>> Announcer: Live from Las Vegas it's theCUBE covering VMWorld 2017. Brought to you by VMware and its ecosystem partners. >> Okay, welcome back everyone. Live CUBE coverage here at VMWorld 2017. Three days, we're on our third day of VMWorld, always a great tradition, our eighth year. I'm John Furrier with theCUBE co-hosted by Dave Vellante of Wikibon and our next guest is Keegan Riley, vice president and general manager of North American storage at HP Enterprise. Welcome to theCUBE. >> Thank you, thanks for having me. >> Thanks for coming on, love the pin, as always wearin' that with flair. Love the logo, always comment on that when I, first I was skeptical on it, but now I love it, but, HP doing great in storage with acquisitions of SimpliVity and Nimble where you had a good run there. >> Keegan: Absolutely. >> We just had a former HPE entrepreneur now on doing a storage startup, so we're familiar with he HPE storage. Good story. What's the update now, you got Discover in the books, now you got the Madrid coming up event. Software to find storage that pony's going to run for a while. What's the update? >> Yeah, so appreciate the time, appreciate you having me on. You know, the way that we're thinking about HPE's storage it's interesting, it's the company is so different, and mentioned to you guys when we were talking before that I actually left HP to come to Nimble, so in some ways I'm approaching the gold pin for a 10 year anniversary at HP. But the-- >> And they retro that so you get that grand floated in. >> Oh, absolutely, absolutely, vacation time carries over it's beautiful. But the HPE storage that I'm now leading is in some ways very different from the HP storage that I left sic years ago and the vision behind HPE's storage is well aligned with the overall vision of Hewlett-Packard Enterprise, which is we make hybrid IT simple, we power the intelligent edge, and we deliver the services to empower organizations to do this. And the things that we were thinking about at Nimble and the things that we're thinking about as kind of a part of HPE are well aligned with this. So, our belief is everyone at this conference cares about whether it's software defined, whether it's hybrid converge, whether it's all flash so on and so forth, but in the real world what clients tend to care about is kind of their experience and we've seen this really fundamental shift in how consumers think about interacting with IT in general. The example I always give is you know I've been in sales my whole career, I've traveled a lot and historically 15 years ago when I would go to a new city, you know, I would land and I would jump on a airport shuttle to go rent a car and then I would pull out a Thomas Guide and I would go to cell C3 and map out my route to the client and things like that. And so I just expected that if I had a meeting at 2:00 p.m., I needed to land at 10:00 a.m., to make my way to, that was just my experience. Cut to today, you know, I land and I immediately pull out my iPhone and hail an Uber and you know reserve an Airbnb when I get there and I, for a 2:00 p.m. meeting I can land at 1:15 and I know Waze is going to route me around traffic to get there. So, my experience as a consumer has fundamentally changed and that's true of IT organizations and consumers within those organizations. So, IT departments have to adapt to that, right? And so a kind of powering this hybrid IT experience and servicing clients that expect immediacy is what we're all about. >> Okay, so I love that analogy. In fact when we were at HP Discover we kind of had this conversation, so as you hailed that Uber, IT wants self driving storage. >> Keegan: Absolutely. >> So, bring that, tie that back, things that we talk a lot about in kind of a colorful joking way, but that is the automation goal of storage is to be available. We talk about edge, unstructured data, moving compute to the edge, it's nuanced now, storage and compute all this where they go through software. Self driving storage means something, and it's kind of a joke on one hand, but what does it actually mean for an IT guy? >> No, that's a great question and this is exactly the way that we think about it. An the self driving car analogy is a really powerful one, right? And so the way we think about this, we're delivering a predictive cloud platform overall and notice that's not a predictive cloud storage conversation and it's a big part of why it made a ton of sense for Nimble storage to become a part of HPE. We brought to bear a product called InfoSight that you might be familiar with. The idea behind InfoSight is in a cloud connected world the client should never know about what's going on in their infrastructure than we do. So, we view every system as being at the edge of our network and for about seven years now we've been collecting a massive amount of information about infrastructure, about 70 million telemetry points per day per system that's coming back to us. So, we have a massive anonymized dataset about infrastructure. So, we've been collecting all of the sensor data in the same way that say Uber or Tesla has been collecting sensor data from cars, right, and the next step kind of the next wave of innovation, if you will, is, okay it's great that you've collected this sensor data, now what do you do with it? Right? And so we're starting to think about how do you put actuators in place so that you can have an actual self managing data center. How can you apply a machine learning and global kind of corelation in a way that actually applies artificial intelligence to the data center and makes it truly touchless and self managing and self healing and so on and so forth. >> So, that vision alone is when, well, I'm sure when you pitched that to Meg, she was like,"Okay, that sounds good, "let's buy the company." But as well, there was another factor, which was the success that Nimble was having. A major shift in the storage market and you can see it walking around here is that over the last five, seven years there's been a shift from the storage specialist expert at managing LUNs and deploying and tuning, to the sort of generalist because people realize, look, there's no competitive advantage. So, talk about that and how the person to whom you've sold and your career has changed. >> Yeah, no, absolutely, it's a great point. And I think it's in a lot of ways it goes to, you're right, obviously Meg and Antonio saw a lot of value in Nimble Storage. The value that we saw as Nimble Storage is as a standalone storage company with kind of one product to sell. You know there's a saying in sales that if you're a hammer everything looks like a nail, right. And so, it's really cool that we could go get on a whiteboard and explain why the Castle file system is revolutionary and delivers superior IOPs and so on and so forth, but the conversation is shifting to more of a solutions conversation. It moves to how do I deliver actual value and how do I help organizations drive revenue and help them distinguish themselves from their competitors leveraging digital transformation. So, being a part of a company that has a wide portfolio and applying a solutions sales approach it's game changing, right. Our ability to go in and say, "I don't want to tell you about the Nimble OS, "I want to hear from you what your challenges are "and then I'm going to come back to you with a proposal "to help you solve those challenges." It's exciting for our sales teams, frankly, because it changes our conversations that makes us more consultative. >> Alright, talk about the some of the-- >> Value conversations. >> Talk about the sales engagement dynamic with the buyer of storage, especially you mentioned in the old days, now new days. A new dynamic's emerging we've identified on theCUBE past couple days and I'll just kind of lay it out for you and I want you to get a reaction. I'm the storage buyer of old, now I'm the modern guy, I got to know all the ins and outs of speeds and feeds against all the competitors, but now there's a new overlay on top of which is a broader picture across the organization that has compute, that has edge, so I feel more, not deluded from storage, but more holistic around other things, so I have to balance both worlds. I got to balance the, I got to know and nail the storage equation. >> Yeah. >> Okay, at well as know the connection points with how it all works, kind of almost as an OS. How do you engage in that conversation? 'Cause it's hard, right? 'Cause storage you go right into the weeds, speeds and feeds under the hood, see our numbers, we're great, we do all this stuff. But now you got to say wait a minute, but in a VM environment it's this, in a cloud it's like this and there's a little bit of bigger picture, HCI or whatever that is. How do you deal with that? >> No, absolutely, and I think that's well said. I mean, I think the storage market historically has always been sort of, alright, do you want Granny Smith apples or red delicious apples? It always sort of looked the same and it was just about I can deliver x number of IOPs and it became a speeds and feeds conversation. Today, it's not just not apples to apples, it's like you prefer apples, pineapples, or vacuum cleaners. Like, there's so many different ways to solve these challenges and so you have to take the conversation to a higher level, right. It has to be a conversation about how do you deliver value to businesses? And I think, I hear-- >> It gets confusing to the buyers, too, because they're being bombarded with a lot of fudd and they still got to check the boxes on all the under the hood stuff, the engine's got to work. >> And they come to VMWorld and every year there's 92 new companies that haven't heard of before that are pitching them on, hey, I solve your problems. I think what I'm hearing from clients a lot is they don't necessarily want to think about the storage, they don't want to think about do I provision RAID 10 or RAID five and do I manage this aggregate in this way or that way, they don't want to think about, right. So, I think this is why you're seeing the success of these next generation platforms that are radically simple to implement, right, and in some ways at Nimble, wen we were talking to some of these clients to have sort of a legacy approach to storage where you got like a primary LUN administrator, there's nothing wrong with that job, it's a great job and I have friends who do that job, but a lot of companies are now shifting to more of a generalist, I manage applications and I manage you know-- >> John: You manage a dashboard console. >> Exactly, yeah, so you have to make it simple and you have to make it you don't have to think about those things anymore. >> So, in thinking about your relationship over the years with VMware, as HP, you are part of the cartel I call it, the inner circle, you got all the APIs early, all the, you know, the CDKs or SDKs early. You know, you were one of the few. You, of course EMC, NetApp, all the big storage players, couple of IBM, couple others. Okay, and then you go to Nimble, you're a little guy, and it's like c'mon hey let's partner! Okay and so much has changed now that you're back at HPE, how has that, how is it VMware evolved from a ecosystem partner standpoint and then specifically where you are today with HPE? >> That's a great question and I remember the early days at Nimble when you know we were knocking on the door and they were like, "Who are you again? "Nimble who?" And we're really proud of sort of the reputation that we've earned inside of VMware, they're a great partner and they've built such a massive ecosystem, and I mean this show is incredible, right. They're such a core part of our business. At Nimble I feel like we earned sort of a seat at that table in some ways through technology differentiation and just grit and hustle, right. We kind of edged our way into those conversations. >> Dave: Performance. >> And performance. And we started to get interesting to them from a strategic perspective as just Nimble Storage. Now, as a part of HPE, HPE was, and in some ways as a part of HPE you're like, "Oh, that was cute." We thought we were strategic to VMware, now we actually are very strategic to VMware and the things that we're doing with them. From an innovation perspective it's like just throwing fuel on the fire, right. So, we're doubling down on some of the things we're doing around like VM Vision and InfoSight, our partnership with Visa and on ProLiant servers, things like that, it's a great partnership. And I think the things that VMware's announced this week are really exciting. >> Thank you, great to see you, and great to have you on theCUBE. >> Thank you so much. >> I'll give you the last word. What's coming up for you guys and HP storage as the vice president general manager, you're out there pounding the pavement, what should customers look for from you guys? >> No, I appreciate that. There's a couple things. So, first and foremost are R&D budget just got a lot bigger specifically around InfoSight. So, you'll see InfoSight come to other HPE products, 3PAR, ProLiant servers so on and so forth and InfoSight will become a much more interesting cloud based management tool for proactive wellness in the infrastructure. Second, you'll see us double down on our channel, right. So, the channel Nimble's always 100% channel, SimpliVity was 100% channel, HPE Storage is going to get very serious about embracing the channel. And third, we're going to ensure that the client experience remains top notch. The NPS score of 85 that Nimble delivered we're really proud of that and we're going to make sure we don't mess that up for our clients. >> You know it's so funny, just an observation, but I worked at HP for nine years in the late '80s, early '90s and then I watched and been covering theCUBE for over seven years now, storage is always like the power engine of HPE and no matter what's happening it comes back down to storage, I mean, the earnings, the results, the client engagements, storage has moved from this corner kind of function to really strategic. And it continues that way. Congratulations. >> Thank you so much. Appreciate the time. >> Alright, it's theCUBE. Coming up Pat Gelsinger on theCUBE at one o'clock. Stay with us. Got all the great guests and alumni and also executives from VMware coming on theCUBE. I'm John Furrier, Dave Vellante. We'll be right back with more live coverage after this short break.