>> Narrator: Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE covering VMworld 2017 brought to you by VMware and its ecosystem partners. >> Hi, I'm Stu Miniman here with Keith Townsend, and you're watching theCUBE SiliconANGLE Media's production of VMworld 2017 here in Las Vegas. For the last few years, hyper-converged infrastructure has been one of the hot topics, and I'm happy to welcome back to the program Jesse St. Laurent, who is the chief technologist of hyper-converged software group-- Sorry, software-defined hyper-converged and cloud group at Hewlett Packard Enterprise. A slightly longer title than last time I interviewed Jesse. Thanks so much for joining us. >> Yeah, thanks Stu, it's great to be here. >> Alright, so hyper-converged has had a lot of hype. Hyper-converged has also had a lot of customers, a lot of dollars. First of all, I have to say, I think it's the-- You're the first employee of SimpliVity that we've had on since the acquisition. We've had the pleasure of knowing-- I've known you since before SimpliVity, but we've been watching SimpliVity since stealth mode, a $650 million acquisition in cash for HPE, so congratulations on that. >> Thanks. >> Stu: What have you been doing since the acquisition? >> I think one of the biggest changes, really, is going from being a product company, where, in reality, startups, if you're going to be successful, you have to focus on one thing, and you have to do it well. And for SimpliVity, well, we spent a lot of time building technology that was much more broadly applicable from an industry perspective. Taking it to market, it had to be narrow, and that's why we focused specifically on hyper-convergence. But we always felt that, and you and I have talked about this long ago, that some of the underpinnings of our technology really were about this concept of a data fabric. So, fast-forward to today, SimpliVity is no longer a single-product company, right? We're part of a portfolio company that has technology that spans the entire hybrid IT marketplace. >> Jesse, I want you to look back for a little bit for us. >> Sure. >> As I've said, you've ridden this wave. I sometimes joke, I'm still yet to find a CIO that had a convergence problem. (Keith laughs) But you're solving real customer problems. Obviously, you've got a lot of customers. As you look back, what have you learned along the way? What are some of those key drivers that kind of got you to where you are, and what's changed in the conversations recently for your customers? >> I think it's always been about simplification. The strange thing is SimpliVity always talked about simplifying IT, right? Whenever any of us talked about what the company did, the first slide was, "Our mission is to simplify IT," and I didn't know it prior, but after the acquisition, HP's, one of the core strategies of the company, is to simplify hybrid IT, which aligns remarkably well. I think that's the common thread for SimpliVity, is we've seen the product evolve, and the use cases of all of early on, smaller customers, much larger enterprises over time, different use cases, ranging from data centers to kind of extreme robo examples. I think, really, the thread through that is hybrid IT's complicated, right, and what I think is a common thread through all of what we see on the floor here, for the most part, is IT is really hard. I always use the term, "the messy middle." In the end of the day, vendors like to make the world seem binary, right? It's either, you're either public cloud or you're private cloud, or you're either x or y, and the reality is no customer I've ever seen has come in in the morning and said, "You know what? "Today, we're going to flip this switch, "and everything is going to go from the mainframe "to open systems, or open systems, you know, bare metal, "to virtualization, or virtualization to containers." Customers live in a very messy world, and that's where simplification is that theme. >> So Jesse, no matter the technology, technologists, we love to say scale break stuff. SimpliVity is used to scale, but coming into HPE, much different sized organization, organization that looks at the industry a little bit differently than SimpliVity does, how has things changed for your view now that you're inside of HP? >> Yeah, I mean one of the things that is a huge change is we're everywhere, right? SimpliVity talked about being in tens of countries before, and we were excited about that, and for a startup, the number was huge. >> Keith: Right. >> It paled in comparison to the footprint of Hewlett Packard Enterprise. In one of the first couple weeks of the acquisition, I was presenting to some customers, and Meg Whitman was part of the discussion as well, and I said, "One of the biggest changes will be "we will be in 90% of the opportunities "where somebody's talking about hyper-convergence," and Meg stopped me and said, "No, no no. "We will be in 100% of the opportunities where someone's talking about hyper-convergence." And just to a scale perspective, that's a scale that no startup has ever experienced. You can't be everywhere, and that's a huge transition just in terms of enabling a global sales force to be able to be everywhere. >> Jesse, I'd like to get your take. People talk about software's eating the world. We live in a software-defined world right now. You know, cloud's a lot of software, but hardware still has an impact. We all know virtualization, boy, you know, some of those underlying things. The devil's in the details on networking and storage specifically. Hewlett Packard Enterprise, obviously your solution is predominantly software, but now you have a lot more hardware that goes with it. I know you've done a lot of the integration on that. What, has anything changed as to how you think of the software and hardware? And I'd love to hear a little insight as to that integration work. Anything surprise you or excite you coming into the HPE family? >> Yeah, I think, let me talk about a little bit of the SimpliVity hardware view and how that's evolved because I think it's an interesting transition, which is we've always based our technology on one, our accelerator that just made everything faster and more predictable. It was a core part of our technology, but we've always talked about having a software-optimized version of the stack, as well, and doing that across a whole suite of hardware platforms was never a simple thing to do because there was one SimpliVity, and there were a lot of hardware platforms out there. What we've seen now is, we're going into an environment where there's one suite of hardware technology, and it's a company that has a massive amount of expertise in Hewlett Packard Enterprise, developing hardware technologies. So where SimpliVity had an accelerator, one of the things that I didn't think about in advance of the acquisition is a whole bunch of people coming to us, saying, "We've got some really interesting ideas "on how to take what you've built around this accelerator, "and make it really fast." You imagine when you own the chassis, when you own the motherboard, when you own everything about the platform, the idea of putting a card in, well, yeah, well that's easy, but what else can you do? When you have an army of people that can build hardware, you can do all sorts of really cool stuff. So I think what you'll see is, actually, us doing two separate things more. You'll continue to see a hardware-optimized version of everything SimpliVity's done for years now. It seems a little strange to say "years," but years now. That's not going to go away, in fact, it's going to get even better, but at the same time, there're form factors and there're places where you want to run in software, whether it's to be extra small, whether it's to bounce down the road in a Humvee, whether it's to be in an airplane; there's a whole bunch of reasons you want to do that. So you'll actually see us having a portfolio that embraces both sides of that. >> So one last question around that hardware and software abstraction. HPE, while a lot of expertise, you have to be a little bit overwhelmed. DL380, which you guys are supporting now, DL580, Synergy, where are we going to see SimpliVity next in HPE's massive hardware profile? >> Yeah, my hope is you see it everywhere, but it takes time to get there. I think one of the things that's most exciting about this transformation that SimpliVity will go through is really becoming a data fabric company. So hyper-convergence isn't going away, and hyper-convergence will come to other platforms, whether it's a one-year platform or a four-year platform, more sockets, higher density. I think you'll see all those things over time. You'll also see, what does it mean to be part of a software-defined stack, living in a composable world, right? I think those things fit together really well, and you'll see a lot of cool stuff coming around that. We're seeing the biggest boost in terms of exposure in the market. It has caused huge SimpliVity product growth in the market. Now what we want to do is broaden that portfolio to be in a lot of other places in the market. >> Alright, well Jesse, we really appreciate catching the update. We're surely going to be watching as to how composable infrastructure and the portfolio of the HPE offerings fit in with SimpliVity, so thanks so much for joining us. For Keith Townsend, I'm Stu Miniman. We'll be back with lots more coverage here from VMworld 2017 Las Vegas. You're watching theCUBE. (upbeat music)