>>The cube presents HPE discover 2022 brought to you by HPE. >>Welcome back to HPE. Discover 2022. My name is Dave Lanta. I'm here with my co-host John fur. John we've been watching the evolution of H HP to HPE. We've seen GreenLake when Antonio Neri, I called it. I called it burn the boats. He goes, no, no, no, it wasn't burn the boats. I said, well, okay, burn the bridges. But it was all in on as a service on, on GreenLake. And we're gonna talk about that. Brad Shapiro is here. He's the vice president and managing director of the enterprise business at HPE financial services. Brad. Good to see him. Good to see >>You as well. >>Yeah, you guys got it all started. When, when Antonio kinda laid down, the gauntlet said, this is where we're going. Let's make it happen now. Cause the first place he turned I would imagine is the financial services said, okay, how do we start this today? Can you help us? And they take us back to that >>And yeah, sure. So, you know, uh, yeah, HP financial services, um, it's kind of a foundational element cuz when you think about it, asset management is really what we're doing here. And I know asset management's a, a big word, right? And it can mean lots of things to, to different people. Um, in this context, uh, we started looking at how do customers manage assets over the life cycle and a lot of customers while they were interested in a consumption model and looking at GreenLake for their private cloud, they were certainly looking at public cloud for certain workloads and then maybe even traditional data center for other activities that, that they're running. So it's really that hybrid environment. Uh, but they were stuck going well, Hey, I'm in a CapEx model today. How do I get out of CapEx and really get into this hybrid model? >>And that's where asset management comes in. So one of the, the biggest initial focus is, and we continue to have that focus. We call it our accelerated migration offer and it's really us going in and acquiring the customer assets, moving it on the HPE balance sheet and then figuring out what are we gonna do with those assets, which are gonna stay in use under a consumption model, which are excess. And we can put through our, uh, asset up cycling process, we monetize the majority of that, put that back into reuse and then maybe a small amount gets recycled. So, so really focused on the assets and accelerating customers transition to GreenLake. Did you >>See, or are you seeing a difference between like Le traditional leasing customers who already have kind of on that model versus like what you just described as sort of the, the CapEx was more complicated, you gotta get, I presume procurement involved the legal issues and was there a lot less, was it less friction with the, the leasing customers? Well, >>You know, I, I look at leasing and financing, very similar to CapEx. It's, it's a much more traditional model versus this new as a service experience. Um, so if, if they were in a leasing model, we could convert those leases into GreenLake. I wouldn't say one was any more difficult than the other. Yeah. Um, they were both really traditional mindset, um, and not really looking at a consumption model. So I think we had our fair share of both. And I think we, we have and are able to address both customers moving in into a consumption >>Mode. Right. How does this tie into sustainability? Because you know, we have on one end of the spectrum, the, the high end sustainability, you know, the, the science and sure. And the behind it, tactically speaking companies still now want to operate in this kind of, there's a sustainable angle here. Yeah. Talk about that piece of it. How does that tie in obviously consumption versus CapEx you're building, you're not building, what, what does that thread through the sustainability angle? >>Yeah. So, so first let me just say sustainability is really important to our customers. Um, and, and we're seeing it all over and it is real. Um, the good thing is that you can get business value out of the solutions and have a more sustainable model. So when I think about, and I talk to customers about sustainability, uh, there's a number of fronts they're focused on one, their customers believe it's important, right? So, so they're focused on making sure they're driving sustainable models. Uh, I've seen an increasing number of customers, both commercial and public sector have sustainability requirements in their tenders, in their RFPs. And you have to be able to, to comply with those. Um, second, uh, they, they look at it and go, how do I attract talent? It's increasingly important for them to attract talent. And then really if you, because >>They wanna work for a mission driven company that's >>Sustainable. Absolutely. Absolutely. And, and the third area is investors. You know, the investment community is now looking at ESG and whole and you know, certainly environmental impacts, um, in where they're making an investment. So quick personal story, I was talking, uh, to a friend of mine who works for a hedge fund and he was telling me over the last year, they've hired a whole team. That's focused on just doing analysis of companies, ESG initiatives, determining where they're gonna invest their money. So it's, it's a wall street thing now. So this is real from a number of angles where, where sustainability has an impact. Now, how we play in that. Um, clearly when you go to a GreenLake consumption model, the idea is improving utilization of the asset. So driving higher utilization means you need less assets. You know, over time, the, the secret is we're gonna sell you less, right? >>You're gonna have less assets, but you're gonna have higher utilization. That's good for the environment where HPE Fs comes in is when those assets are done. We put those assets back into reuse. So we have a remark, we have remarketing facilities, one in, in Andover, mass, one in kin Scotland. And then we have 80 different facilities. We have partnerships around the world and our focus is how do we drive more reuse, 85% of the assets we get back, go into reuse. And when you look at servers and PCs and things like that, it's over 95% go into reuse. So a real focus on reuse is good for the environment as well. And then needless to say, the new technology that goes into a GreenLake deal, we're seeing like 30% energy savings coming, coming out of those environments. So all really good stuff related to it's >>Interesting. I mean, a couple points there is one is, you know, Benoff kind of got it all started pre pandemic. He was out talking about, you know, sustainability and ESG. And a lot of people were like, no way. It's all about bottom line profits. And so he was ahead of that. And I guess, you know, back to at least you were, oh, you were always in the residual value game, but now it's a little different, isn't it? Absolutely. It's, it's it's yes. You gotta figure out what the value of that asset's gonna be, but also there's a sustainability aspect of it as >>Well. Yeah, absolutely. And the, the pretty cool thing here is while you drive sustainability, we're also seeing customers that, that go into GreenLake. Um, we had a good example with Kern county, a 42% savings over their CapEx environment when they moved to GreenLake. So it was better for the environment and significant savings. So you can have kind of like have your cake and eat it too. You, you get better environmental, uh, impacts and you're getting better bottom line, uh, performance. >>It's a business case there too do. Now we kind of, I was talking upfront about the, the early days of GreenLake where, you know, they were, it was a financial model. Yeah. And now it's evolving to actually a technology model. We heard Alma with the platform. How has that, or has that changed the way that financial services your >>Group >>Yeah. Approaches the, the, the market. >>Yeah. So, um, yeah, that's a great point. You know, when people talk about GreenLake, they think about the old days. And, and look, I've been around a while. I remember the flex capacity, right? Yeah, of course this isn't flex capacity. I mean, the platform's amazing and it really starts to bring to life the whole thought, when we talk about hybrid, right, there are workloads sure. They might belong best in the public cloud. Right. There, there are workloads that belong best in the private cloud, under the HPE GreenLake model. And there are still workloads that customers may say, Hey, look, I've got legacy applications. I'm gonna continue to run them in a traditional data center. And so from an H P E Fs perspective, you know, we look at this, not as a leasing and financing company, we're looking at this on how do we leverage the customer's existing assets? >>How do we create incremental budget using those existing assets? And then what kind of model best serves that workload? And then how do you optimize the capacity and the spend on that? So, you know, an interesting note in the past year, we put 500 million back into customer budgets by just leveraging their existing it estate. And, and it does, it's not all HPE product, you know, we're, we're, we're monetizing third party products in the data center, in the network, in the workplace. So we can really look at, we call it any tech any time, anywhere we look at all the technology and really assess what's the best way to leverage that investment. Yeah. And, and get the most out of >>It. Yeah. I mean, it's really evolved from just recycling assets for profit, but integrating the business model into the value proposition, the core value proposition in GreenLake. That's great innovation. Um, and, and congratulations on that. Sure. My, my question for you is more kind of zooming out at the market. Mm-hmm <affirmative>, from your perspective in financial services at HPE, what has the pandemic proven to you guys? How has it changed? How you guys work and how has it changed the customer environment? Cuz you mentioned assets. I think real estate. Oh no. One's going back to work. Yeah, no one's been in the office. How has the market changed with hybrids as a steady state now coming outta the pandemic? What are customers doing with the assets? What are some of the trends that you're seeing in the customer base? >>Yeah. So, so look, I'll give you my personal perspective of what I think about as a business leader. And when I talk to customers, I think we're all thinking about the same thing. So I start with experience, what experience do I wanna create for my customers and very closely linked to that, my colleagues, right? So it, the, the people working in our organization, what experience am I creating for them? So they can in turn, create that experience for partners and customers externally. So experience is one thing. The second is innovation, right? We spend a lot of time thinking about what's next? Where do we want to go? What's the innovation and more and more that innovation is all digital, right? So digital transformation is huge within my organization. And it's huge within all of our customers. Dave, I think the last time we talked, I was in my living room on a little laptop screen and zoom and, and I think I use the analogy E every business is now a digital business, even my pizza shop in jerseys. >>Yeah. Right. I mean, everything was online curbside pickup. So what I'm finding is the, the trends in terms of how to leverage technology is how do you create that customer experience? And then how does digital now blend as we're coming out of the pandemic? And, and you're, you know, now able to go into restaurants and stores, how do you blend digital with that in person experience and maybe leverage the best of both. Right. And, and how do you do that in a seamless way to really give customers choice and give them that smooth, seamless experience. So that, that's what I see happening. And you know, what we are trying to do with our asset management plays with the financial modeling we do is how do we get more of that spend going to innovation versus maintenance. And, and that's a big key because, you know, you have to be fast. So I talk about innovation. I talk about customer experience, speed to market. I mean, you know, and the bar keeps getting higher, right? It's like, as soon as you think you're fast, you're slow. We, because you have to keep, it all keeps rolling. >>We heard yesterday on the cube from, uh, one of the HP point, next executives said, you gotta perform and transform >>At the >>Same time at the same time. And you gotta know where the people are gonna land. Absolutely. And how the assets are gonna be distributed. >>And to your point, Brad, you know, from our virtual interview, you're so right. I mean, every business has to be a digital business. And you know, my, my personal story, John, you know, my brother Richie was the executive chef at legal seafood. Right. Pandemic. So then that was a, a place you wanted to go to that restaurant, famous restaurant in Boston when they reopened, they weren't ready. Right. They didn't have the digital story together. They ended up having to, we were just at Smith and Linsky, they ended up selling to Smith and Wilensky's oh, and you, you drive around, you see a lot of these retail businesses is shut down. Yeah. Right. And so, okay. So we're, they weren't able to get through that, you know, cross that chasm in digital transformation. Yeah. A lot of businesses were able to and make it a tailwind. >>Yeah. And, and look, the other thing I think all businesses are focused on right now, uh, with the labor market is talent. And, and so when you think about all of these things tying together, you want to drive, uh, you know, innovation. You want to drive your digital transformation. You wanna make that environmentally sustainable. And, and I think all of that, if you start putting all that together, those are the companies that are gonna attract the talent in the marketplace. And, and really there there's a battle for talent and >>You wanna make it profitable. Uh, Brad bureau. Thanks so much for you. Great to see you face to face. >>Yeah. Likewise. Thanks. Thanks. >>All right. Keep it right there, John. And I will be back. We're wrapping up day three of HPE, discover 2022. You're watching the cube.

>> 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)

(upbeat music) >> Welcome back to HPE Discover 2021, the virtual version. My name is Dave Vellante, and you're watching theCUBE. As the saying goes, follow the money. And with me to talk about HPE Financial Services and the value that it can bring to customers are two great guests, Brad, Shapiro's VP and managing director of the Enterprise Business at HPE Financial Services. And Paul Sheeran is Managing Director of Worldwide Channel and SMB for HPE Financial Services. Gents, welcome to theCUBE. Come on in. >> Thanks Dave, we really appreciate you having us. >> Hi, Dave. >> So Brad, why don't you start us off? Give us the rundown on HPE Financial Services. What's the scope of your services? Should we think of you as a bank? And maybe you could talk about some of the things that you do beyond financing. >> Yeah, that sounds great. So look, we are so much more than banking. Our mission is to create investment capacity to help customers accelerate their transformation. And maybe you could think of us as kind of like a two-in-one partner. We're part-CIO, part-CFO. We kind of refer to ourselves as the CIFO, if you will. And we've got an expertise in a number of different areas. Of course, we'll start with financial. And yes, we offer financial services, and we do an awful lot of financial solutioning. In our portfolio, it's over 13 billion of assets that have been financed. So that is a core competency for us. But we're more than that. We focus also on the technology side of things. And we have expertise in asset management. And we deal with multiple generations of technologies and all major manufacturers as well, not just HPE, but we understand technology and all different types, all different ages of technology. And lastly, we play a pretty big role around sustainability. HPE takes a leadership position when it comes to sustainability. And a lot of our capabilities around the circular economy and putting assets back into reuse play an important role in not only helping customers financially, but helping them meet their sustainability goals. >> I want to come back and ask you more about that, but Paul, I wonder... First of all, I like the CIFO. That's a great, little nomenclature. But Paul, if you're a small business, the CEO is also sometimes the CIO, is sometimes the CFO, a lot of hats. So maybe you could talk about the role that you guys play for SMBs and also channel partners. Channel's a whole different ball game. They want to make margin, they want to grow their business. So maybe you could discuss some of the differences in that channel. >> Yeah. Sure, Dave. Well, starting with the SMB customer is really critical part of our portfolio. As you said, they cover all the roles, so the CIO, CFO. And their budgets can be tight. And especially given the last 18 months, if you read some of the data out there, the budgets are really constrained, especially for the SMB customer. So we try and do, and what our mission is, is what we call creating investment capacity, giving budgets a boost, bringing that vitality to the SMB customer base, to all our customers, but especially SMB customers to help them be able to invest in their digital transformations going forward. So crucial now that all our customers are able to continue to invest in technology. And the pandemic clearly brought it home how important having a digital capability it is. So SMB budgets are tight, and what we try and do is give them that boost, give them that vitality to actually continue to advance ahead and make the right investments for the future. And then from the partners, we actually do a four and a half thousand partners around the world. As you said, partners, they're also not only looking for financial solutions, but how do we differentiate ourselves is to try and help that partner move to a digital platform. We have invested heavily in our digital tools over the last couple of years. So in terms of offering solutions, it can be literally zero touch, low touch so the partner community can plug into our platforms. We also help them on that journey as a service. So technology is moving to as a service. People want to consume technology as a service like they do in the rest of their lives. It's all about subscription. And partners need help to be able to move to another service way. Hopefully GreenLake is the answer. So we support HPE GreenLake's offering. But there's different parts along the way for partners that we look to help them. And last but not least is helping them about asset management. As Brad said, it's all about the assets and understanding how those assets are managed. And helping the partners, having a relevant conversation with their customers as to how best to put in an asset management strategy for their customers. So three areas that we look to differentiate ourselves, Dave. >> We got a lot to talk about. So I want to come back and talk about as a service as well. But Brad, I want to go back to sustainability. So is it just the right thing to do? What's the financial case? Is it good business as well, and where do you fit? >> Yeah, so we believe that sustainability is good for the environment, obviously, but it's also good for business. And when you think about what we bring to the table and those assets back into reuse. So we handle between three and four million assets a year, and over 90% of those, we put back into reuse, with about 10% going into recycling. Putting those back into reuse, the customer that has those assets, we can monetize those assets and help accelerate transformation. So we monetize the asset, and we fund that transition in that transformation so we can really help customers get more budget than they were expecting by leveraging what they would deem to be end-of-life assets, but we find another home for those assets. So it definitely helps customers accelerate the transformation, while being good for the world, good for the environment. >> And that's true, Paul, for SMBs, just maybe on a smaller scale, and definitely makes sense for the channel, right? >> Absolutely. Absolutely. Sustainability now is key. Certainly key for our channel partners is moving from a nice-to-have to a must-have. So absolutely, totally agree. >> Yeah. And it's almost like gain sharing. I mean, sometimes we sell used equipment on eBay. It helps fund future business or future transformation. So let's get into the transformations. Everybody talks about digital transformation. Coming into the pandemic, everybody talked about it, but there was a lot of complacency. We've all seen the wrecking ball and the acceleration we talk about all the time, but what role does HPE Financial Services, and do you have any specific solutions that support digital transformations? Any examples there? Maybe Brad, you could start it off. >> Yeah. Yeah. So I'll start off, and then Paul, feel free to jump in. Look Dave, what I would say is the pandemic taught us that every company is a technology company. And where HPFS comes in is we're looking to provide the investment capacity, which is the lifeblood of a company's digital roadmap. So if you don't have the investment capacity, there is no transformation. So when something like the pandemic comes up, and you can't budget for a pandemic, and revenues are down and budgets are getting squeezed, you really need a partner to help you with that. How do you uncover that investment capacity? So we we've talked to lots of customers. We've also done some research, and the ESG group and analysts basically found that 73% of organizations, not surprisingly, either delayed or canceled projects around IT transformation because of all the uncertainty. So what we're looking to do is leverage all of our capabilities in a timely fashion. Last year, we announced the idea of payment holidays and deferred payments so you could keep your transformation going and not have to pay for it for a full year. And now we look at it as we're coming out of the pandemic. And what we're looking to help customers with is one, help them transition their existing infrastructure into a modernized consumption model like GreenLake. Also looking to accelerate the velocity of the transformation programs by leveraging our capabilities around asset upcycling, as well as our accelerated migration program. And last, looking at our existing customers really doing some financial engineering with them, so they can stretch their budgets more and expand the budget to be able to handle new projects. >> Yeah, I mean, Paul, I think Brad nailed it. You're right, their transformations are strategic. They had to fund VDI initiatives or endpoint security or find some cash to buy laptops to support people at home. People were pulling out their servers and sticking them in their trunk and driving to their home because they couldn't get laptops for awhile. And so what are you seeing now, Paul, particularly in the channel. And of course, again, SMBs were squeezed. Maybe they don't have the liquidity that some of these large public companies have. A lot of people just shored up their balance sheets during the pandemic. Maybe the SMB doesn't have as much advantage to do that. But what are you seeing in regard to the sort of bounce back of spend in more strategic areas like transformation? >> Well, I think what we're seeing right now and what we're hearing, especially for SMB customer, is cash is king. It's all about cash preservation. It's about making sure that... You'll hear some studies where some SMB customers only have three or four months left of cash in their kitty to keep their businesses running. So that is really top of mind now. Would they have to invest? If they don't want invest, they're going to be dead in the water to stay ahead of the competition. So what we're looking to do is really help those customers preserve that cash and reach and look for different ways about how to boost their budget. There's actually nothing better than an example. Brad laid out very nicely in terms of what we can do. Bringing it to life, not so much an SMB customer, but there is UNAD. And UNAD is a university in Columbia based in Bogota. And their mission is very simple, it's all about excellence and learning. But as they went into the pandemic, they needed to invest in their distance learning platforms to really help their students. And like most businesses, cash and budget was being squeezed. Revenues were tight. So it would've been very easy to postpone that investment. Well, what we did with UNAD and working with UNAD under IT team was firstly to understand their existing IT estate and really see what assets are being utilized, what are not being utilized, what assets have reached or ended their useful life. And you'd be amazed. And it's not just the data center, we can work right across their whole estate. So as well as the data center, we look at the PCs. To your point, David, we look at even their print estate. And we identified many, many assets that were being underutilized and other assets that were end of life. So we were able to take those assets back and actually release value and boosts UNAD's budget. And some of those assets could not. They had no value. And sustainability was top of their agenda as well. As you'd imagine, the university wanted to lead and show their students that sustainability is key. So we were able to take those assets back and actually recycle them in a very environmentally sound way. So that was the first step to actually inject some cash into their budgets. The next step then was to look at their existing financial contracts that they had in place where maybe some of their banks and actually restructured those contracts to actually give them additional capacity to invest right now in technology. And I'm delighted to say they partnered with the HPE team, I mean, Aruba, to actually continue their five-year roadmap and actually improved their distance learning platforms. So I just thought that was a really good example right now and in the current climate as to show when we work together with our customers, what's actually possible. >> So let's talk a little bit more about GreenLake. I mean, for decades, I mean, even if I go back to the '80s, I saw financial instruments to sort of rent essentially, but it's different. GreenLake, HPE, has pivoted its entire company to as a service. And I want to understand better what role HPE Financial Services plays in making that transition. It's obviously a crucial part of the financing piece, but Brad, maybe you could tell us a little bit more there. >> Yeah, sure. And I think the great thing about GreenLake is it's more than just a consumption model, it's really providing that cloud experience, on-prem, and being able for customers to really manage a hybrid cloud experience. But where HPEFS plays a role, again, it's around our knowledge and ability around assets. So we are underneath GreenLake, doing financial engineering, managing the assets. But the biggest thing, when you think about how does a customer transition? If they're in a traditional cash purchase paradigm, the cost of change and figuring out how to move into a new type of paradigm and new consumption model can be daunting. So HPFS works closely with our GreenLake team and the customer, and we can take those existing assets and look to accelerate the migration into a GreenLake. A great example of that, a public sector customer, Kern County, they were in that cash paradigm, they had lots of assets. Like most entities, they were under pressure from a budget perspective. Tax revenues were down for a couple years in a row. So not only did moving to a GreenLake model provide some cost savings, and cost savings are important, but it also allowed them to deliver the services they needed to their constituents because they had that pay for use type of flexibility. They didn't have a long delay in procuring and provisioning equipment when they needed to roll something out. And again, once again, HPFS was able to monetize their existing assets, roll those into a GreenLake solution and help self-fund that transformation and really accelerate it to get from that cash paradigm model to a new GreenLake consumption model. >> Paul, what about the channel? I mean, on the one hand, I could see the channels loving GreenLake because there's a lot of services involved, and it's sort of an ongoing drip of cash as opposed to the sort of big hit. But on the other hand, it's the ongoing drip of cash as opposed to the big hit. What's the conversations like with the channel? How is that going? I mean, clearly it's the future, but how do they see it? >> I wouldn't say a drip of cash. We would call it an in-use revenue where it's very predictable, which is actually also a good thing, rather than a sort of a one-and-done solution. So clearly, GreenLake is very important to our channel partners, and we're seeing some really good adoption across the world. Again, we underpin that. The other thing to say is a lot of channel partners, as you likely say, want as sell services and become service providers. And what we also do is support not just the data center, but also workplace and print. And what you'll see on the printing side for many, many years, the print partners have been selling a contractual type of model. But a lot of partners now are moving all of their core portfolio into as a service. And there's different parts. It's nearly a cash to as a service journey, and there's different parts of that ladder on the way. And we will look to help our partners get along that ladder and hopefully position GreenLake. But there's also more simpler solutions like subscription that we can position on that journey. So it's really helping that partner get the confidence and the financial wherewithal and the infrastructure to get on the as a service journey. >> How about solutions? I mean, you guys have had some recent announcements. Maybe Brad, you can take us through sort of what the highlights of those were. >> Sure. So yeah, the first announcement was really the example I just provided, which was how do we transition customers to GreenLake? So again, that's a really important step for many customers, and something that we can help them with is moving from that existing paradigm to GreenLake. The second is really helping customers create velocity to move their transformation programs faster. And we do that in a number of ways, but again, all around the asset in our asset management expertise, whether we look to put those assets back into reuse in their facility, or if we look to monetize those assets and put them into reuse with a different customer. Really, it's all around how do we accelerate the customers transformation as we come out of a pandemic. And then lastly, the offering is really focused on how can we help the customer look at existing budget and really financially engineer where they're spending their money to create new pools of budget and cash so they can fund new projects. So it's interesting because when I look at the customers that we're doing these things with, it really spans every industry. So we're dealing with financial services and insurance companies, communications and broadcasting, travel and hospitality, you name it, manufacturing. So the interesting thing is, while sometimes you come out with solutions that are very industry-specific, I think our circumstances today really span lots of industries, both in the commercial and the public sector. And we're finding that these offers are really relevant right now for customers. >> Let's zoom out for a bit. And Brad, let's start with you, and then Paul, I want to get your unique perspectives from the standpoint of SMB in the channel. Summarize your overall strategy in that context. And then I'm interested in, how important do you feel the HPE Financial Services is with regards... And of course, you guys are biased, but that's okay, I want to hear your bias view. How important is it in the grand scheme of actually doing business with HPE. And I'm interested in in why HPE and how much of a competitive advantage you bring relative to some of your major competitors. >> Yeah, sure. So look, the strategy, in my mind, I'll start with HPFS, it's really making sure that we're working closely with our customers, understanding their needs from a business perspective and what business outcomes they're trying to achieve and then marrying both the financial planning and the technology planning to help those customers deliver and achieve those business outcomes. Doing that, also in a way that is sustainable and is good for the environment and helps customers achieve their sustainability initiatives. So kind of marrying that financial technology and sustainability portion of it. From my perspective, I think HPE is a fantastic partner. One, we've been at GreenLake for quite a while, and it continues to evolve. The experiences that we can provide customers now are significantly advanced from when flex capacity came out years and years and years ago. So I really think if a customer took a look at GreenLake a few years ago, you need to keep looking at it because it really has evolved, really creates a unique experience. But I think it's the combination of our technology. We have great technology in our portfolio. We have a fantastic model in GreenLake, and then we have all of the financial engineering expertise around assets and lifecycles and how to get the most out of your IT investment. And we are a partner. If you have sustainability initiatives, I mean, HPE talks the talk, we walk the walk. We do all of this for ourselves, and then we bring those practices out and share best practices with customers. So I really think it's a great time to partner with HP if you're a customer. >> Right, thank you for that, Brad. Paul, what would you add for your constituents? >> Brad, said it beautifully. So just a couple of points I'd add in. From a partner perspective, we are actually in every corner of the world. So we have that global footprint. And then as you see, consolidation in the market, that's very important, not only for our customers, but also for our partners, more and more solutions are going cross border and involve different regions. And we look to make sure that we're globally consistent in how we work with our partners and work with our customers. And the final thing I'd say is we get very excited about supporting our HPE colleagues. But from a channel perspective, we actually also support HPI, HP Inc. You will recall, before separation, that the companies did. So we also support the workplace and print environments, plus third party vendors, which again, is important for the channel community. Why do you need a one-stop shell? And where you'll often have a mixed technology and the solution. So we're there for that as well and always have been. And I think the partner community love our consistency there >> It's a nice arrow when you quiver. And of course we've seen laptop demand explode. And it looks like it's going to sustain for a while here. It's hard to predict, but Paul, still with you, tell us, thinking about the future, what's getting you jazzed up? >> Well, I said we have a global footprint, and every country is in a different place right now. As we sort of come out of the pandemic, some countries are still in the midst of it. But what gets me jazzed up and what gets me excited is the sense of optimism. I think we're sort of figured out how to navigate our way out of this pandemic and the current environment. And customers all recognize the need to invest in technology. Technology is the way forward. So that means having the capacity, investment capacity, the investment vitality, to make that investment. So what gets me excited is what we do is important and we're there to help. >> Great. Thank you. And then Brad, two-part question for you to bring us home. So what are you excited about, and what do you got going at Discover? >> So in terms of my excitement, I think Paul said it well, every company is a technology company. And when we see that everybody is going through a digital transformation, quite frankly, we at HPEFS are going through our own digital transformation. Paul mentioned earlier about Technomics. We have omni-channel ways of engaging with us that are consistent. We're looking at our customer and partner experience and continuing to improve those. So we're not resting on our laurels in what we've done in the past, we continue to change, to modernize, to create new and better ways of doing business with our customer base. So the exciting part, for me, is that change that comes with innovation and technology. And I just think HPE is a great place to be right now with all of that innovation going on. So you asked about Discover. So we're really excited. We've got a spotlight with Irv Rothman focused on investment agility and key to growth and regeneration. So that's really exciting. We have a few breakouts, making technology a force for good, getting back on track that create the investment vitality to take on the world and investment strategies to accelerate innovation in a disruptive world. So really excited about that. And then last, we've got some demos. We have a live interactive demo on our technology renewal center, as well as some on-demand demos of those renewal centers as well. So we've got a lot going on at Discover, and we're really excited about it. >> Great. Gentlemen, thank you for that. So I mean, look, cost of capital is low, but to have a technology partner with you that's also has financial expertise, that, to me, is a killer combination. Guys, thanks so much for coming on theCUBE. I really appreciate your time. >> Dave, thanks for having us. >> Thanks, Dave. >> All right, and thank you for watching theCUBE's continuous coverage of HPE Discover 2021, the virtual edition. Keep it right there for more great content. (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)

>> Narrator: From around the globe, it's theCUBE, covering HPE Discover Virtual Experience, brought to you by HPE. >> Hello and welcome to theCUBE's coverage of HPE Discover 2020, The Virtual Experience. I'm Lisa Martin and I've got a couple of guests joining me, Stephen Laaper principal at Deloitte consulting and Brenna Sniderman the Executive Director for the Center of Integrated Research at Deloitte Services, Stephen and Brenna, nice to have you on the program today. >> Thank you, >> (mumbles) >> So we're going to be talking about The Smart Factory. I'd love for you to start Brenna, we'll start with you. Give our audience an overview of Deloitte's definition of The Smart Factory then we can dig into some of the very interesting research that Deloitte has been doing the last few years. >> Sure, absolutely. So the way we think about The Smart Factory is it is a system that's quite flexible that uses data and information from throughout, physical assets to optimized performance, to enable the facility to be more agile, to be proactive, to optimize its assets and to react and change as quickly as possible to shifts going on. It overall enables organizations to just be more intelligent about the way they use their assets to use data, to make more informed decisions and to drive a more optimized process. >> And Stephen for you, one of the things that I found interesting looking at some of Deloitte's research is that the last few years or so, there's been net zero growth in manufacturing labor productivity and labor productivity being an indicator of economic impact. Why in Deloitte's perspective, has that manufacturing labor productivity growth been flat? >> Yeah, it's a really interesting observation. And what we've seen is really decades and decades of management principles, companies using things like Lean, like Six Sigma, taking advantage of labor arbitrage in many cases. And the reality is that a lot of that low hanging fruit is gone. Those projects have been executed well and we're now seeing what we would consider to be diminishing returns as it relates to the investments in those same types of tools. And that is really what's leading many organizations now towards things like the capabilities that you'd find in a Smart Factory. Adding additional technologies to the capability set to really bring companies to that new productivity frontier. >> One of the things that I saw too, is that Smart Factory adoption in one of your studies, can result in a threefold productivity increase. So talk to me about in the last few years, some of the early adopters, Brenna we'll start with you, what are some of the trends that you've seen with those early adopters? any industries in particular that are leading in that respect? >> Well, that's a good question. I think when we recently published a study on lessons from early adopters in the Smart Factory and what we found was that a lot of the organizations that have adopted the Smart Factory have learned lessons that are not necessarily new but some that are new as well. Really I think the biggest challenge has been to figure out how to gather data from a lot of assets that maybe haven't had to produce data before to find out where all the information is from throughout the facility to bring together different groups and different cultures within the organization, whether it's IT and OT and have them figure out how to share information and data and really just to figure out what to do with that information once we've gotten it. Some of the organizations that we spoke with for our research really ran the gamut from aerospace to automotive, to consumer products, to industrial manufacturing. It really has been an interesting spread that we've looked at. >> Stephen walk us through the last three years or so of research that Deloitte has been doing into the Smart Factory from the 2017 study to the 2019 study, to the one that was just released, what's some of the progress that you've seen over the last three years? Is it what you anticipated it would be? >> Yeah, it's interesting. I mean, three years ago, I think a lot of people were talking about Industry 4.0, they were talking about the industrial internet of things, they were talking about The Smart Factory, but we saw relatively few very concentrated efforts to advance those. Now as we fast forward three years, we're seeing that the specific capabilities that each one of those topic areas can enable for organizations, has become much clearer. So correspondingly companies have been planning for these types of investments and they're taking action on much of the capability build and quite frankly, starting to see the value. One of the underlying kind of architectural elements that I think are critical as part of the modern Smart Factory is exactly what Brenna touched on. And that was as it relates to the data. Many assets out there even if they're several decades old likely have a wealth of data associated with them. The challenge is that data is either not readily accessible or it's not well understood. And much of the effort that organizations have now undertaken is not only how do they connect, extract and use that information many times on a real time or near real time basis, but now also combining that information with other assets, other parts of the manufacturing facility, or even their manufacturing network to generate that value. >> So Stephen follow on question, how does an organization, a company start that process, if as you said, there's myriad assets of varying age, some really advanced, some really old as well as even from, I guess, a generational perspective in the workforce, you've got multiple generations, for organizations that know we've got data that's hidden, where do they start? >> Yeah, absolutely. And I think a really important element of your question is how do you determine where to start? And the reality is that not all of these solutions are created equal. Not all of the assets have data that's interesting enough to be equal. And so really going through a very concerted effort to understand what are the capabilities we're trying to build And what value does it create for our organization? Aligning that to the objectives and the goals of the organization is critical right from the outset. And we see companies that are being most successful in their implementation of the Smart Factory, following that value orientation. And that might not mean that that value comes tomorrow, It might not come next month, but there's a very clear guidance in terms of how the particular capabilities that are being built will lead to value. Organizations that are not doing that, we tend to see random X visual. We see a lot of different efforts underway with very little tied value and correspondingly many of those efforts don't continue because the executive team, the shareholders aren't going to continue those investments in that space without showing them (mumbles). >> So Brenna walk us through, along what Stephen was just saying. I was reading in your 2020 study that positioning a Smart Factory initiative for value starts with human-centered design and I thought this was really interesting that Deloitte research demonstrated successful teams generally focus on the user first, not the technology. >> Well, yeah. And I think to follow on a little bit to what Stephen said about understanding the value and the goal of what you're trying to do before thinking about the technology you need to rush out and implement goes along with this as well. You want to think about what the user is actually going to be using that data for, what is their job, what information are they going to need and think about from their perspective, what is going to be most helpful and effective for them. And I think the value of this is twofold. One is if talent within your organization and folks on the shop floor, see the value of this data and information, they're going to be more inclined to adopt it because it makes their job easier. But also if you have a tremendous amount of data and information from all the different assets and parts of your facility, if an individual has to sift through all of that, to find what's going to be valuable to them, it's not really going to make their job easier. So human-centered design is really thinking about what that individual needs to do their role, and in a lot of the work that we've done, we've almost thought about it as personas where this particular persona or job needs this information, needs to go through these steps and here's the data information we need to show them to enable them to do that. It's just a way for people to leverage information, to make smarter decisions more quickly. >> How does a manufacturing company do that, Brenna, excuse me, without being siloed, like in business units, so I'm thinking, getting cross-functional support all the way up to the top level. >> Mhhh, that's something that we saw quite a bit in our research that many of the groups or organizations that have successfully enacted a Smart Factory have done so because it's not just coming down from the top, it's also coming up from the bottom. You know, although that may sound like a pejorative term, but coming from all angles of the organization. So we see from the strategic level, this is what we need to do to change the way our organization operates in a more effective way. But from the line of business individuals that are using this information and data every day, we need to think about sort of having a groundswell of support work there as well, so that our team members are using this information. So I think it has to be something that comes from throughout the organization. What we've also found your point about silos is bringing in diverse teams and individuals from throughout the organization who have different types of expertise, different perspectives, different things that they're looking at in different ways that they need to use this technology to do their job, will enable us to make sure that, what we're producing is something that's going to be of value to them. >> And along those lines, Stephen question for you, this must need to be looked at, not as what can we do today or the next six months, but over the long-term. So that ongoing enablement and education is going to be critical. >> Yeah, absolutely. Right. And you know, the reality is that some of these investments that organizations are making into Smart Factory, do take quite a bit of thought, research and assessment and those aren't investments that they're making for the short-term, many of them are long-term. The important part about those investments that organizations are making is that they're creating platforms by which teams can continue to evolve the persona-based type solutions that Brenna referred to, so critical. And so, the flexibility, the adaptability, the agility of those platforms and the investments that are being made, really is one of their critical factors. I did want to just revisit the user adoption of these types of solutions. And, I'm a engineer by education. And I could look up back to early in my career and say, "Hey, look, I built solutions, "using data for manufacturing shop floor equipment. "And I created those solutions for others." But the reality was that I created it in a way that an engineer would you consume that data. And the reality is the persona-based approach really lets us focus on how is a particular individual in their job going to consume that data in a way that enables them to make the best next decision which ultimately has a positive outcome for the company. And in some cases that might mean not exposing them to all the complexities that happen underneath the surface. The modern smartphone, for example, enormously complex device, yet intuitive to use, easy to pick up, easy to interact with. The modern Smart Factory is also very similar in that frame. >> Along those lines of agility, but also designing with certain mindset, culturally IT and OT are different. Brenna, one of the things that I found interesting in the research was the marriage of IT and OT, how do you advise or let's go to clients that were part of that 2020 study, what lessons can the next wave of adopters learn where it comes to bridging those two IT OT mentalities and different cultures? >> Yeah, that's a good question. And I think the different cultures is sort of, key insight that is helpful. With respect to IT, they work on different timeframes, they think about investments in a different way, they think about technology in a different way than individuals who are in OT, who are on the shop floor, who are using these tools every day. and what we found was that bridging that divide and bringing them together, is a challenge that many overlook and something that really the importance of it, can't be overstated. I think to get back to Stephen's point about adoption, if those within the OT space have an understanding of what IT is doing and why, they're just likelier to adopt and to use. And conversely, if those in IT have a deeper understanding of what those in OT are doing and what types of tools they need, they're likelier to come up with solutions that are going to be effective. I think the cultural divide is something that's practically important to understand, to address and not to overlook because I think the last thing that anyone implementing any sort of Smart Factory solution wants is to roll out a solution that was sort of baked in one area, but not taking into account the other as well. >> Great point. Stephen, I want to go back to you for a second. Just understanding along the lines of the cultural differences and the design principles that need to be factored in. When the COVID-19 pandemic hit in March of 2020, for clients that you were talking to that were in whatever stage process of rolling out Smart Factory initiatives, where are they now? And what are some of the advantages that you see that organizations that aren't yet adopting Smart Factory initiatives should be doing to prepare to thrive in this new normal? >> Yeah, absolutely. Let me start with some of those advantages right at the outset. So many organizations now have been looking at advanced solutions, perhaps, to enforce social distancing within the manufacturing environment or perhaps contact tracing within the manufacturing environment and the advantages organizations are seeing that are already on that Smart Factory journey is they're finding they have largely a lot of the infrastructure required to be able to do that already in place. So that has been an enormous accelerant for companies that are already on the journey. The reality is that many organizations, are unable to have their experts, their engineers, their vendors, many of the people that are supporting the equipment and the people in their manufacturing plants around the world, they're not able to get them there. And companies that have been on the Smart Factory journey, specifically as it relates to creating what we would call the digital twin of many of their assets, where they can now see not only visual representations of those assets, but can also see that the data flowing off those assets and in the most advanced solutions, being able to see those together, they'd be able to unlock remote support, in a way that organizations that have not been on this journey simply can't. And we're starting to see some very distinct results, as it relates to those who are able to continue running at scale, and those who are struggling in the COVID environment. >> And Stephen, last question for you. I know you've got a session or a demo on Smart Factory an AI that you're doing at Discover 2020. Tell us a little bit about that and what the participants can anticipate. >> Yeah. So we're really excited to be able to bring Factory AI as we call it, in a live virtualized session. That session is going to cover what we have built around we'll call it a mini manufacturing line. And usually we'd have that with you at the conference, or we take that around the country, to many of our manufacturing clients to really show them, the power of adopting many of these different types of capabilities in the manufacturing environment. So what we're going to be showing and what viewers can expect to see is a demonstration of edge capabilities, of computer vision, of advanced internet of things, all wrapped into several high-impact use cases. So we're looking forward to you're doing that. >> Excellent. Well, Stephen, Brenna, thank you so much for your time discussing The Smart Factor. This is such an interesting provocative topic. I wish we had more time, but appreciate you speaking with me today. >> Thanks for having us. >> Thank you. >> You're watching the cube, Lisa Martin for HPE Discover 2020, The Virtual Experience. Thanks for watching. (upbeat music)

>> Narrator: Live from Las Vegas, it's The Cube. Covering HPE Discover 2017, brought to you by Hewlett Packard Enterprise. >> Hey welcome back everyone, live here in Las Vegas is Silicon Angle Media's Cubes, three days of exclusive coverage, we're on day three of HPE Discover 2017, our seventh year covering HPE Discover. Our second year, Hewlett-Packard Enterprise, Discover, I'm John Furrier, my co-host Dave Vallante. Our next guest is Flynn Maloy, Vice President of HPE.next solution, pointing to what's next. Welcome back Good to see you. >> Thank you. Good to see you guys. >> So nice, clean positioning, point next, nice and tight. Nice messaging. >> Flynn: Thank you. >> Clean positioning, new opportunity, give us the update. What is the positioning? How's it been going? And what's the reaction with partners? >> Well, when we last spoke in London, we told you we were going to do something big with our services business and that's what we did. In March, we launched HPE.next and we've got really fabulous reaction from the market. We see it, all of our customers across the board, our marketing numbers, in terms of our inbound. What it looks like, the amount of interest that we're gathering, really we couldn't be happier with where .next has gone. >> For the record, just why ... What's the motivation behind .next? Why do this? What's the official position on why you're doing it and what's the impact for the customer? >> Well, you know, a year ago, just before the show, we announced that we were going to be spinning out our outsourcing business. And up to that point, over the last five years, six years, we'd approached our largest customers with a run message, we can help run your IT. And I think Meg, and the board of directors, and our senior leaders, really took a look at it and said, "It's a good business for a certain segment "of the market, but where HPE wants to go is we want to be more about advise, and transform, we want to help you get there. Not necessarily do it for you. That market's changing. As we announced and moved out that business, we took look and, in fact, I think the very first question you guys asked Antonio in London was, "So, jokingly, you're a play product company "now, right guys? " And no, we're not. We have a big services business, a big part of our business, and that's what .next was, was really to bring that to the front as we spun out the outsourcing business, we really wanted to bring our very strong services business, our consulting and support business to the front, rebrand it, get it out there. And really lead with services. And I think at the show this week, across the board, on main-stage, on the show floor, you can see again and again, HPE is walking the walk on really realizing, let's start with digital transformation, let's lead with services first and start with outcomes. And then bring in the technology to get you where you need to go. >> Wow. And that's a business that Antonio used to run, so obviously he's got an affinity for that. Flynn, can you take us through the background of the branding and sort of what you went through? It's always fascinating to us. How did you get to .next, right? It didn't just fall out of the sky. >> Well, we have the company, we have a company that accelerates next, right? So, that's what HPE does. We believe in what's next. We believe in always looking to the future. HPE has always been about invent, and innovation, right? We are looking for what's next and so we sat down with some of our senior leaders and said "Okay, we could certainly name ourselves "HPE Services and look like everybody else in the market." You go out there and look at our competitors, you've got global services, technology services. We think it's time to break from the past. We think it's time to look to the future and point to the future, and we are the company that accelerates next, we have a point of view on where our customers should go. We have a point of view on where technology is going. And so we want to help point you to what's next. It's got to feel it's certainly heavy on advisory, and you heard Meg on stage talk again and again, this is our business. We're not about run. We're about advising. We understand where digital transformation is going, we have a point of view, and let us talk to you about it, let us help you on that endgame. >> Dave: And bumper sticker the brand promise for us. What's the brand promise? >> We make hybrid IT simple. We power the intelligent Edge and we have the expertise to make it happen. >> The bridge to the future is really, the customer are looking at the future and I like the name, by the way. I think it's great, it's clean, it's generic in a way, .next. Clever. But really, the transformation journey is about business process and improvement and changes with Cloud, and big data. You see in the apps, with div apps, you see, certainly that movement, top line revenue growth. This is really about crossing to the future, right? I mean, for the customers. Having that head room option, that's where you guys see the advisory shining. How do you talk to the customers? Because, again, they start on a journey, you guys always talk about, but ultimately there's going to be some unknowns that they have to face. How does that play into what you guys are doing with the hybrd IT message, simplifying hybrid IT? >> I'll definitely say, I completely agree with that. And that's the way Anna Pinczuk, who you guys spoke to earlier today, that's the way she really envisions it. She used an analogy for like a GM car. In the 70's, you had a different key for the trunk, a different key for the ignition, A different key for the door and customers are looking for one key, That's what they're looking for. And so we want to create a seamless experience for our customers across the board. And you may not always need a high-end, big transformation is that's not what you're looking for. Most customers today, don't have one giant, macro-transformation. There's dozens of them going on in different areas and that's the way we've kind of built this business is to be able to handle the small ones, to be in and out quickly, you know, it's not bringing in thousands of people. It's taking a look at, what are you trying to do and let's get some quick wins, and there might be some big ones along the way. But one other thing you touched on was business model, and I know we talked a lot about consumption this week, what changing business models are like. And I know we've talked about that at length in the past and we really see that big change around, what we believe is a huge opportunity. We've talked about flex capacity a lot this week, right? Which is, your stack, in your environment. We put a lease on top, we run-time optimize it, activate capacity management and basically it feels to you, as it flexes up and down, like a public Cloud option on Prim. But it's your stack in your environment. And there's so much more that we can do with that, and Anna talked about in hers, about private backup. We're debuting in here. Private backup is a service, which is basically your backed up data, that you pay for as you back it up, but it's on Prim. It's not out there. It's inside of your firewall, it's inside of your environment, and that's a big deal. We're onto something there. >> Well, where that gets interesting, too, is if you backup not only your data, but maybe you back up data from AWS, or maybe you back up data from your CRM system. >> Absolutely. >> And it goes both ways. So you become that sort of center of the data protection service. And there's probably "n" number of examples like that, but we've talked in the past about services as a service. We kind of joked about that. But is that the model that you're working toward? >> Well, I would say as the marketing leader for .next, we're not branding services as a service. We've tested out a lot of different ideas. What we fundamentally believe is that there's a new category out on the market. We believe that, as we say, hybrid IT will win in the end. We believe that there are plenty of workloads that are going to go out to the commodity cloud, that's a very important part of your right mix. We've talked to enterprises across the board, you hear it across the bard, why flexible capacity has been so successful. There is this whole class of service which is consuming, but consuming on Prim. And that doesn't just mean a lease, that means private backup, that means a group of clusters, that means a whole series of IT, but you consume it. You meter it, you measure it, you consume it, You pay for what you use but you do it inside of your own environment and that's not only in your data center. Your environment can be your manufacturing floor, or your mall, or your airport because we have these great Edge assets. >> The refinery. >> Right., and if you're able to again, same idea, put that sort of consumption model in place, at your Edge, or in your data center ... Of course, bring in public when you need it, but that mix, that right mix, we think this is a huge class of service. We think we have a six year advantage on the market, and we're going to go strong on that. >> I guess the point is, in services traditionally, either a maintenance contract or it's an SOAW-based business, and what you're describing now is much more of an at-your-service, monthly, or whatever, quarterly billing, type of cycle, right? >> Flynn: Absolutely, absolutely. Well, I think the tail wins for you guys have the wind at your back and I think you're right. You're onto something. Some things we're seeing here at the show, and also other Cube events we've done is, micro services, you're seeing things with Cloud Native on the Cloud side, and general Cloud, on Prim as well as in the public micro services. And people know about the compos-ability of lego blocks and open sources even going down to the point where things are being open-sourced like we've never seen before, so people have to cobble together and roll their own solutions. The other thing that's interesting and most notable, that's come up this week, is Ricky Vaughn's private Cloud report, that true private Cloud report came out and the only one in the market that actually has real numbers, points to-- >> Flynn: Great numbers, by the way. Love it. >> This is complete validation, that the right mix is also a good message in the sense that are on-Prim, those are some markets over 260 billion. That means, that IT is not going to be shrinking, like some might say, service shipments are certainly shrinking maybe here and there, but IT is growing in a Cloud-like environment. On-prim's not going away. >> No. >> So this really comes down to, Okay, I've got to deal with what I've got, build on these micro services, a lot of open-source projects coming in. This is, I think, a great opportunity for you guys. How are you going to attack that? How do you go in to a customer, because I know they have Slizer on it, the globalist ... (overlapped talking) ...was on earlier, these are big problems to solve. >> Yep. >> How do you engage with that kind of level of scope? >> Well let's start with, and we completely agree with the Premise As you know, we've been talking about that for a while. We also believe that the term on Premise, that doesn't just mean a big, air-conditioning room in your building, that can be the Colo, that can be your hoster, that can be in a lot of different places, but it's your private item, right? That's what it is. >> The air control. >> That's the point, it's control, it's about controlling security. And once you put that in, as you develop the micro services, we know, to answer your question directly about, how do we engage? We know these enterprise customers, and even smaller customers. They want to move from capex to apex, that's an overused term. But really it means, instead of buying 100 servers and then I go over provision for six months, and then another 100 servers, right? If we can get into a way where we can actually get apex, and that conversation is ... You're still starting out with the same business problems, this is kind of the thing that we learned. It's not some, you don't go in and say "Apex to capex", you go in and say "Hey, you need a new customer "experience, right? You want to transcribe your "customer experience." (overlapped talking) >> That's right, let's talk about your digital transformation that you want to put in, what's the new technology that you need? And then, let's talk about the business model that follows behind that, so it's not consumption for consumption's sake. It starts as, what is the outcome and then, bring in the technology, solve the problems, bring in the partners, and then, you can consume it over time. >> John: I think that validates why hybrid Cloud is so hot. We've been pointing at it, but really when you break it down like that, with a true private Cloud environment, which is essentially IT on Prem, or however you describe it. Then you got hybrid. That's where workloads, move to the Cloud and that destination-oriented multi-Cloud environment. So, we believe that multi-Cloud will be there. I personally don't think, and Levon's got some research coming out on this, that multi-Cloud is a little bit further out. That hybrid is a gateway to multi-Cloud. And right now, you can be on multiple Clouds but it's just different workloads. But the nirvana is just having workloads just moving in and out of Clouds, and eventually that's how I see it. What's your thoughts on that? >> Well, have you had a preview of New Stack, and some of the discussions this week? >> Well, we've had the PowerPoint preview and today, this afternoon, we get the NBA preview. >> Oh, fantastic. Well, we see that, too. We believe that that's the control point. And by the way, you're not going to find that from public Cloud, you're not going to get that... The over-arching single pane. That's not going to come from that side, it's going to come from this side, right? And that's where New Stack is aimed, That's where a lot of our software-defined technology is aimed and we completely agree and we think that, that's what's going to be that top control layer. >> Dave: You'll get, from the public logic, about five single panes, or four single panes, or eight single panes, or ... >> That's right, but you know what? You need a pane for the pane, I mean ... There's a sea of panes. (laughter) Flynn, thanks for coming out on The Cube, I know you got a hard stop, but I want to just get your thoughts. What's next as you go out and market .next? Great, clever name. Simple to get. Pointing to the future. We do a little dab with the point. >> It is a dab point. >> With a point to the future, up to the right, growth. What's next? What are you guys going to be doing in the marketplace? What's the message going to be? What's going to be the cadence of .next from a marketing standpoint? >> Well, we're going to continue to talk to our customers about the value that .next brings, and we're just previewing a few services here this week. We think it the tip of the ice berg, around, private backup as a service, big data as a service, we think there is an enormous amount of work here. We've previewed a little bit of it, Anna's talked about it on stage. I think, in the next few months, you're going to see us really come out strong to talk to the market, because we have, we do believe we have a six year leadership in this space, we purchased Cloud Cruiser, which is secret sauce that really allows us to do these kinds of services. Measure the meter, you know? And I expect to see a bunch of new messages and a bunch of new services around the space. >> John: Awesome. Thanks for coming on The Cube, great to have you, great conversation, new opportunities that is the ice berg. Cloud is certainly changing, a big day to IoT, all happening in real time. This is the Cube happening here, day three, coverage of HPE Discover, 2017. Stay with us. More coverage after this short break, stay with us. (electronic music)