>> Announcer: Live from Madrid, Spain. It's the Cube. Covering HPE Discover Madrid 2017, brought to you by Hewlett Packard Enterprise. >> Welcome back to Madrid everybody. This is the Cube, the leader in live tech coverage, and this is day two of HPE Discover 2017. I'm Dave Vellante with my co-host, Peter Burris, Alain Andreoli is here. He's the Senior Vice President and general manager of the hybrid IT group at HPE. Great to see you again. >> Great to see you David, great to see you Peter. >> So, a lot of good energy here, the story Alain is coming together. >> Alain: Yes. >> We've seen it over the last five years but really fine-tuned the organization and seems like things are going well. >> We have more clarity on our strategy than I've ever seen in a company, and this was not easy to do because the market is changing so fast. We addressing $120 billion market in hybrid IT, we lead the market in compute, we lead the market in storage, we lead the market with private cloud, we have invented composable, we are ramping up our Harper converge offering, and now on top of the infrastructure, we building these layers of one sphere, which is managing a multi-cloud environment for the data, and we are adjusting our services to become advisory and consumption models. This is having such an impact on our customers, 74 percent of our customers are going for hybrid IT journey. So we have organized ourselves to make this journey to be basically the partner of choice for our customers as they go through that. >> I mean so cloud of the last five, seven years, cloud and open-source software have really disrupted our industry. You've had to respond to that, and basically bringing cloud-like operating models to your customers. >> Alain: Yes. >> How have you done that, how do you rate your progress and where are you to date in that regard? >> So the first decision we had to make is are we a neutral party to our customers? (laughing) >> Dave: Yeah. >> We need to redo it. (laughing) >> They're getting you back, right? So, I don't know if you can see that, alright? Alain came by on his scooter, here we go, let's catch this. Here we go, this is called payback. (laughing) During Dr. Tom's interview, Alain came by with his scooter. (laughing) >> I will get you, I will get you for this. (laughing) >> It's great fun on the Cube. >> We can kid, that's alright. >> That's good. >> So the decision we had to make is are we the partner for our customers to go to the cloud or are we saying on PRIM is better? >> Dave: Yeah. >> And we 'vedecided to be this partner. Because we believe there is value for everyone and we believe it is not a one-way street. And we see actually that 32 percent of the customers who have moved work loads to the cloud are bringing these work loads back on PRIM. So we had to advise them. We helped them go through this journey, we really mean it, we helped them to go on Amazon, we helped them to go on Azure, we helped them to go on Google, and we helped them make it work, and this is why it's a service-led journey. The problem if you go on the public cloud is that we don't really know how much it is going to cost you, and you don't really have a single pane of glass to have all your data being managed across, what is now an ecosystem. We enabled them to do that. And the market we are directly addressing on PRIM is not shrinking. We still see huge pockets of growth, in flash storage, in HPC, you've seen the results we have in HPC. In Mission-Critical X86, in Hyperconvert, so we are basically moving from the one-size fits all type of organization of freeing X86 and start off storage, to become a company that offers value to customers, in specialized pools of compute, of storage, of networking, and offering them the end to end journey across the different stack. What I think is going to make a huge difference, if you look at the five-year horizon, is the growth of The Edge and the fact that 70 percent of the data are going to come from The Edge, and then you will really see the power of our strategy of private IT which goes from The Edge, to the core, to the cloud, because we will be able to enable our customers to have their data moving seamlessly across this journey. And we have exactly organized the company that way. >> One of the obvious use cases from what I like to call machine intelligence or artificial intelligence is really infusing artificial intelligence into infrastructure for predictive analytics and predictive maintenance, IT operations management, Infocyte, you got through an acquisition of Nimble and have been impressed with the pace at which you pushed that throughout the portfolio, I wondered if you could address that. >> We've been almost surprised. We looked at, we wanted to become the flash company because we saw that the market over three years, would completely move to flash. And when there is such a pendulum shift, you want to be at the forefront. >> Dave: Right. >> So we looked at all these companies who were having very strong positions on flash and Nimble intrigued us because they had, by far, when we talked to their customers, the highest customer satisfaction, I think it was something like 87 percent. >> The NPS is off the charts. >> The NPS is off the charts, right? And then we peeled the onion and we saw Infocyte, which was almost enough to start south because it was not part of our list, right? Initially of our list of this is how we are gonna select a company we want to acquire, and when we got into Infocyte, how it works, how we can actually port easily these to three power and then to SimpliVity and then to the rest of the portfolio we felt this is the crown jewel that is going to be the foundation of us making >> Dave: And not just the storage portfolio. >> No, end to end so we're gonna do these for everything, now we cannot do it in one day. The priority was to give a seamless experience to customers going three power or Nimble, so we've done that very quickly. We acquired the company six months ago and it's already there for three power. Next one will be Simplivity, very soon in a few weeks, then we go to the whole computes platform as well, then finally to networking. I hope, it's not a commitment, but I hope that by the end of next year, and under a year, we will be done for the whole infrastructure portfolio. >> And explain the benefit to customers. >> And then the benefit is that you basically have, you eliminate the need for level one and level two support because it's proactively, now you have to be wanting to have your device calling home, right? Because otherwise, if you want your device to be in the data center and insulated from communicating with the network effect, that is not going to work, so but assuming you want your device to be connected centrally, so that it can be monitored centrally the artificial intelligence that is embedded in Infocyte is basically going to monitor the behavior of your device compared with hundreds of thousands of other ones and therefore anything that is deviant will be flagged as a potential problem and resolved before you even know about it. That's one. So when you end up having a problem eventually, which is becoming very, very rare, then you directly call the level three engineer who is an expert and who has, on the screen, the behavior of your device for the last month compared to others, and the resolution is in less than a minute. So it's a revolution in the way to do service. >> So, one of the things that we've observed as we've talked to customers is that the characteristics of the problems that they're now trying to solve have real world elements, and that's really what The Edge is about in many respects. For the first 50 years of IT, we were doing accounting, and HR, and supply chain, and we were able to define what the data models looked like, we could therefore say, the data's going to be here, the processing is going to be here, we could build data centers. Now as you said, 70 percent of the data is going to be coming from The Edge. It's not clear, necessarily where the best place to process that data is. Where's the compute going to be? How's it going to integrate with people? In many respects, hybrid IT is about diminishing the degree to which infrastructure dictates the way the problem gets solved. Would you agree with that? It's kind of like where does, let the data reside where it needs to reside, and make sure that the business is a natural infrastructure that reflects and corresponds to the work that needs to get done. >> I totally agree with your problem statement, and the way you position the question. In terms of semantics, I would just say we need to make infrastructure invisible. It's still there because it's all running on infrastructure. The iPhone is infrastructure, your PC is infrastructure, your camera is infrastructure, it's all there. >> A C.I.O said to me not too long ago... >> But you know what? We are having this interview, we are not thinking about what makes it happen. >> Peter: Right, right, right. >> Our business is to talk and communicate right now, this all has got to be seamless and that's how we need to make IT, seamless. >> I had a conversation with a C.I.O. >> Invisible. >> Yeah, who said that the value of my infrastructure is inversely proportional to the degree to which anybody knows anything about it. So, is that kind of what the HP promise is, is we're gonna let the data and the work loads define where the infrastructure goes and ensure we have those options? >> It's exactly right and the vehicle to do that, we call it autonomous data centers. Your phone is a data center. Your data center is a data center. Your off-frame cloud is a data center that you are subcontracting, right? So we want all of these to be autonomous, in terms of self-healing and everything else, and then the intelligence of where these data are being moved and how you use what and when is the single pane of glass that we are developing around one sphere. And how to get the customers to move their work loads and their business around that is what we do with point next with services. This is our strategy. >> So let me break that down a little bit. So, we've got devices that are powerful enough that we could put new types of control, new types of work loads there if we wanted to, we've got now the ability to package infrastructure, and have a single pane of glass, and have a common management framework. >> Right. >> But when you say the autonomous data center, it's we have a common business approach thinking about policy, thinking about value, thinking about how we're gonna do things, and we can put that into this entire vision, and let it actually execute how that manifests itself from a business standpoint. >> Exactly right. >> Have I got that right? >> It's exactly right. I love the way you put it. That's exactly what we are trying to do. it's not going to be done in one day, but that is our strategy, and we have organized, once again, the whole company around it, to execute this strategy and to make it happen for our customers. >> So if we think about what an HPE customer is gonna look like in, you know a really good HPE customer in 2023, what.. >> Alain: That's a long time. >> That's, five years, but I'm giving you that much run way, because you're right, it's not there yet and if it's too ambitious then so be it, but how is a business person going to think differently about working, about the role that IT is going to play in the business, and what it means to have a great partnership with a company like HP? >> Yeah, so we are basically, our motto is One size doesn't fit all, so we are first trying to understand the business of the customer, and then we will apply solutions to enhance this business, or to empower this business, right? So, we have the biggest brace of infrastructure that you can think of, think about this infrastructure becoming self-healing, but this infrastructure is more and more specialized, there is HPC, there is Mission-Critical, we just found Superdome flex, or SAP, we have all these specializations that, for those customers to optimize their business outcome. Then we have the single pane of glass that allows everything to seamlessly operate the data around, and then our point-neck services are going to work with the customers to architect their IT model in a way that their work loads are optimized. And one of the key is the right mix. The right mix of what you do yourself, what you got from multi-cloud, how much do you pay for it, how much do you anticipate that you're gonna pay for it, do you want this to be CAPEX, do you want this to be OPEX? And then how do you manage The Edge, and with Aruba and with Edgeline, and then with all your IT platforms that can manage the data across The Edge. We have the capability to also let the customer decide, do I want a lot of analytics and decisions to be made at The Edge, in my devices, and this is highly valuable depending on what customer business model we are talking about, or, do I want all the data from the analog world through the censors to come straight back to the ranch. All of these decisions, we are gonna have platforms to allow customers to make these decisions, to decide, kind of templates if you want, this is how I want it to run, and to be executed, and then to be automatically, autonomously operated. That's our vision of how we can help our customers moving forward. >> Last question, so the attendees of Discover, your customers, when they go back and he or she talks to their boss, what do you want them to say about Discover 2018? >> I invested two or three days of my time to come to HPE Discover. It was really exciting because I felt that it's like a new company, it's the company I know. I know they are customer first and customer last, and they are the ones who help me when I have a problem, whether they created it or not, they are here to help me. This is not going away, but they are taking us to the new world. They are gonna help us to build our hybrid IT model, and I think we need to trust them to have a seat at the table when we make these decisions, boss. >> Intimacy, innovation... >> Alain: Yeah, innovation. >> Trust. >> HPE's no longer wandering in the desert. (laughing) >> Alain Andreoli thanks so much for coming on the Cube, it is always a pleasure. >> It was a pleasure. Take care, thanks Peter. >> Keep it right there, everybody, Peter and I will be back with our next guest, right after this short break, we're live from Madrid. You're watching the Cube. (techno music)