>> Announcer: theCUBE presents HPE Discover 2022, brought to you by HPE. >> We're back at the formerly the Sands Convention Center, it's called the Venetian Convention Center now, Dave Vellante and John Furrier here covering day three, HPE Discover 2022, it's hot outside, it's cool in here, and we're going to heat it up with Rashmi Kumar, who's the Senior Vice President and CIO of Hewlett Packard Enterprise, great to see you face to face, it's been a while. >> Same here, last couple of years, we were all virtual. >> Yeah, that's right. So we've talked before about sort of your internal as-a-service transformation, you know, we do call it dog fooding, everybody likes to course correct and say, no, no, it's drinking your own champagne, is it really that pretty? >> It is, and the way I put it is, no pressure to my product teams, it's being customer zero. >> Right, take us through the acceleration on how everything's been going with you guys, obviously, the pandemic was an impact to certainly the CIO role and your team but now you've got GreenLake coming in and Antonio's big statement before the pandemic, by 2022 everything will be as a service and then everything went remote, VPNs and all this new stuff, how's it going? >> Yeah, so from business perspective, that's a great point to start that, right? Antonio promised in 2019 that HPE will be Everything-as-a-Service company and he had no view of what's going to happen with COVID. But guess what? So many businesses became digital and as-a-service during those two years, right? And now we came back this year, it was so exciting to be part of Discover when now we are Everything-as-a-Service. So great from business perspective but, when I look at our own transformation, behind the scene, what IT has been busy with and we haven't caught a breadth because of pandemic, we have taken care of all that change, but at the same time have driven our transformation to make HPE, edge to cloud platform as a service company. >> You know, I saw a survey, I referenced it earlier today, it was a survey, I think it was been by Couchbase, it was a CIO survey, so they asked, who was responsible at your organization for the digital transformation? And overwhelming, like 75% said, CIO, which surprised me 'cause, you know, in line with the business and so forth but in fact I thought, well, maybe, because of the forced march to digital that's what was top of their mind, so who is responsible for, and I know it's not just one person, for the digital transformation? Describe that dynamic. >> Yeah, so definitely it's not one person, but you do need that whole accountable, responsible, informed, right, in the context of digital transformation. And you call them CIO, you call them CDIO or CDO and whatnot but, end of the day, technology is becoming an imperative for a business to be successful and COVID alone has accelerated it, I'm repeating this maybe millions time if you Google it but, CIOs are best positioned because they connect the dots across organization. In my organization at HPE, we embarked upon this large transformation where we were consolidating 10 different ERPs, multiple master data system into one and it wasn't about doing digital which is e-commerce website or one technology, it was creating that digital foundation for the company then to transform that entire organization to be a physical product company to a digital product company. And we needed that foundation for us to get that code to cash experience, not only in our traditional business, but in our as-a-service company. >> So maybe that wasn't confirmation bias, I want to ask you about, we've been talking a lot about sustainability and I've made the comment that, if you go back, you know, 10, 12 years and you were CIO IT at that time, CIO really didn't care about the energy bill, that was paid for by facilities, they really didn't talk to each other much and that's completely changed, why has it changed? How should a CIO, how do your your peers think about energy costs today? >> Yeah, so, at some point look, ESG is the biggest agenda for companies, regulators, even kind of the watchers of ISS and Glass Lewis type thing and boards are becoming aware of it. If you look at 2-4% of greenhouse emission comes from infrastructure, specifically technology infrastructure, as part of this transformation within HPE, I also did what I call private cloud transformation. Remember, it's not data center transformation, it's private cloud transformation. And if you can take your traditional workload and cloudify it which runs on a GreenLake type platform, it's currently 30% more efficient than traditional way of handling the workload and the infrastructure but, we recently published our green living progress report and we talk about efficiency, by 2020 if you have achieved three times, the plan is to get to 30 times by 2050 where, infrastructure will not contribute to energy bill in turn the greenhouse emission as well. I think CIOs are responsible multifold on the sustainability piece. One is how they run their data center, make it efficient with GreenLake type implementations, demand from your hyperscaler to provide that, what Fidelma just launched, sustainability scorecard of the infrastructure, second piece is, we are the data gods in the company, right? We have access to all kinds of data, provide that to the product teams and have them, if we cannot measure, we cannot improve. So if you work with your product team, work with your BU leader, provide them data around greenhouse gas and how they're impacting a mission through their products and how can they make it better going forward, and that can be done through technology, right? All the measurements come from technology. So what technology we need to provide to our manufacturing lines so that they can monitor and improve on the sustainability front as well. >> You mentioned data, I wanted to bring that up 'cause I was going to bring that up in another top track here, data as an asset now is at play, so I get the data on the sustainability, feed that in, but as companies go to the cloud operating model, they go, hey, I got the hyperscalers, you call microscale, Amazon for instance, and you got on-premises data center, which is a large edge and you got the edge, the data control plane, and then the control plane and the data plane are always seem to be like the battle ground, I want to control the data plane, will customers own the data plane or will the infrastructure providers control that data plane? And how do you see that? Because we want to power the machine learning, so data plane control plane, it seems to be like the new middleware, what's your view on that? How do you look at that holistically? >> Yeah, so I'll start based on the hyperscaler conversation, right? And I had this conversation with one of the very big ones recently, or even our partner, SAP, when they talk about RISE, data center and how I host my application infrastructure, that's the lowest common denominator of our job. When I talk about CIOs being responsible for digital transformation, that means how do I make my business process more innovative? How do I make my data more accessible, right? So, if you look at data as an asset for the company, it's again, they're responsible, accountable. As CIO, I'm responsible to have it managed, have it on a technology platform, which makes it accessible by it and our business leader accountable to define the right metrics, right kind of KPIs, drive outcome from that data. IT organization, we are also too busy driving a lot of activities and today's world is going to bad business outcome. So with the data that I'm collecting, how do I enable my business leader to be able to drive business outcome through the use of the data? That's extremely important, and at HPE, we have achieved it, there are two ways, right? Now I have one single ERP, so all the data that I need for what I call operational reporting, get hindsight and insight is available at one place and they can drive their day to day business with that, but longer term, what's going to happen based on what happened, which I call insight to foresight comes from a integrated data platform, which I have control of, and you know, we are fragmenting it because companies now have Databox, Snowflake, AWS data analytics tool, Azure data analytics tool, I call it data torture. CIOs should get control of common set of data and enable their businesses to define better measurements and KPIs to be able to drive the data. >> So data's a crown jewel then, it's crown jewel not-- >> Can we double-click on that because, okay, so you take your ERP system, the consumers of data in the ERP system, they have the context that we've kind of operationalized those systems. We haven't operationalized our analytics systems in the same way, which is kind of a weird dynamic, and so you, right, I think correctly noted Rashmi that, we are creating all these stove pipes. Now, think I heard from you, you're gaining control of those stove pipes, but then how do you put data back in the hands of those line of business users without having to go through a hyper specialized analytics team? And that's a real challenge I think for data. >> It is challenge and I'll tell you, it's messy even in my world but, I have dealt with data long enough, the value lies in how do I take control of all stove pipes, bring it all together, but don't make it a data lake which is built out of multiple puddles, that data lake promise hasn't delivered, right? So the value lies in the conformed layer which then it's easier for businesses to access and run their analytics from, because they need a playground because all the answers they don't have, on the operation side, as you mentioned, we got it, right? It'll happen, but on the fore site side and deeper insight side based on driving the key metrics, two challenges; understanding what's the key metrics in KPI, but the second is, how to drive visibility and understanding of it. So we need to get technology out of the conversation, bring in understanding of the data into the conversation and we need to drive towards that path. >> As a business, you know, line of business person putting that hat on, I would love to have this conversation with my CIO because I would say, I just want self-service infrastructure and I want to have access to the data that I need, I know what metrics I need to run my business so now I want the technology to be just a technical detail, you take care of that and then somebody in the organization, probably not the line of business person wants to make sure that that data is governed and secure. So there's somebody else and that maybe is your responsibility, so how do you handle that real problem? So I think you're well on the track with GreenLake for self-serve infrastructure, right, how do you handle the sort of automated governance piece of it, make that computational? Yeah, so one thing is technology is important because that's bringing all the data together at one place with single version of truth. And then, that's why I say my sons are data scientist, by the way, I tell them that the magic happens at the intersection of technology knowledge, data knowledge, and business knowledge, and that's where the talent, which is very hard to find who can connect dots across these three kind of circles and focus on that middle where the value lies and pushing businesses to, because, you know, business is messy, I've worked on pharma companies, utilities, now technology, order does not mean revenue, right? There's a lot more that happen and pricing or chargeback, rebates, all that things, if somebody can kind of make sense out of it through incremental innovation, it's not like a big bang I know it all, but finding those areas and applying what you said, I call it the G word, governance, to make sure your source is right and then creating that conform layer then makes into the dashboard the right information about those types of metrics is extreme. >> And then bringing that to the ecosystem, now I just made it 10 times more complicated. >> Yeah, this is a great conversation, we on theCUBE interview one time we're talking about the old software days where shrink-wrap software be on the shelf, you wouldn't know if was successful until you looked at the sales data, well after the fact, now everything's instrumented, SaaS companies, you know exactly what the adoption is, either people like it or they don't, the data doesn't lie. So now companies are realizing, okay, I got data, I can instrument everything, your customers are now saying, I can get to the value fast now. So knowing what that value is is what everyone's talking about. How do you see that changing the data equation? >> Yeah, that's so true even for our business, right? If you talk to Fidelma today, who is our CTO, she's bringing together the platform and multiple platforms that we had so far to go to as-a-service business, right? Infosite, Aruba Central, GLCP, or now we call it it's all HPE GreenLake, but now this gives us the opportunity to really be a alongside customer. It's no more, I sold a box, I'll come back to you three years later for a refresh, now we are in touch with our customer real time through Telemetry data that's coming from our products and really understanding how our customers are reacting with that, right? And that's where we instantiated what we call is a federated data lake where, marketing, product, sales, all teams can come together and look at what's going on. Customer360, right? Data is locked in Salesforce from opportunity, leads, codes perspective, and then real time orders are locked in S4. The challenge is, how do we bring both together so that our sales people have on their fingertip whats the install base look like, how much business that we did and the traditional side and the GreenLake side and what are the opportunities here to support our customers? >> Real quick, I know we don't have a lot of time left, but I want to touch on machine learning, which basically feeds AI, machine learning, AI go together, it's only as good as the data you can provide to it. So to your point about exposing the data while having the stove pipes for compliance and governance, how do you architect that properly? You mentioned federated data lake and earlier you said the data lake promise hasn't come back, is it data meshes? What is the architecture to have as much available data to be addressed by applications while preserving the protection? >> Yeah, so, machine learning and AI, I will also add chatbots and conversational AI, right? Because that becomes the front end of it. And that's kind of the automation process promise in the data space, right? So, the point is that, if we talk about federated data lake around one capability which I'm talking about GreenLake consumption, right? So one piece is around, how do I get data cleanly? How do I relate it across various products? How do I create metrics out of it? But how do I make it more accessible for our users? And that's where the conversational AI and chatbot comes in. And then the opportunity comes in is around not only real time, but analytics, I believe Salesforce had a pitch called customer insight few years ago, where they said, we have so many of you on our platform, now I can combine all the data that I can access and want to give you a view of how every company is interacting with their customer and how you can improve it, that's where we want to go. And I completely agree, it ends up being clean data, governed data, secure data, but having that understanding of what we want to project out and how do I make it accessible for our users very seamlessly. >> Last question, what's your number one challenge right now in this post isolation world? >> Talent, we haven't talked about that, right? >> Got to get that out there. >> All these promises, right, the entire end to end foundational transformation, as-a-service transformation, talking about the promise of data analytics, we talked about governance and security, all that is possible because of the talent we have or we will have, and our ability to attract and retain them. So as CIO, I personally spend a lot of time, CEO, John Schultz, Antonio, very, very focused on creating that employee experience and what we call everything is edge for us, so edge to office initiative where we are giving them hybrid work capabilities, people are very passionate about purpose, so sustainability, quality, all these are big deal for them, making sure that senior leadership is focused on the right thing, so, hybrid working capability, hiring the right set of people with the right skill set and keeping them excited about the work we are doing, having a purpose, and being honest about it means I haven't seen a more authentic leader than Antonio, who opens up his keynote for this type of convention, with the purpose that he's very passionate about in current environment. >> Awesome, Rashmi, always great to have you on, wonderful to have you face to face, such a clear thinker in bringing your experience to our audience, really appreciate it. >> Thank you, I'm a big consumer of CUBE and look forward to having-- >> All right, and keep it right there, John and I will be back to wrap up with Norm Follett, from HPE discover 2022, you're watching theCUBE. 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>> Male Voice: From around the globe, it's theCUBE covering HPE Discover Virtual Experience brought to you by HPE. >> Hi everybody, you're watching theCUBE. And this is Dave Vellante in our continuous coverage of the Discover 2020 Virtual Experience, HPE's virtual event, theCUBE is here, theCUBE virtual. We're really excited, we got a great session here. We're going to dig deep into machine intelligence and artificial intelligence. Dr. Arti Garg is here. She's the Head of Advanced AI Solutions and Technologies at Hewlett Packard Enterprise. And she's joined by Dr. Sorin Cheran, who is the Vice President of AI Strategy and Solutions Group at HPE. Folks, great to see you. Welcome to theCUBE. >> Hi. >> Hi, nice to meet you, hello! >> Dr. Cheran, let's start with you. Maybe talk a little bit about your role. You've had a variety of roles and maybe what's your current situation at HPE? >> Hello! Hi, so currently at HPE, I'm driving the Artificial Intelligence Strategy and Solution group who is currently looking at how do we bring solutions across the HPE portfolio, looking at every business unit, but also on the various geos. At the same time, the team is responsible for building the strategy around the AI for the entire company. We're working closely with the field, we're working closely with the things that are facing the customers every day. And we're also working very closely with the various groups in order to make sure that whatever we build holds water for the entire company. >> Dr. Garg, maybe you could share with us your focus these days? >> Yeah, sure, so I'm also part of the AI Strategy and Solutions team under Sorin as our new vice president in that role, and what I'm focused on is really trying to understand, what are some of the emerging technologies, whether those be things like new processor architectures, or advanced software technologies that could really enhance what we can offer to our customers in terms of AI and exploring what makes sense and how do we bring them to our customers? What are the right ways to package them into solutions? >> So everybody's talking about how digital transformation has been accelerated. If you're not digital, you can't transact business. AI infused into every application. And now people are realizing, "Hey, we can't solve all the world's problems with labor." What are you seeing just in terms of AI being accelerated throughout the portfolio and your customers? >> So that's a very good idea, because we've been talking about digital transformation for some time now. And I believe most of our customers believed initially that the one thing they have is time thinking that, "Oh yes I'm going to somehow at one point apply AI "and somehow at one point "I'm going to figure out how to build the data strategy, "or how to use AI in my different line of businesses." What happened with COVID-19 and in this area is that we lost one thing: time. So I think discussed what they see in our customers is the idea of accelerating their data strategy accelerating, moving from let's say an environment where they would compute center models per data center models trying to understand how do they capture data, how they accelerate the adoption of AI within the various business units, why? Because they understand that currently the way they are actually going to the business changed completely, they need to understand how to adapt a new business model, they need to understand how to look for value pools where there are none as well. So most of our customers today, while initially they spend a lot of time in an never ending POC trying to investigate where do they want to go. Currently they do want to accelerate the application of AI models, the build of data strategies, how then they use all of this data? How do they capture the data to make sure that they look at new business models, new value pools, new customer experience and so on and so forth. So I think what they've seen in the past, let's say three to six months is that we lost time. But the shift towards an adoption of analytics, AI and data strategy is accelerated a lot, simply because customers realize that they need to get ahead of the game. >> So Dr. Garg, what if you could talk about how HPE is utilizing machine intelligence during this pandemic, maybe helping some of your customers, get ahead of it, or at least trying to track it. How are you applying AI in this context? >> So I think that Sorin sort of spoke to one of the things with adopting AI is, it's very transformational for a business so it changes how you do things. You need to actually adopt new processes to take advantage of it. So what I would say is right now we're hearing from customers who recognize that the context in which they are doing their work is completely different. And they're exploring how AI can help them really meet the challenges of those context. So one example might be how can AI and computer vision be coupled together in a way that makes it easier to reopen stores, or ensures that people are distancing appropriately in factories. So I would say that it's the beginning of these conversations as customers as businesses try to figure out how do we operate in the new reality that we have? And I think it's a pretty exciting time. And I think just to the point that Sorin just made, there's a lot of openness to new technologies that there wasn't before, because there's this willingness to change the business processes to really take advantage of any technologies. >> So Dr. Cheran, I probably should have started here but help us understand HPE's overall strategy with regard to AI. I would certainly know that you're using AI to improve IT, the InfoSite product and capability via the Nimble acquisition, et cetera, and bringing that across the portfolio. But what's the strategy for HPE? >> So, yeah, thank you. That's (laughs) a good question. So obviously you started with a couple of our acquisition in the past because obviously Nimble and then we talked a lot about our efforts to bring InfoSite across the portfolio. But currently, in the past couple of months, let's say close to a year, we've been announcing a lot of other acquisitions and we've been talking about Tuteybens, we've been talking about Scytale we've been talking about Cray, and so on, so forth, and now what we're doing at HPE is to bring all of this IP together into one place and try to help our customers within their region out. If you're looking at what, for example, what did they actually get when Cray play was not only the receiver, but we also acquire and they also have a lot of software and a lot of IP around optimization and so on and so forth. Also within our own labs, we've been investigating AI around like, for example, some learning or accelerators or a lot of other activity. So right now what we're trying to help our customers with is to understand how do they lead from the production stage, from the POC stage to the production stage. So (mumbles) what we are trying to do is we are trying to accelerate their adoption of AI. So simply starting from an optimized platform infrastructure up to the solution they are actually going to apply or to use to solve their business problems and wrapping all of that around with services either consumed on-prem as a service and so on. So practically what we want to do is we want to help our customers optimize, orchestrate and operationalize AI. Because the problem of our customers is not to start in our PLC, the problem is how do I then take everything that I've been developing or working on and then put it in production at the edge, right? And then keep it, maintaining production in order to get insights and then actually take actions that are helping the enterprise. So basically, we want to be data driven assets in cloud enable, and we want to help our customers move from POC into production. >> Or do you work with obviously a lot of data folks, companies or data driven data scientists, you are hands on practitioners in this regard. One of the challenges that I hear a lot from customers is they're trying to operationalize AI put AI into production, they have data in silos, they spend all their time, munging data, you guys have made a number of acquisitions. Not a list of which is prey, obviously map of, data specialist, my friend Kumar's company Blue Data. So what do you see as HPE's role in terms of helping companies operationalize AI. >> So I think that a big part of operationalizing AI moving away from the PLC to really integrate AI into the business processes you have and also the sort of pre existing IT infrastructure you talked about, you might already have siloed data. That's sort of something we know very well at HPE, we understand a lot of the IT that enterprises already have the incumbent IT and those systems. We also understand how to put together systems and integrated systems that include a lot of different types of computing infrastructure. So whether that being different types of servers and different types of storage, we have the ability to bring all of that together. And then we also have the software that allows you to talk to all of these different components and build applications that can be deployed in the real world in a way that's easy to maintain, and scale and grow as your AI applications will almost invariably get more complex involved, more outputs involved and more input. So one of the important things as customers try to operationalize AI is think is knowing that it's not just solving the problem you're currently solving. It's not just operationalizing the solution you have today, it's ensuring that you can continue to operationalize new things or additional capabilities in the future. >> I want to talk a little bit about AI for good. We talked about AI taking away jobs, but the reality is, when you look at the productivity data, for instance, in the United States, in Europe, it's declining and it has for the last several decades and so I guess my point is that we're not going to be able to solve some of the world problems in the coming decades without machine intelligence. I mean you think about health care, you think about feeding populations, you think about obviously paying things like pandemics, climate change, energy alternatives, et cetera, productivity is coming down. Machines are potential opportunity. So there's an automation imperative. And you feel, Dr. Cheran, the people who are sort of beyond that machines replacing human's issue? Is that's still an item or has the pandemic sort of changed that? >> So I believe it is, so it used to be a very big item, you're right. And every time we were speaking at a conference and every time you're actually looking at the features of AI, right? Two scenarios are coming to plays, right? The first one where machines are here, actually take a walk, and then the second one as you know even a darker version where terminator is coming, yes and so forth, right? So basically these are the two, is the lesser evil in the greater evil and so on and so forth. And we still see that regular thing coming over and over again. And I believe that 2019 was the year of reckoning, where people are trying to realize that not only we can actually take responsible AI, but we can actually create an AI that is trustworthy, an AI that is fair and so on and so forth. And that we also understood in 2019 it was highly debated everywhere, which part of our jobs are going to be replaced like the parts that are mundane, or that can actually be easily automated and so on and so forth. With the COVID-19 what happened is that people are starting to look at AI differently, why? Because people are starting to look at data differently. And looking at data differently, how do I actually create this core of data which is trusted, secure and so on and so forth, and they are trying to understand that if the data is trusted and secure somehow, AI will be trusted and secure as well. Now, if I actually shifted forward, as you said, and then I try to understand, for example on the manufacturing floor, how do I add more machines? Or how do I replace humans with machines simply because, I need to make sure that I am able to stay in production and so on and so forth. From their perspective, I don't believe that the view of all people are actually looking at AI from the job marketplace perspective changed a lot. The view that actually changes how AI is helping us better certain prices, how AI is helping us, for example, in health care, but the idea of AI actually taking part of the jobs or automating parts of the jobs, we are not actually past yet, even if 2018 and even more so in 2019, it was the year also where actually AI through automation replaced the number of jobs but at the same time because as I was saying the first year where AI created more jobs it's because once you're displacing in one place, they're actually creating more work more opportunities in other places as well. But still, I don't believe the feeling changed. But we realize that AI is a lot more valuable and it can actually help us through some of our darkest hours, but also allow us to get better and faster insights as well. >> Well, machines have always replaced humans and now for the first time in history doing so in a really cognitive functions in a big way. But I want to ask you guys, I'll start with Dr. Arti, a series of questions that I think underscore the impact of AI and the central role that it plays in companies digital transformations, we talk about that a lot. But the questions that I'm going to ask you, I think will hit home just in terms of some hardcore examples, and if you have others I'd love to hear them but I'm going to start with Arti. So when do you think Dr. or machines will be able to make better diagnoses than doctors? We're actually there today already? >> So I think it depends a little bit on how you define that. And I'm just going to preface this by saying both of my parents are physicians. So I have a little bit of bias in this space. But I think that humans can bring creativity in a certain type of intelligence that it's not clear to me. We even know how to model with the computer. And so diagnoses have sometimes two components. One is recognizing patterns and being able to say, "I'm going to diagnose this disease that I've seen before." I think that we are getting to the place where there are certain examples. It's just starting to happen where you might be able to take the data that you need to make a diagnosis as well understood. A machine may be able to sort of recognize those subtle patterns better. But there's another component of doing diagnosis is when it's not obvious what you're looking for. You're trying to figure out what is the actual sort of setup diseases I might be looking at. And I think that's where we don't really know how to model that type of inspiration and creativity that humans still bring to things that they do, including medical diagnoses. >> So Dr. Cheran my next question is, when do you think that owning and driving your own vehicle will become largely obsolete? >> (laughs) Well, I believe my son is six year old now. And I believe, I'm working with a lot of companies to make sure that he will not get his driving license with his ID, right? So depending who you're asking and depending the level of autonomy that you're looking at, but you just mentioned the level five most likely. So there are a lot of dates out there so some people actually say 2030. I believe that my son in most of the cities in US but also most of the cities in Europe, by the time he's 18 in let's say 2035, I'll try to make sure that I'm working with the right companies not to allow them to get the driving license. >> I'll let my next question is from maybe both of you can answer. Do you take the traditional banks will lose control of payment system? >> So that's an interesting question, because I think it's broader than an AI question, right? I think that it goes into some other emerging technologies, including distributed ledgers and sort of the more secure forms of blockchain. I think that's a challenging question to my mind, because it's bigger than the technology. It's got Economic and Policy implications that I'm not sure I can answer. >> Well, that's a great answer, 'cause I agree with you already. I think that governments and banks have a partnership. It's important partnership for social stability. But similar we've seen now, Dr. Cheran in retail, obviously the COVID-19 has affected retail in a major way, especially physical retail, do you think that large retail stores are going to go away? I mean, we've seen many in chapter 11. At this point, how much of that is machine intelligence versus just social change versus digital transformation? It's an interesting question, isn't it? >> So I think most of the... Right now the retailers are here to stay I guess for the next couple of years. But moving forward, I think their capacity of adapting to stores like to walk in stores or to stores where basically we just go in and there are no shop assistants and just you don't even need the credit card to pay you're actually being able to pay either with your face or with your phone or with your small chips and so on and so forth. So I believe currently in the next couple of years, obviously they are here to stay. Moving forward then we'll get artificial intelligence, or robotics applied everywhere in the store and so on and so forth. Most likely their capacity of adapting to the new normal, which is placing AI everywhere and optimizing the walk in through predicting when and how to guide the customers to the shop, and so on and so forth, would allow them to actually survive. I don't believe that everything is actually going to be done online, especially from the retailer perspective. Most of the... We've seen a big shift at COVID-19. But what I was reading the other day, especially in France that the counter has opened again, we've seen a very quick pickup in the retailers of people that actually visiting the stores as well. So it's going to be some very interesting five to 10 years, and then most of the companies that have adapted to the digital transformation and to the new normal I think they are here to stay. Some of them obviously are going to take sometime. >> I mean, I think it's an interesting question too that you really sort of triggering in my mind is when you think about the framework for how companies are going to come back and come out of this, it's not just digital, that's a big piece of it, like how digital businesses, can they physically distance? I mean, I don't know how sports arenas are going to be able to physically distance that's going to be interesting to see how essential is the business and if you think about the different industries that it really is quite different across those industries. And obviously, digital plays a big factor there, but maybe we could end on that your final thoughts and maybe any other other things you'd like to share with our audience? >> So I think one of the things that's interesting anytime you talk about adopting a new technology, and right now we're happening to see this sort of huge uptick in AI adoption happening right at the same time but this sort of massive shift in how we live our lives is happening and sort of an acceptance, I think that can't just go back to the way things work as you mentioned, they'll probably be continued sort of desire to maintain social distancing. I think that it's going to force us to sort of rethink why we do things the way we do now, a lot, the retail, environments that we have the transportation solutions that we have, they were adapted in many cases in a very different context, in terms of what people need to do on a day-to-day basis within their life. And then what were the sort of state of technologies available. We're sort of being thrust and forced to reckon with like, what is it I really need to do to live my life and then what are the technologies I have available to meet to answer that and I think, it's really difficult to predict right now what people will think is important about a retail experience, I wouldn't be surprised if you start to find in person retail actually be much less, technologically aided, and much more about having the ability to talk to a human being and get their opinion and maybe the tactile sense of being able to like touch new clothes, or whatever it is. And so it's really difficult I think right now to predict what things are going to look like maybe even a year or two from now from that perspective. I think that what I feel fairly confident is that people are really starting to understand and engage with new technologies, and they're going to be really open to thinking about what those new technologies enable them to do in this sort of new way of living that we're going to probably be entering pretty soon. >> Excellent! All right, Sorin, bring us home. We'll give you the last word on this topic. >> Now, so I wanted to... I agree with Arti because what these three months of staying at home and of busy shutting down allowed us to do was to actually have a very big reset. So let's say a great reset but basically we realize that all the things we've taken from granted like our freedom of movement, our technology, our interactions with each other, and also for suddenly we realize that everything needs to change. And the only one thing that we actually kept doing is interacting with each other remotely, interacting with each other with our peers in the house, and so on and so forth. But the one thing that stayed was generating data, and data was here to stay because we actually leave traces of data everywhere we go, we leave traces of data when we put our watch on where we are actually playing with our phone, or to consume digital and so on and so forth. So what these three months reinforced for me personally, but also for some of our customers was that the data is here to stay. And even if the world shut down for three months, we did not generate less data. Data was there on the contrary, in some cases, more data. So the data is the main enabler for the new normal, which is going to pick up and the data will actually allow us to understand how to increase customer experience in the new normal, most likely using AI. As I was saying at the beginning, how do I actually operate new business model? How do I find, who do I partner with? How do I actually go to market together? How do I make collaborations more secure, and so on and so forth. And finally, where do I actually find new value pools? For example, how do I actually still enjoy for having a beer in a pub, right? Because suddenly during the COVID-19, that wasn't possible. I have a very nice place around the corner, but it's actually cheaply stuff. I'm not talking about beer but in general, I mean, so the finance is different the pools of data, the pools (mumbles) actually, getting values are different as well. So data is here to stay, and the AI definitely is going to be accelerated because it needs to use data to allow us to adopt the new normal in the digital transformation. >> A lot of unknowns but certainly machines and data are going to play a big role in the coming decade. I want to thank Dr. Arti Garg and Dr. Sorin Cheran for coming on theCUBE. It's great to have you. Thank you for a wonderful conversation. Really appreciate it. >> Thank you very much. >> Thanks so much. >> All right. And thank you for watching everybody. This is Dave Vellante for theCUBE and the HPE 2020 Virtual Experience. We'll be right back right after this short break. (upbeat music)

>> From the SiliconANGLE Media office in Boston Massachusetts, it's the theCUBE. Now here's your host, Dave Velllante (electronic music) >> Hi everybody. Welcome to the special CUBE conversation sponsored by Hewlett Packard Enterprise. This is part of our partner series. You know the partner business has changed quite dramatically over the years. It used to be you could make a lot of money pushing hardware and get some pretty good margins there. But increasingly, partners are becoming system integrators. They're becoming much more specialized in helping organizations transform, supporting their digital transformations, their infrastructure modernization, moving to the cloud, hybrid cloud, security. It really runs the gamut. And here to talk to me about that is Tim Ferris, who's a solutions architect at GreenPages. Tim, good to see you. Thanks for coming on. >> Great to be here. Thank you. >> So tell me a little bit about GreenPages. It's kind of a cool name. Where did that come from? And what are you guys all about? >> Oh God, I'm going to be killed for not knowing the history here. But, I think back in the old days, we used to hand out a neon green catalog. So we couldn't, back when we were doing cold calls, you'd probably get a lot of okay, we shipped you a catalog. Did you get that? Oh, I'm not quite sure. It may be buried under there. Neon green catalog, you could not lose. (laughs) I think we do our invoices on neon green paper now. >> That's good, green, the color of money. So tell us about your role as a solutions architect. What does that entail? And what's your background? >> Sure. So I'm a solutions architect. We have a number of different solutions architects at GreenPages who have a number of different specialties. My specialty is storage, disaster recovery and data management and protection and DR automation. And that's where it computes hyperconvergence, infrastructure and hybrid cloud. So specialization, a little bit wide, but we have other architects who are very deep in networking and hybrid cloud networking and that sort of thing as well. >> So let's get into some of that. Looking at your website, you guys are into everything. You've got software defined. You got cloud. You got security. You got DevOps and really runs the gamut. Well sometimes in this industry, we suffer from acronym soup. The reality is that things are changing quite dramatically. I mean it used to be you'd build an infrastructure to support a single application. You'd harden that infrastructure and that was it. It became a silo and people don't want that anymore. They want their data to be shared. They want it out of the silos, but at the same time it has to be protected. So what are some of the big trends that you're seeing in the marketplace and let's get into it. >> Sure. So yeah, many years ago that one app, one server, one application thing went the way of the dodo. You just got back from VM world. I paid my dues during the Wave One virtualization boom. When people were transforming racks and racks of servers into virtual machines. And so it used to be so easy to impress a customer. You show them a vMotion and it was like magic. You move the server from this server to that server without missing a beat. Now people are looking at hybrid cloud. So not just cloud, but hybrid cloud. Everybody we're talking to, we hear some people say that this is the last major hardware purchase that I want to make. Now I don't know the reality is that. That's debatable, right? But I think people want to have a roadmap to move their infrastructure to cloud or cloud services. Not just infrastructure as a service. You know, lift and shift. Software is a service and take advantage of that. So helping our customers manage that hybrid cloud journey is a big part of what GreenPages does. >> And of course, what the customer is really telling you is we don't want to spend a lot of time provisioning LUNs anymore because it doesn't add value to our business. We want to focus on building new apps or our digital transformation, etc. So and I think you're right. It's sort of aspirational that okay, we're not going to buy anymore hardware anymore. To me the key is, can the industry, through R & D, simplify what's on-prem and you know, lets face it, those mission critical apps you don't just want to throw them into the cloud. I mean, they're working. You don't want to have to refactor them and migrate. That's sort of an evil word. So to the extent that the industry can deliver that cloud-like experience on-prem, you can start to see this hybrid cloud vision evolve. What are your thoughts on that? >> Sure. So I think, in H it's fortuitous that we're here with HPE. I think they're doing a couple of things with some of their products and services that help push that. So it used to be that storage was relatively complicated. There were a lot of knobs and dials on storage that you could push and rotate in order to increase performance. You could have a number of different RAID levels. You know the 3PAR chunklets, and this sort of thing. There was a lot of customization you could do, you could use as a customer in order to properly set up your array for your workloads. People appreciate that level of detail that you can put into that but they want it easier. So I'm seeing a trend toward less customization and more ready just set it and forget it arrays. Nimble, the 3PAR array was highly available. Very good, very good array, very fast, but a little bit higher end to operate. Nimble with HPE's acquisition of Nimble, they've taken that operational complexity down significantly. Not only with operating the array, provisioning LUNs but managing it, maintaining it and performing predictive analytics through Infosite and that sort of thing. So at the storage level I think Nimble, in that paradigm is transforming storage. And HPE's GreenLake technologies, that is very much an answer to the private cloud. Having that hyperscale feel, that ability to expand elastically and get out of the hardware maintenance business by using the GreenLake service. >> So actually, a little bit of history here. So 3PAR was actually, the company was formed in the early 2000s before the term cloud computing really came out. They used, I think utility computing in their S-1 registration. But what 3PAR did is, it really simplified that high end. And then 3PAR reached escape velocity by going after the high end EMC base and did very well and of course famously got acquired by Hewlett Packard. At the time HP then became HPE. Nimble now is bringing sort of a new level where you're talking about intelligent automation and AI managing infrastructure, predictive analytics and that drives more automation which I think, Tim has really got to be a theme of hybrid cloud. I mean cloud is all about automation so hybrid cloud, on-prem, and public some kind of interconnection has to be highly automated, doesn't it? >> It absolutely does and people don't have time to turn the dials and to optimize their storage. They need systems that will do that for them. And there's the level one, the level two support that you get through those predictive analytics of Infosite are critical to customers. They don't, you know a lot of customers don't have time for full time storage admins anymore. And these technologies are what's freeing up those resources, those people resources to do other strategic things for the business. >> Especially in small and mid-sized businesses. >> Absolutely. >> Where they're generalist really, not really specialists at one thing. I want to come back to the hybrid cloud. You know thinking about data governance and management and security. Are we at the point where you can start to see sort of a consistent framework across clouds? You're smiling. (laughs) So what's the journey there? How are we going to get there? I mean (mumbling) (laughs) >> Yeah, I would say we're certainly early days there. I think you know customers need to be much more cognizant of the tools that they use and buy. They can't be necessarily proprietary on-prem tools. The best use of your money is to buy tools, that can be used to manage hybrid and secure hybrid infrastructures. So that should be a main qualifier for what people are looking for for security technologies and that sort of thing. It's not quite the wild west, though we still see, you know there's that shared governance model. That shared responsibility in the cloud. I think there are still some who haven't woken up to that basic concept. That just because I moved the workload to the cloud doesn't mean it's no longer my responsibility to secure that data. Though we're still talking with people today who may be under that misimpression. >> You're right, Tim. I mean that is not well understood and people think if I move in the cloud, I'm good. But there is shared responsibility model whether it's for security or governance, etc. And when you talk to chief information security officers they'll tell you, yeah, you know the cloud vendor might secure the storage device, but its' really our responsibility to do everything else. And the list of everything else is still quite long. >> Absolutely, you know rights, roles and responsibilities. Those sorts of things, firewall rules. They provide the firewall. They make sure the firewall is up to date on it's firmware. But you're setting the rules. You're setting the ingress, egress. So, yes it's very much still a shared responsibility. And yeah, it's eye opening still to some. >> Let's talk about your partnership with HPE. We talked about some of the products, but what do you look for in a partner? Obviously as I said before, you know used to be you sell in boxes. You want margin and I'm sure you still want margin. But there's got to be more, right? >> Well yeah, I mean we've known for quite a while. I mean we've seen the writing on the wall that, I remember the glory, I don't know glory days, the old days back when people could make a fortune selling memory, back before the turn of the century, turn of the century. (laughs) I'm dating myself. But it's true you could make quite a bit of money selling memory back then. But today and certainly over the past 20 years, people, our clients are choosing partners that they can't, not just the cheapest price, but people who can talk to them about a solution. Not just a product. Hear their business problems and turn that into technology solutions that help them address those problems. So that's what I would look for as a partner, if I were, we look to HPE for the same thing. Not just pushing product, where to sell product, but to solve business problems. And I think that HPE is listening, they're hearing their clients. They were listening to them with the acquisition of HPE Nimble. They're listening to them, how they're expanding Infosite from just a Nimble platform, the 3PAR and Prolient and other things and expanding some of those things. >> Yeah, the pendulum has swung after the dot.com boom it became cut, cut, cut. Everyone was concerned about budgets. You know IT doesn't matter anymore. We heard all that >> crosstalk >> and that's totally changed. IT's driving revenue. It's driving top line. Of course budgets are still critical and we've talked a lot about simplification which is a lot about attacking the IT labor problem. But right now the sentiment with the booming economy we're in. This tenth, ninth year of a run on a bull market, obviously in the late cycles, but the sentiment is much more toward how do I enable the business with technology? >> Yes. Yeah, yeah. So how does IT add value back to the business? They can do that through AI, through analytics and through digital transformation in general. I think we've seen a, you know there's always been this upward curve to storage growth. But it's dramatically increased I think. It's upward, predicted to be upward of 40 zettabytes, or something like that by the year 2022. And that's because more and more businesses are using this data more creatively. They're saving it more and not only is that growing, the usable data, but they need to retain it for longer. You've got to retain it, you've got to protect it and we've still got data protection problems. Not just storing it and providing the right performance level for it. But it's really difficult. And then you've got to secure all that extra data, as well. >> Well, I think you're right too. The curve is getting non-linear. I mean it used to be, I've said this often on the theCUBE that we for decades, we've marched to the cadence of Moore's law. But now the innovation sandwich, if you will, it's about applying machine intelligence to data and then automating, whether it's public cloud or on-prem cloud-like, it's being able to scale. >> Right. >> And it's those three pieces of the sandwich that are now driving innovation. No longer the doubling of transistors every 18 months. >> Yeah, so do people want to scale on-prem? Do they want to scale to the cloud and the cloud market itself as it's very elastic, very easy to grow and shrink and contrast? Or can you do some of those types of things on-prem? You know with GreenLake and with some other programs that let you have your on-prem security blanket and your on-prem performance with the hands-off operational paradigm and the elastic growth that you have in cloud. I think that's the best of both worlds for some. >> Let's end with a call to action. So what advice would you give to practitioners, clients that are looking to modernize their infrastructure? They're trying to support their digital transformation. They want to get from point A to point B. They don't want to spend a billion dollars doing it. They got to go on a journey. How do they get there? What's your advice? >> My advice is to certainly, I'm jaded here, but I would say engage professionals who have done this many many times. Don't learn on the job here. You can make some expensive mistakes moving workloads to the cloud. And we've seen anecdotal evidence, and in-person evidence of people moving to the cloud, doing it the wrong way and then having to migrate that back. That's a costly mistake. So make sure you do your planning. Migrate in phases. Move your data there in phases. Bite off some smaller chunks first to make sure if you have growing pain, teething pains that that happens with a non-critical application. Build your knowledge base and then make some better decisions. Engage people like GreenPages to help you roadmap your journey, your hybrid cloud journey. And don't go in with a preconceived notion of where you need to end, right? The applications, their performance requirements and that assessment work up front should dictate where the best place is for those workloads. >> Great advice. Tim Ferris from GreenPages. Thanks so much for coming on theCUBE. It's great to have you. >> Thank you. >> And thank you for watching everybody. We'll see you next time. This is Dave Vellante. We're out. (electronic music)

>> From the SiliconANGLE Media Office in Boston, Massachusetts, it's The Cube! Now, here's your host, Dave Velante. >> We're back with Patrick Osborne. All right Patrick, we've been talking about how customers want to be data-driven, they're doing digital transformation, they want to put data at the core of the enterprise. All sounds good. What's your strategy as HPE in terms of helping them get there? >> Yeah so, for our customers, this is a common theme, right. Some feel that they're going to be disrupted, they've been disrupted, right, and one of the key threads that runs through that is that they want to get more AI driven, right, so they want to use analytics as a way to provide new services around their products, get these services out faster, be able to use all that data they have in their enterprise. So for us, it's being able to have that conversation of whether the data sits out in the edge, right, you guys are very familiar with our Edge strategy, using Edgeline and Aruba, our core infrastructure in the data center, which we've had-- for a long history of helping customers with that, and then more recently around Hybrid Cloud, right, so most of the products, services, experiences we have there have Hybrid Cloud built in from the ground up. So for us, all those conversations have to do with data. >> So you recently made an acquisition of BlueData. >> Correct. >> What was that all about? Was that your AI play? Was it a software-as-a-service play? Explain that. >> Yeah, certainly a little bit of both. BlueData's a fantastic platform and it allows you to virtualize, containerize the application, so we know that in the market, you've got mode one applications, you've got mode two applications, a lot of mode one apps, you know, business applications, mission critical applications, have been virtualized. But what we also see is that a lot of the new product development is around these mode two applications that are using things like big data, whether it's a dupe in H-D-F-S, fast data - some of the streaming services - and now you're doing things around A-I inferencing, modeling, all using essentially containers as a way to do that, fuel that application development. So when we saw BlueData, it's essentially a platform to be able to virtualize all of these container-based applications. And as customers, big data and analytics and A-I platforms and their pipeline gets bigger and more complicated, it allows us to, A) manage that, increase their time to value, unlock a lot of the resources on the data scientists side, right, who have the responsibility of managing all of those applications, and it's a really great platform, great people, right, so they have a team of data scientists to be able to help customers implement this, not only within the product but within their own enterprise. And then we've got some really, really big logos that we're going to build off of for the BlueData ecosystem. >> So things are moving very fast. You've got all this data, you're applying machine intelligence and quickly moving from a world that was all batch to one that's real time, and we blinked and real time flew by. Now you've got this machine intelligence world where systems are acting, they're sensing, they're hearing, they're smelling... >> Yup. >> And so, is that what you're seeing with customers? Are they trying to build these sort of new systems that will act on their behalf? >> Absolutely. We see it on our own. If you take a look at some of our strategy, as HPE, especially within our storage and big data division, one of the big things that we're doing is introducing all of our products with the capability of A-I ops, right. And so all of our products that go out the door, using platforms like Infosite, will have this A-I ops capability to, not only just start with support automation, predictive analytics, and now you've got predictive A-I driving the actual management experience of these products. And it lets our customers ultimately unlock those resources that were doing mundane, repeatable tasks to focus on where they're going to add value. >> So I got to ask you, you guys do-- obviously a lot of your revenue comes from indirect channels. So you've seen the cloud, the cloud is not about selling boxes anymore, now you're seeing all this machine intelligence and automation. What does all this mean for partners? Where's the opportunity for those guys? >> Yeah so, I would say that when we go and make an acquisition like Blue Data, it's a great, like we said before, it's a great product, it's a good platform, right, they've got great engineers and great people within the organization and certainly some big logos. The reason why they got those logos was partly based on the product, but it's also a very services led methodology. So for-- I'd say for our partner community, being able to do discovery services, to understand what they're requirements are, a lot of folks that use BlueData and these type of platforms are builders. They're building a platform that has services on it for their end user customers. So being able to gather those requirements, do implementation, certainly be able to take a lot of this dynamic application ecosystem that is either very new, it's nascent, when you take a look at A-I or it's even in the open source arena, being able to de-risk that for the customers, from a services perspective, is a huge opportunity. >> Okay, great, so that's exciting because it's new frontier for those folks. So think about HPE, the tech that you guys have, the partner opportunity that you just described, how are you going to change the life of a data scientist? And maybe we could add in some other personas as well. >> Yeah, so, as a lot of our customers and partners certainly know, data scientists don't grow on trees, right, and they're very important folks within these large organizations, right, so you want to unlock their capabilities. So for us at the end of the day, we're trying to have a platform and as a service experience around A-I that unlocks the value of these data scientists. So for example, if I have a production environment or a U-A-T or a test dev environment, I can very quickly spin up your entire toolchain as a data scientist, right, so your toolchain, your models, your H-D-F-S data lakes, you can tap into existing data lakes, all of my streaming data, Kafka, Spark, all this stuff, very dynamic ecosystem, complex application dependencies. What I can do is I can sandbox that, I can test it, I can iterate, and I can very, very quickly provide that type of environment for your developers and your data scientists (snaps) just like that. >> So, in addition to the data scientist, is the chief data officer somebody that you guys are interacting with? There's also the application developer. Are you trying to sort of effect this collaboration amongst those different roles and personas? >> Yeah I think one of the greatest things for the partners and we've seen this at HPE too, is that you're going to be calling on new buyer personas. Right, so in the case of infrastructure, working a lot with enterprise architects, data center manager, infrastructure manager, C-I-O. In the case of BlueData and some of these A-I and analytics projects, right, you're at the front of the budget cycle, right, so you're talking to line of business, application developers, data scientists, analytics team, and now the rise of the C-D-O, the chief data officer. So you not only get to establish value with the infrastructure team, who are going to have to support this, right, you're going to go make some new friends and be able to get on the front of the budget cycle with a whole new set of buyer personas, and I think that's very exciting for partners. >> So, we talk a lot about A-I and, sort of this machine learning environment, machine intelligence. Software-defined is a hot topic. It's kind of a buzzword but it has meaning. What does it mean to you? Where does it fit in this whole equation? >> It's very adjacent to the big data and A-I analytics conversation. I think that what we see in software-defined, it's heavy on scale, right, so now that you're into petabytes, tens of petabytes, hundreds of petabytes, scaling, scaling, scaling, you need some new architectures to be able to do that cost-effectively. And you think about automated cars for example. They're-- each car is spinning off terabytes of data a day, so think about how am I going to store that, it's a monumental task. You got scale on your mind, you also have automation, right, so not only the scale of being able to store that effectively from a price-point, to be able to automate that. So you want to keep your-- the folks who are managing that infrastructure, they're going to have to increase the amount of systems, capacity under management, and the only way you can achieve that is through automation. And so, we see some themes around that and software-defined is really, kind of stepping in in that angle where you've got N-V-M-E, S-S-Ds, can saturate-- two N-V-M-E can saturate a C-P-U at this point, right, and now you're moving to hundred gig fabrics, so this rack-scale architecture that you can provide and paint on different software-defined personalities onto it is something that customers are definitely leaning in towards right now. >> And what you've been describing-- you mentioned autonomous vehicles-- data's at the edge, it's at the core, it's everywhere, and so, easier to bring, maybe, let's call it, ten meg of code to a petabyte of data than the reverse. >> Yeah, and what we see too is customers want to-- they want to dip their toe in this water, right, starting with very large enterprises, and we're able to, as HPE, bring a vetted ecosystem, whether from a workload perspective, 'cause we always talk about follow the workload, in software-defined, if you need something like scale-out file for A-I workloads, or you need scale-out file for more of a high performance, capacity-driven architecture, you're looking for object storage, you're looking for hyper-converged secondary, right, we bring an ecosystem of partners running on our infrastructure that's scalable, automated, and customers can feel confident in. >> Awesome. Well thank you Patrick, love the story. >> Yeah, thank you so much. >> You're welcome. (upbeat music)

(upbeat electronic music) >> Announcer: Live from Chicago, Illinois, it's theCUBE, covering Veeamon 2018. Brought to you by Veeam. >> Welcome back to Chicago everybody, the Windy City, you're watching theCUBE, the leader in live tech coverage and we're here day two at Veeamon 2018, theCUBE's second year doing Veeamon, and I'm Dave Vellante, with my cohost, Stu Miniman. Patrick Osborne is here, the newly minted VP and GM of big data and secondary storage. >> And CUBE alumni. >> HPE and many time CUBE alumni, did you get a sticker? >> Yeah, it's already on my laptop. >> Oh, awesome, great to see you again. >> Good to see you guys. >> Thanks so much for coming on, always fun at Veeamon. >> Yep. >> They have a big presence. Your show, HPE Discover, they painted the Chi-Town green. >> Patrick: Yep. >> What's going on at the show for you guys? >> So a huge partner for us, in our ecosystem, as you guys know, HPE and the world of virtualized workloads, like, you know, we definitely own the space in terms of the number of Veeams sitting on our infrastructure and they are a great partner. You know, we've got thousands of customers, and I think what we're seeing, too, is that as Veeam grows up into the midsize and enterprise space, that is, you know, that's where our wheelhouse is. And so we're getting a lot of customer interactions in that space, and then, with some of our offerings around Nimble and SimpliVity, where they play very well in the commercial segments, that's a great way for us to go grab new logos, be present in the channel. So it's a really good partnership for us on both ends. >> I definitely want to understand what's going on in big data, but before we get there, let's talk a little bit about secondary storage and your point of view there. We know that data protection is moving way up on the list of CXO priorities, we also know there's a dissonance in the customer base, between the expectations of how much automation is actually there from the line of business, versus what IT can deliver. >> Patrick: Yeah, yeah. >> And so there's this gap and now you have multi-cloud coming on in a big way, digital transformation, and so it feels like backup and recovery and data protection is transforming. Throw in security and it even complicates it further. What's your point of view on what's going on in this mix? >> Well, certainly the sands are shifting in the secondary storage market. I think because of a heightened customer expectation in this area, whether it's, you know, I want to do more with my data, running things that we do at Veeam, like test data, automation, Sandboxing, security, you know, ransomware. All those are higher level data services than just what people were doing in the past around backup and recovery. So for us, we're really focused a lot on automation right in this space. The death of backup and recovery in that traditional space is essentially caused by comPlexxity, right? So automate or die in this space, nobody wants to deal with backup, right? What you want is outcomes, and what we're doing is, for our product line, we've got sort of this three-tiered mantra, of predictive, cloud-ready and timeless. So we want to be able to, through platforms like InfoSite, be able to heavily, heavily automate all those activities. Cloud-ready, because, you know, as we talked before, it's a hybrid world. People, especially in secondary storage, want to have some data on-prem, and certainly a lot of it for archival and retention off-prem. And then, timeless is sort of this scenario around, even though I'm operating a data center, I want the purchasing experience to be elastic, and like, again, the cloud, right? So consumption-based as a service. So that's what we're trying to bring to the market for secondary storage and storage in general. >> Dave: Awesome. >> Patrick, as I look at this space, you talk about that hybrid, multi-cloud world that we talked about. The two big, main things are data and my applications. So you talked a bit about the data, connect for us, kind of the applications and things, cloud native and 12 factor microservices, versus traditional applications. And you've got that whole spectrum, what are you seeing from your customers and how are you helping them? >> Yeah, so, we're definitely seeing a lot of the tech leading customers in the enterprise from HPE, you know, the big logos, right? They're out there disrupting themselves, disrupting industry, are massively betting on analytics, right? So, they've moved certainly from databases to batch now, it's all, you know, I think people call it fast data, streaming analytics, Kafka, Spark. So we're seeing, that part of our business that HPE's growing, like, non-sequentially, right? So it's really good business for us. But what's going on right now, is that the customers who are doing this, these are all net new apps. Kubernetes, you know, new styles of application, it's not a rip and replace, it's more of an augmentation scenario, where you're providing new services on top of existing apps. So that is very new and I think one of the things we'll see over the next couple of years is, how do I protect those workloads? How do I provide multi-cloud for them? So it's an interesting space, it's very nascent, a lot of tech-heavy investment going on for the, you know, the big players in the market. But that's going to have a long tail into the mid range. >> How will the data protection architecture sort of change for those new emerging applications? You know, maybe IoT is another piece of that. And maybe, where does your partnership with Veeam fit into that? >> Yeah, so we are having a number of strategy discussions on that this morning, you know. And I think that space is, you know, there's a lot of identification that has to go on. Do I want to back it up, do I care? Right, are those persistent streams? Or that IoT data that's coming in, do I really have to back it up at the end of the day or can I back up the results? So, a lot of it is not just an availability issue, it's certainly a data management issue. But a lot of the tools that we would need to do that, today, they're focused on bare-metal, VM wear, virtualization, a lot of stuff that hasn't been written yet, right? So I think there's a lot of actual tech development that has to go on in this space and I think we're kind of poised together as partners to deliver in that area the next couple years. >> You guys have this tagline, "We Make Hybrid IT Simple." >> Patrick: Yes. >> IT, you know-- >> Patrick: Very quantifiable. >> It ain't simple. (laughter) So, where does storage fit into that equation? >> Yeah, the stats that blow my mind was, I think IBC came out with this, was that there's essentially around 500 million apps in the data center today. And then, in any sort of spectrum of bare-metal, being virtualized, maybe being containerized, in the next four years there's going to be 500 million net new apps, right? So that's like, it's mind blowing, in terms of, most people have a flat budget, maybe a little increase. So you think that you're doubling the amount of apps you have and all the services around it. So for us, the automation piece is absolutely key, right? So anything we can do with InfoSite as a platform, we're going to be extending that to other products, you see we've done it for 3PAR, we'll be bringing that experience. But anything we can do around automation, analytics, that's going to take a lot of the mystery and comPlexxity out of managing these apps and services, I think is a win for the customers, and that's why they're going to buy into the platforms. >> Yeah, it's like, imagine if you're a young family, you've got two kids and you have twins. >> Patrick: Yeah. (laughter) >> Uh-oh. (laughs) >> Or you decide to have two more, like I did. (laughter) >> Patrick, we've been talking about intelligence in the storage world for decades. >> Yes. >> Why is it real, you know, more real and different now, than it was in some of the previous generations? >> Yeah, I think, you know, some of the techniques... So, we've had systems that have called home and brought telemetry home forever, right? But I think what's going on is that, as you take the tools that we've developed, and a lot of them are new, right, that are allowing you to do this, it's the practition of the data science, which is like the key, at the end of the day. InfoSite is an amazing piece of technology, a lot of the magic is in the way that you set up your teams, and to be able to take that on, right? So, it's no longer a product manager, an engineering guy, support person in a different organization, right? What we have is what's called a peak team, right? Which just takes all the functions, brings them together with a data scientist, to be able to take a look at, how can I do machine learning, AI, a more predictive model, to actually take use of this data, right? And I think the techniques and the organizational design is the big change that's happened over the last couple of years. Data's always been there, right? But now we know what to do with that. >> Yeah, and like you said before, the curve is reshaping, it's not this linear Moore's Law curve anymore. >> Patrick: Yeah. >> It's this exponential curve. >> Patrick: Exactly. >> I can't even draw it anymore you know, it used to be easy, just put the dotted line straight out, now it's twisting. So, that increases the need obviously, for automation. Now talk about how HPE's automation play is differentiable in the marketplace. >> So I think a couple of things from a differentiated perspective. Obviously we talked a lot about InfoSite as a platform, as a portfolio company, we're definitely trying to take out the friction, in terms of the deployment and automation of some of these big data environments. So our mission is to be able to, like you would stand up some analytic workloads in the public cloud, to provide that same experience, on-prem, right? And essentially be the broker for that user experience. So that's an area that we're going to differentiate, and then, you know, in general, there's not that many mega portfolio companies, right, anymore. And I feel like, that we're exploiting that for our customers, bringing together compute networking and storage. And certainly on the automation side. So you know, for us, I really feel that you're no longer going to be buying on horizontal lines anymore. You know, best of breed servers, best of breed networking, best of breed storage, but bringing together a complete, vetted stack for a set of workloads, from a vendor like HPE. >> Yeah, and it was just announced, the deal's not closed yet, but just to mention to the audience, HPE just made an acquisition of Plexxi, a networking specialist-- >> Patrick: Yeah, a good friend, too, Rich Napolitano. >> Rich Napolitano. Just this week, which is interesting, because that brings cloud scale to some of the hyperconvergence infrastructure. It's essentially hyperconverge networking, so really interested to see how that plays out. HPE has made a number of really effective acquisitions over the last several years, starting really with 3PAR, was the one. Clearly Aruba, you know, the Nimble acquisition, you know, SimpliVity, so, SGI. So some really strong, both tactical and strategic moves for HPE, really interested to see how Plexxi sorts out. Okay, we got to talk sports for a minute. I asked Peter McKay this question, I asked his boss, some sports fans, if you were Robert Kraft, would you have traded Tom Brady? >> (sharp inhale) No. >> No way? >> No way, no way. >> Okay, that's consistent with McKay. >> Yeah, no way, that's like trading Montana, that didn't work out. >> That did work out, right? They traded Montana, then they won another Superbowl. >> Yeah, I know, I mean, I think, for me, he's an icon and then he's still operating at maximum efficiency, which is amazing, but I think he got a lot of legs in him. >> What do you think of the... Well hopefully he stays, hopefully he does play 'til 45. What do you think of the Garoppolo trade, though? Are you disappointed that they didn't get more, or do you think it was the right move to hang on, just in case Brady went down again? >> I think it's the right move at the end of the day, right? You're not going to get much from him anyways, and they're certainly not going to pay him out as a backup quarterback. What I don't like, though, is the fact that he's gone to the 49ers, and that's where most of my engineering team is in the Bay Area. So, to have to deal with yahoo 49ers fans, you know, for the next couple years, is going to be painful. But it's good, it's a good renewed rivalry. >> So you're not a-- >> Celtics, Warriors, you know, Patriots, Niners. >> You're not an instant transplanted 49ers fan, because of Garoppolo, right? >> Patrick: No, absolutely not. >> He's a carpet-bagger, right? >> He's out, he's off the team, he's out of the house. >> I love it, okay, Bruins were a big disappointment this year. >> Yeah, yeah. >> We thought that, you know, the Celtics were super exciting, let's go there, I mean. You know, you watched the Celtics early in the year, 'cause your like, after Hayward went down, you're like, kind of' we were all walking around like this. And then you-- >> I felt like, it's like where Kennedy was shot, right? I know exactly where I was, right? >> Right, and you had people blaming Danny Ainge for, like, making a move, I'm like, come on, guys. And you see what happened with the young players, and then they sort of tailed off a little bit, they were struggling, you know, Ky was trying to find his way and now they're the exciting team. Up to on Cleveland, I mean, you got to believe that Lebron is going to step up his game with a little home cooking. But let's assume for a second that they get by Cleveland (laughs) which will be a huge task. I mean, I don't think there's anybody in the NBA who can stop Kevin Durant, but I'd love to see Marcus Smart try. >> So two things in that scenario. One is that, who needs Kyrie Irving more right now, Cleveland or Boston, right? (laughter) Which is amazing, can you imagine saying that a couple months ago? It blows my mind. And then, for me, it's a revamping of the NBA, right? If you get the Celtics versus the Warriors in that style of play, I mean, it's definitely, it's changed the whole game, right? Shooting guards, ballers, I think it's fantastic to see, you know, a whole new style of play in the NBA. >> It's so exciting to see the Celtics back in. >> Team basketball, defense, passing, all of it, it's great. >> And ESPN is losing their minds, they don't know what to do. Stephen A Smith doesn't know what to say. >> Patrick: ESPN Live. >> He's actually pissed I think, yeah. (laughter) So, now, Stu, you're a Yankees fan, of course, and you know my line on the Yankees. Stu's kind of a weekend Yankees fan. My line on the Yankees is, that sucks you can't beat us in April. (laughs) Here it is in May. >> Dave, I'm just quiet around you, because I know where my paycheck comes from. >> I appreciate that perspective, Stu, okay. >> Patriots win, we're in agreement. >> Think about all these renewed rivalries, it's great. Celtics, Sixers, Red Sox, Yankees, it's unbelievable. >> And like I said, San Francisco-- >> Patrick: Phillies! >> And the Pats. >> The Pats! >> Well Patrick, always a pleasure seeing you, thanks for making time out of your busy schedule. >> Yeah, absolutely, it was great. >> For coming on theCUBE. Alright, keep it right there everybody, we'll be back with our next guest, right after this brief break. You're watching theCUBE, Live from Veeamon 2018. (upbeat electronic music)

>> Voiceover: Live from Chicago, Illinois it's The Cube, covering Veeamon 2018. Brought to you by Veeam. >> Welcome back to the Windy City everybody. You are watching The Cube, the leader in live tech coverage. My name is Dave Vellante and I'm here with Stu Miniman. Veeamon 2018 #Veeamon The husband of Mrs Philbin is here. (chuckling) The Astros, Warriors, Eagles, and whoever wins the Stanley Cup this year fan, Bill Philbin, Senior Vice President and Global Chief Technology Officer for Hybrid IT, for Hewlett Packard Enterprises, good friend of The Cube. >> Hello everybody. >> Awesome seeing you again, thanks for coming on. >> Every time you introduce me, it's something new, so I can't wait to share that with Mrs Philbin. >> Well she, like Stu says, that's where you go, for the information. >> That's exactly right, that's exactly right. >> So, another great keynote here, you stole the show last year, you're vying for top spot, top gun this year, so how do you feel? >> It was good, I said I think, the funny thing about Veeamon Hewlett Packard is, we have so much in common. The agenda is the same. It was almost hard to actually to create a unique slide set that was different from what they said, versus what we said. I think after 32 years, Mrs Philbin and I, we're not quite finishing each other's sentences, but I know what she wants me to do, without her telling me at this point. So, Veeam and HP have that kind of relationship. >> Well Veeam has a tendency and a way of inserting itself, into an ecosystem and it's certainly embedded itself into the HPE ecosystem. >> And I think that's, that's a lot of credit to Peter Mackay you know, he's joined now, what is it, 23, 24 months ago, and he's sort of brought that partner-centric viewpoint, grew the team around us. And they're really a, who we sort of pull out for other partners, say hey look, this is what these guys are doing, this is what you need to do to be successful, in a sprawling enterprise like Hewllet Packard, so, he's done a really, really good job I think. >> So give us an update on that sprawling enterprise. We make Hybrid IT simple, is your mantra. How is that going, you know where does your group fit in? >> So our couple of quarters into the new tenure of Antonio Anieri being the CEO, the engineer turned CEO. >> Got to make you happy? >> Absolutely makes me, and the thousands and thousands of engineers happy. Great first quarter, and we'll see what happens, sort of in quarter number, in quarter number two. There's a lot of focus within the company, now that we have divested ourselves of things that were less important. Focus on enterprise infrastructure, customers, around a couple of key concepts. Certainly we're pushing synergy, sort of, the synergy platform. Second pushing and talk about one sphere or hybrid IT, hybrid cloud offering, three, you know, we've had a lot of success in storage. Certainly the Nimble acquisition, which is hard to believe, was almost consummated, (mumbles) it's almost a year ago right? Its a year ago, actually in May. I just got off a holiday with Mrs Philbin, last year on the holiday, I was closing the Nimble transaction in the middle of the Indian Ocean, talking WIFI on the boat, via Google Voice to San Jose. There is nowhere now. >> Always on. >> Always on, exactly right. Talk about hyper availability. And so, I think we're pushing on, pushing on that, and then we've got, we renamed our services offering to Point Next offering, focusing around transformation et cetera so, I think the business is really clicking on all cylinders, and I think, you know, focus is actually quite interesting. We often focus on what we don't have, versus only focusing on what remains. And just like any start up, you focus on the first market segment, second market segment. Hewlett Packard is focused on enterprise infrastructure as a profession, I think that's, I think that's bode well for us. >> Yep, Bill one of the things we were talking about on the intro is, Veeam getting much deeper with their partners. One of the things we highlighted is, there's a couple of partners added in the price book. >> And what does that mean, from a go to market standpoint, that it's a little bit more seamless, you know, not invented by HP, but part of the whole solution. >> Well I said to Peter Mackay on stage, 18 months ago we did this transaction, which at the time was considered pretty revolutionary, given the fact that we had other things in the portfolio at that point that did data protection. And it's what, first and foremost, it's what our customers wanted and asked for. They wanted a more seamless transaction between the two organizations so we went ahead and did that. Second, there's always been a strong engineering relationship between the two companies, but if it's still talking to two partners at the end of the day, it doesn't matter. You know, an integrated offering, on the same price list, on the same PO, supported by both companies together, is really what customers are looking for. And as I said in the keynote, you know, we closed the single biggest transaction that, in Veeam's history, which was a Hewlett Packard and Veeam win for every seven dollars, I think it was, of Hewlett Packard, that we closed, a dollar of that was Veeam. And that's, sort of, the power of the partnership, demonstrated by the two companies coming together. And it's hard to believe, again, it's 18 months, you know, that's a pretty impressive track record. >> You're obviously not sharing, you know, any names on that deal. But can you share with us, any other information that's public, why did you win? Maybe you can share, you know, the type of win that it was. Why HPE and Veeam? >> Yeah, the customer, obviously, is not prepared to have us, sort of, talk about their name, for now anyway. But, essentially, what the customer was looking for was, a complete sort of back up and recovery solution that covered, not only traditional virtualized environments, but also gave them outlet for the cloud. More and more customers, as I said in my keynote, it's more than keeping a copy everyday between your primary and your secondary. You need a third copy, because guess what happens? And I said this last year, if you remember. Boo boos happen quickly right? (laughing) Something changed and deleted here, actually fast replicates here, you need a third copy to be complete, they were looking for that. And third, they were looking for, sort of, they were already an HP customer, they were looking for solution offering that would amortize their existing real estate, that was the three reasons. >> And, but your third copy model is different than having to build a third data center. It's a much more space-efficient, modern approach. >> So together with Veeam and our, (mumbles) our displace back up target, roughly last year, we announced this capability called Cloudbank which allows you to keep a copy in any S3 compliant interface. So it can be in on prem, or on open stack, implementation or it can be on any of the web services providers and it's done in an efficient, data protected deetip capability so, it's an efficient way to keep a copy of, what we call hail Mary data. Right, you hope you never need it right? An efficient way to sort of do that. >> Okay, one of the big topics of discussion these days is ransomware, what are your thoughts on ransomware? >> Well it's funny, you know, I always thought ransomware was something that you wore when you were dropping off the money, right. (laughing) Apparently it means something more than that. >> Dave: Yeah, I think so. (voice drowned out by crosstalk) >> Last year at Discover, we had a customer who was a meat processor, a meat processor. Now you can imagine what kind of customers you're going to ask, a customer that does meat processing. But it actually infected their servers that actually helped them run their meat processing capability. Now that is not a business that you would expect someone will call you up and say, "Hi we have your data, give us $1000 and we'll give you your data back.". It's a meat processing company, or a gourmet food provider is a more typical way they would present it. But if they're, if that's happening to that sort of line of business, imagine what's happening to power plants, you know et cetera et cetera. So the ramsomware stuff is really real. So if you think about HP, we developed the most secure server with our Gen10 platform. We actually guarantee and actually look at changes being made in a firmer environment. We cover them for you automatically. We've got the Veeam sort of capability to recover, and I think we were talking about it in the preview. We used to measure availability in how many nines you had. Now, unavailability is the only thing that customers care about and if you go to a customer and say, "It's okay, you're only .0001 of the rest of our customers" that's not a good story right? It's not about when something happens, or if something happens, it's when something's going to happen and the power of Veeam and HP together, prevents, bad things from happening right? >> Bill, it's interesting, I know in my career, it's been a significant shift. It used to be, let's pardon it as much as possible, tool, redundancy, hardware focused. But cover eventually breaks. >> Bill: It does. >> Today, it's a soft world, it's distributed architecture, look at things like your synergy solution, it's much more modular and componentized. Maybe you can talk a little bit about some of those shifts, as to how we build availability architecturally, like the HPE and Veeam meet the new needs of what we need, as opposed to kind of the old way of doing things. >> It's actually interesting, so a lot of customers are looking at software-fine infrastructures as a way of amortizing their existing infrastructure. And it's actually cost savings. But I equate it to sort of, making a decision to buy Mrs Philbin a chest of drawers at a furniture store or, going to Home Depot, buying the wood, milling the wood and actually creating something myself. Now the good news about software fine infrastructure is, it's just like me making Mrs Philbin a chest of drawers, is at the end, it's mine. Right, I got it to my specifications. The bad news about software fine infrastructure is when there's a problem, Mrs Philbin isn't calling the furniture store, she's calling me right? And so, when you think about software fine infrastructure, is, you have to imagine two things. One is, are you prepared to write an application that is ready to resolve the kinds of data resiliency and data availability, capabilities that the hardware manufacturers have built into systems for 20 years. Now if you've got a unique system, that does one thing, it's probably easy. Imagine hosting 160 different applications, like that was mentioned on the stage today. And creating resiliency for that. So my conversation with customers about software define is, please go in wide open. Number two, please think about resiliency, not at the storage level, but also think about resiliency at the application level. You have got to provide for a time when something is not as available as you think it is. And make those steps consciously. >> Let me ask you, from a technologist's perspective. >> Bill: Yeah. >> If I understand you correctly, so if I'm Oracle, I can do things in the application, >> Bill: Sure. >> To accomplish that outcome, but you're not an application ISD, so you have to do things in your architecture, and assume that any application that's running can recover. >> Bill: Correct. >> Is that right? So can you help us understand that, how you approach that problem architecturally? >> Well I think you know, we haven't talked about big data, or Infosite, but if you think about it. The way to best protect a customer's infrastructure, is to actually monitor their infrastructure, compare their results to what others are receiving, recommend ways that they can actually tune up their infrastructure and eventually, act on their behalf, to make the changes to their infrastructure, so they're always protected. As I said in my keynote, it's getting to a point where you actually can't do all that stuff yourself. So the key, one of the key strategies around Hewlett Packard Enterprises, is to take the infrastructure capability which is basically machine learning, artificial intelligence, sort of capability, and deliver a system which helps customers be always on. That's the first thing that I think you can do. And you're going to be really good about making sure that I get out. >> I am, we got like two minutes, and I want to use every second I have of you, so. Okay, so I want to follow up on the Infosite, you've brought that out beyond just Nimble. >> Bill: That's right. >> I think you've brought it to Three Par and you're pushing it out throughout your entire portfolio right? >> So for customers who are going to see us at Discover, we've got some interesting things we'll talk about there. But effectively we've rolled it out across the portfolio, because, as I said in my keynote, it's not really easy to predict, why availability is an issue. Is it a host issue, is it a software issue, is it a networking issue, is it a storage issue. What Infosite eventually provides is a set of hooks that allow you to meter and measure and manage your entire infrastructure, and get it to a point where it's actually subscribing to the best practice of the organization or application provider. >> One of the things you hear a lot about is, how do you take back up and recovery, which is largely an insurance business, and create value out of it? GDPR is this sort of heinous you know, set of regulations, everybody's got to pay attention to it. Are we finally seeing the day, where the backup data protection, governance approach, can actually bring value to the rest of the organization? Or is it still just insurance, deal with it? >> So I think, I would say two things Dave, one is if you look at what Nimble's just announced with their secondary flasher right? Where we can keep a very cost effective copy of your data on an array, that looks like the array you copied it from. That can be used for dev ops, it can be used in the event of a failure et cetera. I think we're starting to see technologies available now where that, that happens. Second, the ability to make a copy of that in the cloud, and actually bring up your most critical applications in the cloud by using a Synergy, or a Onesphere capability, so you can actually keep a hot stand by, I think we're starting to see that. I think, you know backup is moving from a, cost of doing business, to something that's vital, vital in the enterprise but always remember that, the best time to think about a backup, is before you need it. The worst time to think about a backup, is when you need it. >> Yeah, and I think you'd agree that data protection as a topic, is moving up in the minds of CXO and boards of directors and the like. >> Yeah, and it's unfortunate that some of these bad actors that are out there, right, the CNN's and, this has caught more than just the IT community press, it's actually caught the business press. And I think it's drawing a lot more attention around the reason why people should think about availability. >> Right, you got to go, you got to catch a plane. But just give a little tease for HPE Discover. It's coming up in June, it's a great conference that you guys have every year, twice a year you do this US one, and one in Europe, give us a tease for June. >> I would say, this is going to be the most exciting HPE Discover on record. And this is Antonio's opportunity to sort of, talk to you about what's headed, what's headed forward for Hewlett Packard so, be there or be square. >> Okay. >> Dating myself. >> Okay we're square. Alright thank you Bill, for coming on The Cube and we'll be right back after this short break. We're at Veeamon 2018 in Chicago. Thanks for watching. (electronic music)

>> Announcer: Live, from Las Vegas, It's the cube, covering VMWorld 2017, brought to you by VMWare and its ecosystem partners. (techno music) >> Welcome back, I'm Stu Miniman, joined by Keith Townsend, welcome back to the program, a multi-time cube-along. Patrick Osborne, who's the senior director of product management with Hewlett-Packard Enterprise. Patrick, great to see you. >> Great to be back, thanks for having me. >> Yeah, uh, what number VMWorld is this for you? >> Oh gosh, uh, it's, it's, I can't count it at this point, too many. >> Yeah, it's like I've been working with VMWare for 15 years, it's the eighth one of these for me. Keith, I know you've been few, so what's your take so far, the show? Big ecosystem, a lot of news going on. What do you think so far? >> Yeah so I mean, from my perspective, VMWare has been such a huge ecosystem partner for HP for forever, y'know? It covers everything from, y'know, from our perspective on the compute networking, storage side, certainly services. So um, y'know for me it's always good to catch up with, y'know, old colleagues and kind of understand what's going on in the industry. A lot of talk today around private cloud, multi-cloud, y'know, what people are doing around automation. Y'know certainly a lot of things around software defined, software defined networks, software defined storage, so uh, a lot of good topics, um, it's always good to see the customers here too, as well. >> Yeah uh, the joke a few years ago was VMWorld became storage world, so uh, y'know, in your space of availability, and data protection, y'know, and I walk through the show floor, HP's got a big boot but I see a lot of companies that are attacking different angles of that. You brought up the cloud being a, y'know increasing piece. >> What's top of mind, of a customers that are coming to you, and what sort of things are you working on these days? >> Yeah so, um, from our perspective on the storage and data management landscape, I think that you see a lot of vendors in the space right now. Some of them are certainly part of our ecosystem, you see folks like Veem and, y'know, other folks that we partner with out on the floor. There is an increased look from the customer perspective on availability. It's, the segment's changing, the requirements are changing. I don't think people are tackling availability in the same way as sort of traditional data protection architectures. So we see customers, especially when they're looking for certain inflection points in their infrastructure, like, I'm going to go to all flash, or y'know, deploy some new storage. They're definitely rethinking the way they're doing availability from an application standpoint. So we're uh, we're trying to y'know, meet those market demands through our own technologies, as well as having a pretty robust ecosystem here that we barter with. >> So a lot of talk, not just at this show, but at previous HP shows about hybrid IT. It's obvious the data center isn't going anywhere for the majority of customers, but we have the complexity of cloud. How does cloud impact, practically, data protection, data availability. >> Yeah so uh, from our perspective it's certainly an opportunity, right, to help customers out. We have a, we've, y'know, from a strategy standpoint, we've put a couple solutions and things into market that we hope address some of these cases. So y'know, when you talk about Nimble cloud volumes, right, being able to have your data in a co-located facility very close to, y'know, public clouds so you can do some compute arbitrage, and ultimately be able to, y'know, control your data. And then we do other things for example, Store one's cloud bay, being able to back up to the cloud, which is a pretty established use case. I think from our perspective, helping customers make that move in terms of, um, y'know, you can set up the data path, and make the bits move, but when we talk to mid-size, especially large enterprise customers, the governance around that, I think is really important, And the user experience, to make sure that what you're sending out to the cloud is certainly protected, it's audited. We've even had customers coming to us, we just had a big customer that you've had on here before, 21st Century Fox, right, a big customer of HPE talk last week about, I want to back up workloads that are in the cloud to the cloud, right? There's not a lot of great tools for that today, and I want that audited, and I want y'know, a paper trail around that for their own internal uh, capabilities. So I think there's a lot of opportunities in the space. It's very nascent. >> Yeah, Patrick I think you're bringing up a great point. We were talking a lot at this show, kind of the multi-cloud world. I've got my maturation of what's happening in my data center, deploying a bunch of sass on one or multiple public clouds. And there's certain things like security or y'know, data protection availability. I need to get my arms around all of it. HPE's looking to fill some of those y'know, gaps, and help customers, y'know. What's the overriding story in y'know how you're not one of the big three public cloud providers, but why does HP have a position in this discussion, and maybe you can help us kind of round out that story a little. >> Yeah so, we have a position in that discussion because of, y'know, we are very large infrastructure provider to a lot of customers, right? In terms of providing on-prem, hybrid IT experiences. From a public cloud perspective, we're very sort of, public in our strategy of not having a public cloud within HPE, but we certainly partner with folks and we've got a very long standing partnership with Microsoft. We come to market with things like Azure Stack, and we have a number of integrations we do with things like Nimble, and um, in that area we resell y'know, Azure, from an HPE standpoint. So we're really looking to provide y'know, a full experience for customers in that space. And y'know, the other day, like you said before, people are still going to buy and deploy in their data center, right? But, they want to buy and deploy in their data center with the thought that um, y'know multi-cloud is going to be a possibility, and they want to have the infrastructure that's going to allow them to do that. So what we're doing is incrementally, in our product portfolio, I care about storage, right, is to be able to provide those experiences. I buy a 3PAR all flash, I want to be able to tier that or back that up to the cloud. I have Nimble, right, I want to be able to replicate that to a co-located provider that provides Nimble cloud volumes, and then assign compute to and from the cloud, right. So a bunch of things that we want to get customers ready for, and make it easier for them. >> So can we talk a little bit more about that Nimble story? Y'know, the 3PAR, we understand it. It is, covers a great depth of use cases in enterprise, where does Nimble fit in the strategy? Yeah, um so we're super excited to have Nimble in the portfolio for three reasons. They have a great team, number one, they bring a really good go to market engine, and the sales team, y'know, with that, and they have great products. So from the product angle, which we're very interested in, is a couple different areas. Infosite, predictive analytics, right, is something that we want to apply to our entire product line, hands down. So the things that they do around VM Vision, right, with um, with VMWare, we want to apply that to 3PAR, right, and essentially give the people the simplicity that it takes to manage a very large virtualized environment. They have a lot of things that they've done that are very unique. I mentioned Nimble cloud volumes before, that's a use case for primary storage, but could easily be extended to backup, data protection, object storage, right, as not only just a technology provider, but as a way to price it, consume that type of storage. And then they also bring a number of things around, in the availability space, which we find is very interesting. Secondary flash, right. So you think, all flash as high performance maybe a higher cost, right? But certainly is going to help you with that application acceleration. They just, we just released the Nimble secondary flash array for workloads that are tech-dev cloned workloads, y'know, things you can automate, and that you need some performance on it. But it's more performance than your backup storage, not as much cost and not as much storage as your primary. So think about secondary flash as flash for secondary workloads. Very cost optimized. More performance, maybe a little bit more expensive than your backup tier. So there's a lot of things that they bring to the table from a technology standpoint that we want to take advantage of. >> Patrick, HPE's got a broad portfolio, but still to meet all the needs of the customers, especially in like, the divergals niche ecosystem, acquires a lot of partnerships. Where are the, kind of the deep integrations that your team's been doing, where are the places where customers have been asking you to kind of pull things in, and any solutions that you want to highlight specifically? Yeah so, um, I think more and more what you start to see is portfolio vendors, like HPE, they bring great technology that we build organically, or that we go and acquire. I think one of the big things that customers rely on us as well, that doesn't get a lot of air play is that we bring in a vetted ecosystem to a customer. Y'know, so the whole kit and caboodle, from compute networking storage, services to bring that all together, and an ecosystem that's supported, and we basically HPE stamp of quality and support behind that so, y'know when it comes to VMWare, obviously this has a huge ecosystem. So we do a lot with, y'know, innovating with VMWare. I mentioned Nimble, VM Vision, things we're doing there to make hypervisor environments quite a bit more easy to implement for customers from a storage angle. You talked to Jessie from the SimpliVity standpoint. We do a lot around data protection, with certain things, with 3PAR, Nimble. So there's a lot on integrations that we do in, for VMWare specifically, and then in other areas of the portfolio, especially automation, right. So we've got fully supported solutions, I think we've got one of the best docker implementations for storage with Nimble. Huge partnerships with Puppet and Kubernetes, and Sheb, all these great things around the automation side. So when we go out and partner with somebody, we're going to go provide a whole solution, a complete solution to a customer that's vetted, RA's, supported, so from my perspective, partnering is actually one of the most important things we do at HPE. >> So, from a customer's perspective, HPE hugely important, key industry player for most CIO's, you guys are still very very trusted in that area, you have a huge ecosystem, huge portfolio, what should CIO's, CTO's, high level architects be focused on at this point? What's like, the consistent theme that you're telling your customers you really need to pay atttention to this part of the industry? >> So, from a corporate perspective, we've got a couple of things that we're working on, right. So we talk about hybrid IT, right. And that sort of transformation from, I would call it established methodologies of application and development to y'know, sort of new style. And we're definitely helping customers along that journey, and a lot of it is around bringing this vetted portfolio and ecosystem along with the services. So the services I think is one thing that, um, y'know HP is very unique in the fact that we've got a very very broad set of services, in terms of, y'know, we can go and help CIO's and CFO's and CTO's understand y'know, where are you along that journey, right. All the way to implementation, I think one of the things that we're going to be very very focused on over the next couple of years, is providing everything in our portfolio as consumption based pricing, right. So all the things that you like about the cloud, right, the things that are implied there are elasticity, right, agility, consumption based. You're moving from a cap-ex to an op-ex model, making that more predictable. So we want to be able to model that, and provide those experiences. Definitely one of the things that we're really focused on in HPE is IOT in the edge, right, so, that's a very fundamental part of our business that we're going to be looking at to make a lot of investments in big data. Certainly, some of the assets are on Edgeline and Aruba, and all the implications around security for that. So those are some of the key areas that we are, y'know, we talk to CIO's every day about. >> Patrick, from an availability and data protection standpoint, what does something like IOT mean? I have to think, we're not going to store all the data, lots of it's just going to be processed at the edge, we're talking a lot about edge so, I'm curious, what are the things that you're looking at, maybe start there, I think about like, containers, or a lot of times going to be something that is going to fit at that kind, maybe even serverless at the edge, so y'know, I seem to think back, y'know, when we talk about like oh, we're going to go to object store and therefore the way I do everything changes. So y'know, are we going to, couple years from now, is this going to be a very different discussion? >> Well I think, yeah, it's an interesting topic, right. When you talk about that volume of data, right, and the fact that it's very dispersed, right, being able to do, apply traditional availability techniques to something like that is um, it's difficult, it's next to impossible, right? So, um, y'know what we see is customers buying, in these type of ecosystems, you're not buying along horizontal lines, right. You're not buying a specific server vendor, or a networking vendor, or y'know, a storage vendor, and then going best of breed, trying to integrate that yourself. A lot of these things are vertically oriented now in terms of you're buying a stack, y'know, from a portfolio vendor or going to a service, y'know, an integrator. And I think with he volume of data that it takes to, to do some of these implementations, so we have very large customers, autonomous cars, y'know big, big implementations of Hadoop and analytics. I mean a lot of that stuff is built in. I think one thing you're starting to see is that, those types of deployments are outstripping or outpacing, y'know running away from the support of the traditional IT folks. So we have customers that are operationalizing, very large Hadoop customers for example, who don't have methodologies for backing that up and replicate it, so I think there's a lot of technology that needs to catch up with some of these implementations, we see it all the time. So, y'know, I think there's different techniques from a technology standpoint. Y'know, when we try to approach these from a customer perspective, we want to provide a full stack for edge, IOT, um, and but, from a data protection availability standpoint, that's a difficult problem to solve. >> Stu: Well Patrick Osborne, always a pleasure to catch up with you, thanks for all the updates here. Looking forward to tracking some of those, y'know, emerging areas that you were just-- >> Yeah, I look forward to talking to you guys in Discover in Madrid. >> Absolutely, so The Cube, so many events, check out siliconangle.tv, or actually thecube.net is where you're going to be able to see everything. Nice shorter url, you're going to keep the branding of The Cube, for Keith Townsend, I'm Stu Miniman, stay with us, watch more coverage here still to come. VM World 2017, you're watching The Cube. (techno music)

>> Commentator: Live from New Orleans. It's theCUBE. Covering VeeamON 2017. Brought to you by Veeam >> We're back, this is theCUBE. The leader in live tech coverage. We're here at VeeamON 2017 day two. Bill Philbin is here, Senior Vice President at Hewlett Packard Enterprise. And runs the storage business for HPE. Great to see you again my friend. >> Hey Dave, it's always good to see you. >> Really? >> Always look so fantastic. >> Thank you, where's the tie? >> There's no tie. >> I will say, you guys, those of you who didn't see it, Bill nailed the Keynote this morning. It was great, it was funny, self deprecating, and genuine. And essentially you resonated with me, 'cause I got four kids and you were talking about how you call your kids, you either get voicemail, or their voicemails full. >> Bill: That's right. >> You text them, at least your kids text you back. I got to Snapchat my kids to get a hold of them. So you got to get into Snapchat >> They have told me that texting and Facebook is so, you know, 20th century Dad. >> You email 'em, right? >> Yeah. >> You get some important email, you send it to 'em. Like, email? What are you kiddin' me? >> No you know it's not in >> Our lives are challenged, but nonetheless, you got some of your challenges of your own. You're running a big business now at HPE. You guys are making some serious moves in the marketplace. Give us the update on the HPE storage business. >> Yeah, so thanks Dave. >> Every squirrel finds a nut in the forest eventually, so I just had a pretty good day today. But, that was because we have a great story, frankly, to tell. And I think you know, as I was saying before, the storage business is changing. Rather dramatically. Now is it, is it self inflicted? Or is it you know, just a a course correction. I actually believe it's self inflicted in a sense that we've taken many of the capabilities that were previously on high end systems. And we brought 'em to the mid range. We've thinned it, we've de-uped it, we've compressed it, We've got it on SSDs. And so the whole business model, now is different than it was five years ago. Before you sold somebody an appliance, you chocked it full of spinning media. They ran out of IOPS, you sold another appliance, you chocked it full. It was a pretty good business model. That's how I kept Mrs. Philbin in the lifestyle she's grown accustomed, right? Well, now, you don't chock it full of spinning media, you chock it full of SSDs. IOPS are always on guarantee. And then you take all that compaction technology, and that has actually forced a fundamental change, I think, in the storage landscape. That we, including Hewlett Packard have inflicted upon ourselves. I think we take a look at that, and need to take a look at the storage landscape, the number of vendors that are out there. You know, I think that is changing as well, which is, you know, part of the reason why we decided to get into acquiring companies like SimpliVity and Nimble. >> Dave: And you've got a knife fight going on in All-Flash. I got to say, you know, what HPE did with 3PAR surprised me and probably a lot of people. >> Bill: Mhm. >> Most people didn't think you could quote, unquote "bolt on" flash into that architecture. Obviously it wasn't a bolt on, you guys have been very successful. When you talk to your competitors, certainly when you talk to customers they love it. When you talk to competitors they say "yeah, we can compete with company A, B, and C. It's 3PAR that we have trouble with. Because it's simple and it works. >> And some times enduring technologies actually extend beyond, you know, single generations, right? And so, we certainly have heard the story about the new versus the old, and being old maybe this is my perspective. But, you know, enduring technologies actually can transition across architectural and technology boundaries. And that's exactly what we've done, exactly what we've done with 3PAR. >> Now, having said that, you guys have been, I mean you saw 3PAR initially with you know, spinning, and hybrid. Took off, you know, justified the acquisition, made the transition to All-Flash >> Bill: Yeah. >> I've called it many times, 3PAR's the gift that keeps on giving. So how many times can you go to that well, right? So you guys have made some moves here. Not the least of which was Nimble, want to talk about that. And SimpliVity, so. Even though SimpliVity's not under your organization, you have an affinity there. Talk about those two moves and where they fit in the portfolio. >> So let's just start with the 3PAR, just the 3PAR comment just for a quick second. The pure plays versus sort of the, what they call the stayed play. So, it's hard to imagine that 3PAR as a stayed play technology, right? I don't agree with that statement. But that, the reason I don't agree with it is, we're actually going faster than the pure plays in the All-Flash market. We have more revenue than they do, so. I think it's comfortable for people to sort of set one technology off over another but the fact of the matter is, that we're growing faster. The other thing about the market is it generally gravitates toward technologies that are unique in purpose regardless of what they cost. Because the customer demands it. And All-Flash started with guys like Fusion-io and Violin Memory, and all of those guys, right? Eventually what happens though, is customers tire of those additional assets in their data center, right? One more thing they don't want in their data centers, is one more thing in their data center. And that's when the big guys eventually sort of overtake that position. So, I think what you're going to, you're starting to see in the storage landscape is compression at a company level, right? You're seeing the Neutonics and Pures out there. You're seeing then the next tier of companies trying to sort of, you know, make the big break. And the last time a company made a big break in the storage business, that's still independent today. It's a billion dollars of revenue or more, was? >> Dave: NetApp. >> NetApp. Because storage looks like it's easy goin' in but it's not easy when you think about bare metal and databases and transactional systems, and highly available. It's not that easy, and so, that's why a company like a Nimble, who has great technology, Infosite, the CASL file system, great people. To order scale that business, profitably, and have to go to market reach, it needs to align themselves with a company like Hewlett Packard. So, we're really, really excited about Nimble joining the family for sure. That now enables us to sort of take the flash portfolio further across the across the landscape. On SimpliVity, I think the way that you should think about our strategy at Hewlett Packard is it's all about choice. So, you're a customer who wants to sort of, you know, put assets in your data center, and have assets in Microsoft as your cloud we should enable that. If you think Software Defined's the right way to go, we should enable that. You have an appliance customer, we should enable that. If you want to co-locate applications in a simple easy to use interface with storage, we have that, that's SimpliVity. But that choice shouldn't come with operational complexity. So, one of the things that we have to do, and I was talking about this at the Keynote, is we have to somewhat hide ourselves behind the application and make it easier for customers to consume. Because that is what the web offers them. We ought to be able to federate the data, so that you can actually move your data around when your requirements change, or you've got to burst. And the administration ought to be really, really simple. So, our strategy around technologies like SimpliVity, or Nimble, or 3PAR, or you know, MSA, XP, is all around giving customers choice without the operational complexity of having lots of things to manage. >> Bill, I guess I'm trying to, for our audience, try to maybe compare and contrast a little bit >> Yeah. >> Against you know, what was formerly EMC, now Dell EMC, >> Uh-huh. >> Which the knock on them for many years has been, they've got so many products, they overlap. We've covered for many years how, you know, if I have 3PAR and some of the other HP, HPE storage products, I can move between them, is that the difference issues thing So even though if you have Nimble, plus SimpliVity, plus you know, 3PAR. >> So, three is less than seven. Let's just start with that answer. And maybe it's not seven anymore, you know, I've lost track. Second, I think if you're really talking about provisioning storage and networking compute from an application layer, really what you've doing is you want to have a conversation about the service level underneath that the storage provides. Maybe for certain applications you're okay with thinly provisioned or not thinly provisioned et cetera. So, one answer is, a lot of those capabilities are actually hidden by the application layer. However, we know that the thing that doesn't move all that well is data. And data has gravity. So, being able to move data in addition to moving your compute, is one of the reasons that they differentiation for us over the other guys. >> Dave: But, you know, let me just stay on that for a second Stu. We're all storage guys or quasi-storage guys. >> Bill: He's only a quasi-storage guy? >> He's really a networking guy. >> I worked at a storage company for ten years but, yeah. >> You're a newbie then. >> But if you look at history, it is shown that you actually have to have multiple architectures to increase the size of your TM, and penetrate the marketplace. I mean, NetApp is the exception that proves the rule. I mean, they could only go so far with WAFL. I mean you were there, and you know, And so even now NetApp makes a move for solid fire. Obviously EMC has been very successful with, I think it's 17, so not 7. But it actually works, and so, that dogma of oh we have to have one architecture is never proven to really be a winning strategy. >> And frankly, it is really hard to actually stress an architecture from top to bottom, right? So I don't disagree with the comment you made, but that is effectively, however the same problem with the storage startups today is if they do a single thing, only support virtualized environments, whatever it is, right. Only support VDI. The breath is what customers are looking for. And if you don't have the breath, or you're forced to go get the breath, by adding bolt-ons to try and get the breath. It's just going to make it very, very difficult for them to survive in the new world order. Both acquisitions SimpliVity and Nimble were great for the company. >> Bill, can you tie together for us HPE and Veeam, how those fit together. One of the big themes we've been covering is the extension of Veeam started very, very much virtualized now they're physical they're talking about all the cloud solutions. Expect there's a lot of fit between your strategies. >> There is, for years we've have a very, very strong technical partnership between the Veeam engineering team and the StoreOnce engineering team. I think, you know, that is like the basis of trust, I think is the best way to think about it. We've both sort of got competing road maps on occasion, but at the end of the day it's all about, sort of, what's best for the customer. Number one is technical people, second is we have the same view of the market. And I talked about this, this morning, which is, this highly available, always on sort of environment is the same story that we tell. So the messages are aligned. The third is that it's complimentary, we have our own sort of data protection technology with data protector. We have our own sort of snapshot management capability with RMC. The question is, how do we sort of you know, protect the entire environment. And Veeam is a critical asset in that. It's a great business partnership, great technology partnership. The fact that our folks kind of resell Veeam, has just launched the business forward . >> Well, the move to sell the software business to Micro Focus has just opened up new partnership opportunities for you guys. >> Bill: In regards to that we still have a very, very strong partnership with the software guys. You know there's, the largest connect that we have on a backup product today, is get a protector. So I don't expect that to change. But there are people who prefer, you know, to use Veeam and we have to support that. >> Dave: Yeah, but still I mean, if you got the your colleagues in data protector and you're out aggressively partnering with Veeam and it's part of HPE. Maybe you get an email or, you get a "hey, come on Bill, you know, give me a break here." And now I feel like you know, the gloves are off you can do independent of all that internal stuff, plumbing. It's what's right for the customer. Maybe I'm overstating that. >> Perhaps a bit, because we'll still have equity ownership in the new company. Again with all the sort of connect I have, I think that regardless of where the paychecks come from if you will, we have to have a really strong partnership with them. And it's no different than, you know, we also have a partnership with Symantec, I mean we have other partnerships that customers just have made a preference around. That we're not going to convince them, you know, to do something different. Therefore, we've got to have a strong partnership. >> Dave: Alright, so we're going to be at Discover, theCUBE will be there for, been there many years now. I think this is our seventh Discover. >> You've been there as many years as I have, >> So what are we looking forward to there. >> So I think there's a bunch of announcements, we've highlighted one of them today around the secondary flash array for Nimble. There's some new 3PAR announcements that are certainly coming. The Synergy guys are going to certainly have a thing or two to say, I'm thinking. Based on the strength of that platform, that platform's really starting to take off. And so I think you're going to see that, I think this will probably be really the first Discover where, you know, you'll start to see, and maybe Madrid Discover will be different. But you'll start to see the new Hewlett Packard Enterprise. We keep focusing on things that we've spin-merged out, but the thing I think we need to focus on is the fact that we're, this is like a Phoenix of a new company, right? Solely focused on enterprise infrastructure and the customer needs. We've rebranded the TS business and PointNext, which is all around transformation and technology services, so. It's almost like we're starting the clock over again. For the HP employees, we're not changing your service levels. But, for almost everything else, we're rebuilding a brand new company. And that is what Meg and the board are doing, it's really exciting. >> Well, it's true the last couple of Discovers there was a distraction with the split, there was a distraction with two spin-merges. But you've now seen the M&A activity focus on areas like storage, areas like converge, type or converge. >> I always tell this story 'cause you guys like my analogies which is, you know, when you've got lots of kids in your family, my family, my oldest I've got lots of pictures of. The middle kid, you know, some pictures of. The third one virtually no pictures of, right? 'Cause you go from man to man defense, to zone defense. Same is true with a CEO. When you've got seven or eight different things to manage, you're focused, it needs to be spread over seven different or eight things. Now, Meg is actually, got fewer children to manage if you roll the analogy out a little bit. We got a lot of her attention, and a lot of focus. And that I think is really, really important. >> Dave: And now all the pictures are digital, they're in the cloud, they're protected. >> Bill: Yeah. >> Bill, great to see you. >> Good to see you guys. >> Thanks very much for coming on theCUBE, we'll see you in Vegas. >> Bill: You bet. >> Alright, keep it right there everybody, we'll be back with our next guest right after this short break.