>> Narrator: Live from Madrid, Spain it's theCube, covering HPE Discover Madrid 2017. Brought to you by Hewlitt Packard Enterprise. >> Welcome back to Madrid everybody. This is theCube, the leader in live tech coverage. My name is Dave Vellante and I'm here with my co-host for the week, Peter Burris, otherwise known as Mr. Universe. This is HPE Discover Madrid 2017. Flynn Maloy is here as the Vice President of Marketing the HP Point Next. >> Hi guys. >> And John Treadway is here as the Senior Vice President of Strategy and Portfolio at Cloud Technology Partners, an HPE company. Gentlemen, great to see you again. Welcome to theCube. >> Great to see you. >> It's been a good week. We were just talking about the clarity that's coming to light with HPE, the portfolio, some of the cool acquisitions. You and I, Flynn, were at this event last year in London. You had the Cheshire Cat smile on your face. You said something big is coming. I can't really tell you about it partly because I can't tell you about it. The other part is we're still shaping it. Then Point Next came out of it. How are you feeling? Give us the update. >> It's been a really exciting year for services. This time last year we knew as Antonio announced, we're going to be bringing our services together after we announced that we're spinning out our outsourcing business. We're bringing technology services at the time forward. We had a new brand coming. We purchased Cloud Cruiser in February so we're investing in the business. We also invested in services back in the engine room all year long to really build up to our announcement this week with Green Lake which takes our consumption services to the next level. Then of course in September we continue to invest and acquire Cloud Technology Partners and by the way brought on our new leadership team with Ana Pinczuk and Parvesh Sethi. For us here at HP it's really been a banner year for services. It's really been transformative for the company and we're excited to lead it going into FY '18. >> John, Cloud Technology Partners specializing, deep technology expertise. You've got an affinity for AWS, you've got a bunch of guys that reinvent this week in close partnership with them. Interesting acquisition from your perspective coming into HPE. What's it been like? What has HP brought you and what have you brought HP? >> That's a fantastic question. We have really found that everything about this experience has exceeded our expectations across the board. When you go into these things you're kind of hoping for the best outcome, which is we're here because we want to be able to grow our business and scale it and HP gives us that scale. We also think that we have a lot of value to add to the credibility around public cloud and the capabilities we bring. You hope that those things turn out to be true. The level of engagement that we're getting across the business with the sellers, with the customers, with the partners is way beyond expectations. I like to say that we're about six months ahead of where we thought we'd be in terms of integration, in terms of capability and expertise. Really bringing that public cloud expertise, not just to AWS, we do a lot of Azure work, we do a lot of Google work as well, really does allow the HPE teams to be able to go into their clients and have a new conversation that they couldn't have a year ago. >> What is that new conversation? >> The new conversation is really about, and we like to use the term "the right mix." I.T. is not just one mode. You're gonna have internal I.T., you're gonna have private clouds. Public cloud is a reality. AWS is the fastest growing company in tech history ever. If you think about that it's a reality for our clients, HPE clients, that public cloud is there. That new capability that we could bring, that credibility is that we have done this for the last seven years with large enterprises across all sorts of industries and domains: Toko, healthcare, financial services in particular. We bring that to the table, combine that with the scale and operational capability of HPE and now we have something that's actually pretty special. >> Just to add, it is about the customers at the end of the day. It's about where do those workloads want to land? Public cloud, private cloud, traditional, those are all tools in your toolbox. What customers want to know is what is the right mix? There are workloads that are ideal for going to the public cloud. There are workloads that are ideal for staying on prem. Finding that right mix, especially by bringing in the capabilities of what needs to go to public cloud that really rounds out our portfolio for hybrid I.T. >> I'm starting to buy the story. The upstarts, the fastest growing company in the world would say old guard trying to hang onto the past. I like the way you framed it as look, we know our customers want to go to the cloud. They want certain workloads to be on prem. We want them to succeed. We're open, we're giving them choice. Maybe two years ago it sounded like bromide. But you're actually putting it into action acquiring a company like CTP. It's interesting what you were saying, John, about well no not just AWS, it's Google, it's Azure. You've got independent perspective on what should go where or on prem. >> We always have so even as a company that derived most of our revenue from public cloud over the last few years, we've never, ever been the company that said everything should go to public cloud. Toss it all, go to Amazon, toss it all, go to Azure. Never been our perspective. We've had methodology for looking through the application portfolio and helping determine where things should go. Very often a large percentage of the portfolio we say it's good where it is, don't move it. Don't move it right away. >> But in the past that's where it ended. You said okay, hey, go figure out, go talk to HPE. >> That's actually a funny thing because we've had this conversation. Literally when we would say okay we'll take care of this part for the public cloud, but you're on your own for the private cloud stuff, in the past HP would do the reverse. We'll help you with the private cloud stuff, and we think this could go to public cloud. But you're kind of on your own with that. Not that there wasn't any capability, but it wasn't really well developed. Now we can say this should go to private cloud, this should go to public cloud and guess what? We can do both. >> Dave: So now you've got a lean-in strategy. >> Absolutely right, as John said the funnels and the response from our customers have been outstanding. As you can imagine, Mike, all of our top customers are saying fantastic, come talk to us, come talk to us. They're having to prioritize where they go over the last few months. We are well ahead of where we were. >> We strongly believe over the years that the goal is not to bring your business to the cloud. It's to bring the cloud to your business. That ultimately means that public cloud will be a subset of the total although Amazon's done a wonderful job of putting forward the new mental model for the future of computing. Can you guys reliably through things like Green Lake and other, can you present yourselves as a cloud company that just doesn't have a public cloud component? >> Let me approach the response to that question in a slightly different way. When you look at our strategy around making hybrid I.T. simple it's not necessarily which cloud is the right cloud? It's not really about that. It's about where should the workloads land? We do believe that the pragmatic answer is you need to be a little bit above all of those choices. They're all in the toolbox. If you look at, for example, our announcement with One Sphere this week that's a perfect example of what customers are asking the industry to do which is to look across all of it. The reality is it's hybrid, it's multi-cloud and speaking at that length. >> But you're saying it's a super set of tools that each are chosen based on the characteristics of workloads, data, whatever it might be, that's right. So John look, as human beings we all get good at stuff. We say I know that person I can stereotype him. I can stereotype that. What's the euristic that your team is using to very quickly look at a workload? Give our audience, our clients a clue here so that they can walk away a little bit and say well that workload naturally probably is going to go here. And that workload's naturally going to go there. What's it like 30 second where you're able to generally get it right 80% of the time? >> It really comes down to a set of factors, right? One factor is just technical fit. Will it work at all? We can knock out a lot of workloads because they're on old Unix or just kind of generally the technical fit isn't there, right? Second thing is from a business case. Does it make sense? Is there gonna be any operational saving against the cost of doing the migration? Because migrating something isn't free right? It's never free. Third is what is the security and governance constraint within which I'm living? If I have a data residency requirement in a country and there's no hyper-scale public cloud presence in that country then that workload needs to stay in that country, right? It's those types of high-level factors we can very quickly go from the list of here's your entire list down to already these are candidates for further evaluation. Then we start to get into sort of deeper analysis. But the top level screen can happen very, very quickly. >> You do that across the, you take an application view, obviously. A workload view. Then how do avoid sort of boiling the ocean? Or do you boil the ocean? You have tools to help do that. >> We do, I mean we've invested a lot in IP, both service IP and software IP in both Point Next also comes with some strong IP in this as well that we've been able to merge in with. Our application assessment methodology is backed by a tool called Aura. Aura is a tool for taking that data, collecting it, and help providing individualization in reporting and decisioning at the high level on these items. Then every application that looks like a great candidate for something that I'm gonna invest in migration, we need to do a deeper analysis. Because it isn't lifting and shifting. It doesn't work for 90% of the applications, or 80%, or 70. It's certainly not anywhere near 50% of the applications. They require a little bit of work, sometimes a lot of work, to be able to have operational scale in a public cloud environment because they're expecting a certain performance and operational characteristic of their internal infrastructure and it's not there. It's a different model in the public cloud. >> A lot of organizations like yours would have a challenge presenting that to a customer because they can't get the attention of the senior leaders. How is it that you guys are able to do that? You were talking I think, off-camera, talking about 20-plus years of experience on average for each of your professionals. Is that one of the secrets to how you've succeeded? >> This is a big thing and why this integration's working so well is that the people, the early team all the way through today of CTP are all seasoned I.T. professionals. We're not kids straight out of school that have only known how to do I.T. in an Amazon way. We have CIOs of banks that are in our executive team, or in our architecture team that have that empathy and understanding of what it means to be in the shoes. Not having this arrogant approach of everything must be a certain way because that's what we believe. That doesn't work. The clients are all different. Every application is a snowflake and needs to be treated as such, needs to be treated like an individual, like a human. You want to be treated like an individual, not like -- >> Stalker! (laughing) >> Gezunheit. (laughing) >> Okay, so now the challenge is how you scale that. How you replicate that globally and scale it and get the word out. Talk about that challenge. >> That's right and one of the big things we're really excited to see is the merger of the IP that comes from CTP along with everything that we have inside of Point Next and then rolling that out to the 5,000 plus consultants that we've got inside of HP and our partners. That's really where we're expecting a lot of the magic to come from is once we really expose the integrated set of what those capabilities are we think, and Ana has said it on stage. We had heard from a couple of analysts that we believe that together we have the largest cloud advisory in the industry today. >> It was interesting we actually had, we've had challenges in the past where we've gone into clients and were starting to get into some pretty serious level of work. We were a younger company, didn't have the scale, and scope, and capability of HPE. Now we're being brought in to these opportunities and the clients are saying HP, you're right here. We can do that. We have the scale to now start doing the larger transformation programs and projects with these clients that we didn't have before. Now we're being invited back in, right? In addition to that being invited in because now we have the cloud competency that we can bring to the table. >> You know what, I kind of want to go back to the point you made earlier about how it's all cloud. That resonates with me. I think it is all cloud depending on where you want to land the various pieces. If that's what you want to call that umbrella I think it makes a ton of sense. You know, a lot of what we've announced this week with Green Lake is about trying to bridge the benefits gap with public cloud as the benchmark for the experience today for what needs to stay on prem. When you sit down and for all those reasons you outlined, whether it's ready, whether it isn't ready, where the data has to sit, or whether or not. There's gonna be x-workloads that need to stay on prem. We've been working hard in the engine room to really build out an experience that can feel to the customer a lot like what you get from the public cloud. That's gonna continue to be an investment area for us. >> If the goal is success for the business then you don't measure success by whether you got to Amazon. >> That's correct. >> The goal of success is the business. You measure success by whether or not the business successfully adopts the technology where the data requires. What's interesting about the change we're experiencing is in many respects for the first time the way of thinking about problems in this industry is going through a radical transformation. Let's credit AWS for catalyzing a lot of that change. >> Absolutely, setting that benchmark. I mean it really is a catalyst. >> But you look at this show, HP has adopted the thought process, it's adopted it. It's no longer in our position to say fine, you want to think this way, we'll help. >> Imagine this, as One Sphere comes up and as we really can manage multi-clouds and as we'll eventually be able to move workloads between the various clouds, manage the whole estate, view the whole estate and everything under it whether it's off-prem or on-prem is all consumption. I mean, how does that change central I.T.? Central I.T. radically changes. If everything's consumed, wherever it is and you've got a visibility to the whole estate and you can move stuff depending on what the right mix is, that's a fundamental change and we're not there yet as an industry. But that's a fundamental change to the role of Central I.T. >> But your CIOs are thinking along those lines. We can verify they are thinking along those lines. >> Again the strategy's coming into focus for me personally. I think us generally. We talked to Ana about services-led, outcome-led. And if it's big chewy outcome like kind of IBM talks well you've got partners to help you do that. Deloitte, we had PWC on. They're big, world-class organizations with deep expertise in retail and manufacturing and oil and gas. You're happy to work with those guys. If it is service-led or outcome-led you can make money whether you're going to Amazon, whether you're staying on prem, whether you're doing some kind of hybrid in between and you're happy to do that as an agnostic, independent player. Now yeah, of course you'd like to sell HP hardware and software, why not? >> I think that's really an important point. When it comes to the infrastructure itself we do believe we have the best infrastructure in the industry, but we play well with others and we always said HPE plays well with others. When it comes to the app layer we are app agnostic. A lot of our biggest competitors are not. When you go out and talk to CIOs today that's really, this is my app, this is my baby. This is the one that I want. They're not really looking for alternatives for that in many cases. When you're thinking agnostic that's really where we think partner, being agnostic, working with all the ad vendors, working with all the SIs, we think that's where the future-- >> And it's a key thing. You guys are younger, but you remember Unix is snake oil. I mean-- >> Designing is a Russian Trump. >> Unix is snake oil and then two years later it's like here our Unix. >> Flynn: It's the best thing ever. >> So you now are in a position to say great, wherever you wanna go we'll take you there. That's powerful because it can be genuine and it can be lucrative. >> What's unlocking here is the ability to actually execute a digital transformation program within the enterprise. One of the big things the public cloud providers brought to us and that HPE's now bringing in through the internal infrastructure is that agility and speed of innovation of the users. Their ability to actually get things done very quickly and reduce the cycle time of innovation. That frankly has always been the core benefit of the public cloud model, that pay-as-you-go, start with what you need, use the platform services as they grow. That model has been there since the beginning and it's over 11 years of AWS at this point. Now with enterprise technology adopting similar models of pay for it when you consume it, we'll provision it in advance, we'll get things going for you, we're giving that model. It's about unlocking the ability for the enterprise to do innovation at scale. >> I wanna end if I can on met Jonathan Buma last night, J.P., J.B., sorry. You're J.T. >> It's confusing. >> But one of the things I learned, a small organization, 200-250 people roughly when you got acquired, but you've got this thing called Doppler, right? Is that what it's called, Doppler? Explain that, explain the thought leadership angles that you guys have. >> Actually from the very beginning. >> The marketing team loves this, it's fantastic. >> So follow up with how. >> From day one there's a few things that we said were core principles, the way that we were going to grow and run the business. I'll talk about one other thing first which was that we were gonna be technology-enabled, technology-enabled services company. That we were gonna invest in IP both at the service level but as the technology level to accelerate the delivery of what we do. The second thing as a core principle is that we were going to lead through thought leadership. So we have been the most prolific producers of independent cloud content as a services firm bar none. Yeah, there's newspapers, magazines, analyst firms like yourself producing a lot of content. The stuff that we're producing is based on direct experience of implementing these solutions in the cloud with our clients so we can bring best practices. We're not talking about our services. We're talking about what is the best practice for any enterprise that wants to get to the cloud. How do you do security? How do you do organizational change? That has a very large following of Doppler both online where we have an email newsletter. But we also do printed publication of our quarterly Dopplers that goes out to a lot of our clients, the CIOs and key partners. That kind of thought leadership has really set us apart from all of the rest of the, even the born in cloud consultancies who never put that investment in. >> Flynn, you're a content guy. >> Absolutely. >> So you've got to really appreciate this. >> That's a dream, it's an absolute dream. One of the things, another proof point as a way to end, services first strategy is what we're doing in the market community at HP more money, energy, content, time is going into how we're talking, thought leadership and services than anything else in the company. We've got not just branding for Point Next and Green Lake, but bringing Doppler forward, bringing those great case studies forward. Putting that kind of content at the tip of the HPE sphere. It's not something you've seen from our company in the past. I think keep your eyes out over the next year. We'll have this conversation in six months and you'll see a lot more from us on that topic. >> Great stuff, congratulations on the process, the exit, the future. Good luck, exciting. >> Thanks guys. >> Really appreciate it. Keep it right there everybody, we'll be back right after this short break. Dave Vallente for Peter Burris from HPE Discover Madrid. This is theCube. (upbeat instrumental music)