[digital Music] >> Okay, welcome back to "theCUBE," Supercloud 22. I'm John Furrier, host of "theCUBE." We got a very special distinguished CUBE alumni here, Rajiv Ramaswami, CEO of Nutanix. Great to see you. Thanks for coming by the show. >> Good to be here, John. >> We've had many conversations in the past about what you guys have done. Again, the perfect storm is coming, innovation. You guys are in an interesting position and the Supercloud kind of points this out. We've been discussing about how multi-cloud is coming. Everyone has multiple clouds, but there's real structural change happening right now in customers. Now there's been change that's happened, cloud computing, cloud operations, developers are doing great, but now something magical's happening in the industry. We wanted to get your thoughts on that, that's called Supercloud. >> Indeed. >> How do you see this shift? I mean, devs are doing great. Ops and security are trying to get cloud native. What's happening in your opinion? >> Yeah, in fact, we've been talking about something very, very similar. I like the term supercloud. We've been calling it hybrid multicloud essentially, but the point being, companies are running their applications and managing their data. This is lifeblood for them. And where do they sit? Of course, some of these will sit in the public cloud. Some of these are going to sit inside their data centers and some of these applications increasingly are going to run in edges. And now what most companies struggle with is every cloud is different, their on-prem is different, their edge is different and they then have a scarcity of staff. Operating models are different. Security is different. Everything about it is different. So to your point, people are using multiple clouds and multiple locations. But you need to think about cloud as an operating model and what the supercloud or hyper multicloud delivers is really a consistent model, consistent operating model. One way for IT teams to operate across all of these environments and deliver an agile infrastructure as a service model to their developers. So that from a company's managed point of view, they can run their stuff wherever they want to, completely with consistency, and the IT teams can help support that easily. >> You know, it's interesting. You see a lot of transformation, certainly from customers, they were paying a lot of operating costs for IT. Now CapEx is covered by, I mean, CapEx now is covered by the cloud, so it's OpEx. They're getting core competencies and they're becoming very fluent in cloud technologies. And at the same time the vendors are saying, "Hey, you know, buy our stuff." And so you have the change over, how people relate to each other, vendors and customers, where there's a shared model where, okay, you got use cases for the cloud and use cases on-premise, both CapEx, both technology. You mentioned that operating model, Where's the gap? 'Cause nobody wants complexity, and you know, the enterprise, people love to add, solve complexity with more complexity. >> That's exactly the problem. You just hit the nail on the head, which is enterprise software tends to be very complex. And fundamentally complexity has been a friend for vendors, but the point being, it's not a friend for a company that's trying to manage their IT infrastructure. It's an an enemy because complexity means you need to train your staff, you need very specialized teams, and guess what? Talent is perhaps the most scarce thing out there, right? People talk about, you know, in IT, they always talk about people, process, technology. There's plenty of technology out there, but right now there's a big scarcity of people, and I think that talent is a major issue. And not only that, you know, it's not that we have as many specialized people who know storage, who know compute, who know networking. Instead, what you're getting is a bunch of new college grads coming in, who have generalized skill sets, who are used to having a consumer like experience with their experience with software and applications, and they want to see that from their enterprise software vendors. >> You know, it's just so you mentioned that when the hyper converged, we saw that movie that was bringing things together. Now you're seeing the commoditization of compute storage and networking, but yet the advancement of higher level services and things like Kubernetes for orchestration, that's an operating opportunity for people to get more orchestration, but that's a trade off. So we're seeing a new trend in the supercloud where it's not all Kubernetes all the time. It's not all AWS all the time. It's the new architecture, where there's trade offs. How do you see some of these key trade offs? I know you talked to a lot of your customers, they're kind of bringing things together, putting things together, kind of a day zero mentality. What are some of those key trade offs and architectural decision points? >> So there's a couple of points there, I think. First is that most customers are on a journey of thoughts and their journey is, well, they want to have a modern infrastructure. Many of them have on-prem footprints, and they're looking to modernize that infrastructure. They're looking to adopt cloud operating models. They're looking to figure out how they can extend and leverage these public clouds appropriately. The problem is when they start doing this, they find that everything is different. Every little piece, every cloud is different, their on-prem is different, and this results in a lot of complexity. In some ways, we at Nutanix solved this problem within data centers by converging separate silos of high computer storage and network. That's what we did with HCI. And now this notion of supercloud is just simply about converging different clouds and different data. >> Kind of the same thing. >> And on-prem and edges, right? Trying to bring all of these together rather than having separate teams, separate processes, separate technologies for every one of these, try to create consistency, and it makes life a lot simpler and easier. >> Yeah, I wanted to connect those dots because I think this is kind of interesting with the supercloud was, you get good at something in one cloud, then you bring that best practice and figure out how to make that work across edge and on-premise, which is, I mean, basically cloud operations. >> Exactly. It's cloud operations, which is why we say it's a cloud is an operating model. It's a way you operate your environment, but that environment could be anywhere. You're not restricted to it being in the public cloud. It's in your data center, that's in the edges. >> Okay, so when I hear about substrates, abstraction layers, I think two things, innovation cause you extract away complexity, then I also think about from the customer's perspective, maybe, lock-in. >> Yes. >> Whoa, oh, promises, promises. Lock in is a fear and ops teams and security teams, they know the downside of lock-in. >> Yes. >> Choice is obviously important. Devs don't care. I mean, like, whatever runs the software, go faster, but ops and security teams, they want choice, but they want functionality. So, what's that trade off? Talk about this lock-in dynamic, and how to get around. >> Yeah. >> And I think that's been some of the fundamental tenants of what we do. I mean, of course, people don't like lock-in, but they also want simplicity. And we provide both. Our philosophy is we want to make things as simple as possible. And that's one of the big differentiators that we have compared to other players. Our whole mission inside the company is to make things simple. But at the same time, we also want to provide customers with that flexibility and every layer in the stack, you don't want to lock to your point. So, if at the very bottom hardware, choice of hardware. Choice of hardware could be any of the vendors you work with or public cloud, Bare Metal. When you look at hypervisor, lots of choices. You got VMware, you got our own Ahv, which is KBM-based open source hypervisor, no lock-in there, provide complete flexibility. Then we have a storage stack, a distributor storage stack, which we provide. And then of course layers about that. Kubernetes, pick your Kubernetes, runtime of choice. Pick your Kubernetes, orchestrator and management of choice. So our whole goal is to provide that flexibility at every layer in the stack, allowing the customer to make the choice. They can decide how much they want to go with the full stack or how much they want to go piecemeal it, and there's a trade off there. And they get more flexibility, but at the cost of a little bit more complexity, and that, I think, is the trade off that each customer has to weigh. >> Okay, you guys have been transforming for many, many years. We've been covering on SiliconANGLE and theCUBE to software. >> Yes. >> I know you have hardware as well, but also software services. And you've been on the cloud bandwagon years ago, and now you made a lot of progress. What's the current strategy for you guys? How do you fit in? 'Cause public cloud has great use cases, great examples of success there, but that's not the only game in town. You've got on-premise and edge. What are you guys doing? What specifically are customers leaning on you for? How are you providing that value? What's the innovation strategy? >> Very simply, we provide a cloud software platform today. We don't actually sell anymore hardware. They're not on our books anymore. We're a pure software company. So we sell a cloud soft platform on top of which our customers can run all their applications, including the most mission critical applications. And they can use our platform wherever, to your point, on the supercloud. I keep coming back to that. We started out with our on-prem genes. That's where we started. We've extended that to Azure and AWS. And we are extending, of course, we've always been very strong when it came to the edge and extending that out to the edge. And so today we have a cloud platform that allows our customers to run these apps, whatever the apps may be, and manage all their data because we provide structured and unstructured data, blocks, files, objects, are all part of the platform. And we provide that in a consistent way across all of these locations, and we deliver the cloud operating model. >> So on the hardware thing, you guys don't have hardware anymore. >> We don't sell hardware anymore. We work with a whole range of hardware partners, HP, Dell, Supermicro, name it, Lenovo. >> Okay, so if I'm like a Telco and I want to build a data center at my tower, which could be only a few boxes, who do I buy that from? >> So you buy the software from us and you can buy the hardware from your choice of hardware partners. >> So yeah, whoever's selling the servers at that point. >> Yeah. >> Okay, so you send on the server. >> Yeah, we send on the server. >> Yeah, sound's good. So no hardware, so back to software that could transfer. How's that going, good? >> It's gone very well because, you know, we made two transformations. One is of course we were selling appliances when we started out, and then we started selling software, and now it's all fully subscription. So we're 100% subscription company. So our customers are buying subscriptions. They have the flexibility to get whatever duration they want. Again, to your philosophy, there's no lock-in. There is no long term lock-in here. We are happy if a customer chooses us for a year versus three years, whatever they like. >> I know that you've been on the road with customers this summer. It's been great to get out and see people in person. What are you learning? What are they viewing? What's their new Instagram picture of Nutanix? How do they see you? And how do you want them to see you? >> What they've seen us in the past has been, we created this whole category of HCI, Hyperconverged Infrastructure. They see us as a leader there and they see us as running some of their applications, not necessarily all their applications, especially at the very big customers. In the smaller customers, they run everything on us, but in the bigger customers, they run some workload, some applications on us. And now what they see is that we are now, if taking them on the journey, not only to run all their applications, whatever, they may be, including the most mission critical database workloads or analytics workloads on our platform, but also help them extend that journey into the public cloud. And so that's the journey we are on, modernized infrastructure. And this is what most of our customers are on. Modernizing the infrastructure, which we help and then creating a cloud operating model, and making that available everywhere. >> Yeah, and I think one, that's a great, and again, that's a great segue to supercloud, which I want to get your thoughts on because AWS, for example, spent all that CapEx, they're called the hyperscaler. They got H in there and that's a hyperscale in there. And now you can leverage that CapEx by bringing Nutanix in, you're a hyperscale-like solution on-premise and edge. So you take advantage of both. >> Absolutely. >> The success. >> Exactly. >> And a trajectory of cloud, so your customers, if I get this right, have all the economies of scale of cloud, plus the benefits of the HCI software kind of vibe. >> Absolutely. And I'll give you some examples how this plays out in the real world based on all my travels here. >> Yeah, please do. So we just put out a case study on a customer called FSP. They're a betting company, online betting company based out of the UK. And they run on our platform on-prem, but what they saw was they had to expand their operations to Asia and they went to Taiwan. And the problem for them was, they were told they had to get in business in Taiwan within a matter of a month, and they didn't know how to do it. And then they realized that they could just take the exact same software that they were running on our platform, and run it in an AWS region sitting in Taiwan. And they were up in business in less than a month, and they had now operations ready to go in Asia. I mean, that's a compelling business value. >> That's agile, that's agile. >> Agile. >> That's agile and a great... >> Versus the alternative would be weeks, months. >> Months, first of all, I mean, just think about, they have to open a data center, which probably takes them, they have to buy the hardware, which, you know, with supply chain deliveries, >> Supply chain. and God knows how long that takes. >> Oh God, yeah. >> So compared to all that here, they were up and running within a matter of a month. It's a, just one example of a very compelling value proposition. >> So you feel good about where you guys are right now relative to these big waves coming? >> Yeah, I think so. Well, I mean, you know, there's a lot of big waves coming and. >> What are the biggest ones that you see? >> Well, I mean, I think there's clearly one of the big ones, of course, out there is Broadcom buying VMware or potentially buying VMware and great company. I used to work there for many years and I have a lot of respect for what VMware has done for the industry in terms of virtualization of servers and creating their entire portfolio. >> Is it true you're hiring a lot of VMware folks? >> Yes, I mean a lot of them coming over now in anticipation, we've been hiring our fair share, but they're going other places too. >> A lot of VMware alumni at Nutanix now. >> Yes, there are certainly, we have our share of VMware alumni. We also have a share of alumni from others. >> We call the V mafia, by the way. (laughs) >> I dunno about the V mafia, but. But it's a great company, but I think right now a lot of customers are wondering what's going to happen, and therefore, they are looking at potentially what are the other alternatives? And we are very much front and center in that discussions. >> Well, Dave Alante and I, and the team have been very bullish on on-premise cloud operations. You guys are doing there. How would you describe the supercloud concept to a customer when they say, "Hey, what's the supercloud? "It's becoming a thing. "How would you describe what it is and the benefits?" >> Yeah, and I think the first thing is to tell them, what problem are you looking to solve? And the problem for them is, they have applications everywhere. They have data everywhere. How do their teams run and deal with all of this? And what they find is the way they're doing it today is different operating platform for every one of these. If you're on Amazon, it's one platform. If you're an Azure, it's another. If you're on-prim, it's a third. If you want to go to the edge, probably fourth, and it's a messy, complex thing for their IT teams. What a supercloud does is essentially unify all of these into a consistent operating model. You get a cloud operating model, you get the agility and the benefits, but with one way of handling your compute storage network needs, one way of handling your security policies, and security constructs, and giving you that, so such a dramatic simplification on the one side, and it's a dramatic enabler because it now enables you to run these applications wherever you want completely free. >> Yeah. It really bridges the cloud native. It kind of the interplay on the cloud between SAS and IAS, solves a lot of problems, highly integrated, that takes that model to the complexity of multiple environments. >> Exactly. >> That's a super cool environment. >> (John speaks over Rajiv) Across any environment, wherever. It's changing this thing from cloud being associated with the public cloud to cloud being available everywhere in a consistent way. >> And that's essentially the goodness of cloud, going everywhere. >> Yeah. >> Yeah, but that extension is what you call a supercloud. >> Rajiv, thank you so much for your time. I know you're super valuable, and you got a company to run. One final question for you. The edge is exploding. >> Yes. >> It's super dynamic. We kind of all know it's there. The industrial edge. You got the IOT edge and just the edge in general. On-premise, I think, is hybrid, it's the steady state, looking good. Everything's good. It's getting better, of course, things with cloud native and all that good stuff. What's your view of the edge? It's super dynamic, a lot of shifting, OT, IT, that's actually transformed. >> Yes, absolutely. >> Huge industrial thing. Amazon is buying, you know, industrial robots now. >> Yes. >> Space is around the corner, a lot of industrial advance with machine learning and the software side of things, so the edge is exploding. >> Yeah, you know, and I think one of the interesting things about that exploding edge is that it tends to be both compute and data heavy. It's not this notion of very thin edges. Yes, you've got thin edges too, of course, which may just be sensors on the one hand, but you're seeing an increased need for compute and storage at the edges, because a lot of these are crunching, crunching applications that require a crunch and generate a lot of data, crunch a lot of data. There's latency requirements that require you and there's even people deploying GPUs at the edges for image recognition and so forth, right? So this is. >> The edge is the data center now. >> Exactly. Think of the edge starting to look at the edge of the mini data center, but one that needs to be highly automated. You're not going to be able to put people at every one of these locations. You've got to be able to do all your services, lifecycle management, everything completely remove. >> Self-healing, all this good stuffs. >> Exactly. It has to be completely automated and self-healing and upgradeable and you know, life cycle managed from the cloud, so to speak. And so there's going to be this interlinkage between the edge and the cloud, and you're going to actually, essentially what you need is a cloud managed edge. >> Yeah, and this is where the super cloud extends, where you can extend the value of what you're building to these dynamically new emerging, and it's just the beginning. There'll be more. >> Oh, there's a ton of new applications emerging there. And I think that's going to be, I mean, there's people out there who code that half of data is going to be generated at the edge in a couple of years. >> Well, Rajiv, I am excited that you can bring the depth of technical architectural knowledge to the table on supercloud, as well as run a company. Congratulations on your success, and thanks for sharing with us and being part of our community. >> No, thank you, John, for having me on your show. >> Okay. Supercloud 22, we're continuing to open up the conversation. There is structural change happening. We're going to watch it. We're going to make it an open conversation. We're not going to make a decision. We're going to just let everyone discuss it and see how it evolves and on the best in the business discussing it, and we're going to keep it going. Thanks for watching. (digital music)

>> Announcer: "theCUBE" presents HPE Discover 2022. Brought to you by HPE. >> Welcome back to HPE Discover 2022. You're watching "theCUBE's" coverage. This is Day 2, Dave Vellante with John Furrier. Sheila Rohra is here. She's the Senior Vice President and GM of the Data Infrastructure Business at Hewlett Packard Enterprise, and of course, the storage division. And Omer Asad. Welcome back to "theCUBE", Omer. Senior Vice President and General Manager for Cloud Data Services, Hewlett Packard Enterprise storage. Guys, thanks for coming on. Good to see you. >> Thank you. Always a pleasure, man. >> Thank you. >> So Sheila, I'll start with you. Explain the difference. The Data Infrastructure Business and then Omer's Cloud Data Services. You first. >> Okay. So Data Infrastructure Business. So I'm responsible for the primary secondary storage. Basically, what you physically store, the data in a box, I actually own that. So I'm going to have Omer explain his business because he can explain it better than me. (laughing) Go ahead. >> So 100% right. So first, data infrastructure platforms, primary secondary storage. And then what I do from a cloud perspective is wrap up those things into offerings, block storage offerings, data protection offerings, and then put them on top of the GreenLake platform, which is the platform that Antonio and Fidelma talked about on main Keynote stage yesterday. That includes multi-tenancy, customer subscription management, sign on management, and then on top of that we build services. Services are cloud-like services, storage services or block service, data protection service, disaster recovery services. Those services are then launched on top of the platform. Some services like data protection services are software only. Some services are software plus hardware. And the hardware on the platform comes along from the primary storage business and we run the control plane for that block service on the GreenLake platform and that's the cloud service. >> So, I just want to clarify. So what we maybe used to know as 3PAR and Nimble and StoreOnce. Those are the products that you're responsible for? >> That is the primary storage part, right? And just to kind of show that, he and I, we do indeed work together. Right. So if you think about the 3PAR, the primary... Sorry, the Primera, the Alletras, the Nimble, right? All that, right? That's the technology that, you know, my team builds. And what Omer does with his magic is that he turns it into HPE GreenLake for storage, right? And to deliver as a service, right? And basically to create a self-service agility for the customer and also to get a very Cloud operational experience for them. >> So if I'm a customer, just so I get this right, if I'm a customer and I want Hybrid, that's what you're delivering as a Cloud service? >> Yes. >> And I don't care where the data is on-premises, in storage, or on Cloud. >> 100%. >> Is that right? >> So the way that would work is, as a customer, you would come along with the partner, because we're 100% partner-led. You'll come to the GreenLake Console. On the GreenLake Console, you will pick one of our services. Could be a data protection service, could be the block storage service. All services are hybrid in nature. Public Cloud is 100% participant in the ecosystem. You'll choose a service. Once you choose a service, you like the rate card for that service. That rate card is just like a hyperscaler rate card. IOPS, Commitment, MINCOMMIT's, whatever. Once you procure that at the price that you like with a partner, you buy the subscription. Then you go to console.greenLake.com, activate your subscription. Once the subscription is activated, if it's a service like block storage, which we talked about yesterday, service will be activated, and our supply chain will send you our platform gear, and that will get activated in your site. Two things, network cable, power cable, dial into the cloud, service gets activated, and you have a cloud control plane. The key difference to remember is that it is cloud-consumption model and cloud-operation model built in together. It is not your traditional as a service, which is just like hardware leasing. >> Yeah, yeah, yeah. >> That's a thing of the past. >> But this answers a question that I had, is how do you transfer or transform from a company that is, you know, selling boxes, of course, most of you are engineers are software engineers, I get that, to one that is selling services. And it sounds like the answer is you've organized, I know it's inside baseball here, but you organize so that you still have, you can build best of breed products and then you can package them into services. >> Omer: 100%. 100%. >> It's separate but complementary organization. >> So the simplest way to look at it would be, we have a platform side at the house that builds the persistence layers, the innovation, the file systems, the speeds and feeds, and then building on top of that, really, really resilient storage services. Then how the customer consumes those storage services, we've got tremendous feedback from our customers, is that the cloud-operational model has won. It's just a very, very simple way to operate it, right? So from a customer's perspective, we have completely abstracted away out hardware, which is in the back. It could be at their own data center, it could be at an MSP, or they could be using a public cloud region. But from an operational perspective, the customer gets a single pane of glass through our service console, whether they're operating stuff on-prem, or they're operating stuff in the public cloud. >> So they get storage no matter what? They want it in the cloud, they got it that way, and if they want it as a service, it just gets shipped. >> 100%. >> They plug it in and it auto configures. >> Omer: It's ready to go. >> That's right. And the key thing is simplicity. We want to take the headache away from our customers, we want our customers to focus on their business outcomes, and their projects, and we're simplifying it through analytics and through this unified cloud platform, right? On like how their data is managed, how they're stored, how they're secured, that's all taken care of in this operational model. >> Okay, so I have a question. So just now the edge, like take me through this. Say I'm a customer, okay I got the data saved on-premise action, cloud, love that. Great, sir. That's a value proposition. Come to HPE because we provide this easily. Yeah. But now at the edge, I want to deploy it out to some edge node. Could be a tower with Telecom, 5G or whatever, I want to box this out there, I want storage. What happens there? Just ship it out there and connects up? Does it work the same way? >> 100%. So from our infrastructure team, you'll consume one or two platforms. You'll consume either the Hyperconverged form factor, SimpliVity, or you might convert, the Converged form factor, which is proliant servers powered by Alletras. Alletra 6Ks. Either of those... But it's very different the way you would procure it. What you would procure from us is an edge service. That edge service will come configured with certain amount of compute, certain amount of storage, and a certain amount of data protection. Once you buy that on a dollars per gig per month basis, whichever rate card you prefer, storage rate card or a VMware rate card, that's all you buy. From that point on, the platform team automatically configures the back-end hardware from that attribute-based ordering and that is shipped out to your edge. Dial in the network cable, dial in the power cable, GreenLake cloud discovers it, and then you start running the- >> Self-service, configure it, it just shows up, plug it in, done. >> Omer: Self-service but partner-led. >> Yeah. >> Because we have preferred pricing for our partners. Our partners would come in, they will configure the subscriptions, and then we activate those customers, and then send out the hardware. So it's like a hyperscaler on-prem at-scale kind of a model. >> Yeah, I like it a lot. >> So you guys are in the data business. You run the data portion of Hewlett Packard Enterprise. I used to call it storage, even if we still call it storage but really, it's evolving into data. So what's your vision for the data business and your customer's data vision, if you will? How are you supporting that? >> Well, I want to kick it off, and then I'm going to have my friend, Omer, chime in. But the key thing is that what the first step is is that we have to create a unified platform, and in this case we're creating a unified cloud platform, right? Where there's a single pane of glass to manage all that data, right? And also leveraging lots of analytics and telemetry data that actually comes from our infosite, right? We use all that, we make it easy for the customer, and all they have to say, and they're basically given the answers to the test. "Hey, you know, you may want to increase your capacity. You may want to tweak your performance here." And all the customers are like, "Yes. No. Yes, no." Basically it, right? Accept and not accept, right? That's actually the easiest way. And again, as I said earlier, this frees up the bandwidth for the IT teams so then they actually focus more on the business side of the house, rather than figuring out how to actually manage every single step of the way of the data. >> Got it. >> So it's exactly what Sheila described, right? The way this strategy manifests itself across an operational roadmap for us is the ability to change from a storage vendor to a data services vendor, right? >> Sheila: Right. >> And then once we start monetizing these data services to our customers through the GreenLake platform, which gives us cloud consumption model and a cloud operational model, and then certain data services come with the platform layer, certain data services are software only. But all the services, all the data services that we provide are hybrid in nature, where we say, when you provision storage, you could provision it on-prem, or you can provision it in a hyperscaler environment. The challenge that most of our customers have come back and told us, is like, data center control planes are getting fragmented. On-premises, I mean there's no secrecy about it, right? VMware is the predominant hypervisor, and as a result of that, vCenter is the predominant configuration layer. Then there is the public cloud side, which is through either Ajour, or GCP, or AWS, being one of the largest ones out there. But when the customer is dealing with data assets, the persistence layer could be anywhere, it could be in AWS region, it could be your own data center, or it could be your MSP. But what this does is it creates an immense amount of fragmentation in the context in which the customers understand the data. Essentially, John, the customers are just trying to answer three questions: What is it that I store? How much of it do I store? Should I even be storing it in the first place? And surprisingly, those three questions just haven't been answered. And we've gotten more and more fragmented. So what we are trying to produce for our customers, is a context to ware data view, which allows the customer to understand structured and unstructured data, and the lineage of how it is stored in the organization. And essentially, the vision is around simplification and context to ware data management. One of the key things that makes that possible, is again, the age old infosite capability that we have continued to hone and develop over time, which is now up to the stage of like 12 trillion data points that are coming into the system that are not corroborated to give that back. >> And of course cost-optimizing it as well. We're up against the clock, but take us through the announcements, what's new from when we sort of last talked? I guess it was in September. >> Omer: Right. >> Right. What's new that's being announced here and, or, you know, GA? >> Right. So three major announcements that came out, because to keep on establishing the context when we were with you last time. So last time we announced GreenLake backup and recovery service. >> John: Right. >> That was VMware backup and recovery as a complete cloud, sort of SaaS control plane. No backup target management, no BDS server management, no catalog management, it's completely a SaaS service. Provide your vCenter address, boom, off you go. We do the backups, agentless, 100% dedup enabled. We have extended that into the public cloud domain. So now, we can back up AWS, EC2, and EBS instances within the same constructs. So a single catalog, single backup policy, single protection framework that protects you both in the cloud and on-prem, no fragmentation, no multiple solutions to deploy. And the second one is we've extended our Hyperconverged service to now be what we call the Hybrid Cloud On-Demand. So basically, you go to GreenLake Console control plane, and from there, you basically just start configuring virtual machines. It supports VMware and AWS at the same time. So you can provision a virtual machine on-prem, or you can provision a virtual machine in the public cloud. >> Got it. >> And, it's the same framework, the same catalog, the same inventory management system across the board. And then, lastly, we extended our block storage service to also become hybrid in nature. >> Got it. >> So you can manage on-prem and AWS, EBS assets as well. >> And Sheila, do you still make product announcements, or does Antonio not allow that? (Omer laughing) >> Well, we make product announcements, and you're going to see our product announcements actually done through the HPE GreenLake for block storage. >> Dave: Oh, okay. >> So our announcements will be coming through that, because we do want to make it as a service. Again, we want to take all of that headache of "What configuration should I buy? How do I actually deploy it? How do I...?" We really want to take that headache away. So you're going to see more feature announcements that's going to come through this. >> So feature acceleration through GreenLake will be exposed? >> Absolutely. >> This is some cool stuff going on behind the scenes. >> Oh, there's a lot good stuff. >> Hardware still matters, you know. >> Hardware still matters. >> Does it still matter? Does hardware matter? >> Hardware still matters, but what matters more is the experience, and that's actually what we want to bring to the customer. (laughing) >> John: That's good. >> Good answer. >> Omer: 100%. (laughing) >> Guys, thanks so much- >> John: Hardware matters. >> For coming on "theCUBE". Good to see you again. >> John: We got it. >> Thanks. >> And hope the experience was good for you Sheila. >> I know, I know. Thank you. >> Omer: Pleasure as always. >> All right, keep it right there. Dave Vellante and John Furrier will be back from HPE Discover 2022. You're watching "theCUBE". (soft music)

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

>> From around the globe, it's theCUBE. Covering HPE Discover Virtual Experience. Brought to you by HPE. >> Welcome back, this is theCUBE's coverage of HPE Discover the Virtual Experience. I'm your host Stu Miniman. And we are now excited to be able to go beyond the hype of hyper convergence. Happy to welcome back to the program one of our regulars, even though he has a new title, Patrick Osborne is the vice president and general manager for Hewlett Packard Enterprise Hyperconverged Infrastructure, or HPE HCI as we could abbreviate. Patrick, good to see you. Thanks for much for coming back on theCUBE. >> Absolutely Stu, thanks for having me. It's always a pleasure to be on theCUBE. >> All right. So, you know, HCI, obviously has had a dramatic impact on the storage industry, you know, HPE has, you know, acquisitions like SimpliVity, Nimble has a play there, you've got partnerships with some solutions including with GreenLake. Why don't you give us just kind of the update, you've been with HPE for quite a while, what really, you know, excited you about taking this job and then we'll begin on the latest in the portfolio. >> Well, I think, so what's exciting about this market is it's a growth market. HCI is certainly a great solution for a whole swath of customer segments. So we thought, you know, about these HCI solutions from everyone, from our largest enterprise customers all the way down to our smallest SMB customers, and it really fits the bill not only for what you think about a standard HCI, where you're collapsing workloads and you're collapsing infrastructure, but also I think one of the interesting things that we've been able to deliver, especially with products like the HCI is around delivering dHCI experience for three tiers of architecture. And, you know, I think that's really exciting for customers that you know, certainly are moving more towards generalists, away from specialists and, you know, you're going to get really get that HCI experience in addition to a lot of other things we bring to the table here at HPE, that you know, we've talked about before, especially around AI ops and InfoSight and the ability to do a ton of things around predictive analytics. So it's an exciting space and it serves almost our entire customer base. >> Excellent. Now your group you did some announcements, a little bit ahead of Discover, why don't you give us the latest on the news and lay out how the portfolio fits. >> Yeah, so back in May we made some significant announcements on, in the HCI portfolio. So both on HCI SimpliVity as well as our Nimble dHCI offerings. One of the things we brought to market was around VDI specifically and we launched a new platform called the SimpliVity 325 and based on some new technology with our partner AMD are able to, you know, significantly lower the cost and increase the performance for the number of remote users that were, you know, that we're able to support with the platform and also bring together a solution you know, so, you know, what you also partner with folks like Citrix and CTERA and a whole a number of folks so we can have a full vertically oriented solution stack for customers that are doing, you know, they're significantly expanding their footprint around remote workers. And, you know, at the end of the day, it's going to cut in half, you can say 50% savings on your, you know per remote worker for desktop. So some significant savings there, and we've seen a huge amount of uptick for that platform in the last two months, even since we announced it. And then secondly, on the dHCI side, we made a number of announcements around simplicity, adding that a platform to our GreenLake consumption model, which is really cool, and then adding a whole set of new building blocks on the compute side based on AMD technology that allows, you know, folks to apply different types of compute per workload for our dHCI solution. So we made a pretty, pretty big announcement back in May around our portfolio for HCI solutions and the customers are definitely impacted super positively for both announcements. >> Yeah, it's funny. I remember a few years back, everybody kind of rolled their eyes a little bit. It was like, Oh, you know, VDI talked about it to death. And of course with the global pandemic, now of course remote work so critically important, I've talked to a number of CIOs that have had HCI solutions and it's like, Hey, I need to dramatically increase my services, I need to be able to scale things up and if I didn't have these solutions, I wouldn't be able to react as fast as I need. You said you you've seen an uptick, any particularly anecdotes or, you know, customer stories as to how they've been able to react fast in today's climate. >> Yeah, so especially for knowledge workers that are working remote, I mean, I can tell you that, almost 98 or 99% of my staff and the folks at HPE are working remotely and they're doing a fantastic job. So, you know, when we're able to service, you know, very small customers that are just, you know, embarking on their journey for remote workers to some of the largest corporations out there that our partners and customers of HPE, we've been able to, you know, produce a, you know, a really good outcome for them in addition to, you know, working with our partners, our reseller partners, to put this is another solution building block in their bag of tricks for their customers. >> All right. The other thing, what I want to talk a bit about is, you know, HCI is a managed service, so GreenLake, I've talked to some of your team, it has about a thousand customers HCI, so you know, one of the main options that they're offering there. Why don't you bring us inside a little bit as to, you know, why customers are choosing choosing GreenLake and you know, what that means for your product set? >> So this, from a strategic perspective, HPE, we've stated this publicly is that we want to offer all of our products and solutions as a service from a consumption perspective over the next couple of years. And so, you know, one of those key things that we want to offer from a workload perspective is certainly HCI as a service, so VMs as a service and as well as, you know, higher level type of applications, like VDI as a service. And so one of the announcements that we made was including both of our portfolios, HCI and dHCI in GreenLake so you can, essentially as a customer, you can start off very small and you are paying for the solution in metered increments, and we have lots of flexibility, you can do it at the workload level, you can do it at the CPU consumption level, you can do it at storage consumption level and so that gives a lot of flexibility and that's great for our larger customers that want to move from a CAPEX to an OPEX model. And, but it also really helps a lot of our small and medium sized customers who are, you know, in this environment, they are, you know, one of the top things in their mind is maintaining liquidity and so they can move that to an OPEX model and we actually have some really great offers that we announced with HPE financial services in conjunction with GreenLake on making this a very flexible, very cost effective manner to consume infrastructure and provide solutions for their customers and their end users. >> Excellent. You mentioned before a little bit about AI ops, give us a little bit as to how you see the, really the next generation of HCI taking advantage of, you know, automation intelligence and the like. >> Yes, so you know, as we've a talk on theCUBE before, one of the, I think one of the key solutions that we have and experiences that we bring to our customers in addition to the consumption level is this ability to do AI ops, global learning, predictive analytics for our workloads, for our customers, and essentially really really cut down on the costs in people that it takes to maintain these solutions and then you can, you know, essentially use the global learning and global aspect of, you know, a giant fleet in our entire install base and that gets applied to HCI. So SimpliVity HCI has been plugged into info site for over about a year now. Nimble obviously, Nimble dHCI, it's a core from the product offering and it's the best offering in the market for AI ops. And so our ability to do these things and provide predictive analytics, memory pressure, black listing, and white listing, the install base for problems, being able to reach out to customers before issues happen, noisy neighbors, VM consumption, storage consumption, all these things, you know, really cut down and provide a really awesome support automation experience for customers and essentially have a seamless experience for managing all of our systems. And when you think about HCI 2.O being able to do that, not only on a compressed infrastructure like HCI, but being able to do it on dHCI, which is desegregated hyperconverged so you can scale storage and networking and compute separately and you provide that same HCI experience from a management perspective and the AI ops around it is a game changer for, you know, some of the most, you know, business and mission critical applications that our customers are running. >> Alright. Well, one of the big themes that we're hearing across HPE Discover this year is about it's solutions. Traditionally I think of HCI really as helping collapse and simplify the data center, really that cloud operating model almost in the data center, where do these things connect? How does the edge fit in to this whole discussion? >> Yeah, so one of the beauties of HCI and specifically SimpliVity is our ability to be hyper efficient not only in the just the storage of the data. So, you know, from day one, everything is de-duped, everything is compressed and that's across both your on prem copies, as well as your DR copies, as well as your backup copies. And one of the things that we're seeing is that, sure HCI is great to collapse workloads in the data center and, but what we're seeing now is the ability to go serve as workloads that are running outside of the data center and when we talk about edge, we have some fantastic assets and a lot of customers, you know, running our edge compute solutions, our edge networking solution, specifically wireless and Aruba and what we're able to do is we're bringing those services, so compute, networking, and storage closer to the end user, but outside the data center and so there are some challenges to that like, so how do you federate the management of hundreds, if not thousands of clusters of these workloads running that could be anywhere from, you can think about a small, like a micro data center to a closet to even just, you know, small form factor that could be in a half of a rack and being able to manage those effectively but then also be able to pull the workloads and the data back. So being able to do edge, to core to cloud from a data mobility perspective. It's something that we provide and our customers are certainly deploying our solutions because of that. So a lot of stuff going on in the edge and I think one of the other things too that we see is people are running virtualized workloads, so VMs, and then also starting to incorporate containers. So microservices for, you know, industry specific things like vision and video and, you know, a whole bunch of things that happen around AI and ML at the edge. So it's very exciting place. >> Yeah. I'm glad you brought that up. You know, obviously one of the things that we're hearing a lot of interest from the community when it comes to virtualization is, you know, what is happening with that, really application modernization and containerization a big piece of that, of course, VMware with vSphere 7 are really helping to bring Kubernetes together to the virtualization environment. How do you see all of these playing together? You know, being a bare mental virtualization, containers, you know, edge, core, cloud, it's a complicated environment and, you know, the goal of HCI was always to help simplify this but we know IT is a bit messy and additive. >> Yeah, I think at the end of the day, you know, there are some basic services that customers want to run at the end of the day. They want to be able to deploy a workload on infrastructure that can be managed remotely, that could be managed at scale that provides, resiliency, it provides performance and it provides data mobility and HCI provides all of those capabilities whether it's, you know, through the HPE SimpliVity portfolio or Nimble dHCI and so you have a number of different building blocks that you can build. But on top of that is a set of data services in cloud consumption like experience that allows you to place those workloads on the infrastructure that you need and where you need it. And so if it's running at the edge, this commingling of VMs and containers, you know, we have a pretty unique platform out there, especially for things like AI and ML workloads in our HPE container platform and so you can run that for example, on something like HPE SimpliVity or dHCI, whether that's in the data center or whether you're running that on the edge and being able to service those customers, that's not an all or nothing proposition. At this point, you know, a number of our customers are running workloads that are virtualized and that are side by side to provide essentially good to customers, their customers at the end of the day. >> Excellent. Patrick, I'll give you the final word, takeaways if you want, that your customers want to have from HPE Discovery's week. >> Yeah, HPE Discover Virtual Experience has been great and you know, I think everyone participating in this, you know, we'd love to provide you as (mumble) as possible. There are a number of announcements around HCI, both our HCI platform was SimpliVity, to dHCI, we made some really great announcements recently around our primary storage and then we're going to continue at HPE Discover around some of our cloud data services. So when you think about someone who's going to provide, you know, you're going to partner with, from a costumer perspective on your most valuable workloads, whether it's workloads that exist today, or workloads that are fuel your digital transformation, HPE really is a partner that's providing, you know the infrastructure, the workloads and the cloud like experience both from a management perspective as well as from a consumption perspective that's going to service as these workloads from edge to core to cloud. So we're pretty excited about HPE discover now. >> Excellent. Thanks so much, Patrick and we'll be right back with lots more coverage from HPE Discover, I'm Stu Miniman and thank you as always for watching theCUBE.

>> Live from Los Vegas. It's theCUBE covering Dell Technologies World 2019. Brought to you by Dell Technologies and it's ecosystem partners. >> Welcome back to Los Vegas everybody. You're watching theCUBE, the leader in live tech coverage. This is our wall-to-wall coverage. We're wrapping up day one. I'm Dave Alonte, my cohost here at this segment is Stu Miniman. Jon Siegal is here as the vice president of product marketing, cubulum from Dehli MC. Good to see you again Jon. >> Great to be back as always guys! >> And I love that you brought a customer, Suzan Pickett is here. >> That's what I do, by the way. You realize that, that's my new thing. >> Suzan is the VP and director of Converged Infrastructure at US Bank. >> Thank you for having me. >> Welcome, one of my banks. I got a lease with US Bank. You guys are great. >> Thank you. >> Great to have you guys. >> Let's start with a customer, if that's okay? >> Absolutely. >> Tell us about your role, you got CI in your title that's interesting. >> I do. >> That's a relatively new trend, explain that. >> Yeah absolutely, so I've been at the bank a couple years now and my teams focus on Converged and Hyperconverged Infrastructure, delivering solutions and infrastructure as a service for our business. >> You guys have been working together for a while if I understand it Jon, right? Talk a little bit about what's happening here at the show maybe give us a quick overview of what's happening in CI and HCI in your world. >> Absolutely, so a lot going on as you saw today in Dell Tech cloud announcement. HCI was a key pillar there. Really VxRail, in particular, was featured as the simple and fast foundation for the Dell Tech cloud both as the on-prem manage version as well as, as you heard, the Data Center as a service. So really exciting to see how HCI continues to evolve and it's use cases around cloud and infrastructure as a service, as well as platform as a service as well. So a lot of exciting announcements there. In addition to that, just this past week, by the way, we also, since you mentioned CI, Converged Infrastructure, we just announced that we re-upped our agreement with Cisco, a new multiyear agreement extension to continue to innovate with Cisco on the VxBlock, which, as you know, was the pioneer in this, Converged Infrastructure space and with all the recent integrations we've done now with VMware, VxBlock as well as HCI, is really built to be a on-prem foundation for the cloud. >> Yeah so, this goes back to 2009, when Cisco and VMware and EMC got together and created this concept of Converged Infrastructure. There were other competitors in the market, but you guys kind of lead that trend, and so when you go back to that years ago, that's our storage and networking and compute, they were different parts of the organization. I presume you guys went through a similar journey. You had to put all that together. Herd some calves. And what did that do for your business? What was your journey like to CI? >> I think we're still on that journey, but I think it's also evolving as we go more Agile and more DevOps, more software-defined, we're seeing a lot more blending of the teams as well so we're creating a lot of virtual teams that encompass not just infrastructure but security, developers, networking as well and really being able to deliver that infrastructure's service, platform as a service, end-to-end provisioning for our business lines. >> Suzan, I love that story because I remember talking to, when this started, you talk to the storage group and they'd say, "Oh my gosh, you're going to take away my job." I'm like, "You know that security thing that they've been yelling at you to fix for a while? You talk about the new business apps that we need to do. These are the types of jobs that we want you to do." I heard you talk about Agile and DevOps and all these things. Talk a little bit about, what are the pressures you're facing from the business and the relationship between your group that help you to meet those now. >> Sure, well the first thing we did was we created an infrastructure automation services team and people looked at us like we're a little crazy to do that and we pull those highly, highly motivated potentials from within the organization that we already had to focus on automation and get the foundation for infrastructure as a service and get that part right. Something as basic as provisioning a virtual machine would take 12 weeks or longer and through our journey with Kubernetes today, containers, vRealize Automation Suite, on both Converge and Hyperconverge, VxFlex. We're now reducing that down to about three days and we anticipate, with a lot of our sprints and iterations, that we're going to be getting that down to less than a day within the next quarter. >> So John Furry says that automation is the killer app for infrastructure, so are you guys, are you building essentially out on infrastructure as a service platform, where people used to call it private cloud. I don't know if you use that term still. I think it's still valid. >> We do, yeah. >> How's that going? What's been the business impact of that so-called private cloud? >> We had a Business Critical Application that would often take year release cycles, more than 12 weeks to get a server, primarily focusing on physical servers, and now what we're doing is we're partnering with them with not only the business, the application folks, the developers, the middleware teams, networks, security, but also all of the infrastructure teams to deliver that faster speed to market, and so now they're down to days now to provision. They actually gave us a stat the other day that said, "By using our automation with Kubernetes on Hyperconverge VxFlex, that they were able to have cost avoidance of hiring a bunch of people to build physical servers. So that in and of itself was a huge win, but the fact that we can repurpose and releverage that automation, those workflows, the orchestration models, means that we can continue this conversation with the next business line and the next business line and keep telling that story and it's a good one. >> Jon I'd live to hear from what Suzan was saying and there's so many of the modern things that they're doing. When you look at your customer base, how are they doing on that journey? We used to always ask, in the earlier days, it was like, alright how much was I just eliminating sub-silos but pretty much doing the same apps and same processes before or have I really gone through some transformation? >> I tell you what, we've seen quite a bit of transformation in our customer base because they had to. You look at now, as you see with US Banks, they're now transforming their organization to support DevOps, right? That's an entirely new realm for them to focus on. That means they need to make infrastructure easier and simpler so we're finding that is really, I think, that's the catalyst and that they're realizing that the way to do this is let's make infrastructure as simple as possible. Infrastructure service. Make that platform as a service available so our customers can spend less, wait, our IT department can spend less time on the speeds and fees, if you will, of maintaining infrastructure, more time innovating up the stack versus down the stack, right? >> Alright Suzan, I got to ask a question Jon probably doesn't want me to ask you. You're trying to simplify, 'cause you're doing all this stuff that's not really adding value to your business, you want to do stuff that's going to make you more competitive. Well why don't you just throw all this stuff in the cloud? >> Good question and I think that eventually we will have a multicloud strategy, but it is a bank and we don't want to be in the news for a data breach and that's the real answer but also because we want to, again, lay that foundation for an on-premise, solid infrastructure as a service with service catalogs at the business. We can then drive that product taxonomy and they know that they get a good, solid product from IT and then we extend that into the cloud so as much as we can do that, and maybe there will be some cloud native apps down the road that go 100% in the public cloud. I don't have a crystal ball. I suspect there will be, but again we want to do it right and we think this is the right foundation to lay for that. >> You want to have total control over, certainly, your mission critical apps, I'm presuming, right? Maybe put some stuff up. I'm sure you have plenty of stuff in the cloud. Well why Dell EMC? >> I think it goes back to our strategic partnership. It's always been that strong partnership, that enablement, and that continuous feedback loop. We need something, we go talk to our product teams. We get that back, we get it back from our product teams, so it's not always perfect, and there are competitors out there, but at the end of the day, when we look at the Dell Technologies family and that ecosystem and our ability to integrate, iterate, automate within that family, it just helps us stream like that and standardize. >> We've heard this morning from a lot of folks. Michael Dell talked about it. Jeff Clark talked about it. Companies want to consolidate the number of suppliers, certainly infrastructure suppliers, throwing sass forget it, so many apps now. Are you seeing that? Is there pressure to consolidate the number of suppliers, or do you still have, in certain cases, where you really want to go best of breed, so-called best of breed, for some niche app, or do you want to consolidate suppliers? >> So I always want to standardize because that's going to help our automation story, but I still want best of breed, and so that's one of the primary reasons that we're standardized on Dell Technologies today. VxFlex being one of them and Converged Infrastructure being another. There are use cases for multi-vendor strategy, but again, you would look at the right solution for the right job at the right time. >> Okay Jon, that was a totally loaded question, so can you be both a portfolio company like yours and still be best of breed and if so, how so? >> Well I think what we are, we certainly are a portfolio company in the way that, but I think we have leading infrastructure, leading solutions in each case. You take things like Hyperconverge and Converge, great example of that, and I think what we see at the US Bank is that that porfolio of solutions is what's actually enabling US Bank to essentially address all other challenges, right? Whether it's the IS, whether it's the crown jewel applications that Suzan's trying to support, whether it's the DevOps that they're trying to actually build out right now. We've got best of breed solutions for each of those as well within our portfolio. And also, I would say that we're really focused on, ultimately, a portfolio with a purpose meaning that we're taking our networking, for example, portfolio, you just talk to Drew Shulkin. Together with out HCI portfolio, and we're ensuring that they work really seamlessly together so that in the case of, for example, working with, say VxRail or VxRack, we're able to automate all the networking for a HCI environment or at least 98% of it. That's really, again, taking but that's because we're best of breed and porfolio at the same time. >> Yeah so, I'm throwing all kinds of loaded questions out here, and I want to understand this because as independent observers you get Company A says this, Company B says that, but the customer's ultimately the arbiter. How do you, maybe not define, but how do you look at best of breed, what is best of breed to you? >> I look at the technology that's going to make me look good and that's going to make my teams look good and that's not just day one, that's day two and I think that's where the differentiator is as well. We've always found that Dell Technologies is there to support us. Stuff breaks, right? Your car needs oil, your tires need rotating, and it's the same with equipment in the Data Center. How those companies react and they support and they have your back when that happens, I think is the key differentiator and we always found Dell Technologies to be there for us. >> So I'm hearing the breadth, the porfolio. We haven't talked about services but I know that's a key part of it. >> Well, Suzan I hear you talking about day two. CI helped simplify that day one and then, as it matured, it worked more on the day two, and HCI even more. When you talk about the cloud solutions from Dell EMC, that cloud operating model. When you think about public cloud, I don't think about what version I'm on, it takes care of that. When I hear some of the solutions from Dell, it's getting to that model. How are they doing along that that spectrum, I guess, from the, "Okay I need to do the RCM and manage when I do the updates" to "I don't even think about it anymore." >> Sure, I think it is still something that we all care about as much as we're told we shouldn't care about it, I care. I want to make sure that we're doing the right things at the right time. I think it's a journey. I think we've come a long way in the last few years and I think that every year it gets better and as we start extending to that multicloud, obviously that's going to drive some of that solutioning as well. I think we'll continue to see improvement in that area. >> What is something that you'd like to see Jon do to make your life better? (laughs) Besides cut prices, you can't say cut prices. >> Alright, cut prices. >> Every year you cut prices. >> Let's talk about that deal. I think just continuing to be there, continuing to represent, bringing forth the products, the products team, helping us be strategic and also be very tactical. While I have this one last opportunity 'cause I don't know where we are timewise. I just want to shout out to my team. Right, so it's not just the Dell Technologies team that's bringing all this to the table, it's my team and the organization and my peer teams as well. We just keep sharing, we keep collaborating, and we keep iterating. >> Yeah Jon, one of the things, talk about collaboration, my understanding is Suzan's part of one of the user groups here. You know, big community. >> Yes. >> We always talk about at these shows. Maybe you can share that. >> Yeah so Suzan is actually a new board member for our Converge user group which has been around for several years now and she just joined a few months ago. >> I did. >> And I think that we talk about collaboration and feedback. Suzan is representing not just her own team, she's representing teams around IT around the world. And I think she's a great example of providing feedback, not just at Dell EMC directly, but to other users as well, and best practices and tips and tricks. We have a user group tomorrow at three o'clock. I think couple big executives might be there as well, so it's going to be a lot of fun. So tomorrow at three o'clock. I think it's, at least, our sixth annual that we've had here. But the user group itself, I think exemplifies as much as you've been talking about 'cause that's evolved from being what used to just be about a user group just about blocks, VxBlocks, now it's about CI, it's about HCI, it's about VxBlock, it's about Dell Tech cloud. We have VMware on the panel as well as Dell EMC so I think you see the user group has evolved with our customers and with our portfolio. >> It's a community, it's a mechanism for people to say, "How did you do that" or "How should I do this" or "How do I get my team motivated" or "How do I collaborate with security?" These are tough questions and so I think just having that network of people that can come together and ask those questions and be transparent and be authentic, that's what it's about. >> Appearance, problem-solving, sharing ideas. >> Yeah. >> You've been a Converged Infrastructure client, customer for a number of years. >> I have. >> So you've seen pre-acquisition, how has the Dell EMC merger affected your perception of the company and your relationship with them? >> I think in the last year, or the previous year, we were all waiting to see where things fell and what was going to happen, and I think now it's found it's feet, right? We're starting to see some announcements in both the Converged and the VxFlex space, and it's really starting to come together and I think that story, the Dell Technologies family story is really starting to come together where maybe in the last 12, 18 months, there was a little bit of unknown there and so, we just kind of sitting back and waiting and curious but keep doing what we're doing using that best of breed, the best practices that we have on the floor. >> Alright awesome. Suzan, Jon, thanks so much for coming on theCUBE. It was a great segment. >> Thank you. >> I appreciate it. Alright, that's a wrap for day one. Dave Alonte, Stu Miniman, John Furry's over there. Lisa Martin, Rebecca Knight is here. This is day one, we got wall-to-wall coverage. Tomorrow, day two and day three. Check out siliconangle.com for all the news. Michael Dell's coming on tomorrow. We got Pat Kelsey going to be on tomorrow. Tom Sweet's coming on later on in the week. Awesome coverage, check out thecube.net. This is Dave Alonte, Stu Miniman. We'll see you tomorrow, thanks for watching.

>> From the SiliconANGLE media office in Boston Massachusetts, it's the CUBE. Now here's your host, Dave Vellante. >> Hi everybody, I'm Dave Vellante. Welcome to this special CUBE conversation. We're gonna be talking today about hyper conversion infrastructure. HCI really brought together compute, storage, and networking to simplify management and operations. But the networking piece has always been, you know, a little bit to the side, right? Because you bring your own network to HCI. And the integration has not always been there. So we're gonna talk today about simplifying cloud on VMWare and transforming the network. This week is VMWorld Europe. Chad Dunn is here. He's the vice president of product management for HCI at Dell EMC. Chad, thanks for coming on to talk about this. >> Hey Dave, always glad to be with you. >> So, HCI is hot, it's smoking. VxRail is a leader there. We're gonna talk about that. >> Yep. >> Based on some of the market numbers from IDC and others. So give us the update, what's new with VxRail? >> Well obviously for VxRail, the big new is, unless you've been under a rock, you know the market is growing like crazy. Now VxRail is now achieving a growth rate that's roughly twice the overall market. And so we've moved into this market leadership position. And now it's about how we start to differentiate the product even further, and pull further away from the pack. And that deeper integration with networking and some of the other VMWare components are keys for us to be able to achieve that. >> And that growth, those are IDC numbers, Gartner numbers. >> Those are IDC numbers if you look at the overall market growth rate. >> What do you attribute that growth from? You guys came out of nowhere to take the market leadership. Why? Where's that coming from? >> You know, it's a pretty easy question. When we look at who the market leader is in terms of the hypervisor, in terms of virtualization, it's clearly VMWare. And the value proposition to a customer is a very simple question. Are you a VMWare customer? Do you intend to continue to be a VMWare customer? Do you like the tools? Do you like the hypervisor? Do you like the ecosystem around it? And you know, nine and a half times out of ten, the answer is yes. And if it's time to go hyperconverged, we believe and I think most customers believe we have the best hyperconverged solution to be able to do that within the VMWare experience. >> So, Dell, obviously a huge portfolio. Since the merger, you guys have done a lot of work together. And now you're really focusing on network automation. What are you guys doing, specifically, and why is it important? >> Yeah. Well, the integration with Dell, I've become one of the biggest Dell fanboys there is at this point. Because, first of all, I started with a hyperconverged product that was not based on Dell. We became part of Dell. Now I have a world-class X86 portfolio to build on top of. But I also now have access to an amazing portfolio of open networking products. And so the next logical step, after integrating with Dell computers, is to integrate with Dell networking. And when we look at the challenges that people have in adopting and deploying hyperconverged infrastructure, a lot of times, it has to do with the network. So we said "what can we do between these two organizations, "to make it a lot easier for our customers" "to adopt hyperconverged." And that really means network automation. So that means that, in Dell OS10 enterprise-based switches, we've created an auto-detect and auto-configuration feature between VxRail and those switches. >> So let's break that down a little bit. So as I was saying at the top, hyperconverge really has been about bringing storage. And well actually in some cases, networking and compute together. And then sort of storage bringing in. Or storage and compute, and then the networking is "bring your own," right? Everything is "bring your own network." And then what, you put a top-of-rack switch in? >> Yep >> But so why is this simpler? What specifically are you guys automating? >> Well there's two things. One is organizational. So very often, in customers, we encounter the virtualization team, the server team, storage team, networking team, different organizations. Now, largely hyperconverge, and even before that, converge was sort of an excuse for many of those functions to come together. But networking is sort of the last one where those organizations are coming together with our customers. And that's really prompted by hyperconverge. But then at the technical level, how do you make that real for a customer? So at the risk of getting into the weeds, the way this works is if you take a Dell OS10 enterprise-based switch, and you have a single command to put it in VxRail mode, from then on the switches and VxRails will discover one another through an in-line protocol. VxRail manager will access the switch via API's. We'll configure all the ports. We'll configure all the VLANS. We'll configure the connection up to the customer's network. And then from there on out, we're able to detect new VxRails as they enter the network, automatically plumb those together with the existing cluster. So when we look at the steps that you would normally take to deploy hyperconverged just on the network side, it's about a 98% savings in terms of the number of steps that you have to go through to be able to stand that environment up. And then from there on out, we also wanna look at operational savings. So you will now be able to manage that switch also within vCenter. So we have a philosophy in VxRail that says every time a user has to leave the VMWare user experience, that's a bad thing and we want to minimize that. So as we implement the Dell networking portion of the solution, you'll be able to now manage that from vCenter just as you'll be able to manage VxRail from vCenter. >> Is this degree of networking automation unique in the marketplace? Are you guys ahead of the pack? Are you playing catch-up? >> We feel like we're ahead of the pack in this. I think that a lot of folks are certainly focusing on integration with software-defined networking. And in fact, we did that first. You know our integration with NSX. Both v, NSXv for infrastructures of service. And now increasingly NSX-T, especially when we're in a container, or cloud-native environments. So there's been a lot of focus there. But I think our focus on the configuration and management of the physical network, I think is unique. >> Talk more about the Dell, EMC, and VMWare relationship. Obviously, you guys are part of the same sort of company. Even though VMWare of course is a separate public company. But you guys work closer together. VMWare works with everybody. What's unique about what you guys are doing? Give us some double-click on that. >> Sure. If I think back previous to Dell, you know, we had our cousins at VMWare that we worked pretty closely with. And I think that our success is sort of born out the concept that we were able to collaborate more effectively than most other EMC and VMWare projects that we've done in the past. So, it's been very successful for both companies. Then along comes Dell, and Michael has a saying that says, "I'm happy but I'm not satisfied." So he looked at this. Jeff Clark looked at this. Pat Gelsinger looked at this, the collaboration that we have and said "We're happy. We're not satisfied. Do more of it." "Do it harder. Do it faster." And that's what we've done. And that top-down directive has really driven us to collaborate much more broadly and deeply with VMWare, and in fact Pivotal, than we have in the past. And I think that's shown a lot of benefits. Not just in the networking integration. But we're moving all of the graphical user interface out of VxRail manager into vCenter plug-ins. So our focus is really around robust API's that can be leveraged across different VMWare management properties as well as third party properties to give you the best possible VMWare user experience when you use VxRail. >> What does that mean for customers? Let's talk about the business impact. I mean you mentioned 98% time savings before. I mean, that's enormous. But let's talk a little bit about the customer impact. >> I think if you look at the customer impact that we're observing, the five-year TCO empirically is running about 600% in terms of ROI. So I think we're very successful in that. And the key to that success is not creating new panes of glass, or new management paradigms for a customer who is a VMWare customer. We want to be in lock-step with the way the VMWare develops. Not only the hypervisor, but certainly VSAN, and certainly the rest of the Vrealize assets as well as software-defined networking. To that end, one of the biggest changes that we made was something internally we call SimShip with VMWare. Now if you think about where we've come from, the lag time between when we would ship a new version of VMWare on VxRail versus when VMWare releases it was pretty variable, right? Could be three months, six months, nine months, it really depends on how the development schedules would align. And that was something that, quite frankly, to Michael and Pat and Jeff was not acceptable. If we want this to be the premier hyperconverged experience for a VMWare user, we need to be simultaneous with VMWare. And so now you're gonna see very regular tight integration between the release schedules of software on VxRail and the release of the underlying software from VMWare. So that's enabled us to shift a lot of that up-front development and engineering work left into VMWare so we can be much more quick to adopt new VMWare technology. >> So if I could, I'd like to stay on this business impact for a moment. You're talking about 600% ROI over a five-year period. I'm presuming that ROI comes predominately from the simplified infrastructure management and simplified labor costs. I'm not focused on heavy-lifting. I'm shifting to more strategic things, presumably. And there may also be some capex savings as well. But where is it coming from? >> I think it's primarily operational. I think, depending on what the competing solution might be, or the legacy solution might be, there may be some capex savings there. But it's really around operations. Now we have seen customers fundamentally shift from simple virtualization and consolidation of virtual machines onto hyperconverged like VxRail to implementing full infrastructures of service stacks right up through the Vrealize suite. But also platform and containers of service as well as we collaborate with Pivotal and VMWare. So it's that infrastructure as a service deployment methodology that I think leads to most of that capex saving, right? Three years ago, hyperconverged was all about VDI and sort of point applications, and islands of applications. Now it's predominately about infrastructures of service, containers of service, platforms of service. And that's where you really start to see those operational efficiencies shine through. >> Well, you know, in our experience the VDI, while nice, was largely a benefit for IT. Didn't really have a huge impact on the business. But when you start to talk about things like Pivotal, and the impact of moving from say Waterfall to an Agile environment. Now you're talking about business impact in terms of time to deployment and accelerating the time to value, which may or may not be in that 600%, I'm not sure. But those are oftentimes considered soft dollars. But to the business, it's not. It's competitive. >> Those are real dollars. Those are real resources working on those things. And just as we saw a shift in terms of constructing versus consuming IT resources, we see that up the stack. As VxRail automates things like software and firmware updates, our customers don't have to do that anymore. Now we look to see how can we can we drive those same kinds of benefits further up into the stack in terms of deployment, management of virtual machines, management of cloud-native workloads. >> So coming off of VMWorld U.S. a couple months ago, a lot of talk about VMWare Cloud Foundation, a lot of buzz about multi-cloud. That's kind of the hot topic right now. What's going on with VCF? We're hearing a lot of buzz leading up to VMWorld Europe. What's going on in that space? >> There's a lot going on between us and VMWare on the multi-cloud strategy. One thing that we heard in the last VMWorld was the integration between us and Cloud Assembly. This is a really important and strategic solution for us. Because what we found, especially with smaller customers who wanted to get those efficiencies of infrastructures of service, there is a fairly high upfront capital cost. Because you simply needed all the hardware to run the cloud management platform. And then you needed the tenant nodes to actually run the virtual machines. And very often, that was a high entry point, a high entry cost for those customers. What VMWare has done with Cloud Assembly is basically turn that cloud management platform into software as a service, so it lives in the cloud. And now with an agent that VxRail automatically installs, you can now point that CMP at your tenant nodes and start getting that infrastructure of service benefit. So that was one that we talked about at the last VMWorld. We also talked about our partnership with VMWare around Project Dimension, which basically takes the VMWare-managed cloud providers, The VMC providers, and extends that management paradigm, and that update paradigm to on-premises. So you have effectively got a cloud service that could run at a cloud provider but could simultaneously run on your premises. So are the two really good examples of how we're collaborating more broadly and deeply with VMWare to lower the overall operational cost, and in some cases, even the capital cost of implimenting infrastructure as a service. With respect to cloud foundation, in VxRack SDDC, which is the other product that I look after, we've had that partnership underway for over two years now and that's been very successful for us. And it tends to be the larger customers who want to buy everything as a fully-integrated system, a fully turn-key racked, stacked, cabled, and ready to deploy. But with regard to what you're teasing, I think where you're going is "well what's gonna be next?" and "what's unique about what we're doing" "with Cloud Foundation?" And there are a lot of dimensions to that. And I think the first one is what we've done around the VMWare validated design and the certified partner architecture. So if a customer wants to achieve a VMWare software-defined data center, the VMWare-validated design for VxRail gives them the exact prescription of how to get there. It can be delivered by us, can be delivered by VMWare, could be delivered by our channel partners who are certified to do so. And that gives you this nice consistent deployment architecture that we can continue to life-cycle manage as a customer moves forward. But it preserves all the VxRail value add in terms of our cluster management, our life-cycle management capability, all of that automation. Now as we move forward, we'll add more and more automation into the VVD deployment toolkit to make that even easier for customers. And so then the next logical question is VxRack and Cloud Foundation versus VxRail. We effectively have two hyperconverged solutions. That doesn't make a lot of sense. So what you'll start to see us do, and I think what some people have already started to see us do is to start to bring those solutions together, bring those products together. So in fact, even now, if you have a VxRack SDDC, if you open up that cabinet, well guess what. Those are VxRails inside there. And those software stacks will ultimately converge as well. So you can go from a build-to-consume continuum even within hyperconverged where you've got VxRails with VVD's. But the VVD basically defines deployment architecture that is compatible with Cloud Foundation. And just as we've preserved a lot of those value-add features for VxRail in the VVD, we'll be doing the same thing with Cloud Foundation. So, you know, stay tuned for that. But, as I mentioned a little bit earlier on, when we look at the management paradigm for VxRail, my directive to the product management team and the engineering team is "your first three priorities" "are API, API, and then user interface," right? So that's where we're placing a lot of that effort. And because, in may cases when we approach our collaboration with VMWare, we want to look for opportunities to be first best and only. I think as you see us bring VxRail and VCF together, that's gonna be one of those "best and only" sorts of solutions. But you have to stay tuned for further details on that. >> But that makes a lot of sense, simplifying that portfolio. But the big takeaway to me, Chad, and we've talked about this in the past, is what we call the "true private cloud" or even "true hybrid cloud" is bringing the cloud experience to your data no matter where it lives. Whether it's on PRIM in your private cloud. The VMWare AWS deal, obviously simplifies the sort of public cloud piece. Or you're in a service provider, and you've now got a homogenous experience that really is much more cloud-like than we've seen over the years. >> Well, you look at the old saying about cloud-native applications, "write it once," "and I don't care where it runs." Well as the multi-cloud strategy evolves, whether that's running in a VMC cloud provider, whether that's running on premise, our users shouldn't have to care. There may be things that they want to keep on premise for perfectly good reasons. There's may be things that they want to have in the cloud. Great example, we just got our certification for SAP HANA on VxRail. Now that's a workload that, just because of the latency requirements, and the kind of data they're processing, very likely that's gonna stay on premise for quite a while. So there are good reasons to have that construct where we don't necessarily care where the workload is. But we wanna provide a consistent user experience that really lowers that opex for customers. >> Great. How do people learn more about this? >> Come see us at VMWorld in Barcelona. We've got presence all over the show. And then hit us up on the cloud marketplace on dellemc.com, find out more about VxRail and VxRack SDDC as our primary cloud platforms. >> Alright Chad, you've been busy. Congratulations on the announcement. And thanks for watching everybody, Dave Vellante. We'll see you next time. (electronic music)

>> Announcer: Live from Madrid, Spain, it's The Cube covering HPE Discover Madrid 2017, brought to you by Hewlett-Packard Enterprise. >> Welcome back to HPE Discover Madrid 2017. This is The Cube, the leader in live tech coverage. My name is Dave Vellante. I'm here with my co-host Peter Burris. Jesse St. Laurent is here. He's the CTO of Hyperconverged at Hewlett-Packard Enterprise and he's joined by Jacobus Steyn, who is the GM of IT Operations at Key Price Insurance at South Africa. >> That's correct. King Price Insurance, yeah. >> Welcome to The Cube. >> Thank you. >> Dave: Jesse, good to see you again. >> Yeah, good to be here. >> What's happenin' at Discover? Hyperconverged, all the rage. Taking over the world. >> Yeah. (laughs) Hyperconverged taking over the world. I think, yeah, virtual machines continue to be a big challenge for customers, right? They're still exploding. As much as we talk about all the other cool things that are happening in the industry, a lot of times, it's the old unsolved problems that just won't go away, right? And it's funny to call VMs the old problem, but in some ways, they're kind of forgotten at times as we talk about next generation stuff. But, the reality is, you know, hyperconvergence still growing like crazy, still helping the customers simplify that management experience. So, for us, that's, you know, running on the Gen 10 platform from Hewlett-Packard Enterprise. You know, just rock solid server platform in terms of delivering customers the same thing we've been delivering, right, which is that predictable performance and simple management experience to provide IT for them. >> Yeah, VM ware's the new legacy and we should all have such a legacy. And okay, Jacobus, let's get into it. First, tell us about your organization, Key Price. >> Yeah, so, King Price is a short term insurance company in South Africa started off about five years ago by a very innovative CIO. So, he's been in the insurance industry most of his life. But, he didn't like what he was doing in the insurance industry, so he kinda like wanted to reinvent the whole insurance industry. So, he came up with this one of a kind business model. And our biggest selling point today is that as your car value depreciates on a monthly basis, so does your insurance premium, and that is our biggest selling point in the short term industry when it comes to vehicles. And that's really been taking off in South Africa. And I was telling some other guys this morning, it's actually surprising that nobody else in South Africa has tried to copy that 'cause it's a winning model for us. >> Dave: Sorry, that happens monthly? >> Monthly, yeah, we decrease your premium on a monthly basis. >> You guys sell it to the U.S.? (laughing) >> (laughs) Not yet. But yeah, definitely on the maps. >> Dave: I mean, it's so logical, right? The replacement costs are going down, so why wouldn't your premiums go down? >> Yeah, one thing, it is quite logical. So it is, there's obviously a lot of questions about how your repair costs goes up on a monthly basis, on a yearly basis, and the RAND dollar is not always very healthy for us. But, I mean, we do all the math in the background and it makes sense. It's more valuable to retain a customer on the book, than having to replace a customer every five or six months. So, keeping a customer on the books while decreasing it's premium, in the long run, it make a lot more sense. >> So if you could keep churn below a threshold and maintain that customer relationship for a long enough period of time, you get profitable. >> Yeah, 'cause I mean, in South Africa, especially, the short term insurance industry is extremely competitive. So, the acquisition cost of the customer is very high. We've got various forms of leads coming in via websites and partners and things like that. But the price just to get a customer on the books is extremely high, so the longer the customer stays on the book, the sooner he pays off all his acquisition. And that way, we actually return that into the customer. >> Radio ads are the big thing in the U.S. for-- I don't know if that's the case in South Africa, I mean... >> We've tried a few radio ads. It's not-- >> It's not the main technique? >> No, no, definitely not- >> What is? What is the main channel? Is it online or-- >> So, we're very big on social media. So, the one thing that we've adopted from the get-go is definitely technology. And that is evident in every aspect of our business. So, we really push social media. We've got a whole team looking after social media. We've got brand ambassadors working at our business. We do some TV ads, but again, that's quite pricey. Some billboards still, yeah, little radio ads, but predominantly-- >> Social's productive, then. >> It is. >> Alright, let's get it. I love talking about your business, especially disruptors to the insurance business. I mean, it's just sitting there waiting to get disrupted, so-- Let's get into the infrastructure side, maybe paint a picture for us. What's that look like? >> Yeah, so, when I joined the company about two and a half years ago, they were just starting with this whole virtualization thing, so it was kind of like new to them. Having started up just five years ago, it was like a hundred IT guys working there, but some of them were working in marketing and some of them were working in management. So, it was all over the show. And my main job was actually just to consolidate in that entire environment and get them on this journey. With the competitive of the market, it's really important for us to get proper product to market quickly and that's one of the challenges that I faced from day one is that our inability to actually get product to market because of a lack of proper infrastructure, the turn around times in getting environments up and running. And it was literally to the point where we were detrimental to the business. We were causing serious downtime. Business was running major losses almost on a monthly basis because systems were down. They were ill managed. And then, luckily for us, we came across the guys from HP SimpliVity and they came in there. We deployed some of their technology on a proof of concept basis, you know, development space 'cause that was our biggest burning challenge at that point. The developers shouting for environments and we just couldn't provide that. So, we thought, you know what, let's invest this in a development space and see how it goes and if it works, we'll see how it goes from there. I think they dropped three cubes there, commissioned them, started moving their development teams across and two months, three months later, when the guys from HP were there to pick up their POC cubes, we just said, "No way, guys. Where do we sign for this? (laughing) You're not taking this out of my server room." And from there, it just, the adoption into the production environment was so quick. We instantly order three more cubes for the production environment. So, there's still that definite split between production and development. And that just allowed us to actually allow the developers, again, to get almost fresh daily copies of the production environment, to allow them to develop products to do some modeling against the production environment in their own spaces. And that's really lifted their performance to such an extent that we now got that whole agile sprint running in two week cycles. >> So, we've done some research. It suggests that when you bring this kind of infrastructure into the development world, you can actually get as high as seven X productivity improvement in developers. Have you seen those kinds of jumps? >> Yeah, definitely. The one challenge that we had, so the guys from development were really trying to adopt a whole agile development methodology. But, again, the infrastructure was a detriment to them 'cause they were hoping to have the environments up and running by Tuesday morning when their sprint would start, but then, two, three days later, we were still trying to restore copies of the databases onto their environments. So, they ended up with three days left of their two week sprint. So, I mean, that alone, the fact that we can have the environments up and running within hours, that's definitely a major improvement for them. And mid sprint, we can actually just decommission their environment, restore it back for them. So, infrastructure is no longer the showstopper in the development team and it's definitely just taken off for them. >> Common story of land and expand, dev impact, productivity impact. How's that compare? >> I think it is a common thread. And I think, you know, one of the other things that happens typically is from a land and expand perspective, those first systems go in. They're for POC, they're for development environment, and the theory is, they're isolated. And then, what happens is everybody realizes that it's easier to provision. It's more agile for the development team. It's easier for IT. And suddenly, the old environment just kind of atrophies and the new environment keeps growing. So, if you look at your environment, you had some traditional infrastructure within your environment. How much has that expanded versus the SimpliVity environment since you went live with SimpliVity? >> Yeah, we have actually-- We no longer are investing in that portion of our infrastructure 'cause it's... It's still, I mean, it's good technology and it's still valuable to us, but we will just put that on a normal run out. Things that we cannot get value from a SimpliVity perspective like, well, like, I think I was telling Jesse this morning, we've got a method of contracting because we are entirely paperless, our method of contracting is literally the call that you make to the client to close this policy deal. So, that is our proof if there is a claim or whatever the case might be. So, all those recordings we need to keep for seven years. So, those are the type of things that we saw in an all traditional infrastructure currently 'cause there's no deduplication there. There's no compression of any value there, so we're just chipping all that old kinda like-- >> Pure archive. >> Yeah, pure archive type of approach to that environment, yeah. >> Did you feel like you've achieved a substantially similar operating model to what people talk about with the public Cloud on PRIM? >> I think that the ease of deployment and the fact that it is so so simple-- I mean, the guy that's currently doing it, it's one guy, so again, our team is not very big. We've got the one guy looking after the entire server infrastructure environment. But the ease of deploying that and the fact that it's so simple, he can do it from anywhere and it's literally one or two clicks and he's got it up and running. It's, for us, it's definitely really very similar. >> I mean, that's the goal, right? I mean, it's kinda why you got into this business is-- >> So, before the acquisition, SimpliVity's theme was to simplify IT. With Hewlett-Packard Enterprise, it's to simplify hybrid IT. But the message in the approach hasn't changed. If we can give IT cycles back to focus on things that return value to the business, that's the goal at the end of the day, right? It's taking time away back from all those tasks that, the classic keeping the lights on tasks, allow the business to do something productive. >> But it's also to make the cycles that remain that much more valuable as well. >> Yeah, absolutely, and anything we can do that takes, you know, day to day management tasks off the plate of the IT organization, allows them to be that much more productive, you know, developers having their whole sprints, I mean, that's night and day in terms of productivity back to the business. In terms of the performance that customers see in their environment, what you're-- You have a critical nightly batch job in your environment, right? >> Yeah. >> And what was your pre and post experience there? >> So, the one thing that we do, I mean, the monthly decrease, that's a big cycle job that runs very often in our environment. So, it's all part of the financial billing cycles that run, so we've got this one job that runs at, I think it's actually on a weekly basis, and that would kick off on a Sunday evening and we would literally have the guys from the finance team getting up, starting the job, and sitting there, waiting for 14 hours for this job to complete. Number one, the environment was not very trustworthy, so they had to be up to make sure that it actually completes. And post or actually migrate-- Us migrating them onto the SimpliVity environment, the guy phoned me up the next morning and said, so he got up at one, kicked off the job, and two hours later, it was done. And he said, something must be wrong. This can't be happening. (laughs) So, that's literally, that's 12 hours saved time. The challenge we had that that job actually ran into our production environment or office hours, so the effect that health had on our entire business was just bad, bad for IT, bad for rep for IT. >> Alright, last question. >> When it failed. >> Sorry? >> When it failed. >> Well, even if it ran, it ran for 14 hours. It had ran into business hours. If it failed-- >> But it wasn't bad for the business after you got to two hours. >> No, no, no, I mean, that was like by three in the morning it's all sorted. And even if you had the failure on the job itself, you could just rerun it like once or twice and it would still be outside business hours. >> Alright, last question. For each of you. Your respective to dos. Jacobus, what on your to do list, then Jesse what's on HPE's HCI to do list? You first. >> Yeah, so King Price is definitely seriously looking at expanding internationally. So, what we are busy doing is to actually redesign our entire architecture structure of our infrastructure and our network and our security. So, we are busy planning to deploy another active data center. We'll probably be in South Africa still, but to get that full value of the RAM optimization that the SimpliVity offer, the compression that we can see to actually have a proper duplicate data center up and running to ensure business continuity. >> Yeah, for us, the market knows us for our product in the VCR market, in the VMR market. Real next growth area for us is around Hyper-V, so big excitement there around seeing that market expand. We've seen a lot of excitement from customers around multi-hypervisor. That's an area both with what's happening with SimpliVity from a platform perspective, as well as the other technologies from Hewlett-Packard Enterprise really coming together to offer that multi-Cloud experience for customers. >> Excellent, gentlemen, thanks very much for coming on The Cube. It's great to see you again. >> Thanks for having us. Jesse, Jacobus. >> Thank you so much for having us. >> Dave: Good luck, go forward. >> Yeah, great stuff. >> Okay, keep it right there, everybody. Peter and I will be back at Discover Madrid to wrap right after this short break. (techy music)