all the cores that are on the system. I'm only paying the licenses for the ones that I use. And so that should bring dramatic cost savings to our customers as well. So we're looking from the silicon all the way up. Uh you know, you hear us talk about project Aurora, which is our security capability. We're looking at the silicon level, but we're also looking at the the container and bare metal and then obviously the workloads in the industry solution. So we're sprinting forward. We're listening to our customers were taking their feedback. We're seeing what they're prioritizing and because we have that tight relationship with them as we help move them to the direction they want to go, it's giving us a ton of fantastic inside information for what really matters. >>Right, Thank you for that. So, I want to ask you about data. A lot of organizations are kind of rethinking their ideal data architecture, their organization. They're they're they're seeing the amount of data that is potentially going to be created at the edge, thinking about ai inference and influencing at the edge and maybe reimagining their data organization in this age of insight. I wonder how Green Lake fits into that. How are you thinking about the new era of data and specifically Green Lakes role? >>Yeah, you mentioned the age of insights and and it really is right. So we've moved sort of as the next phase of digital transformation is basically saying, hey look, I've got all this data. I've got to first get my arms around my data estate because in essence it's in all these different pockets around. And so Green Lake gives you that ability to really get that data estate established. Then I want to take and get the answers in the analytics out of it. And then I want to monetize that data either out to my customer set or out to my industry or out to other scenarios as well. And so as we start to deliver our develops capability, our ai and analytics capabilities through HPC. And it's an open platform. So it allows data scientists to easy boot up easily boot up a cluster with which to do their models and their training and their algorithms. But we can also then use and Estancia at that into the business decisions that our customers are trying to make again without the significant cost that they're seeing on that on the public cloud side and in a very secure way because they have the data exactly where they need it. You'll see us continue to do sort of disaster recovery and data protection and those types of scenarios both with our partners and from H P E. So it's exciting to just understand that now you're going to have the tools and resources so you can actually focus on those business outcomes versus how do I protect the data? Where do I start, how do I get my model set up, etcetera. All that becomes automated and self service. You mentioned earlier >>When you talk to customers Keith one of the big sort of challenges that you're addressing. What's the typical, there was no typical but the but the real nuts that they're trying to crack is it financial? We want to move from Capex to opec's is that hey we want this cloud model but we can't do it in the public cloud for a variety of reasons, edicts, organization leaders or we want to modernize our our state. What are the real sort of sticking points that you're addressing with Green Lake? >>Yeah, I think it's threefold and you sort of touched on those. So one is, it really does start with modernization. Hey, you know, we've got to take costs out of the equation. We've got to reduce our carbon footprint. We've got to automate these things because we have limited resources and how do we maximize the ones that we have? And so I mentioned earlier, getting out of the data center, modernizing our apps, really monetizing our data. So I think that's number one. Number two is what you said as well, which is, hey look, I don't need to have all these capital assets. I don't want to be in charge of managing all all these assets. I just want the capability and so being able to sell them that service that says, hey, we can, we can do X number of desktops for your V. D. I. We can run your S. A. P. Environment or we can make sure that you have the, the analytics structure set up to be able to run your models that becomes super compelling and it frees up a lot of resources in cash on that front as well. And then I think the third thing is what you said, which is the world is hybrid. And so I need to find out what's going to run best in my on prem environment and what's going to run best up in the cloud. And I want to be able to optimize that so that I'm not wasting costs in one place or the other, and I want to be able to govern and govern that holistically. So I have the ability to see what's happening end to end across that so I can manage my business most effectively. So I think those are the three big things that people are really excited about with Green Lake as they enable those things. Um and you know, the reality is that it also means that they have a new partner to help them really think through how can they move forward? So it's not them by themselves. Uh It's really in a one plus one equals three type scenario and then you bring the ecosystem in and now you've got, you know, things working really well. So, >>so big enterprise tech, it's like, it's like the NFL is a sort of a copycat league. And so what, you know what I'm saying? But you guys all got >>big, yeah, >>you've got great resources, hey, this West Coast office exactly is gonna work. We're gonna get a short passing game going. And so that happened. So I feel like, okay, you've raised the bar now on as a service and that's gonna become table stakes. Um you know, it's got a lot of work to get there. I know, and it's a it's a journey, but but when you think about the future uh for H. P. E. Uh what's exciting you the most? >>I think what's exciting me the most is this the reaction that we're seeing with customers because in essence it gets them out of the bits and bytes and speeds and feeds and you know, um >>you >>know, component goo and really gets into business value, business outcomes sls and, and that's what they're looking for because what they're trying to do is break out of, you know that day to day and be able to really focus on the future and where they're going. So I think that's one, I think the second big thing is as you see all these things come together, um you know, we're able to basically provide customers with, I would say a mindset that's like, hey, I can do this holistically, but I can always pick and choose the best that I want and if I ramp up, I have capacity. If I ramp down, I don't have to pay for first scenarios. And so I'm getting the best of both worlds across that piece of it. And then third is I mentioned it earlier. But this whole relationship thing is so important because you know, this isn't about technology anymore. As much as it it is about what's the value that you're going to get out of that technology. And how does that help us move the company and the world forward? Like I love the fact that H. P. E. Was so involved in this pandemic. >>You know, >>with our systems were able to actually uh to run a set of of algorithms and analysis on how to, you know, find a vaccine on how to how to address the things that are going forward. You've seen us now up in space and as we, we broaden our frontier and so as a company you're seeing technology turned into things that are truly helping the world go forward. I think that's exciting as well. >>Yeah. Space. It's like the ultimate edge. >>I >>like you said to me if I take it, it's not not about ports and Mick, nips and gigabytes anymore. It's about the outcome. You mentioned before the S L. A. Um, you know, the thing about, you know, think about virtual, it's great. We have to get in the plane. Its downside. We all know we can't hang out, you know, afterwards, you know, have a drink or you know, chit chat about what's going on in the world, but we can't reach a lot more people. But the other downside of virtual is, you know, you don't have the hallway track. It's not like, hey, did you check out that, that demo on IOT? It's really cool. Where is that? So give us the hallway track. How can folks learn more about discover where would you direct folks? >>You bet. You know, I'm doing a full spot. Obviously let me start with at the top right Antonio Neri our ceo he's going to lay out the whole strategy and then I'll have a spotlight. It's about a 30 minute deep dive on all of these things that that you and I just talked about and then we've got a bunch of breakout sessions were doing some with our partners like Nutanix and others, um, Microsoft as well as we talk about, we didn't really touch on that, but you know, we have a strong partnership with the hyper scholars with Microsoft and with others because in essence customers are expecting an integrated solution that's hybrid. And so, you know, we're showcasing all of that with the with the discover breakouts as well and they're available on demand. We have a huge opportunity with respect to that, so really excited and you know, frankly we're here to help, like I hope people understand this is our opportunity to help you be successful and so please know that our ears are wide open to hear what the challenges are and we're ready to help customers as they needed. >>I'm glad you mentioned the partnership with Microsoft and other hyper skills. I feel like keith, the the Hyper scale is giving us a gift. They've spent last year they spent over $100 billion on Capex build out. That is like, it's like the internet. Thank you. >>Now we're gonna build on >>top of it, we're gonna build an abstraction layer that hides all that underlying complexity. We're gonna connect things and and that's really your job. That's really kind of what you're bringing to the table I think with Green Lake and some of these innovations. So >>I really >>appreciate it. Go ahead please. >>I appreciate the time as well. It's always a pleasure and it's always exciting to get a chance to share with you and and as always, any time you don't want me back, I'm happy to happy to join. Alright, >>would love to do that. So appreciate that. And thank you for spending some time with us. Stay tuned for more great coverage from HPD discovered 21 everything is available on demand as well as the that is the other good thing about virtually go back and watch all this content. This is Dave Volonte for the cube the leader in enterprise tech coverage. Be right back

(lively music) >> Welcome back to HPE Discover 2021. My name is Dave Vellante and you're watching theCUBE's virtual coverage of Discover '21, and we're excited to welcome back Arwa Kaddoura, she's a vice president and world-wide go-to market leader for HPE's smoking hot GreenLake Cloud Services. Arwa, welcome back to theCUBE, good to see you again. >> Thank you for having me, it's good to be with you. >> So, talk about how your products and services are supporting customer transformations. I'm interested in the experience that everybody's been dreaming about. Describe how you're giving your customer that competitive advantage. And if you've got an examples, that would be awesome. >> Yeah, you got it. I think as we heard Antonio say, that cloud is an experience, not a destination, right? And what we're doing with GreenLake is bringing those cloud capabilities and the cloud experience to our customers. You know, we like to say, colocations, data center and edge of course. So this is the cloud on prem. And so rather than forcing customers to only have to go up to cloud, to get modern cloud capabilities or the benefits of things like, pay as you go for consumption, etc, cloud native capabilities, like containers, leveraging Kubernetes, we now bring all of that to GreenLake and to our customers, edge locations, and Colocation and data centers. We've been able to dramatically transform many of our customers businesses, right, and you'll probably see it discover some of those examples come to life, for example, Carestream, who is in the electronic medical imaging world, right, they have all of the X-Ray equipment that capture X-rays and different sort of diagnostics for patients. And we worked with them to not only craft a ML solution to better read and diagnose these images, but also all of the underlying infrastructure with the HPE GreenLake ML Ops platform that allows them to instantly leverage the capabilities of machine learning and the infrastructure to go with it. >> And so tell me, so how is it resonating with customers? They're talking to customers all the time? What do they tell you? >> Sure, you know I think what our customers appreciate about HP GreenLake is, it's not sort of look, it's either all on prem in my data center, and I have to fully manage it, build it, implement it, take care of it, or it's fully public cloud, I have little control and basically, I get whatever the public cloud gives me, right? HPE GreenLake gives our customers the flexibility and control that they require, right? And so you can think of many use cases where customers have a need to have the compute storage sort of processing need to happen closer to where their data and apps live. And so for that exact reason, our customers love the flexibility, right. Cloud One Dotto was public cloud, Cloud Two Dotto I think is the cloud that comes to our customers at their convenience. And to me, what I tell CIOs and CTOs and sort of other lines of business leaders when I meet with them, is you shouldn't be forced to have to take your data and apps elsewhere to get the transformation that you need. We want to be able to bring that directly to our customers. >> 'Cause a lot of the transformation is around data, we love talking about data on theCUBE. It's funny, I mean, we talked about big data last decade, we don't use that term much anymore. It was kind of overhyped, but as oftentimes is the case may be in the early days it's overhyped, but then it's underhyped. When it actually starts to kick in, and I feel like we're entering a new age of data and insights with the ascendancy of machine learning and AI. What does this mean from HPEs perspective and what are customers telling you that it means for them? >> Yeah, now, data I think, we often hear data is the new currency, right? It's the new gold. we've heard Antonio even say things like, data can even become something that maybe over time companies start to put some kind of value on their balance sheet behind, right, the same way that maybe brands represented this value on a balance sheet. Effectively, what's happened with data is, a lot of people have a lot of data. But there's not been a lot of ability to extract insights from data, right. And I think this is the new revolution that we're all undergoing is we finally have the modern analytics tools to actually turn the data into insights. And what we bring to the table from an HPE perspective is the fact that we have the best infrastructure, we obviously now have the cloud capabilities mixed in with our data fabric or container platform, or machine learning operations platform, to then be able to process that data, again, integrated with many of the great ISV partners that we have on the data side allow our customers to turn that into real insights for their business. And effectively data is becoming a huge competitive advantage, right? I think many of us are leveraging some pretty interesting tools or gadgets these days, right? Like, I wear one of those sleep rings. You can imagine a company like that in the future that's able to collect so much data from the folks that purchase their products, then being able to give us insights about, where's the best ZIP Code that people get the most amount of sleep and which ZIP Codes are the healthiest in the United States or countries, et cetera? But data really is becoming a competitive advantage. And one of the things that we care most about at HPE is also using it as a force for good and making sure that there is a sort of ethical AI capability. >> That's a great message and very important one. It's interesting what you're saying about data and the value, how we value, it's clearly being valued in terms of companies' market caps, but maybe it's not in the balance sheet yet, but it's on the income statement in terms of data products and data services that that's happening. So, maybe we'll see if Antonia is right in the next several years. But so, let's talk more about the specific data challenges that you're solving for your customers, they talk about silos, they talk about, they haven't gotten as much value out of their data initiatives as they wanted to. What are they telling you are their challenges and how are you approaching it? >> Yeah, I think data is everywhere, right? The ability for customers to store the right amount of data is a huge challenge. Because obviously, there's a huge cost associated with collecting, keeping, cleansing, processing, all the way to sort of analyzing your data. There tends to be a ton of data silos, right. So customers are looking for a common data fabric that they can then process their data sources across, and then be able to sort of tap into that data from an analytics perspective. So much of the technology, again, that we're focused on is be able to store the data, right, our Data Fabric layer with Ezmeral, right, being able to process that data, capture that data, and then allow the analytics tools to then harness the power of that data and turn that into real business insights for our customers. Every customer that I spoken to whether their financial services, you can imagine the big financial services, I mean, they've got just bazillions of pockets of data everywhere. And the real sort of challenge for them is how do I build a common data platform that allows me to tap into that data in effective ways for my business users? >> Can you talk a little bit about how you're changing the way you're providing solutions, maybe you could contrast it with the way HPE has done in the past? Because I think that's important when you think about, you talk a lot about GreenLake and as a service. But if the products are still kind of boxes and lands and gigahertz and ports, then that's a discontinuity. So, what's changed from the past and how are you feeding into the way customers are transforming their business and supporting their outcomes? >> That's exactly right. At some point in time, right, if you think maybe 10 or 20 years back, it used to be very much about the infrastructure for HPE. What's exciting about what we're doing differently for our customers, is, look, we have the best infrastructure in the business, right? HPE has been doing this longer than anyone has probably almost 60 years now. But being able to vertically integrate right, move up in that value chain so that our customers can get more complete solutions, is the more interesting part for our customers. Our customers love our technology yes, the gigahertz and the speeds and feeds, all of that do matter because they make for some very powerful infrastructure. However, what makes it easier is the fact that we are building platform stacks on top of that hardware, that help abstract away the complexity of that infrastructure and the ability to use it far more seamlessly. And then, if you think about it we of course have also one of the most advanced services organizations. So being able to leverage our services capabilities, our platform capabilities, on top of that hardware, again, deliver it back to our customers in a consumption model, which they've come to expect from a cloud model. And then surrounded by a very rich ecosystem of partners, and we're talking about system integrators that now have capabilities on helping our customers run their GreenLake environments. We're talking about ISVs, right, so software stacks and platforms that fully integrate with the GreenLake platform for completely seamless solutions, as well as channel partners and global distributors. So I think that's where we can truly deliver the ultimate end-to-end solution. It's not just the hardware, right? But it's being complemented with the right services, being complemented with the right platform capabilities, the software integrations to deliver that workload that the customer expects. >> So customers and partners, they got to place bets, they've got to put resources, time, money, and align their resources with their partners and their suppliers like HPE. So when they ask you, hey, okay, "HPE, tell me what's your overall strategy? "Why is it compelling? "And why do you give me competitive advantage relative to some of your peers in the industry?" >> Yeah, I think what partners are going to be most excited about is the openness of the platform, right? Being able to allow our partners to leverage GreenLake Central with open API, so that they can integrate some of their own technologies into our platform, the ability to allow them to also layer in their own managed services on top of the platform is key. And, of course, being able to build sort of these win-win solutions with the system integrators, right? The system integrators have some fantastic capabilities all the way from an application development, all the way down to the infrastructure management, and data center delivery centers that they have. And so leveraging HPE GreenLake really helps them have access to the core technologies that they need to deliver these solutions. >> I wonder if I could take a little sort of side road here and ask you because so many changes going on, HPE itself is transforming, your customers are transforming, the pandemic has accelerated all these transformations. Can you talk a little bit about how you've transformed go-to-market specifically in the context of as a service? I mean, that had to be quite a change for you guys. >> Yeah, now go-to-market transformations in support of sort of moving from traditional go-to-markets, right, to cloud go-to-markets are significant. They required us to really think through what does delivering as a service solutions mean for our direct Salesforce? What does it mean for our partners and their transformations and being able to support as a service solutions? For HPE specifically, it also means thinking about our customer outcomes, not just our ability to ship the requisite hardware and say, look, once it's left our dock, our job is done, right. It really takes our obligation all the way to the customer using the technology on a day by day basis, as well as supporting them in making sure that everything from implementation to set up to the ongoing monitoring operations of the technology is working for them in the way that they'd expect in an as a service way, right? We don't expect them to operate it, we don't expect them to do anything more than pick up the phone and call us if something doesn't go as planned. >> Then how about your sellers and your partners? How did they respond? I mean, you wake up one day is Okay guys, here we go. New compensation scheme, new way to sell, new way to market. That took some thought and some time and where are you in that journey? >> That's right. And I always say, if you expect people to wake up one day and be transformed, right, you're kidding yourself. So everything from sort of the way that we think about our customers use cases, right, and empowering our sellers to understand the outcomes that our customers expect and demand from us to things like compensation to the partner rebate program that we leverage through the channel partners in order to give them the right incentives to also allow them to make the right investments to support GreenLake. HPE has a fairly significant field, sales and solution team. And so not thinking about this only as a single person that represents GreenLake, but looking at our capabilities across the board, right, we have fantastic advisory consultants on the ground with PhDs and data science, we have folks that understand high performance computing. So making sure that we're embedding the expertise in all of the right personas that support our customers, not just from a comp perspective, but also from an understanding of the end-to-end solutions that we're bringing to those markets. >> So what gets you stoked in the morning, you get out of bed, you're like, "Okay, I'm going to go attack the world." What are you most excited about for HPE and its future? >> There's so much happening right now in this sort of cloud world, right? To me, the most exciting portion is the fact that given that we've now introduced on prem cloud to the world, our ability to ship new services and new capabilities, but also do that via a very rich partner ecosystem, honestly is what probably has me most excited. This is no longer the age of go-at-it-alone, right. So not only are our engineering and product teams hard at work in the engine room producing capabilities at sort of lightning fast speeds, but it's also our ability to partner, whether it's with platform providers, software providers, or system integrators and services providers. That ecosystem is starting to come together to deliver highly meaningful solutions to our customers and all in a very open way. The number one thing that I personally care about is that our customers never feel like they are being locked in, or that they are sort of being forced, have to give up certain levels of capabilities, we want to give them the best of what's out there and allow them to then have that flexibility in their solution. >> And one of the challenges, of course, with virtual events is you don't have the hallway track, somebody can say, "Hey, have you seen that IoT zone? It's amazing, they got all these robots going around." So what would you say that people should be focused on at discover maybe things that you want to call out specific highlights or segments that you think are relevant? >> Yeah, there's going to be a ton of fantastic stuff. I think, really looking for that edge to cloud strategy, that we're going to be spending a lot of time talking about looking at some of our vertical workload solutions, right? We're going to be talking about quite a few from electronic healthcare records, to payment solutions and many more. I think, depending on what folks are interested in there's going to be something for everyone. Project Aurora, which now starts to announce our new security capabilities, the zero trust capabilities that we're delivering is probably interesting to a lot of our customers. So lots of exciting things coming and I'm excited for our customers to check those out. >> No doubt, that's a hot topic, especially given what's been happening in the news these past several months. Arwa, thanks so much for coming back in theCUBE. It's great to see you hopefully face-to-face next time. >> Thank you, I sure hope so. Thanks so much for having me. >> It was our pleasure. And thank you for watching and thank you for being with us in our ongoing coverage of HPE Discover 2021. This is Dave Vellante. You're watching theCUBE, the leader in digital tech coverage. >> Thank you. (soft music)

>> Announcer: theCube presents HPE Discover 2022, brought to you by HPE. >> Hey, everyone. Welcome back to Las Vegas. This is Lisa Martin with Dave Vellante live at HPE Discover '22. Dave, it's great to be here. This is the first Discover in three years and we're here with about 7,000 of our closest friends. >> Yeah. You know, I tweeted out this, I think I've been to 14 Discovers between the U.S. and Europe, and I've never seen a Discover with so much energy. People are not only psyched to get back together, that's for sure, but I think HPE's got a little spring in its step and it's feeling more confident than maybe some of the past Discovers that I've been to. >> I think so, too. I think there's definitely a spring in the step and we're going to be unpacking some of that spring next with one of our alumni who joins us, Keith White's here, the executive vice president and general manager of GreenLake Cloud Services. Welcome back. >> Great. You all thanks for having me. It's fantastic that you're here and you're right, the energy is crazy at this show. It's been a lot of pent up demand, but I think what you heard from Antonio today is our strategy's changing dramatically and it's really embracing our customers and our partners. So it's great. >> Embracing the customers and the partners, the ecosystem expansion is so critical, especially the last couple of years with the acceleration of digital transformation. So much challenge in every industry, but lots of momentum on the GreenLake side, I was looking at the Q2 numbers, triple digit growth in orders, 65,000 customers over 70 services, eight new services announced just this morning. Talk to us about the momentum of GreenLake. >> The momentum's been fantastic. I mean, I'll tell you, the fact that customers are really now reaccelerating their digital transformation, you probably heard a lot, but there was a delay as we went through the pandemic. So now it's reaccelerating, but everyone's going to a hybrid, multi-cloud environment. Data is the new currency. And obviously, everyone's trying to push out to the Edge and GreenLake is that edge to cloud platform. So we're just seeing tons of momentum, not just from the customers, but partners, we've enabled the platform so partners can plug into it and offer their solutions to our customers as well. So it's exciting and it's been fun to see the momentum from an order standpoint, but one of the big numbers that you may not be aware of is we have over a 96% retention rate. So once a customer's on GreenLake, they stay on it because they're seeing the value, which has been fantastic. >> The value is absolutely critically important. We saw three great big name customers. The Home Depot was on stage this morning, Oak Ridge National Laboratory was as well, Evil Geniuses. So the momentum in the enterprise is clearly present. >> Yeah. It is. And we're hearing it from a lot of customers. And I think you guys talk a lot about, hey, there's the cloud, data and Edge, these big mega trends that are happening out there. And you look at a company like Barclays, they're actually reinventing their entire private cloud infrastructure, running over a hundred thousand workloads on HPE GreenLake. Or you look at a company like Zenseact, who's basically they do autonomous driving software. So they're doing massive parallel computing capabilities. They're pulling in hundreds of petabytes of data to then make driving safer and so you're seeing it on the data front. And then on the Edge, you look at anyone like a Patrick Terminal, for example. They run a whole terminal shipyard. They're getting data in from exporters, importers, regulators, the works and they have to real-time, analyze that data and say, where should this thing go? Especially with today's supply chain challenges, they have to be so efficient, that it's just fantastic. >> It was interesting to hear Fidelma, Keith, this morning on stage. It was the first time I'd really seen real clarity on the platform itself and that it's obviously her job is, okay, here's the platform, now, you guys got to go build on top of it. Both inside of HPE, but also externally, so your ecosystem partners. So, you mentioned the financial services companies like Barclays. We see those companies moving into the digital world by offering some of their services in building their own clouds. >> Keith: That's right. >> What's your vision for GreenLake in terms of being that platform, to assist them in doing that and the data component there? >> I think that was one of the most exciting things about not just showcasing the platform, but also the announcement of our private cloud enterprise, Cloud Service. Because in essence, what you're doing is you're creating that framework for what most companies are doing, which is they're becoming cloud service providers for their internal business units. And they're having to do showback type scenarios, chargeback type scenarios, deliver cloud services and solutions inside the organization so that open platform, you're spot on. For our ecosystem, it's fantastic, but for our customers, they get to leverage it as well for their own internal IT work that's happening. >> So you talk about hybrid cloud, you talk about private cloud, what's your vision? You know, we use this term Supercloud. This in a layer that goes across clouds. What's your thought about that? Because you have an advantage at the Edge with Aruba. Everybody talks about the Edge, but they talk about it more in the context of near Edge. >> That's right. >> We talked to Verizon and they're going far Edge, you guys are participating in that, as well as some of your partners in Red Hat and others. What's your vision for that? What I call Supercloud, is that part of the strategy? Is that more longer term or you think that's pipe dream by Dave? >> No, I think it's really thoughtful, Dave, 'cause it has to be part of the strategy. What I hear, so for example, Ford's a great example. They run Azure, AWS, and then they made a big deal with Google cloud for their internal cars and they run HPE GreenLake. So they're saying, hey, we got four clouds. How do we sort of disaggregate the usage of that? And Chris Lund, who is the VP of information technology at Liberty Mutual Insurance, he talked about it today, where he said, hey, I can deliver these services to my business unit. And they don't know, am I running on the public cloud? Am I running on our HPE GreenLake cloud? Like it doesn't matter to the end user, we've simplified that so much. So I think your Supercloud idea is super thoughtful, not to use the super term too much, that I'm super excited about because it's really clear of what our customers are trying to accomplish, which it's not about the cloud, it's about the solution and the business outcome that gets to work. >> Well, and I think it is different. I mean, it's not like the last 10 years where it was like, hey, I got my stuff to work on the different clouds and I'm replicating as much as I can, the cloud experience on-prem. I think you guys are there now and then to us, the next layer is that ecosystem enablement. So how do you see the ecosystem evolving and what role does Green Lake play there? >> Yeah. This has been really exciting. We had Tarkan Maner who runs Nutanix and Karl Strohmeyer from Equinix on stage with us as well. And what's happening with the ecosystem is, I used to say, one plus one has to equal three for our customers. So when you bring these together, it has to be that scenario, but we are joking that one plus one plus one equals five now because everything has a partner component to it. It's not about the platform, it's not about the specific cloud service, it's actually about the solution that gets delivered. And that's done with an ISV, it's done with a Colo, it's done even with the Hyperscalers. We have Azure Stack HCI as a fully integrated solution. It happens with managed service providers, delivering managed services out to their folks as well. So that platform being fully partner enabled and that ecosystem being able to take advantage of that, and so we have to jointly go to market to our customers for their business needs, their business outcomes. >> Some of the expansion of the ecosystem. we just had Red Hat on in the last hour talking about- >> We're so excited to partner with them. >> Right, what's going on there with OpenShift and Ansible and Rel, but talk about the customer influence in terms of the expansion of the ecosystem. We know we've got to meet customers where they are, they're driving it, but we know that HPE has a big presence in the enterprise and some pretty big customer names. How are they from a demand perspective? >> Well, this is where I think the uniqueness of GreenLake has really changed HPE's approach with our customers. Like in all fairness, we used to be a vendor that provided hardware components for, and we talked a lot about hardware costs and blah, blah, blah. Now, we're actually a partner with those customers. What's the business outcome you're requiring? What's the SLA that we offer you for what you're trying to accomplish? And to do that, we have to have it done with partners. And so even on the storage front, Qumulo or Cohesity. On the backup and recovery disaster recovery, yes, we have our own products, but we also partner with great companies like Veeam because it's customer choice, it's an open platform. And the Red Hat announcement is just fantastic. Because, hey, from a container platform standpoint, OpenShift provides 5,000 plus customers, 90% of the fortune 500 that they engage with, with that opportunity to take GreenLake with OpenShift and implement that container capabilities on-prem. So it's fantastic. >> We were talking after the keynote, Keith Townsend came on, myself and Lisa. And he was like, okay, what about startups? 'Cause that's kind of a hallmark of cloud. And we felt like, okay, startups are not the ideal customer profile necessarily for HPE. Although we saw Evil Geniuses up on stage, but I threw out and I'd love to get your thoughts on this that within companies, incumbents, you have entrepreneurs, they're trying to build their own clouds or Superclouds as I use the term, is that really the target for the developer audience? We've talked a lot about OpenShift with their other platforms, who says as a partner- >> We just announced another extension with Rancher and- >> Yeah. I saw that. And you have to have optionality for developers. Is that the way we should think about the target audience from a developer standpoint? >> I think it will be as we go forward. And so what Fidelma presented on stage was the new developer platform, because we have come to realize, we have to engage with the developers. They're the ones building the apps. They're the ones that are delivering the solutions for the most part. So yeah, I think at the enterprise space, we have a really strong capability. I think when you get into the sort of mid-market SMB standpoint, what we're doing is we're going directly to the managed service and cloud service providers and directly to our Disty and VARS to have them build solutions on top of GreenLake, powered by GreenLake, to then deliver to their customers because that's what the customer wants. I think on the developer side of the house, we have to speak their language, we have to provide their capabilities because they're going to start articulating apps that are going to use both the public cloud and our on-prem capabilities with GreenLake. And so that's got to work very well. And so you've heard us talk about API based and all of that sort of scenario. So it's an exciting time for us, again, moving HPE strategy into something very different than where we were before. >> Well, Keith, that speaks to ecosystem. So I don't know if you were at Microsoft, when the sweaty Steve Ballmer was working with the developers, developers. That's about ecosystem, ecosystem, ecosystem. I don't expect we're going to see Antonio replicating that. But that really is the sort of what you just described is the ecosystem developing on top of GreenLake. That's critical. >> Yeah. And this is one of the things I learned. So, being at Microsoft for as long as I was and leading the Azure business from a commercial standpoint, it was all about the partner and I mean, in all fairness, almost every solution that gets delivered has some sort of partner component to it. Might be an ISV app, might be a managed service, might be in a Colo, might be with our hybrid cloud, with our Hyperscalers, but everything has a partner component to it. And so one of the things I learned with Azure is, you have to sell through and with your ecosystem and go to that customer with a joint solution. And that's where it becomes so impactful and so powerful for what our customers are trying to accomplish. >> When we think about the data gravity and the value of data that put massive potential that it has, even Antonio talked about it this morning, being data rich but insights poor for a long time. >> Yeah. >> Every company in today's day and age has to be a data company to be competitive, there's no more option for that. How does GreenLake empower companies? GreenLake and its ecosystem empower companies to really live being data companies so that they can meet their customers where they are. >> I think it's a really great point because like we said, data's the new currency. Data's the new gold that's out there and people have to get their arms around their data estate. So then they can make these business decisions, these business insights and garner that. And Dave, you mentioned earlier, the Edge is bringing a ton of new data in, and my Zenseact example is a good one. But with GreenLake, you now have a platform that can do data and data management and really sort of establish and secure the data for you. There's no data latency, there's no data egress charges. And which is what we typically run into with the public cloud. But we also support a wide range of databases, open source, as well as the commercial ones, the sequels and those types of scenarios. But what really comes to life is when you have to do analytics on that and you're doing AI and machine learning. And this is one of the benefits I think that people don't realize with HPE is, the investments we've made with Cray, for example, we have and you saw on stage today, the largest supercomputer in the world. That depth that we have as a company, that then comes down into AI and analytics for what we can do with high performance compute, data simulations, data modeling, analytics, like that is something that we, as a company, have really deep, deep capabilities on. So it's exciting to see what we can bring to customers all for that spectrum of data. >> I was excited to see Frontier, they actually achieve, we hosted an event, co-produced event with HPE during the pandemic, Exascale day. >> Yeah. >> But we weren't quite at Exascale, we were like right on the cusp. So to see it actually break through was awesome. So HPC is clearly a differentiator for Hewlett Packard Enterprise. And you talk about the egress. What are some of the other differentiators? Why should people choose GreenLake? >> Well, I think the biggest thing is, that it's truly is a edge to cloud platform. And so you talk about Aruba and our capabilities with a network attached and network as a service capabilities, like that's fairly unique. You don't see that with the other companies. You mentioned earlier to me that compute capabilities that we've had as a company and the storage capabilities. But what's interesting now is that we're sort of taking all of that expertise and we're actually starting to deliver these cloud services that you saw on stage, private cloud, AI and machine learning, high performance computing, VDI, SAP. And now we're actually getting into these industry solutions. So we talked last year about electronic medical records, this year, we've talked about 5g. Now, we're talking about customer loyalty applications. So we're really trying to move from these sort of baseline capabilities and yes, containers and VMs and bare metal, all that stuff is important, but what's really important is the services that you run on top of that, 'cause that's the outcomes that our customers are looking at. >> Should we expect you to be accelerating? I mean, look at what you did with Azure. You look at what AWS does in terms of the feature acceleration. Should we expect HPE to replicate? Maybe not to that scale, but in a similar cadence, we're starting to see that. Should we expect that actually to go faster? >> I think you couched it really well because it's not as much about the quantity, but the quality and the uses. And so what we've been trying to do is say, hey, what is our swim lane? What is our sweet spot? Where do we have a superpower? And where are the areas that we have that superpower and how can we bring those solutions to our customers? 'Cause I think, sometimes, you get over your skis a bit, trying to do too much, or people get caught up in the big numbers, versus the, hey, what's the real meat behind it. What's the tangible outcome that we can deliver to customers? And we see just a massive TAM. I want to say my last analysis was around $42 billion in the next three years, TAM and the Azure service on-prem space. And so we think that there's nothing but upside with the core set of workloads, the core set of solutions and the cloud services that we bring. So yeah, we'll continue to innovate, absolutely, amen, but we're not in a, hey we got to get to 250 this and 300 that, we want to keep it as focused as we can. >> Well, the vast majority of the revenue in the public cloud is still compute. I mean, not withstanding, Microsoft obviously does a lot in SaaS, but I'm talking about the infrastructure and service. Still, well, I would say over 50%. And so there's a lot of the services that don't make any revenue and there's that long tail, if I hear your strategy, you're not necessarily going after that. You're focusing on the quality of those high value services and let the ecosystem sort of bring in the rest. >> This is where I think the, I mean, I love that you guys are asking me about the ecosystem because this is where their sweet spot is. They're the experts on hyper-converged or databases, a service or VDI, or even with SAP, like they're the experts on that piece of it. So we're enabling that together to our customers. And so I don't want to give you the impression that we're not going to innovate. Amen. We absolutely are, but we want to keep it within that, that again, our swim lane, where we can really add true value based on our expertise and our capabilities so that we can confidently go to customers and say, hey, this is a solution that's going to deliver this business value or this capability for you. >> The partners might be more comfortable with that than, we only have one eye sleep with one eye open in the public cloud, like, okay, what are they going to, which value of mine are they grab next? >> You're spot on. And again, this is where I think, the power of what an Edge to cloud platform like HPE GreenLake can do for our customers, because it is that sort of, I mentioned it, one plus one equals three kind of scenario for our customers so. >> So we can leave your customers, last question, Keith. I know we're only on day one of the main summit, the partner growth summit was yesterday. What's the feedback been from the customers and the ecosystem in terms of validating the direction that HPE is going? >> Well, I think the fantastic thing has been to hear from our customers. So I mentioned in my keynote recently, we had Liberty Mutual and we had Texas Children's Hospital, and they're implementing HPE GreenLake in a variety of different ways, from a private cloud standpoint to a data center consolidation. They're seeing sustainability goals happen on top of that. They're seeing us take on management for them so they can take their limited resources and go focus them on innovation and value added scenarios. So the flexibility and cost that we're providing, and it's just fantastic to hear this come to life in a real customer scenario because what Texas Children is trying to do is improve patient care for women and children like who can argue with that. >> Nobody. >> So, yeah. It's great. >> Awesome. Keith, thank you so much for joining Dave and me on the program, talking about all of the momentum with HPE Greenlake. >> Always. >> You can't walk in here without feeling the momentum. We appreciate your insights and your time. >> Always. Thank you you for the time. Yeah. Great to see you as well. >> Likewise. >> Thanks. >> For Keith White and Dave Vellante, I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching theCube live, day one coverage from the show floor at HPE Discover '22. We'll be right back with our next guest. (gentle music)

(electronica music) >> Hello everybody. This is Dave Volante and we are covering HPE's big GreenLake announcements. We've got wall-to-wall coverage, a ton of content. We've been watching GreenLake since the beginning. And of one of the things we said early on was let's watch and see how frequently, what the cadence of innovations that HPE brings to the market. Because that's what a cloud company does. So, we're here to welcome you. Keith White is here as the Senior Vice President General Manager of GreenLake cloud services. He runs the commercial business. Keith, thanks for coming on. Help me kick off. >> Thanks for having me. It's awesome to be here. >> So you guys got some momentum orders, 40% growth a year to year on year. You got a lot of momentum, customer growth. >> Yeah, it's fantastic. It's 46%. >> Kyle, thank you for that clarification. And in 46. Big different from 40 to 46. >> No, I think what we're seeing is we're seeing the momentum happen in the marketplace, right? We have a scenario where we're bringing the cloud experience to the customer on their premises. They get to have it automated. Self-serve, easy to consume. They pay for what they use. They can have it in their data center. They can have it at the edge. They can have it at the colo, and, we can manage it all for them. And so they're really getting that true cloud experience and we're seeing it manifest itself in a variety of different customer scenarios. You know, we talked about at Discover, a lot of work that we're doing on the hybrid cloud side of the house, and a lot of work that we're doing on the edge side of things with our partners. But you know, it's exciting to see the explosion of data and how now we're providing this data capability for our customers. >> What are the big trends you're hearing from customers? And how is that informing what you're doing with Green? I mean, I feel like in a lot of ways, Keith, what happened last year, you guys were, were in a better position maybe than most. But what are you hearing and how is that informing your go forward? >> Yeah, I think it's really three things with customers, right? First off, Hey, we're trying to accelerate our digital transformation and it's all becoming about the data. So help us monetize the data, help us protect that data. Help us analyze it to make decisions. And so, you know, number one, it's all about data. Number two is wow, this pandemic, you know, we need to look for cost savings. So, we still need to move our business forward. We've got to accelerate our business, but help me find some cost savings with respect to what I can do. And third, what we're hearing is, hey, we're in a situation, where there's a lot of different capabilities happening with our workforce. They're working from home. They're working hybrid. Help us make sure that we can stay connected to those folks, but also in a secure way, making sure that they have all the tools and resources they need. So those are sort of three of the big themes that we're seeing that GreenLake really helps manifest itself, with the data we're doing now. With all the hybrid cloud capabilities. With the cost savings that we get with respect to our platform, as well as with solutions such as VDI or workforce enablements that we've, we create from a solution standpoint. . >> So, what's the customer reaction, I mean, I mean, everybody now, who's has a big on-premise state, has an as a service capability. A customer saying, oh yeah, oh yeah, how do you make it not me too? In the customer conversations? >> Yeah. I think it turns into, you know, you have to bring the holistic solution to the customer. So yes, there's technology there and we're hearing from, you know, some of the competitors out there. Yeah, we're doing as a service as well, but maybe it's a little bit of storage here. Maybe it's a little bit of networking there. Customers need that end to end solution. And so as you've seen us announce over time, we've got the building blocks, of course, compute storage and networking, but everything runs in a virtual machine. Everything runs in a container or everything runs on the bare metal itself. And that package that we've created for customers means that they can do whatever solution, or whatever workload they want So, if you're a hospital and you're running Epic for your electronic medical records, you can go that route. If you're upgrading SAP and you're using virtual machines at a very large scale, you can use this, use a GreenLake for that as well. So, as you go down the list, there's just so many opportunities with respect to bring those solutions to our customers. And then you bring in our point-next capabilities to support that. You bring in our advisory and professional services, along with our ecosystem to help enable that. You bring in our HPE financial services to help fund that digital transformation. And you've got the complete package. And that's why customers are saying, hey, you guys are now partners of us. You're not just a hardware provider, you're a partner you're helping us solve our business problems and helping us accelerate our business. >> So what should people expect today? You guys got some announcements. What should people look for? >> Well, I think this is, as we've talked about, you know, now we're sort of providing much more capabilities around the data side of the house. Because data is so such, it's the gold, if you will, of a customer's environment. So first off we want to do analytics. So we want an open platform that provides really a unified set of analytics capabilities. And this is where we have a real strong, sweet spot with respect to some of the, the software that we've built around Esperal. But also with the hardware capabilities. As you know, we have all the way up to the Cray supercomputers that, that are doing all of the analytics for whether this or, or financial data that. So, I think that's one of the key things. The second is you got to protect that data. And, and so if it's going to be on prem, I want to know that it's protected and secured. So how do I back it up? How do I have a disaster recovery plan? How do I watch out for ransomware attacks, as well? So we're providing some capabilities there. And then I'd say, lastly, because of all the experience we have with our customers now implementing these hybrid solutions, they're saying, hey, help me with this edge to cloud framework and how do I go and implement that on my own? And so we've taken all the experience and we've bucketed that into our edge to cloud adoption framework to provide that capability for our customers. So we, you know, we're really excited about, again, talking about solutions, talking about accelerating your business, not just talking about technology. >> I said up the top, Keith, that one of the ways I was evaluating you as the pace and the cadence of the innovations. And, and is that, is that fair? How do you guys think about that internally? Are you, you know, you're pushing yourself to go faster, I'm sure you are, but what's that conversation like? >> I think it's a great question because in essence, we're now pivoting the company holistically to being a cloud services and a software company. And that's really exciting and we're seeing that happen internally. But this pace of innovation is really built on what customers are asking us for us. So now that we've grown over 1200 customers worldwide. You know, over $5 billion of total contract value. You know, signing some, some large deals in a variety of solutions and workloads and verticals, et cetera. What we're now seeing is, hey, this is what we need. Help me with my internal IT out to my business groups. Help me with my edge strategy as I build the factory of the future, or, you know, help me with my data and analytics that I'm trying to accomplish for my, you know, diagnosis of, of x-rays and, and capabilities such as Carestream, if you will. So it's, it's exciting to see them come to us and say, this is the capabilities that we're requiring, and we've got our foot on the gas to provide that innovation. And we're miles ahead of the competition. >> All right, we've got an exciting day ahead. We got all kinds of technology discussions, solution discussions. We got, we got, we're going to hear from the analyst community. Really bringing you the, the full package of announcements here. Keith, thanks for helping me set this up. >> Always. Yeah. Thanks so much for having me. >> I look forward today. And thank you for watching. Keep it right there. Tons of content coming your way. You're watching The Cubes coverage of HP's big GreenLake announcement. Right back. (electronica music)

(intro tune) >> Welcome back to HPE Discover 2021, the virtual version. My name is Dave Vellante and you're watching theCUBE's continuous coverage of the event. John Gromala is here. He's the Senior Director of Product Management for HPE GreenLake Lighthouse, new offering from HPE. We're going to talk about that. We're going to talk about Cloud Native. Hey, John, welcome to theCUBE. Good to see you again. >> Awesome. Great to be with you again. >> All right. What is GreenLake Lighthouse? >> Yes, very excited. Another new offering and innovation from HPE to support our broader GreenLake strategy and plans. It's really a brand new purpose built Cloud Native platform that we've developed and created that pulls together all of our infrastructure leadership with our platform software leadership into a single integrated system, built to run GreenLake Cloud Services. So think of it as, you know, fully integrated, deploy at any place you want on your premises, at a co-location provider or at the edge, wherever you need, they'll all inter-operate and work together, sharing data, you know, running apps together, great capability for people to bring the Cloud where they want. As we talk about with GreenLake, it's the Cloud that comes to you. >> So, should we think of this as a management platform? Is it also sort of a quasi development platform? Kind of where does it fit in that spectrum? >> Well, it's really more of a integrated system with all of the integrated control planes needed to run it, you know, in a distributed fashion. So it's a true distributed Cloud intended to run at any client location it's needed, connects back to GreenLake central and our GreenLake Cloud operations teams to go ahead and run any Cloud services that they want. So you get the benefit of running those workloads wherever you need, but that, you know, centralized control that people want in terms of how they run their Clouds. >> OK so, we think of these, these things like, for instance, how is it different from AWS outposts or things like, you know, as your stack or as your hub? >> Yeah. Very simply, you know, this is because it's a distributed Cloud intended to make it so you could run it wherever you need. You don't need to be tethered to any of the public Clouds or the various public Clouds out there. So people can now run their systems wherever they want, however they need without that required tethering that much of those other vendors require. So you can really sort of own your own Cloud or have that Cloud come to wherever you need it within your overall IT. >> Can I tether to a public Cloud if I want to? >> Yeah. The Cloud services, like many other Cloud services can interconnect together. So no issue if you want to run or even do fail over between public Cloud or on premises, it's all how you want to set it up. But that connection to public Cloud again, through GreenLake is done at that Cloud services level. You know, where you would connect one of these Greenlake Lighthouse systems to the public Cloud through services. >> OK so, maybe you could talk a little bit about the use cases in a minute, but how flexible is this? How do I configure Lighthouse? You know, what comes standard? What are my options? >> Yeah, so we've designed it in a very modular fashion so that people can really configure it to whatever their needs are at any given location. So there's a basic set of modules that aligned to a lot of the compute and storage instances that people are familiar with from all of the Cloud providers. You simply tell us which workloads you want to be running on it, and how much capacity you want. And that'll get configured in deploy to that given sight. In terms of the different types, we have what we're calling two series, or a set of series that are available for this to meet different sets of needs. One being more mainstream for, you know, broad use cases that people need, you know, virtualized container, any other type of enterprise workloads, and another more technically focused with higher performance networking for higher performance deployments. You can choose which of those fits your needs for those given areas. >> So maybe you could talk a little bit more about the workloads and what specifically is supported and how they get deployed. >> Yeah. Again, all of it is managed and run through GreenLake Central. That's our one location where people can go to watch these things, manage them. You can run, you know, container as a service, VM as a service, as needed on these different platforms. You can actually mix and match those as well. So one of these platforms can run multiple of those and you can vary the mix of those as your business needs change over time. So think of it as a very flexible way to manage this, which is really what Cloud Native is all about. Having that flexibility to run those workloads wherever and however you need. In addition, we can build a more advanced type of solutions on top of those sort of foundational capabilities with things like HPC as a service and Ops as a service to better enable clients to deploy any other given enterprise workloads. >> John, what about the security model for Lighthouse? That's obviously a big deal. Everybody's talking about these days. You can't open the news without seeing some kind of hack. How does lighthouse operate in a secure environment? >> Well, you know, first of all, that there's sort of a new standard that was established, you know, within these Cloud operating models. And HPE was leading in terms of infrastructure innovation with our Silicon Root of Trust, where we came out with the world's most secure infrastructure a few years ago. And what we're doing now, since this is a full platform and integrated system, we'll be extending that capability beyond just, you know, how we, you know, create a root of trust in our manufacturing facilities to ensure that it's secure, running it within the infrastructure itself. We'll be extending that vertically up into the software stacks of containers and VMs sort of using that route of trust up to make sure everything's secure in that sense and then eventually up to the workloads themselves. So by being able to go back to that root of trust it really makes a big difference in how people can run things in an enterprise secure way. Great innovations continued. And one of our big focus areas throughout this year. >> So where does it fit in the portfolio, John? I mean, how is it compliment or how is it different from, you know, the typical HPE systems, the hardware and software that we're used to? >> You might think of this as sort of a best of, bringing together all the great innovations of HPE. You know, we've got awesome infrastructure that we've led for many, many years. We've got, you know, great more Cloud Native software that's being developed. We've got great partnerships that we've got with a lot of the leading vendors out there. This allows us to bring all of those things together into a integrated platform that is really intended to run these Cloud Native services. So it builds on top of that leadership, fits in that sense with the portfolio, but it's ultimately about how it allows us to run and extend our GreenLake capabilities as we know them to make them more, more consumable, if you want to call it for a lot of our enterprise clients at whatever location that they. >> So when would I use Lighthouse and when would I use sort of a traditional HPE system? >> Yeah, again, it's a matter of which level of integration people want. You know, Cloud is really also in terms of experience about simplifying what people are purchasing and making it easier for them to consume, easier for them to roll out a lot of these things. That's when you'd want to purchase a Lighthouse versus our other infrastructure products. We'll always have those leading infrastructure products where people can put together everything in exactly the way that they want and go through the qualification and certification of a lot of those workloads. Or they can go ahead and select this GreenLake Lighthouse, where they have a lot of these things available in a catalog. We do validation of the workloads, and platform systems, so that it's all sort of ready for people to roll out at a much more secure, tested and agile fashion. >> So if I have a Cloud first strategy, but I don't want to put it in the public Cloud, but I want that Cloud experience. And I want to go fast. It sounds like Lighthouse, I'm the perfect customer for Lighthouse. >> Precisely, you know, this is taking that Cloud experience that people are wanting, the simplicity of those deployments and making it where it can come to them in whichever location that they want, you know, running it on a consumption basis. So that it's a lot easier way for them to go ahead and manage and deploy those things. Without a lot of the internal qualification and certifications that they've had to do over years. >> Versus OK, but and, or if I want to customize it maybe I want to, maybe I'm a channel partner. I want to bring some of my own value. I got a specific use case, that's not covered by something like Lighthouse. That's where I would go with a more traditional infrastructure. >> Correct. Yeah, if anyone wants to do customization, we've got a great set of products for that. We really want to use a Lighthouse as a mechanism for us to standardize and focus on more enabling these broader Cloud capabilities for clients. >> And lighthouse, talk a little bit more about the automation that I get that, you know, things like patching and software updates, that's sort of included in this integrated system, is that correct? >> Yeah. >> Absolutely. You know, when people think about you know, managing workloads in the Cloud, they don't worry about taking care of firmware updating and a lot of those things. That's all taken care of by the provider. So in that same experience, Lighthouse comes with all of the firmware updating, all of the software updating all included, all managed through our GreenLake managed services teams. So that's just part of how the system takes care of itself. You know, that's a new level of capability and experience that's consistent with all of the Cloud providers out there. >> And that's, OK so, that's something that is a managed service. So let's say I have a Lighthouse on prem, you're going to, that manage services doing all the patching and the releases, and the updates and that, that lives in the Cloud, that lives in HPE, that lives in my prem. >> Well, yeah, ultimately it all goes through GreenLake central and gets managed. You know, all of those deployments are automated in nature so that, you know, people don't have to worry about them. There's multiple ways that that can get delivered to them. We have some, you know, automation and control plane technology that brings that all together for them. You know, it can vary based on the client, on, you know, their degree of how they want to manage some of that, but it's all taken care of for them. >> And, you know, you've got GreenLake in the name, am I to infer from that that it sort of dovetails in, is one of the puzzles in the GreenLake mosaic. >> Yeah, exactly. So think of, think of GreenLake as our broader initiative for everything Cloud. And how do we start enabling not only these Cloud services, but make it easier for people to deploy those and consume them wherever they need. And this is the enablement piece. This is that portion of Greenlake that helps them enable that connected degree like central, where they can manage everything centrally. And then we've got that broad catalog of services available. >> And when can I get it, when's it go GA? >> Yeah. So it'll, July is when our first set of shipments and availability are there. So just a very, you know, few days after, you know, discover here and we'll expand the portfolio over time with more of a mainstream version, early, more technical or performance oriented ones available soon thereafter. And we've got plans even for edge type offerings, more in the future as well. So a case where we'll continue to build and expand more targeting these platforms to folks needs. Whether they're enterprise or maybe there are vertical offerings that they want, in terms of how they, you know, move all these things together. Think of Telco is a great case where people want this. Healthcare is another area where we can have the value of these integrated systems in a very purpose-built way. >> Can I ask you like, what's inside? You know, what can I get in terms of you know, basic infrastructure, compute, storage, networking? What are my options? >> All of the above, you know, what we'll do is we'll go through the basic selection of all of that greatest hits within our complete portfolio, pull them together, give you a few simple choices. You know, you think about it as, you want general purpose compute modules. You might want compute optimized or memory optimized modules. Each of those are simple choices that you'll make that come together. Underlying all that are the great infrastructure pieces that you've known for years. But we take care of simplifying that for you. So you don't have to worry about those details. >> Great. Well, John, congratulations on the new product, and thank you for sharing the update with theCUBE. >> Thank you very much. Great to talk to you. >> All right, thank you for watching theCUBE's coverage of HPE Discover 2021. My name is Dave Vellante. Keep it right there. We're right back with more coverage right after this short break. (outro tune)

(bright upbeat music) >> Announcer: We are entering an age of insight where data moves freely between environments to work together powerfully, from wherever it lives. A new era driven by next generation cloud services. It's freedom that accelerates innovation and digital transformation, but it's only for those who dare to propel their business toward a new future that pushes beyond the usual barriers. To a place that unites all information under a fluid yet consistent operating model, across all your applications and data. To a place called HPE GreenLake. HPE GreenLake pushes beyond the obstacles and limitations found in today's infrastructure because application entanglements, data gravity, security, compliance, and cost issues simply aren't solved by current cloud options. Instead, HPE GreenLake is the cloud that comes to you, bringing with it, increased agility, broad visibility, and open governance across your entire enterprise. This is digital transformation unlocked, incompatibility solved, data decentralized, and insights amplified. For those thinkers, makers and doers who want to create on the fly scale up or down with a single click, stand up new ideas without risk, and view it all as a single agile system of systems. HPE GreenLake is here and all are invited. >> The definition of cloud is evolving and now clearly comprises hybrid and on-prem cloud. These trends are top of mind for every CIO and the space is heating up as every major vendor has been talking about as-a-Service models and making moves to better accommodate customer needs. HPE was the first to market with its GreenLake brand, and continues to make new announcements designed to bring the cloud experience to far more customers. Come here from HPE and its partners about the momentum that they're seeing with this trend and what actions you can take to stay ahead of the competition in this fast moving market. (bright soft music) Okay, we're with Keith White, Senior Vice President and General Manager for GreenLake at HPE, and George Hope, who's the Worldwide Head of Partner Sales at Hewlett Packard Enterprise. Welcome gentlemen, good to see you. >> Awesome to be here. >> Yeah. Thanks so much. >> You're welcome, Keith, last we spoke, we talked about how you guys were enabling high performance computing workloads to get green-late right for enterprise markets. And you got some news today, which we're going to get to but you guys, you put out a pretty bold position with GreenLake, basically staking a claim if you will, the edge, cloud as-a-Service all in. How are you thinking about its impacts for your customers so far? >> You know, the impact's been amazing and, you know, in essence, I think the pandemic has really brought forward this real need to accelerate our customer's digital transformation, their modernization efforts, and you know, frankly help them solve what was amounting to a bunch of new business problems. And so, you know, this manifests itself in a set of workloads, set of solutions, and across all industries, across all customer types. And as you mentioned, you know GreenLake is really bringing that value to them. It brings the cloud to the customer in their data center, in their colo, or at the edge. And so frankly, being able to do that with that full cloud experience. All is a pay per use, you know, fully consumption-based scenario, all managed for them so they get that as I mentioned, true cloud experience. It's really sort of landing really well with customers and we continue to see accelerated growth. We're adding new customers, we're adding new technology. And we're adding a whole new set of partner ecosystem folks as well that we'll talk about. >> Well, you know, it's interesting you mentioned that just cause as a quick aside it's, the definition of cloud is evolving and it's because customers, it's the way customers look at it. It's not just vendor marketing. It's what customers want, that experience across cloud, edge, you know, multiclouds, on-prem. So George, what's your take? Anything you'd add to Keith's response? >> I would, you've heard Antonio Neri say it several times and you probably saying it for yourself. The cloud is an experience, it's not a destination. The digital transformation is pushing new business models and that demands more flexible IT. And the first round of digital transformation focused on a cloud first strategy. For our customers we're looking to get more agility. As Keith mentioned, the next phase of transformation will be characterized by bringing the cloud speed and agility to all apps and data, regardless of where they live, According to IDC, by the end of 2021, 80% of the businesses will have some mechanism in place to shift the cloud centric, infrastructure and apps and twice as fast as before the pandemic. So the pandemic has actually accelerated the impact of the digital divide, specifically, in the small and medium companies which are adapting to technology change even faster and emerging stronger as a result. You know, the analysts agree cloud computing and digitalization will be key differentiators for small and medium business in years to come. And speed and automation will be pivotal as well. And by 2022, at least 30% of the lagging SMBs will accelerate digitalization. But the fair focus will be on internal processes and operations. The digital leaders, however, will differentiate by delivering their customers, a dynamic experience. And with our partner ecosystem, we're helping our customers embrace our as-a-Service vision and stand out wherever they are. on their transformation journey. >> Well, thanks for those stats, I always liked the data. I mean, look, if you're not a digital business today I feel like you're out of business only 'cause.... I'm sure there's some exceptions, but you got to get on the digital bandwagon. I think pre-pandemic, a lot of times people really didn't know what it meant. We know now what it means. Okay, Keith, let's get into the news when we do these things. I love that you guys always have something new to share. What do you have? >> No, you got it. And you know, as we said, the world is hybrid and the world is multicloud. And so, customers are expecting these solutions. And so, we're continuing to really drive up the innovation and we're adding additional cloud services to GreenLake. We just recently went to General AVailability of our MLOps, Machine Learning Operations, and our containers for cloud services along with our virtual desktop which has become very big in a pandemic world where a lot more people are working from home. And then we have shipped our SAP HEC, customer edition, which allows SAP customers to run on their premise whether it's the data center or the colo. And then today we're introducing our new Bare Metal capabilities as well as containers on Bare Metal as a Service, for those folks that are running cloud native applications that don't require any sort of hypervisor. So we're really excited about that. And then second, I'd say similar to that HPC as a Service experience we talked about before, where we were bringing HPC down to a broader set of customers. We're expanding the entry point for our private cloud, which is virtual machines, containers, storage, compute type capabilities in workload optimized systems. So again, this is one of the key benefits that HPE brings is it combines all of the best of our hardware, software, third-party software, and our services, and financial services into a package. And we've workload optimized this for small, medium, large and extra-large. So we have a real sort of broader base for our customers to take advantage of and to really get that cloud experience through HPE GreenLake. And, you know, from a partner standpoint we also want to make sure that we continue to make this super easy. So we're adding self-service capabilities we're integrating into our distributors marketplaces through a core set of APIs to make sure that it plugs in for a very smooth customer experience. And this expands our reach to over 100,000 additional value-added resellers. And, you know, we saw just fantastic growth in the channel in Q1, over 118% year over year growth for GreenLake Cloud Services through the channel. And we're continuing to expand, extend and expand our partner ecosystem with additional key partnerships like our colos. The colocation centers are really key. So Equinix, CyrusOne and others that we're working with and I'll let George talk more about. >> Yeah, I wonder if you could pick up on that George. I mean, look, if I'm a partner and and I mean, I see an opportunity here.. Maybe, you know, I made a lot of money in the old days moving iron. But I got to move, I got to pivot my business. You know, COVID's actually, you know, accelerating a lot of those changes, but there's a lot of complexity out there and partners can be critical in helping customers make that journey. What do you see this meaning to partners, George? >> So I completely agree with Keith and through and with our partners we give our customers choice. Right, they don't have to worry about security or cost as they would with public cloud or the hyperscalers. We're driving special initiatives via Cloud28 which we run, which is the world's largest cloud aggregator. And also, in collaboration with our distributors in their marketplaces as Keith mentioned. In addition, customers can leverage our expertise and support of our service provider ecosystem, our SI's, our ISV's, to find the right mix of hybrid IT and decide where each application or workload should be hosted. 'Cause customers are now demanding robust ecosystems, cloud adjacency, and efficient low latency networks. And the modern workload demands, secure, compliant, highly available, and cost optimized environments. And Keith touched on colocation. We're partnering with colocation facilities to provide our customers with the ability to expand bandwidth, reduce latency, and get access to a robust ecosystem of adjacent providers. We touched on Equinix a bit as one of them, but we're partnering with them to enable customers to connect to multiple clouds with private on-demand interconnections from hundreds of data center locations around the globe. We continue to invest in the partner and customer experience, you know, making ourselves easier to do business with. We've now fully integrated partners in GreenLake Central, and could provide their customers end to end support and managing the entire hybrid IT estate. And lastly, we're providing partners with dedicated and exclusive enablement opportunities so customers can rely on both HPE and partner experts. And we have a competent team of specialists that can help them transform and differentiate themselves. >> Yeah, so, I'm hearing a theme of simplicity. You know, I talked earlier about this being customer-driven. To me what the customer wants is they want to come in, they want simple, like you mentioned, self-serve. I don't care if it's on-prem, in the cloud, across clouds, at the edge, abstract, all that complexity away from me. Make it simple to do, not only the technology to work, you figure out where the workload should run and let the metadata decide and that's a bold vision. And then, make it easy to do business. Let me buy as-a-Service if that's the way I want to consume. And partners are all about, you know, reducing friction and driving that. So, anyway guys, final thoughts, maybe Keith, you can close it out here and maybe George can call it timeout. >> Yeah, you summed it up really nice. You know, we're excited to continue to provide what we view as the largest and most flexible hybrid cloud for our customers' apps, data, workloads, and solutions. And really being that leading on-prem solution to meet our customer's needs. At the same time, we're going to continue to innovate and our ears are wide open, and we're listening to our customers on what their needs are, what their requirements are. So we're going to expand the use cases, expand the solution sets that we provide in these workload optimized offerings to a very very broad set of customers as they drive forward with that digital transformation and modernization efforts. >> Right, George, any final thoughts? >> Yeah, I would say, you know, with our partners we work as one team and continue to hone our skills and embrace our competence. We're looking to help them evolve their businesses and thrive, and we're here to help now more than ever. So, you know, please reach out to our team and our partners and we can show you where we've already been successful together. >> That's great, we're seeing the expanding GreenLake portfolio, partners key part of it. We're seeing new tools for them and then this ecosystem evolution and build out and expansion. Guys, thanks so much. >> Yeah, you bet, thank you. >> Thank you, appreciate it. >> You're welcome. (bright soft music) >> Okay, we're here with Jo Peterson the VP of Cloud & Security at Clarify360. Hello, Jo, welcome to theCUBE. >> Hello. >> Great to see you. >> Thanks for having me. >> You're welcome, all right, let's get right into it. How do you think about cloud where we are today in 2021? The definitions evolve, but where do you see it today and where do you see it going? >> Well, that's such an interesting question and is so relevant because the labels are disappearing. So over the last 10 years, we've sort of found ourselves defining whether an environment was public or whether it was private or whether it was hybrid. Here's the deal, cloud is infrastructure and infrastructure is cloud. So at the end of the day cloud in whatever form it's taking is a platform, and ultimately, this enablement tool for the business. Customers are consuming cloud in the best way that works for their businesses. So let's also point out that cloud is not a destination, it's this journey. And clients are finding themselves at different places on that road. And sometimes they need help getting to the next milestone. >> Right, and they're really looking for that consistent experience. Well, what are the big waves and trends that you're seeing around cloud out there in the marketplace? >> So I think that this hybrid reality is happening in most organizations. Their actual IT portfolios include a mix of on-premise and cloud infrastructure, and we're seeing this blurred line happening between the public cloud and the traditional data center. Customers want a bridge that easily connects one environment to the other environment, and they want end-to-end visibility. Customers are becoming more intentional and strategic about their cloud roadmaps. So some of them are intentionally and strategically selecting hybrid environments because they feel that it affords them more control, cost, balance, comfort level around their security. In a way, cloud itself is becoming borderless. The major tech providers are extending their platforms in an infrastructure agnostic manner and that's to work across hybrid environments, whether they be hosted in the data center, whether it includes multiple cloud providers. As cloud matures, workload environments fit is becoming more of a priority. So forward thinking where the organizations are matching workloads to the best environment. And it's sort of application rationalization on this case by case basis and it really makes sense. >> Yeah, it does makes sense. Okay, well, let's talk about HPE GreenLake. They just announced some new solutions. What do you think it means for customers? >> I think that HPE has stepped up. They've listened to not only their customers but their partners. Customers want consumable infrastructure, they've made that really clear. And HPE has expanded the cloud service portfolio for clients. They're offering more choices to not only enterprise customers but they're expanding that offering to attract this mid-market client base. And they provided additional tools for partners to make selling GreenLake easier. This is all helping to drive channel sales. >> Yeah, so better granularity, just so it increases the candidates, better optionality for customers. And this thing is evolving pretty quickly. We're seeing a number of customers that we talked to interested in this model, trying to understand it better and ultimately, I think they're going to really lean in hard. Jo, I wonder if you could maybe think about or share with us which companies are, I got to say, getting it right? And I'm really interested in the partner piece, because if you think about the partner business, it's really, it's changing a lot, right? It's gone from this notion of moving boxes and there was a lot of money to be made over the decades in doing that, but they have to now become value-add suppliers and really around cloud services. And in the early days of cloud, I think the channel was a little bit freaked out, saying, uh-oh, they're going to cut out the middleman. But what's actually happened is those smart agile partners are adding substantial value, they've got deep relationships with customers and they're serving as really trusted advisors and executors of cloud strategies. What do you see happening in the partner community? >> Well, I think it's been a learning curve and everything that you said was spot on. It's a two way street, right? In order for VARs to sell residual services, monthly recurring services, there has to have been some incentive to do that and HPE really got it right. Because they, again listened to that partner community, and they said, you know what? We've got to incentivize these guys to start selling this way. This is a partnership and we expect it to be a partnership. And the tech companies that are getting right are doing that same sort of thing, they're figuring out ways to make it palatable to that VAR, to help them along that journey. They're giving them tools, they're giving them self-serve tools, they're incentivizing them financially to make that shift. That's what's going to matter. >> Well, that's a key point you're making, I mean, the financial incentives, that's new and different. Paying, you know, incentivizing for as-a-Service models versus again, moving hardware and paying for, you know, installing iron. That's a shift in mindset, isn't it? >> It definitely is. And HPE, I think is getting it right because I didn't notice but I learned this, 70% of their annual sales are actually transacted through their channel. And they've seen this 116% increase in HPE GreenLake orders in Q1, from partners. So what they're doing is working. >> Yeah, I think you're right. And you know, the partner channel it becomes super critical. It's funny, Jo, I mean, again, in the early days of cloud, the channel was feeling like they were going to get disrupted. I don't know about you, but I mean, we've both been analysts for awhile and the more things get simple, the more they get complicated, right? I mean the consumerization of IT, the cloud, swipe your credit card, but actually applying that to your business is not easy. And so, I see that as great opportunities for the channel. Give you the last word. >> Absolutely, and what's going to matter is the tech companies that step up and realize we've got this chance, this opportunity to build that bridge and provide visibility, end-to-end visibility for clients. That's what going to matter. >> Yeah, I like how you're talking about that bridge, because that's what everybody wants. They want that bridge from on-prem to the public cloud, across clouds, going to to be moving out to the edge. And that is to your point, a journey that's going to evolve over the better part of this coming decade. Jo, great to see you. Thanks so much for coming on theCUBE today. >> Thanks for having me. (bright soft music) >> Okay, now we're going to into the GreenLake power panel to talk about the cloud landscape, hybrid cloud, and how the partner ecosystem and customers are thinking about cloud, hybrid cloud as a Service and of course, GreenLake. And with me are C.R. Howdyshell, President of Advizex. Ron Nemecek, who's the Business Alliance Manager at CBTS. Harry Zarek is President of Compugen. And Benjamin Klay is VP of Sales and Alliances at Arrow Electronics. Great to see you guys, thanks so much for coming on theCUBE. >> Thanks for having us. >> Good to be here. >> Okay, here's the deal. So I'm going to ask you guys each to introduce yourselves and your companies, add a little color to my brief intro, and then answer the following question. How do you and your customers think about hybrid cloud? And think about it in the context of where we are today and where we're going, not just the snapshot but where we are today and where we're going. C.R., why don't you start please? >> Sure, thanks a lot, Dave, appreciate it. And again, C.R. Howdyshell, President of Advizex. I've been with the company for 18 years, the last four years as president. So had the great opportunity here to lead a 45 year old company with a very strong brand and great culture. As it relates to Advizex and where we're headed to with hybrid cloud is it's a journey. So we're excited to be leading that journey for the company as well as HPE. We're very excited about where HPE is going with GreenLake. We believe it's a very strong solution when it comes to hybrid cloud. Have been an HPE partner since, well since 1980. So for 40 years, it's our longest standing OEM relationship. And we're really excited about where HPE is going with GreenLake. From a hybrid cloud perspective, we feel like we've been doing the hybrid cloud solutions, the past few years with everything that we've focused on from a VMware perspective. But now with where HPE is going, we think, probably changing the game. And it really comes down to giving customers that cloud experience with the on-prem solution with GreenLake. And we've had great response for customers and we think we're going to continue to see that kind of increased activity and reception. >> Great, thank you C.R., and yeah, I totally agree. It is a journey and we've seen it really come a long way in the last decade. Ron, I wonder if you could kickoff your little first intro there please. >> Sure Dave, thanks for having me today and it's a pleasure being here with all of you. My name is Ron Nemecek, I'm a Business Alliance manager at CBTS. In my role, I'm responsible for our HPE GreenLake relationship globally. I've enjoyed a 33 year career in the IT industry. I'm thankful for the opportunity to serve in multiple functional and senior leadership roles that have helped me gather a great deal of education and experience that could be used to aid our customers with their evolving needs, for business outcomes to best position them for sustainable and long-term success. I'm honored to be part of the CBTS and OnX Canada organization. CBTS stands for Consult Build Transform and Support. We have a 35 year relationship with HPE. We're a platinum and inner circle partner. We're headquartered in Cincinnati, Ohio. We service 3000 customers generating over a billion dollars in revenue and we have over 2000 associates across the globe. Our focus is partnering with our customers to deliver innovative solutions and business results through thought leadership. We drive this innovation via our team of the best and brightest technology professionals in the industry that have secured over 2,800 technical certifications, 260 specifically with HPE. And in our hybrid cloud business, we have clearly found that technology, new market demands for instant responses and experiences, evolving economic considerations with detailed financial evaluation, and of course the global pandemic, have challenged each of our customers across all industries to develop an optimal cloud strategy. We now play an enhanced strategic role for our customers as their technology advisor and their guide to the right mix of cloud experiences that will maximize their organizational success with predictable outcomes. Our conversations have really moved from product roadmaps and speeds and feeds to return on investment, return on capital, and financial statements, ratios, and metrics. We collaborate regularly with our customers at all levels and all departments to find an effective comprehensive cloud strategy for their workloads and applications ensuring proper alignment and cost with financial return. >> Great, thank you, Ron. Yeah, today it's all about the business value. Harry, please. >> Hi Dave, thanks for the opportunity and greetings from the Great White North. We're a Canadian-based company headquartered in Toronto with offices across the country. We've been in the tech industry for a very long time. We're what we would call a solution provider. How hard for my mother to understand what that means but what our goal is to help our customers realize the business value of their technology investments. Just to give you an example of what it is we try and do. We just finished a build out of a new networking endpoint and data center technology for a brand new hospital. It's now being mobilized for COVID high-risk patients. So talk about our all being in an essential industry, providing essential services across the whole spectrum of technology. Now, in terms of what's happening in the marketplace, our customers are confused. No question about it. They hear about cloud, I mean, cloud first, and everyone goes to the cloud, but the reality is there's lots of technology, lots of applications that actually still have to run on premises for a whole bunch of reasons. And what customers want is solid senior serious advice as to how they leverage what they already have in terms of their existing infrastructure, but modernize it, update it, so it looks and feels a lot like the cloud. But they have the security, they have the protection that they need to have for reasons that are dependent on their industry and business to allow them to run on-prem. And so, the GreenLake philosophy is perfect. That allows customers to actually have one foot in the cloud, one foot in their traditional data center but modernize it so it actually looks like one enterprise entity. And it's that kind of flexibility that gives us an opportunity collectively, ourselves, our partners, HPE, to really demonstrate that we understand how to optimize the use of technology across all of the business applications they need to run. >> You know Harry, it's interesting about what you said is, the cloud it is kind of chaotic my word, not yours. But there is a lot of confusion out there, I mean, what's cloud, right? Is it public cloud, is it private cloud, the hybrid cloud? Now, it's the edge and of course the answer is all of the above. Ben, what's your perspective on all this? >> From a cloud perspective, you know, I think as an industry, I think we we've all accepted that public cloud is not necessarily going to win the day and we're in fact, in a hybrid world. There's certainly been some commentary and press that was sort of validate that. Not that it necessarily needs any validation but I think is the linkages between on-prem and cloud-based services have increased. It's paved the way for customers more effectively, deploy hybrid solutions in in the model that they want or that they desire. You know, Harry was commenting on that a moment ago. As the trend continues, it becomes much easier for solution providers and service providers to drive their services initiatives, you know, in particular managed services. >> From an Arrow perspective is we think about how we can help scale in particular from a GreenLake perspective. We've got the ability to stand up some cloud capabilities through our ArrowSphere platform that can really help customers adopt GreenLake and to benefit from some alliances opportunities, as well. And I'll talk more about that as we go through. >> And Ben, I didn't mean to squeeze you on Arrow. I mean, Arrow has been around longer than computers. I mean, if you Google the history of Arrow it'll blow your mind, but give us a little quick commercial. >> Yeah, absolutely. So I've been with Arrow for about 20 years. I've got responsibility for Alliance organization in North America, We're a global value added distribution, business consulting and channel enablement company. And we bring scope, scale and and expertise as it relates to the IT industry. I love the fast pace that comes with the market that we're all in. And I love helping customers and suppliers both, be positioned for long-term success. And you know, the subject matter here today is just a great example of that. So I'm happy to be here and look forward to the discussion. >> All right, we got some good brain power in the room. Let's cut right to the chase. Ron, where's the pain? What are the main problems that CBTS I love what it stands for, Consult Build Transform and Support. What's the main pain point that customers are asking you to solve when it comes to their cloud strategies? >> Sure, Dave. Our customers' concerns and associated risks come from the market demands to deliver their products, services, and experiences instantaneously. And then the challenge is how do they meet those demands because they have aging infrastructure, processes, and fiscal constraints. Our customers really need us now more than ever to be excellent listeners so we can collaborate on an effective map with the strategic placement of workloads and applications in that spectrum of cloud experiences while managing their costs, and of course, mitigating risks to their business. This collaboration with our customers, often identify significant costs that have to be evaluated, justified or eliminated. We find significant development, migration, and egress charges in their current public cloud experience, coupled with significant over provisioning, maintenance, operational, and stranded asset costs in their on-premise infrastructure environment. When we look at all these costs holistically, through our customized workshops and assessments, we can identify the optimal cloud experience for the respective workloads and applications. Through our partnership with HPE and the availability of the HPE GreenLake solutions, our customers now have a choice to deliver SLA's, economics, and business outcomes for their workloads and applications that best reside on-premise in a private cloud and have that experience. This is a rock solid solution that eliminates, the development costs that they experience and the egress charges that are associated with the public cloud while utilizing HPE GreenLake to eliminate over provisioning costs and the maintenance costs on aging infrastructure hardware. Lastly, our customers only have to pay for actual infrastructure usage with no upfront capital expense. And now, that achieves true utilization to cost economics, you know, with HPE GreenLake solutions from CBTS. >> I love focus on the business case, 'cause it's measurable and it's sort of follow the money. That's where the opportunity is. Okay, C.R., so question for you. Thinking about Advizex customers, how are they, are they leaning into GreenLake? What are they telling you is the business impact when they experience GreenLake? >> Well, I think it goes back to what Ron was talking about. We had to solve the business challenges first and so far, the reception's been positive. When I say that is customers are open. Everybody wants to, the C-suite wants to hear about cloud and hybrid cloud fits. But what we hear and what we're seeing from our customers is we're seeing more adoption from customers that it may be their first foot in, if you will, but as important, we're able to share other customers with our potentially new clients that say, what's the first thing that happens with regard to GreenLake? Well, number one, it works. It works as advertised and as-a-Service, that's a big step. There are a lot of people out there dabbling today but when you can say we have a proven solution it's working in our environment today, that's key. I think the second thing is,, is flexibility. You know, when customers are looking for this hybrid solution, you got to be flexible for, again, I think Ron said (indistinct). You don't have a big capital outlay but also what customers want to be able to do is we want to build for growth but we don't want to pay for it. So we'll pay as we grow not as we have to use, as we used to do, it was upfront, the capital expenditure. Now we'll just pay as we grow, and that really facilitates in another great example as you'll hear from a customer, this afternoon. But you'll hear where one of the biggest benefits they just acquired a $570 million company and their integration is going to be very seamless because of their investment in GreenLake. They're looking at the flexibility to add to GreenLake as a big opportunity to integrate for acquisitions. And finally is really, we see, it really brings the cloud experience and as-a-Service to our customers. And with HPE GreenLake, it brings the best of breed. So it's not just what HPE has to offer. When you look at Hyperconverged, they have Nutanix, they have Cohesity. So, I really believe it brings best of breeds. So, to net it out and close it out with our customers, thus far, the customer experience has been exceptional. I mean, with GreenLake Central, as interface, customers have had a lot of success. We just had our first customer from about a year and a half ago just reopened, it was a highly competitive situation, but they just said, look, it's proven, it works, and it gives us that cloud experience so. Had a lot of great success thus far and looking forward to more. >> Thank you, so Harry, I want to pick up on something C.R. said and get your perspectives. So when I talk to the C-suite, they do all want to hear about, you know, cloud, they have a cloud agenda. And what they tell me is it's not just about their IT transformation. They want that but they also want to transform their business. So I wonder if you could talk, Harry, about Compugen's perspective on the potential business impact of GreenLake. And also, I'm interested in how you guys are thinking about workloads, how to manage work, you know, how to cost optimize in IT, but also, the business value that comes out of that capability. >> Yeah, so Dave, you know if you were to talk to CFO and I have the good fortune to talk to lots of CFOs, they want to pay the costs when they generate the revenue. They don't want to have all the costs upfront and then wait for the revenue to come through. A good example of where that's happening right now is you know, related to the pandemic, employees that used to work at the office have now moved to working from home. And now, they have to connect remotely to run the same application. So use this thing called VDI, virtual interfacing to allow them to connect to the applications that they need to run in the office. I don't want to get into too much detail but to be able to support that from an an at-home environment, they needed to buy a lot more computing capacity to handle this. Now, there's an expectation that hopefully six months from now, maybe sooner than that, people will start returning to the office. They may not need that capacity so they can turn down on the costs. And so, the idea of having the capacity available when you need it, but then turning it off when you don't need it, is really a benefit of the variable cost model. Another example that I would use is one in new development. If a customer is going to implement a new, let's say, line of business application. SAP is very very popular. You know, it actually, unfortunately, takes six months to two years to actually get that application set up, installed, validated, tested, then moves through production. You know, what used to happen before? They would buy all that capacity upfront, and it would basically sit there for two years, and then when they finally went to full production, then they were really value out of that investment. But they actually lost a couple of years of technology, literally sitting almost sidle. And so, from a CFO perspective, his ability to support the development of those applications as he scales it, perfect. GreenLake is the ideal solution that allows him to do that. >> You know, technology has saved businesses in this pandemic. There's no question about it. When Harry was just talking about with regard to VDI, you think about that, there's the dialing up and dialing down piece which is awesome from an IT perspective. And then the business impact there is the productivity of the end users. And most C-suite executives I've talked to said productivity actually went up during COVID with work from home, which is kind of astounding if you think about it. Ben, we said Arrow's been around for a long, long time. Certainly, before all of us were born and it's gone through many many industry transitions during our lifetimes. How does Arrow and how do your partners think about building cloud experiences and where does GreenLake fit in from your perspective? >> Great question. So from an Arrow perspective, when you think about cloud experience in of course us taking a view as a distribution partner, we want to be able to provide scale and efficiency to our network of partners. So we do that through our ArrowSphere platform. Just a bit of, you know, a bit of a commercial. I mean, you get single quote, single bill, auto provision, multi supplier, if you will, subscription management, utilization reporting from the platform itself. So if we pivot that directly to HPE, you're going to get a bit of a scoop here, Dave. And we're excited today to have GreenLake live in our platform available for our partner community to consume. In particular, the Swift solutions that HPE has announced so we're very excited to share that today. Maybe a little bit more on GreenLake. I think at this point in time, that it's differentiated in a sense that, if you think about some of the other offerings in the market today and further with having the the solutions themselves available in ArrowSphere. So, I would say, that we identify the uniqueness and quickly partner with HPE to work with our ArrowSphere platform. One other sort of unique thing is, when you think about platform itself, you've got to give a consistent experience. The different geographies around the world so, you know, we're available in North of 20 countries, there's thousands of resellers and transacting on the platform on a regular basis. And frankly, hundreds of thousands end customers. that are leveraging today. So that creates an opportunity for both Arrow, HPE and our partner community. So we're excited. >> You know, I just want to open it up. We don't have much time left, but thoughts on differentiation. Some people ask me, okay, what's really different about HPE and GreenLake? These others, you know, are doing things with as-a-Service. To me, I always say cultural, it starts from the top with Antonio, and it's like the company's all in. But I wonder from your perspectives, 'cause you guys are hands on. Are there other differentiable factors that you would point to? Let me just open that up to the group. >> Yeah, if I could make a comment. GreenLake is really just the latest invocation of the as-a-Service model. And what does that mean? What that actually means is you have a continuous ongoing relationship with the customer. It's not a sell and forget. Not that we ever forget about customers but there are highlights. Customer buys, it gets installed, and then for two or three years you may have an occasional engagement with them but it's not continuous. When you move to our GreenLake model, you're actually helping them manage that. You are in the core, in the heart of their business. No better place to be if you want to be sticky and you want to be relevant and you want to be always there for them. >> You know, I wonder if somebody else could add to it in your remarks. From your perspective as a partner, 'cause you know, hey, a lot of people made a lot of money selling boxes, but those days are pretty much gone. I mean, you have to transform into a services mindset, but other thoughts? >> I think to add to that Dave. I think Harry's right on. The way he positioned it it's exactly where he did own the customer. I think even another step back for us is, we're able to have the business conversation without leading with what you just said. You don't have to leave with a storage solution, you don't have to lead with compute. You know, you can really have step back, have a business conversation. And we've done that where you don't even bring up HPE GreenLake until you get to the point where the customer says, so you can give me an on-prem cloud solution that gives me scalability, flexibility, all the things you're talking about. How does that work? Then you bring up, it's all through this HPE GreenLake tool. And it really gives you the ability to have a business conversation. And you're solving the business problems versus trying to have a technology conversation. And to me, that's clear differentiation for HPE GreenLake. >> All right guys, C.R., Ron, Harry, Ben. Great discussion, thank you so much for coming on the program. Really appreciate it. >> Thanks for having us, Dave. >> Appreciate it Dave. >> All right, keep it right there for more great content at GreenLake Day, be right back. (bright soft music) (upbeat music) (upbeat electronic music)