(upbeat music) >> Hi, everyone. Welcome to theCUBE's coverage of International Women's Day. I'm John Furrier, host of theCUBE. As part of International Women's Day, we're featuring some of the leading women in business technology from developer to all types of titles and to the executive level. And one topic that's really important is called Getting a Seat at the Table, board makeup, having representation at corporate boards, private and public companies. It's been a big push. And former technology operating executive and corporate board member, she's a board machine Sue Barsamian, formerly with HPE, Hewlett Packard. Sue, great to see you. CUBE alumni, distinguished CUBE alumni. Thank you for coming on. >> Yes, I'm very proud of my CUBE alumni title. >> I'm sure it opens a lot of doors for you. (Sue laughing) We're psyched to have you on. This is a really important topic, and I want to get into the whole, as women advance up, and they're sitting on the boards, they can implement policy and there's governance. Obviously public companies have very strict oversight, and not strict, but like formal. Private boards have to operate, be nimble. They don't have to share all their results. But still, boards play an important role in the success of scaled up companies. So super important, that representation there is key. >> Yes. >> I want to get into that, but first, before we get started, how did you get into tech? How did it all start for you? >> Yeah, long time ago, I was an electrical engineering major. Came out in 1981 when, you know, opportunities for engineering, if you were kind, I went to Kansas State as an undergrad, and basically in those days you went to Texas and did semiconductors. You went to Atlanta and did communication satellites. You went to Boston or you went to Silicon Valley. And for me, that wasn't too hard a choice. I ended up going west and really, I guess what, embarked on a 40 year career in Silicon Valley and absolutely loved it. Largely software, but some time on the hardware side. Started out in networking, but largely software. And then, you know, four years ago transitioned to my next chapter, which is the corporate board director. And again, focused on technology software and cybersecurity boards. >> For the folks watching, we'll cut through another segment we can probably do about your operating career, but you rose through the ranks and became a senior operating executive at the biggest companies in the world. Hewlett Packard Enterprise, Hewlett Packard Enterprise and others. Very great career, okay. And so now you're kind of like, put that on pause, and you're moving on to the next chapter, which is being a board director. What inspired you to be a board director for multiple public companies and multiple private companies? Well, how many companies are you on? But what's the inspiration? What's the inspiration? First tell me how many board ships you're on, board seats you're on, and then what inspired you to become a board director? >> Yeah, so I'm on three public, and you are limited in terms of the number of publics that you can do to four. So I'm on three public, and I'm on four private from a tech perspective. And those range from, you know, a $4 billion in revenue public company down to a 35 person private company. So I've got the whole range. >> So you're like freelancing, I mean, what is it like? It's a full-time job, obviously. It's a lot of work involved. >> Yeah, yeah, it's. >> John: Why are you doing it? >> Well, you know, so I retired from being an operating executive after 37 years. And, but I loved, I mean, it's tough, right? It's tough these days, particularly with all the pressures out there in the market, not to mention the pandemic, et cetera. But I loved it. I loved working. I loved having a career, and I was ready to back off on, I would say the stresses of quarterly results and the stresses of international travel. You have so much of it. But I wasn't ready to back off from being involved and engaged and continuing to learn new things. I think this is why you come to tech, and for me, why I went to the valley to begin with was really that energy and that excitement, and it's like it's constantly reinventing itself. And I felt like that wasn't over for me. And I thought because I hadn't done boards before I retired from operating roles, I thought, you know, that would fill the bill. And it's honestly, it has exceeded expectations. >> In a good way. You feel good about where you're at and. >> Yeah. >> What you went in, what was the expectation going in and what surprised you? And were there people along the way that kind of gave you some pointers or don't do this, stay away from this. Take us through your experiences. >> Yeah, honestly, there is an amazing network of technology board directors, you know, in the US and specifically in the Valley. And we are all incredibly supportive. We have groups where we get together as board directors, and we talk about topics, and we share best practices and stories, and so I underestimated that, right? I thought I was going to, I thought I was going to enter this chapter where I would be largely giving back after 37 years. You've learned a little bit, right? What I underestimated was just the power of continuing to learn and being surrounded by so many amazing people. When, you know, when you do, you know, multiple boards, your learnings are just multiplied, right? Because you see not just one model, but you see many models. You see not just one problem, but many problems. Not just one opportunity, but many opportunities. And I underestimated how great that would be for me from a learning perspective and then your ability to share from one board to the other board because all of my boards are companies who are also quite close to each other, the executives collaborate. So that has turned out to be really exciting for me. >> So you had the stressful job. You rose to the top of the ranks, quarterly shot clock earnings, and it's hard charging. It's like, it's like, you know, being an athlete, as we say tech athlete. You're a tech athlete. Now you're taking that to the next level, which is now you're juggling multiple operational kind of things, but not with super pressure. But there's still a lot of responsibility. I know there's one board, you got compensation committee, I mean there's work involved. It's not like you're clipping coupons and having pizza. >> Yeah, no, it's real work. Believe me, it's real work. But I don't know how long it took me to not, to stop waking up and looking at my phone and thinking somebody was going to be dropping their forecast, right? Just that pressure of the number, and as a board member, obviously you are there to support and help guide the company and you feel, you know, you feel the pressure and the responsibility of what that role entails, but it's not the same as the frontline pressure every quarter. It's different. And so I did the first type. I loved it, you know. I'm loving this second type. >> You know, the retirement, it's always a cliche these days, but it's not really like what people think it is. It's not like getting a boat, going fishing or whatever. It's doing whatever you want to do, that's what retirement is. And you've chose to stay active. Your brain's being tested, and you're working it, having fun without all the stress. But it's enough, it's like going the gym. You're not hardcore workout, but you're working out with the brain. >> Yeah, no, for sure. It's just a different, it's just a different model. But the, you know, the level of conversations, the level of decisions, all of that is quite high. Which again, I like, yeah. >> Again, you really can't talk about some of the fun questions I want to ask, like what's the valuations like? How's the market, your headwinds? Is there tailwinds? >> Yes, yes, yes. It's an amazing, it's an amazing market right now with, as you know, counter indicators everywhere, right? Something's up, something's down, you know. Consumer spending's up, therefore interest rates go up and, you know, employment's down. And so or unemployment's down. And so it's hard. Actually, I really empathize with, you know, the, and have a great deal of respect for the CEOs and leadership teams of my board companies because, you know, I kind of retired from operating role, and then everybody else had to deal with running a company during a pandemic and then running a company through the great resignation, and then running a company through a downturn. You know, those are all tough things, and I have a ton of respect for any operating executive who's navigating through this and leading a company right now. >> I'd love to get your take on the board conversations at the end if we have more time, what the mood is, but I want to ask you about one more thing real quick before we go to the next topic is you're a retired operating executive. You have multiple boards, so you've got your hands full. I noticed there's a lot of amazing leaders, other female tech athletes joining boards, but they also have full-time jobs. >> Yeah. >> And so what's your advice? Cause I know there's a lot of networking, a lot of sharing going on. There's kind of a balance between how much you can contribute on the board versus doing the day job, but there's a real need for more women on boards, so yet there's a lot going on boards. What's the current state of the union if you will, state of the market relative to people in their careers and the stresses? >> Yeah. >> Cause you left one and jumped in all in there. >> Yeah. >> Some can't do that. They can't be on five boards, but they're on a few. What's the? >> Well, and you know, and if you're an operating executive, you wouldn't be on five boards, right? You would be on one or two. And so I spend a lot of time now bringing along the next wave of women and helping them both in their career but also to get a seat at the table on a board. And I'm very vocal about telling people not to do it the way I do it. There's no reason for it to be sequential. You can, you know, I thought I was so busy and was traveling all the time, and yes, all of that was true, but, and maybe I should say, you know, you can still fit in a board. And so, and what I see now is that your learnings are so exponential with outside perspective that I believe I would've been an even better operating executive had I done it earlier. I know I would've been an even better operating executive had I done it earlier. And so my advice is don't do it the way I did it. You know, it's worked out fine for me, but hindsight's 2020, I would. >> If you can go back and do a mulligan or a redo, what would you do? >> Yeah, I would get on a board earlier, full stop, yeah. >> Board, singular, plural? >> Well, I really, I don't think as an operating executive you can do, you could do one, maybe two. I wouldn't go beyond that, and I think that's fine. >> Yeah, totally makes sense. Okay, I got to ask you about your career. I know technical, you came in at that time in the market, I remember when I broke into the business, very male dominated, and then now it's much better. When you went through the ranks as a technical person, I know you had some blockers and definitely some, probably some people like, well, you know. We've seen that. How did you handle that? What were some of the key pivot points in your journey? And we've had a lot of women tell their stories here on theCUBE, candidly, like, hey, I was going to tell that professor, I'm going to sit in the front row. I'm going to, I'm getting two degrees, you know, robotics and aerospace. So, but they were challenged, even with the aspiration to do tech. I'm not saying that was something that you had, but like have you had experience like that, that you overcome? What were those key points and how did you handle them and how does that help people today? >> Yeah, you know, I have to say, you know, and not discounting that obviously this has been a journey for women, and there are a lot of things to overcome both in the workforce and also just balancing life honestly. And they're all real. There's also a story of incredible support, and you know, I'm the type of person where if somebody blocked me or didn't like me, I tended to just, you know, think it was me and like work harder and get around them, and I'm sure that some of that was potentially gender related. I didn't interpret it that way at the time. And I was lucky to have amazing mentors, many, many, many of whom were men, you know, because they were in the positions of power, and they made a huge difference on my career, huge. And I also had amazing female mentors, Meg Whitman, Ann Livermore at HPE, who you know well. So I had both, but you know, when I look back on the people who made a difference, there are as many men on the list as there are women. >> Yeah, and that's a learning there. Create those coalitions, not just one or the other. >> Yeah, yeah, yeah, absolutely. >> Well, I got to ask you about the, well, you brought up the pandemic. This has come up on some interviews this year, a little bit last year on the International Women's Day, but this year it's resonating, and I would never ask in an interview. I saw an interview once where a host asked a woman, how do you balance it all? And I was just like, no one asked men that. And so it's like, but with remote work, it's come up now the word empathy around people knowing each other's personal situation. In other words, when remote work happened, everybody went home. So we all got a glimpse of the backdrop. You got, you can see what their personal life was on Facebook. We were just commenting before we came on camera about that. So remote work really kind of opened up this personal side of everybody, men and women. >> Yeah. >> So I think this brings this new empathy kind of vibe or authentic self people call it. Is remote work an opportunity or a threat for advancement of women in tech? >> It's a much debated topic. I look at it as an opportunity for many of the reasons that you just said. First of all, let me say that when I was an operating executive and would try to create an environment on my team that was family supportive, I would do that equally for young or, you know, early to mid-career women as I did for early to mid-career men. And the reason is I needed those men, you know, chances are they had a working spouse at home, right? I needed them to be able to share the load. It's just as important to the women that companies give, you know, the partner, male or female, the partner support and the ability to share the love, right? So to me it's not just a woman thing. It's women and men, and I always tried to create the environment where it was okay to go to your soccer game. I knew you would be online later in the evening when the kids were in bed, and that was fine. And I think the pandemic has democratized that and made that, you know, made that kind of an everyday occurrence. >> Yeah the baby walks in. They're in the zoom call. The dog comes in. The leaf blower going on the outside the window. I've seen it all on theCUBE. >> Yeah, and people don't try to pretend anymore that like, you know, the house is clean, the dog's behaved, you know, I mean it's just, it's just real, and it's authentic, and I think that's healthy. >> Yeah. >> I do, you know, I also love, I also love the office, and you know, I've got a 31 year old and a soon to be 27 year old daughter, two daughters. And you know, they love going into the office, and I think about when I was their age, how just charged up I would get from being in the office. I also see how great it is for them to have a couple of days a week at home because you can get a few things done in between Zoom calls that you don't have to end up piling onto the weekend, and, you know, so I think it's a really healthy, I think it's a really healthy mix now. Most tech companies are not mandating five days in. Most tech companies are at two to three days in. I think that's a, I think that's a really good combination. >> It's interesting how people are changing their culture to get together more as groups and even events. I mean, while I got you, I might as well ask you, what's the board conversations around, you know, the old conferences? You know, before the pandemic, every company had like a user conference. Right, now it's like, well, do we really need to have that? Maybe we do smaller, and we do digital. Have you seen how companies are handling the in-person? Because there's where the relationships are really formed face-to-face, but not everyone's going to be going. But now certain it's clearly back to face-to-face. We're seeing that with theCUBE as you know. >> Yeah, yeah. >> But the numbers aren't coming back, and the numbers aren't that high, but the stakeholders. >> Yeah. >> And the numbers are actually higher if you count digital. >> Yeah, absolutely. But you know, also on digital there's fatigue from 100% digital, right? It's a hybrid. People don't want to be 100% digital anymore, but they also don't want to go back to the days when everybody got on a plane for every meeting, every call, every sales call. You know, I'm seeing a mix on user conferences. I would say two-thirds of my companies are back, but not at the expense level that they were on user conferences. We spend a lot of time getting updates on, cause nobody has put, interestingly enough, nobody has put T&E, travel and expense back to pre-pandemic levels. Nobody, so everybody's pulled back on number of trips. You know, marketing events are being very scrutinized, but I think very effective. We're doing a lot of, and, you know, these were part of the old model as well, like some things, some things just recycle, but you know, there's a lot of CIO and customer round tables in regional cities. You know, those are quite effective right now because people want some face-to-face, but they don't necessarily want to get on a plane and go to Las Vegas in order to do it. I mean, some of them are, you know, there are a lot of things back in Las Vegas. >> And think about the meetings that when you were an operating executive. You got to go to the sales kickoff, you got to go to this, go to that. There were mandatory face-to-faces that you had to go to, but there was a lot of travel that you probably could have done on Zoom. >> Oh, a lot, I mean. >> And then the productivity to the family impact too. Again, think about again, we're talking about the family and people's personal lives, right? So, you know, got to meet a customer. All right. Salesperson wants you to get in front of a customer, got to fly to New York, take a red eye, come on back. Like, I mean, that's gone. >> Yeah, and oh, by the way, the customer doesn't necessarily want to be in the office that day, so, you know, they may or may not be happy about that. So again, it's and not or, right? It's a mix. And I think it's great to see people back to some face-to-face. It's great to see marketing and events back to some face-to-face. It's also great to see that it hasn't gone back to the level it was. I think that's a really healthy dynamic. >> Well, I'll tell you that from our experience while we're on the topic, we'll move back to the International Women's Day is that the productivity of digital, this program we're doing is going to be streamed. We couldn't do this face-to-face because we had to have everyone fly to an event. We're going to do hundreds of stories that we couldn't have done. We're doing it remote. Because it's better to get the content than not have it. I mean it's offline, so, but it's not about getting people to the event and watch the screen for seven hours. It's pick your interview, and then engage. >> Yeah. >> So it's self-service. So we're seeing a lot, the new user experience kind of direct to consumer, and so I think there will be an, I think there's going to be a digital first class citizen with events, so that that matches up with the kind of experience, but the offline version. Face-to-face optimized for relationships, and that's where the recruiting gets done. That's where, you know, people can build these relationships with each other. >> Yeah, and it can be asynchronous. I think that's a real value proposition. It's a great point. >> Okay, I want to get, I want to get into the technology side of the education and re-skilling and those things. I remember in the 80s, computer science was software engineering. You learned like nine languages. You took some double E courses, one or two, and all the other kind of gut classes in school. Engineering, you had the four class disciplines and some offshoots of specialization. Now it's incredible the diversity of tracks in all engineering programs and computer science and outside of those departments. >> Yeah. >> Can you speak to the importance of STEM and the diversity in the technology industry and how this brings opportunity to lower the bar to get in and how people can stay in and grow and keep leveling up? >> Yeah, well look, we're constantly working on how to, how to help the incoming funnel. But then, you know, at a university level, I'm on the foundation board of Kansas State where I got my engineering degree. I was also Chairman of the National Action Council for Minorities in Engineering, which was all about diversity in STEM and how do you keep that pipeline going because honestly the US needs more tech resources than we have. And if you don't tap into the diversity of our entire workforce, we won't be able to fill that need. And so we focused a lot on both the funnel, right, that starts at the middle school level, particularly for girls, getting them in, you know, the situation of hands-on comfort level with coding, with robot building, you know, whatever gives them that confidence. And then keeping that going all the way into, you know, university program, and making sure that they don't attrit out, right? And so there's a number of initiatives, whether it's mentoring and support groups and financial aid to make sure that underrepresented minorities, women and other minorities, you know, get through the funnel and stay, you know, stay in. >> Got it. Now let me ask you, you said, I have two daughters. You have a family of girls too. Is there a vibe difference between the new generation and what's the trends that you're seeing in this next early wave? I mean, not maybe, I don't know how this is in middle school, but like as people start getting into their adult lives, college and beyond what's the current point of view, posture, makeup of the talent coming in? >> Yeah, yeah. >> Certain orientations, do you see any patterns? What's your observation? >> Yeah, it's interesting. So if I look at electrical engineering, my major, it's, and if I look at Kansas State, which spends a lot of time on this, and I think does a great job, but the diversity of that as a major has not changed dramatically since I was there in the early 80s. Where it has changed very significantly is computer science. There are many, many university and college programs around the country where, you know, it's 50/50 in computer science from a gender mix perspective, which is huge progress. Huge progress. And so, and to me that's, you know, I think CS is a fantastic degree for tech, regardless of what function you actually end up doing in these companies. I mean, I was an electrical engineer. I never did core electrical engineering work. I went right into sales and marketing and general management roles. So I think, I think a bunch of, you know, diverse CS graduates is a really, really good sign. And you know, we need to continue to push on that, but progress has been made. I think the, you know, it kind of goes back to the thing we were just talking about, which is the attrition of those, let's just talk about women, right? The attrition of those women once they got past early career and into mid-career then was a concern, right? And that goes back to, you know, just the inability to, you know, get it all done. And that I am hopeful is going to be better served now. >> Well, Sue, it's great to have you on. I know you're super busy. I appreciate you taking the time and contributing to our program on corporate board membership and some of your story and observations and opinions and analysis. Always great to have you and call you a contributor for theCUBE. You can jump on on one more board, be one of our board contributors for our analysts. (Sue laughing) >> I'm at capacity. (both laughing) >> Final, final word. What's the big seat at the table issue that's going well and areas that need to be improved? >> So I'll speak for my boards because they have made great progress in efficiency. You know, obviously with interest rates going up and the mix between growth and profitability changing in terms of what investors are looking for. Many, many companies have had to do a hard pivot from grow at all costs to healthy balance of growth and profit. And I'm very pleased with how my companies have made that pivot. And I think that is going to make much better companies as a result. I think diversity is something that has not been solved at the corporate level, and we need to keep working it. >> Awesome. Thank you for coming on theCUBE. CUBE alumni now contributor, on multiple boards, full-time job. Love the new challenge and chapter you're on, Sue. We'll be following, and we'll check in for more updates. And thank you for being a contributor on this program this year and this episode. We're going to be doing more of these quarterly, so we're going to move beyond once a year. >> That's great. (cross talking) It's always good to see you, John. >> Thank you. >> Thanks very much. >> Okay. >> Sue: Talk to you later. >> This is theCUBE coverage of IWD, International Women's Day 2023. I'm John Furrier, your host. Thanks for watching. (upbeat music)

>>The cube presents HPE discover 2022 brought to you by HPE. >>Hey everyone. Welcome back to the Cube's day one coverage of HPE discover 22 live from the Venetian in Las Vegas. I got a power panel here, Lisa Martin, with Dave Valante, John furrier, Holger Mueller also joins us. We are gonna wrap this, like you've never seen a rap before guys. Lot of momentum today, lot, lot of excitement, about 8,000 or so customers, partners, HPE leaders here. Holger. Let's go ahead and start with you. What are some of the things that you heard felt saw observed today on day one? >>Yeah, it's great to be back in person. Right? 8,000 people events are rare. Uh, I'm not sure. Have you been to more than 8,000? <laugh> yeah, yeah. Okay. This year, this year. I mean, historically, yes, but, um, >>Snowflake was 10. Yeah. >>So, oh, wow. Okay. So 8,000 was my, >>Cisco was, they said 15, >>But is my, my 8,000, my record, I let us down with 7,000 kind of like, but it's in the Florida swarm. It's not nicely. Like, and there's >>Usually what SFI, there's usually >>20, 20, 30, 40, 50. I remember 50 in the nineties. Right. That was a different time. But yeah. Interesting. Yeah. Interesting what people do and it depends how much time there is to come. Right. And know that it happens. Right. But yeah, no, I think it's interesting. We, we had a good two analyst track today. Um, interesting. Like HPE is kind of like back not being your grandfather's HPE to a certain point. One of the key stats. I know Dave always for the stats, right. Is what I found really interesting that over two third of GreenLake revenue is software and services. Now a love to know how much of that services, how much of that software. But I mean, I, I, I, provocate some, one to ones, the HP executives saying, Hey, you're a hardware company. Right. And they didn't even come back. Right. But Antonio said, no, two thirds is, uh, software and services. Right. That's interesting. They passed the one exabyte, uh, being managed, uh, as a, as a hallmark. Right. I was surprised only 120,000 users if I had to remember the number. Right, right. So that doesn't seem a terrible high amount of number of users. Right. So, but that's, that's, that's promising. >>So what software is in there, cuz it's gotta be mostly services. >>Right? Well it's the 70 plus cloud services, right. That everybody's talking about where the added eight of them shockingly back up and recovery, I thought that was done at launch. Right. >>Still who >>Keep recycling storage and you back. But now it's real. Yeah. >>But the company who knows the enterprise, right. HPE, what I've been doing before with no backup and recovery GreenLake. So that was kind of like, okay, we really want to do this now and nearly, and then say like, oh, by the way, we've been doing this all the time. Yeah. >>Oh, what's your take on the installed base of HP. We had that conversation, the, uh, kickoff or on who's their target, what's the target audience environment look like. It certainly is changing. Right? If it's software and services, GreenLake is resonating. Yeah. Um, ecosystems responding. What's their customers cuz managed services are up too Kubernetes, all the managed services what's what's it like what's their it transformation base look like >>Much of it is of course install base, right? The trusted 20, 30 plus year old HP customer. Who's keeping doing stuff of HP. Right. And call it GreenLake. They've been for so many name changes. It doesn't really matter. And it's kind of like nice that you get the consume pain only what you consume. Right. I get the cloud broad to me then the general markets, of course, people who still need to run stuff on premises. Right. And there's three reasons of doing this performance, right. Because we know the speed of light is relative. If you're in the Southern hemisphere and even your email servers in Northern hemisphere, it takes a moment for your email to arrive. It's a very different user experience. Um, local legislation for data, residency privacy. And then, I mean Charles Phillips who we all know, right. Former president of uh, info nicely always said, Hey, if the CIOs over 50, I don't have to sell qu. Right. So there is not invented. I'm not gonna do cloud here. And now I've kind of like clouded with something like HP GreenLake. That's the customers. And then of course procurement is a big friend, right? Yeah. Because when you do hardware refresh, right. You have to have two or three competitors who are the two or three competitors left. Right. There's Dell. Yeah. And then maybe Lenovo. Right? So, so like a >>Little bit channels, the strength, the procurement physicians of strength, of course install base question. Do you think they have a Microsoft opportunity where, what 365 was Microsoft had office before 365, but they brought in the cloud and then everything changed. Does HP have that same opportunity with kind of the GreenLake, you know, model with their existing stuff. >>It has a GreenLake opportunity, but there's not much software left. It's a very different situation like Microsoft. Right? So, uh, which green, which HP could bring along to say, now run it with us better in the cloud because they've been selling much of it. Most of it, of their software portfolio, which they bought as an HP in the past. Right. So I don't see that happening so much, but GreenLake as a platform itself course interesting because enterprise need a modern container based platform. >>I want, I want to double click on this a little bit because the way I see it is HP is going to its installed base. I think you guys are right on say, this is how we're doing business now. Yeah. You know, come on along. But my sense is, some customers don't want to do the consumption model. There are actually some customers that say, Hey, of course I got, I don't have a cash port problem. I wanna pay for it up front and leave me alone. >>I've been doing this since 50 years. Nice. As I changed it, now <laugh> two know >>Money's wants to do it. And I don't wanna rent because rental's more expensive and blah, blah, blah. So do you see that in the customer base that, that some are pushing back? >>Of course, look, I have a German accent, right? So I go there regularly and uh, the Germans are like worried about doing anything in the cloud. And if you go to a board in Germany and say, Hey, we can pay our usual hardware, refresh, CapEx as usual, or should we bug consumption? And they might know what we are running. <laugh> so not whole, no offense against the Germans out. The German parts are there, but many of them will say, Hey, so this is change with COVID. Right. Which is super interesting. Right? So the, the traditional boards non-technical have been hearing about this cloud variable cost OPEX to CapEx and all of a sudden there's so much CapEx, right. Office buildings, which are not being used truck fleets. So there's a whole new sensitivity by traditional non-technical boards towards CapEx, which now the light bulb went on and say, oh, that's the cloud thing about also. So we have to find a way to get our cost structure, to ramp up and ramp down as our business might be ramping up through COVID through now inflation fears, recession, fears, and so on. >>So, okay. HP's, HP's made the statement that anything you can do in the cloud you can do in GreenLake. Yes. And I've said you can't run on snowflake. You can't run Mongo Atlas, you can't run data bricks, but that's okay. That's fine. Let's be, I think they're talking about, there's >>A short list of things. I think they're talking about the, their >>Stuff, their, >>The operating experience. So we've got single sign on through a URL, right. Uh, you've got, you know, some level of consistency in terms of policy. It's unclear exactly what that is. You've got storage backup. Dr. What, some other services, seven other services. If you had to sort of take your best guess as to where HP is now and peg it toward where Amazon was in which year? >>20 14, 20 14. >>Yeah. Where they had their first conference or the second we invent here with 3000 people and they were thinking, Hey, we're big. Yeah. >>Yeah. And I think GreenLake is the building blocks. So they quite that's the >>Building. Right? I mean similar. >>Okay. Well, I mean they had E C, Q and S3 and SQS, right. That was the core. And then the rest of those services were, I mean, base stock was one of that first came in behind and >>In fairness, the industry has advanced since then, Kubernetes is further along. And so HPE can take advantage of that. But in terms of just the basic platform, I, I would agree. I think it's >>Well, I mean, I think, I mean the software, question's a big one. I wanna bring up because the question is, is that software is getting the world. Hardware is really software scales, everything, data, the edge story. I love their story. I think HP story is wonderful Aruba, you know, hybrid cloud, good story, edge edge. But if you look under the covers, it's weak, right? It's like, it's not software. They don't have enough software juice, but the ecosystem opportunity to me is where you plug and play. So HP knows that game. But if you look historically over the past 25 years, HP now HPE, they understand plug and play interoperability. So the question is, can they thread the needle >>Right. >>Between filling the gaps on the software? Yeah. With partners, >>Can they get the partners? Right. And which have been long, long time. Right. For a long time, HP has been the number one platform under ICP, right? Same thing. You get certified for running this. Right. I know from my own history, uh, I joined Oracle last century and the big thing was, let's get your eBusiness suite certified on HP. Right? Like as if somebody would buy H Oracle work for them, right. This 20 years ago, server >>The original exit data was HP. Oracle. >>Exactly. Exactly. So there's this thinking that's there. But I think the key thing is we know that all modern forget about the hardware form in the platforms, right? All modern software has to move to containers and snowflake runs in containers. You mentioned that, right? Yeah. If customers force snowflake and HPE to the table, right, there will be a way to make it work. Right. And which will help HPE to be the partner open part will bring the software. >>I, I think it's, I think that's an opportunity because that changes the game and agility and speed. If HP plays their differentiation, right. Which we asked on their opening segment, what's their differentiation. They got size scale channel, >>What to the enterprise. And then the big benefit is this workload portability thing. Right? You understand what is run in the public cloud? I need to run it local. For whatever reason, performance, local residency of data. I can move that. There that's the big benefit to the ISVs, the sales vendors as well. >>But they have to have a stronger data platform story in my that's right. Opinion. I mean, you can run Oracle and HPE, but there's no reason they shouldn't be able to do a deal with, with snowflake. I mean, we saw it with Dell. Yep. We saw it with, with, with pure and I, if our HPE I'd be saying, Hey, because the way the snowflake deal worked, you probably know this is your reading data into the cloud. The compute actually occurs in the cloud viral HB going snowflake saying we can separate compute and storage. Right. And we have GreenLake. We have on demand. Why don't we run the compute on-prem and make it a full class, first class citizen, right. For all of our customers data. And that would be really innovative. And I think Mongo would be another, they've got OnPrem. >>And the question is, how many, how many snowflake customers are telling snowflake? Can I run you on premise? And how much defo open years will they hear from that? Right? This is >>Why would they deal Dell? That >>Deal though, with that, they did a deal. >>I think they did that deal because the customer came to them and said, you don't exactly that deal. We're gonna spend the >>Snowflake >>Customers think crazy things happen, right? Even, even put an Oracle database in a Microsoft Azure data center, right. Would off who, what as >>Possible snowflake, >>Oracle. So on, Aw, the >>Snow, the snowflakes in the world have to make a decision. Dave on, is it all snowflake all the time? Because what the reality is, and I think, again, this comes back down to the, the track that HP could go up or down is gonna be about software. Open source is now the software industry. There's no such thing as proprietary software, in my opinion, relatively speaking, cloud scale and integrated, integrated integration software is proprietary. The workflows are proprietary. So if they can get that right with the partners, I would focus on that. I think they can tap open source, look at Amazon with open source. They sucked it up and they integrated it in. No, no. So integration is the deal, not >>Software first, but Snowflake's made the call. You were there, Lisa. They basically saying it's we have, you have to be in snowflake in order to get the governance and the scalability, all that other wonderful stuff. Oh, but we we'll do Apache iceberg. We'll we'll open it up. We'll do Python. Yeah. >>But you can't do it data clean room unless you are in snowflake. Exactly. Snowflake on snowflake. >>Exactly. >>But got it. Isn't that? What you heard from AWS all the time till they came out outposts, right? I mean, snowflake is a market leader for what they're doing. Right. So that they want to change their platform. I mean, kudos to them. They don't need to change the platform. They will be the last to change their platform to a ne to anything on premises. Right. But I think the trend already shows that it's going that way. >>Well, if you look at outpost is an signal, Dave, the success of outpost launched what four years ago, they announced it. >>What >>EKS is beating, what outpost is doing. Outpost is there. There's not a lot of buzz and talk to the insiders and the open source community, uh, EKS and containers. To your point mm-hmm <affirmative> is moving faster on, I won't say commodity hardware, but like could be white box or HP, Dell, whatever it's gonna be that scale differentiation and the edge story is, is a good one. And I think with what we're seeing in the market now it's the industrial edge. The back office was gen one cloud back office data center. Now it's hybrid. The focus will be industrial edge machine learning and AI, and they have it here. And there's some, some early conversations with, uh, I heard it from, uh, this morning, you guys interviewed, uh, uh, John Schultz, right? With the world economic 4k birth Butterfield. She was amazing. And then you had Justin bring up a Hoar, bring up quantum. Yes. That is a differentiator. >>HP. >>Yes. Yeah. You, they have the computing shops. They had the R and D can they bring it to the table >>As, as HPC, right. To what they Schultz for of uh, the frontier system. Right. So very impressed. >>So the ecosystem is the key for them is because that's how they're gonna fill the gaps. They can't, they can't only, >>They could, they could high HPC edge piece. I wouldn't count 'em out of that game yet. If you co-locate a box, I'll use the word box, particularly at a telco tower. That's a data center. Yep. Right. If done properly. Yep. So, you know, what outpost was supposed to do actually is a hybrid opportunity. Aruba >>Gives them a unique, >>But the key thing is right. It's a yin and yang, right? It's the ecosystem it's partners to bring those software workload. Absolutely. Right. But HPE has to keep the platform attractive enough. Right. And the key thing there is that you have this workload capability thing that you can bring things, which you've built yourself. I mean, look at the telcos right. Network function, visualization, thousands of man, years into these projects. Right. So if I can't bring it to your edge box, no, I'm not trying to get to your Xbox. Right. >>Hold I gotta ask you since in the Dave too, since you guys both here and Lisa, you know, I said on the opening, they have serious customers and those customers have serious problems, cyber security, ransomware. So yeah. I teach transformation now. Industrial transformation machine learning, check, check, check. Oh, sounds good. But at the end of the day, their customers have some serious problems. Right? Cyber, this is, this is high stakes poker. Yeah. What do you think HP's position for in the security? You mentioned containers, you got all this stuff, you got open source, supply chain, you have to left supply chain issues. What is their position with security? Cuz that's the big one. >>I, I think they have to have a mature attitude that customers expect from HPE. Right? I don't have to educate HP on security. So they have to have the partner offerings again. We're back at the ecosystem to have what probably you have. So bring your own security apart from what they have to have out of the box to do business with them. This is why the shocker this morning was back up in recovery coming. <laugh> it's kind like important for that. Right? Well >>That's, that's, that's more ransomware and the >>More skeleton skeletons in the closet there, which customers should check of course. But I think the expectations HP understands that and brings it along either from partner or natively. >>I, I think it's, I think it's services. I think point next is the point of integration for their security. That's why two thirds is software and services. A lot of that is services, right? You know, you need security, we'll help you get there. We people trust HP >>Here, but we have nothing against point next or any professional service. They're all hardworking. But if I will have to rely on humans for my cyber security strategy on a daily level, I'm getting gray hair and I little gray hair >>Red. Okay. I that's, >>But >>I think, but I do think that's the camera strategy. I mean, I'm sure there's a lot of that stuff that's beginning to be designed in, but I, my guess is a lot of it is services. >>Well, you got the Aruba. Part of the booth was packed. Aruba's there. You mentioned that earlier. Is that good enough? Because the word zero trust is kicked around a lot. On one hand, on the other hand, other conversations, it's all about trust. So supply chain and software is trusting trust, trust and verified. So you got this whole mentality of perimeter gone mentality. It's zero trust. And if you've got software trust, interesting thoughts there, how do you reconcile zero trust? And then I need trust. What's what's you? What are you seeing older on that? Because I ask people all the time, they're like, uh, I'm zero trust or is it trust? >>Yeah. The middle ground. Right? Trusted. The meantime people are man manipulating what's happening in your runtime containers. Right? So, uh, drift control is a new password there that you check what's in your runtime containers, which supposedly impenetrable, but people finding ways to hack them. So we'll see this cat and mouse game going on all the time. Yeah. Yeah. There's always gonna be the need for being in a secure, good environment from that perspective. Absolutely. But the key is edge has to be more than Aruba, right? If yeah. HV goes away and says, oh yeah, we can manage your edge with our Aruba devices. That's not enough. It's the virtual probability. And you said the important thing before it's about the data, right? Because the dirty secret of containers is yeah, I move the code, but what enterprise code works without data, right? You can't say as enterprise, okay, we're done for the day check tomorrow. We didn't persist your data, auditor customer. We don't have your data anymore. So filling a way to transport the data. And there just one last thought, right? They have a super interesting asset. They want break lands for the venerable map R right. Which wrote their own storage drivers and gives you the chance to potentially do something in that area, which I'm personally excited about. But we'll see what happens. >>I mean, I think the holy grail is can I, can I put my data into a cloud who's ever, you know, call it a super cloud and can I, is it secure? Is it governed? Can I share it and be confident that it's discoverable and that the, the person I give it to has the right to use it. Yeah. And, and it's the correct data. There's not like a zillion copies running. That's the holy grail. And I, I think the answer today is no, you can, you can do that maybe inside of AWS or maybe inside of Azure, look maybe certainly inside of snowflake, can you do that inside a GreenLake? Well, you probably can inside a GreenLake, but then when you put it into the cloud, is it cross cloud? Is it really out to the edge? And that's where it starts to break down, but that's where the work is to be done. That's >>The one Exide is in there already. Right. So men being men. Yeah. >>But okay. But it it's in there. Yeah. Okay. What do you do with it? Can you share that data? What can you actually automate governance? Right? Uh, is that data discoverable? Are there multiple copies of that data? What's the, you know, master copy. Here's >>A question. You guys, here's a question for you guys analyst, what do you think the psychology is of the CIO or CSO when HP comes into town with GreenLake, uh, and they say, what's your relationship with the hyperscalers? Cause I'm a CIO. I got my environment. I might be CapEx centric or Hey, I'm open model. Open-minded to an operating model. Every one of these enterprises has a cloud relationship. Yeah. Yeah. What's the dynamic. What do you think the psychology is of the CIO when they're rationalizing their, their trajectory, their architecture, cloud, native scale integration with HPE GreenLake or >>HP service. I think she or he hears defensiveness from HPE. I think she hears HPE or he hears HPE coming in and saying, you don't need to go to the cloud. You know, you could keep it right here. I, I don't think that's the right posture. I think it should be. We are your cloud. And we can manage whether it's OnPrem hybrid in AWS, Azure, Google, across those clouds. And we have an edge story that should be the vision that they put forth. That's the super cloud vision, but I don't hear it >>From these guys. What do you think psycho, do you agree with that? >>I'm totally to make, sorry to be boring, but I totally agree with, uh, Dave on that. Right? So the, the, the multi-cloud capability from a trusted large company has worked for anybody up and down the stack. Right? You can look historically for, uh, past layers with cloud Foundry, right? It's history vulnerable. You can look for DevOps of Hashi coop. You can look for database with MongoDB right now. So if HPE provides that data access, right, with all the problems of data gravity and egres cost and the workability, they will be doing really, really well, but we need to hear it more, right. We didn't hear much software today in the keynote. Right. >>Do they have a competitive offering vis-a-vis or Azure? >>The question is, will it be an HPE offering or will, or the software platform, one of the offerings and you as customer can plug and play, right. Will software be a differentiator for HP, right. And will be close, proprietary to the point to again, be open enough for it, or will they get that R and D format that, or will they just say, okay, ES MES here on the side, your choice, and you can use OpenShift or whatever, we don't matter. That's >>The, that's the key question. That's the key question. Is it because it is a competitive strategy? Is it highly differentiated? Oracle is a highly differentiated strategy, right? Is Dell highly differentiated? Eh, Dell differentiates based on its breadth. What? >>Right. Well, let's try for the control plane too. Dell wants to be an, >>Their, their vision is differentiated. Okay. But their execution today is not >>High. All right. Let me throw, let me throw this out at you then. I'm I'm, I'm sorry. I'm I'm HPE. I wanna be the glue layer. Is that, does that fly? >>What >>Do you mean? The group glue layer? I'll I wanna be, you can do Amazon, but I wanna be the glue layer between the clouds and our GreenLake will. >>What's the, what's the incremental value that, that glue provides, >>Provides comfort and reliability and control for the single pane of glass for AWS >>And comes back to the data. In my opinion. Yeah. >>There, there there's glue levels on the data level. Yeah. And there's glue levels on API level. Right. And there's different vendors in the different spaces. Right. Um, I think HPE will want to play on the data side. We heard lots of data stuff. We >>Hear that, >>But we have to see it. Exactly. >>Yeah. But it's, it's lacking today. And so, Hey, you know, you guys know better than I APIs can be fragile and they can be, there's a lot of diversity in terms of the quality of APIs and the documentation, how they work, how mature they are, what, how, what kind of performance they can provide and recoverability. And so just saying, oh wow. We are living the API economy. You know, the it's gonna take time to brew, chime in here. Hi. >><laugh> oh, so guys, you've all been covering HPE for a long time. You know, when Antonio stood up on stage three years ago and said by 2022, and here we are, we're gonna be delivering everything as a service. He's saying we've, we've done it, but, and we're a new company. Do you guys agree with that? >>Definitely. >>I, yes. Yes. With the caveat, I think, yes. The COVID pandemic slowed them down a lot because, um, that gave a tailwind to the hyperscalers, um, because of the, the force of massive O under forecasting working at home. I mean, everyone I talked to was like, no one forecasted a hundred percent work at home, the, um, the CapEx investments. So I think that was an opportunity that they'd be much farther along if there's no COVID people >>Thought it wasn't impossible. Yeah. But so we had the old work from home thing right. Where people trying to get people fired at IBM and Yahoo. Right. So I would've this question covering the HR side and my other hat on. Right. And I would ask CHS let's assume, because I didn't know about COVID shame on me. Right. I said, big California, earthquake breaks. Right. Nobody gets hurt, but all the buildings have to be retrofitted and checked for seism logic down. So everybody's working from home, ask CHS, what kind of productivity gap hit would you get by forcing everybody working from home with the office unsafe? So one, one gentleman, I won't know him, his name, he said 20% and the other one's going ha you're smoking. It's 40 50%. We need to be in the office. We need to meet it first night. And now we went for this exercise. Luckily not with the California. Right. Well, through the price of COVID and we've seen what it can do to, to productivity well, >>The productivity, but also the impact. So like with all the, um, stories we've done over two years, the people that want came out ahead were the ones that had good cloud action. They were already in the cloud. So I, I think they're definitely in different company in the sense of they, I give 'em a pass. I think they're definitely a new company and I'm not gonna judge 'em on. I think they're doing great. But I think pandemic definitely slowed 'em down that about >>It. So I have a different take on this. I think. So we've go back a little history. I mean, you' said this, I steal your line. Meg Whitman took one for the Silicon valley team. Right. She came in. I don't think she ever was excited that I, that you said, you said that, and I think you wrote >>Up, get tape on that one. She >>Had to figure out how do I deal with this mess? I have EDS. I got PC. >>She never should have spun off the PC, but >>Okay. But >>Me, >>Yeah, you can, you certainly could listen. Maybe, maybe Gerstner never should have gone all in on services and IBM would dominate something other than mainframes. They had think pads even for a while, but, but, but so she had that mess to deal with. She dealt with it and however, they dealt with it, Antonio came in, he, he, and he said, all right, we're gonna focus the company. And we're gonna focus the mission on not the machine. Remember those yeah. Presentations, but you just make your eyes glaze over. We're going all in on Azure service >>And edge. He was all on. >>We're gonna build our own cloud. We acquired Aruba. He made some acquisitions in HPC to help differentiate. Yep. And they are definitely a much more focused company now. And unfortunately I wish Antonio would CEO in 2015, cuz that's really when this should have started. >>Yeah. And then, and if you remember back then, Dave, we were interviewing Docker with DevOps teams. They had composability, they were on hybrid really early. I think they might have even coined the term hybrid before VMware tri-state credit for it. But they were first on hybrid. They had DevOps, they had infrastructure risk code. >>HPE had an HP had an awesome cloud team. Yeah. But, and then, and then they tried to go public cloud. Yeah. You know, and then, you know, just made them, I mean, it was just a mess. The focus >>Is there. I give them huge props. And I think, I think the GreenLake to me is exciting here because it's much better than it was two years ago. When, when we talked to, when we started, it's >>Starting to get real. >>It's, it's a real thing. And I think the, the tell will be partners. If they make that right, can pull their different >>Ecosystem, >>Their scale and their customers and fill the software gas with partners mm-hmm <affirmative> and then create that integration opportunity. It's gonna be a home run if they don't do that, they're gonna miss the operating, >>But they have to have their own to your point. They have to have their own software innovation. >>They have to good infrastructure ways to build applications. I don't wanna build with somebody else. I don't wanna take a Microsoft stack on open source stack. I'm not sure if it's gonna work with HP. So they have to have an app dev answer. I absolutely agree with that. And the, the big thing for the partners is, which is a good thing, right? Yep. HPE will not move into applications. Right? You don't have to have the fear of where Microsoft is with their vocal large. Right. If AWS kind of like comes up with APIs and manufacturing, right. Google the same thing with their vertical push. Right. So HPE will not have the CapEx, but >>Application, >>As I SV making them, the partner, the bonus of being able to on premise is an attractive >>Part. That's a great point. >>Hold. So that's an inflection point for next 12 months to watch what we see absolutely running on GreenLake. >>Yeah. And I think one of the things that came out of the, the last couple events this past year, and I'll bring this up, we'll table it and we'll watch it. And it's early in this, I think this is like even, not even the first inning, the machine learning AI impact to the industrial piece. I think we're gonna see a, a brand new era of accelerated digital transformation on the industrial physical world, back office, cloud data center, accounting, all the stuff. That's applications, the app, the real world from space to like robotics. I think that HP edge opportunity is gonna be visible and different. >>So guys, Antonio Neri is on tomorrow. This is only day one. If you can imagine this power panel on day one, can you imagine tomorrow? What is your last question for each of you? What is your, what, what question would you want to ask him tomorrow? Hold start with you. >>How is HPE winning in the long run? Because we know their on premise market will shrink, right? And they can out execute Dell. They can out execute Lenovo. They can out Cisco and get a bigger share of the shrinking market. But that's the long term strategy, right? So why should I buy HPE stock now and have a good return put in the, in the safe and forget about it and have a great return 20 years from now? What's the really long term strategy might be unfair because they, they ran in survival mode to a certain point out of the mass post equipment situation. But what is really the long term strategy? Is it more on the hardware side? Is it gonna go on the HPE, the frontier side? It's gonna be a DNA question, which I would ask Antonio. >>John, >>I would ask him what relative to the macro conditions relative to their customer base, I'd say, cuz the customers are the scoreboard. Can they create a value proposition with their, I use the Microsoft 365 example how they kind of went to the cloud. So my question would be Antonio, what is your core value proposition to CIOs out there who want to transform and take a step function, increase for value with HPE? Tell me that story. I wanna hear. And I don't want to hear, oh, we got a portfolio and no, what value are you enabling your customers to do? >>What and what should that value be? >>I think it's gonna be what we were kind of riffing on, which is you have to provide either what their product market fit needs are, which is, are you solving a problem? Is it a pain point is a growth driver. Uh, and what's the, what's that tailwind. And it's obviously we know at cloud we know edge. The story is great, but what's the value proposition. But by going with HPE, you get X, Y, and Z. If they can explain that clearly with real, so qualitative and quantitative data it's home >>Run. He had a great line of the analyst summit today where somebody asking questions, I'm just listening to the customer. So be ready for this Steve jobs photo, listening to the customer. You can't build something great listening to the customer. You'll be good for the next quarter. The next exponential >>Say, what are the customers saying? <laugh> >>So I would make an observation. And my question would, so my observation would be cloud is growing collectively at 35%. It's, you know, it's approaching 200 billion with a big, big four. If you include Alibaba, IBM has actually said, Hey, we're gonna gr they've promised 6% growth. Uh, Cisco I think is at eight or 9% growth. Dow's growing in double digits. Antonio and HPE have promised three to 4% growth. So what do you have to do to actually accelerate growth? Because three to 4%, my view, not enough to answer Holger's question is why should I buy HPE stock? Well, >>If they have product, if they have customer and there's demand and traction to me, that's going to drive the growth numbers. And I think the weak side of the forecast means that they don't have that fit yet. >>Yeah. So what has to happen for them to get above five, 6% growth? >>That's what we're gonna analyze. I mean, I, I mean, I don't have an answer for that. I wish I had a better answer. I'd tell them <laugh> but I feel, it feels, it feels like, you know, HP has an opportunity to say here's the new HPE. Yeah. Okay. And this is what we stand for. And here's the one thing that we're going to do that consistently drives value for you, the customer. And that's gonna have to come into some, either architectural cloud shift or a data thing, or we are your store for blank. >>All of the above. >>I guess the other question is, would, would you know, he won't answer a rude question, would suspending things like dividends and stock buybacks and putting it into R and D. I would definitely, if you have confidence in the market and you know what to do, why wouldn't you just accelerate R and D and put the money there? IBM, since 2007, IBM spent is the last stat. And I'm looking go in 2007, IBM way, outspent, Google, and Amazon and R and D and, and CapEx two, by the way. Yep. Subsequent to that, they've spent, I believe it's the numbers close to 200 billion on stock buyback and dividends. They could have owned cloud. And so look at this business, the technology business by and large is driven by innovation. Yeah. And so how do you innovate if >>You have I'm buying, I'm buying HP because they're reliable high quality and they have the outcomes that I want. Oh, >>Buy their products and services. I'm not sure I'd buy the stock. Yeah. >>Yeah. But she has to answer ultimately, because a public company. Right. So >>Right. It's this job. Yeah. >>Never a dull moment with the three of you around <laugh> guys. Thank you so much for sharing your insights, your, an analysis from day one. I can't imagine what day two is gonna bring tomorrow. Debut and I are gonna be anchoring here. We've got a jam packed day, lots going on, hearing from the ecosystem from leadership. As we mentioned, Antonio is gonna be Tony >>Alma Russo. I'm dying. Dr. >>EDMA as well as on the CTO gonna be another action pack day. I'm excited for it, guys. Thanks so much for sharing your insights and for letting me join this power panel. >>Great. Great to be here. >>Power panel plus me. All right. For Holger, John and Dave, I'm Lisa, you're watching the cube our day one coverage of HPE discover wraps right now. Don't go anywhere, cuz we'll see you tomorrow for day two, live from Vegas, have a good night.

>> Narrator: From around the globe, it's theCUBE with coverage of SUSECON Digital, brought to you by SUSE. >> Welcome back, I'm Stu Miniman. And this is theCUBE's coverage of SUSECON Digital '20. Really excited we get to talk to the SUSE executives, their partners and their customers. In this segment, we have one of the customers, he's in the keynote and really excited to talk to him, Günther Tschabushnig and he is the CIO of ZAMG. If you're not familiar with them, they are the Central Institute for meteorology and geodynamics, the oldest weather service in the world, based out of Austria. Günther, thank you so much for joining us. Great to see you. >> Thank you for being here, thank you. >> All right, so obviously weather something we are very interested on theCUBE. We talk how important data is. And data, is it for central to what your service is doing, providing data, the organizations, they can do lots with it. Give us a little bit, we probably don't have time to go through the 150 plus, years history of the organization, but tell us a little bit about what your organization does, and especially your role as CIO. What's involved with that? >> Oh, let me hook you in. One thing you said, we have the oldest, weather service in the world. I always tell people, we are doing big data analytics between until 1851. And actually that's true. We have actually two big data centers based in Austria. We are operating about 20 petabytes of data, 100,000 data sets per minute. What is very, very interesting for tech guys. We have one small data center additional on over 3000 meters above sea level on the observatory. It's in the middle of the glacier. Can't imagine how cool that is. When you go up, into the glacier and yeah, you have a lot of sensors, a lot of measurements and a lot of data collecting, configurations. Actually, we are also using a lot of super-computers. We do simulating, we do a lot of AI. We did big data analytics and the most important thing, we do a lot of cooperation with the people that are out there. >> Yeah, in 1851, wasn't exactly super-computers. You're gathering data from a lot of sources. Help us understand a little bit. What are some of the, asks that the business have for you? What are the kind of challenges? In 2020, that might be a little bit different than they were years ago. >> Weather comes from, but different source, actually in 1851, it was more for the King, for their wars. Nowadays it's much more peaceful, thank, God. It's more for sporting, it's more for producing things. It's a lot for logistics, but it's actually for all the human people are out there, and therefore we have to use a lot of data, a lot of processes and a lot of different customer journeys. Our most important thing is customer first. So we try to produce, our full costs, our, integrated processes, especially for the customers. Justin, quick example is, the Olympic winter games. The ZMAG is doing the forecast for the last two, winter games, because we are doing now casting and we're very good at now casting that means the forecast between the next five minutes to 15 minutes, with, what's it call a breath of 100, 150 meters, which is very, very important for, some kind of events. But we do other forecast as well. The only thing we cannot forecast but we also to, earthquakes, that means naturally earthquakes on the one side, on the other side, artificial earthquakes, which are produced through, normally bombs or nuclear bombs. And, we are working with the CTBTO, the UN organization together to analyze and to measure is illegally, nuclear tests. To make the world a little bit a better place. >> Yeah, so Günther it's interesting you mentioned in the early days it was, weather for the king. One of the things we look about in data, especially in the public sector is what data, where do you collected from? How much hearing is there? Can you talk a little bit about, how it goes kind of beyond your borders and is there, I guess, how do you work with other organizations there any of data that shared any of the models? How does that work together in your organization? >> The most important thing is the link data to link our data to other organizations and to collect other data from other organizations. It's not forecast anymore. It's forecast, integrating into processes, especially in the business processes. Weather doesn't stop at the borders. That's a good thing. So we had a lot of collaboration with our neighbors. We found a weather services from our neighbors. That's one thing. I have them, the big picture. For, our models for our simulations. But what we also do is a lot of crowd data. Because the more data we get, the more data we can assimilate into our model. The better, the higher is the resolution of our forecast, so we do a lot of integration of this crowd source weather, that could be on the one hand, a simple app that could be a weather station, in our, in your home. But that could also be a photograph. What did you do with your smartphone? Well, we do artificial intelligence algorithms. To get out the information about clouds, about damages, what we integrate again in our models, in our simulations. And give you the better forecast as a response. We have a big, cooperation, for example, with, the Austrian fire department. They get the best forecasts we can ever do. A specialist forecast for the emergencies. When does, a fire in the woods, for example, they need a special soil moisture for example, then wind directions. Do we need wind strengths? They can use this on their smartphone. They can, use the smart watch. They do pictures after emergency, send it back to us. We analyze it and do a live modeling through our super-computers. To have a better forecast on this place. >> Excellent, now you talked about a bit about communities, leveraging, a lot of different technologies, I guess that's a good way for us to help connect the dots to us talking here to at SUSECON. Obviously, open-source, the communities, the piece of what we or hearing at the show. Talk to us a little bit about SUSE , what technologies are using them, what's the role of open-source, is that, the piece of how you look at technology. >> Nothing is more boring than they get weather from yesterday. So what we need is a really fast development of our forecasts, to our customers. And SUSE helps us, there. We have special services, especially on our ship of computers. Well, we use the special SUSE ranking system. We use SUSE, on our storage systems on our software defined storage system. To have a, we can develop man, to our customers, to our cooperation partners. And, the last big thing is we use SUSE containering, that forms, and on AI platforms. So the new SUSE AI platform, we tried to do forecasts for avalanches, for snow avalanches and that's a really, really big effort at the moment, because there are people dying every year in Austria and in the Alps, because of avalanches. And maybe we can save some of them, because we do have good forecast together with SUSE. >> Excellent, you talk about moving to containerization, gives a little insight. You are a government agency. How easy it is for you to take advantage of new technologies? Any guidance you can give as to things that you've through that might be able to help? >> Innovation and new technologies, but kind of moving on the edge, because on the one hand we have 24/7, the whole year long, we have to be high availability. We have a very stable, on the other hand, we want to have new technologies, new innovations. So it's really, really working on the edge. We use two groups, two separate data centers. On one hand, we do the all the stable thing. The high availability things on the other things. On the other data center, on other group, they are doing the true new things. They do containerization, they do blockchain and they do artificial intelligent moves. And the thing is they are working together. They are connected, that means tell it this way. We have a very, very experienced, head of our one group, our stable 24/7 group, and very, very young high potential or not innovation group. To be honest, first two weeks they hated each other, because one guy wanted to have the innovation and going forward and forward and forward, and the other one said, "No stop, we have to be stable. "That's the most important thing." After four weeks with a lot of maintenance for sure, and with a lot of guidance, they started to love each other because they can learn from each other. And that's the main point. We learned about all of these things. Now we can combine, stable with technology, with new technology, with cool, new things, which can be proved in the one side and integrate that in the stable side, a little later. >> That's an excellent story to learn from, learning so important, great to hear that the more traditional, reliable group and the new innovation group work together. Of course we can't let you go talking about weather without touching on climate. So, anybody that's watched the space with his global pandemic has some interesting, I guess you'd say, positive side effects, there are parts of the world where pollution's cleaned up, major impacts, on climate that, I'd expect you have some interesting data on. What can you share, when it comes to climate change? Any advice, you'd give for business leaders, that are looking to help contribute in a positive way. >> Okay, sure actually, a data center, we are also data hub for the ESA, the European Space Agency for their sentinel data. This data is very interesting, because it hasn't direct shows and direct impact how the climate is changing. The most important thing I can tell you as a CIO, it is changing. That's the most important thing. What we are looking for is how can we combine data, to stop this climate change. How can we show other leaders, politicians, etc. How to stop it, how can we work against it, and how they can be cooperate, work against. The thing is if we only show us the weather service, our climate data, that's nice to have. You see what a curve that's going to be warmer and warmer and the parameters are changing, but that's not the goal. The goal is, how can we work together? How can we link data together? To stop pollution, to stop several kind of attributes. To stop climate change. We started to do some collaborations with big companies. One of these is SUSE. One of these is Hewlett Packard, to work together. To combine resources, to combine a compute power, to combine storage, to combine knowledge, especially data to stop climate change. >> Excellent, so Günther final question is, anything you've been seeing strange, being a CIO, a question we always have, something we heard in the keynote is the changing role of the CIO. You talked a bit about AI, talked about, you live with actual cloud, and super-computers. So what in 2020 is kind of different about the role of CIO? >> What I really learned is IT, it's the supporting accompany or the supporting department anymore. IT is, the strategic partner of each domain we have, we had all our scientists and they always told us, "We had a scientist and we need IT." From several years now, they started to work together with the IT, with Artificial Intelligence, with big data analytics, with several platforms, both integrations, how to, solve problems. So the CIO especially, is not the IT leader anymore, it's more the management part of the management board. So that means, the integration of the CIO in the whole company is much, much more then it was several years ago. Meg Whitman, I met years ago and we had a good talk, told me there is no company anymore without IT. That's not correct. There's no company anymore that is IT. Even every culture is IT, everything is IT. It's no support anymore, it's linking anymore. >> Excellent, yeah Günther, such an important point to talk about if a company, is going to thrive in the modern era. Data is such a critical piece of that gives you as a CIO, a seat at the table to work closely with them, because if the business needs to be driven by data, the CIO's role of connecting IT in the business, so important. Thank you so much for sharing your stories. Pleasure to talk with you. >> Thank you, it was a pleasure. >> All right, and we'll be back with more coverage from SUSECON Digital '20. I'm Stu Miniman and thank you for watching theCUBE. (upbeat music)

(upbeat music) >> Narrator: It's theCUBE, covering the Virtual Vertica Big Data Conference 2020. Brought to you by Vertica. >> Dave Vellante: Hello everyone, and welcome to theCUBE's exclusive coverage of the Vertica Virtual Big Data Conference. You're watching theCUBE, the leader in digital event tech coverage. And we're broadcasting remotely from our studios in Palo Alto and Boston. And, we're pleased to be covering wall-to-wall this digital event. Now, as you know, originally BDC was scheduled this week at the new Encore Hotel and Casino in Boston. Their theme was "Win big with big data". Oh sorry, "Win big with data". That's right, got it. And, I know the community was really looking forward to that, you know, meet up. But look, we're making the best of it, given these uncertain times. We wish you and your families good health and safety. And this is the way that we're going to broadcast for the next several months. Now, we want to unpack Colin Mahony's keynote, but, before we do that, I want to give a little context on the market. First, theCUBE has covered every BDC since its inception, since the BDC's inception that is. It's a very intimate event, with a heavy emphasis on user content. Now, historically, the data engineers and DBAs in the Vertica community, they comprised the majority of the content at this event. And, that's going to be the same for this virtual, or digital, production. Now, theCUBE is going to be broadcasting for two days. What we're doing, is we're going to be concurrent with the Virtual BDC. We got practitioners that are coming on the show, DBAs, data engineers, database gurus, we got a security experts coming on, and really a great line up. And, of course, we'll also be hearing from Vertica Execs, Colin Mahony himself right of the keynote, folks from product marketing, partners, and a number of experts, including some from Micro Focus, which is the, of course, owner of Vertica. But I want to take a moment to share a little bit about the history of Vertica. The company, as you know, was founded by Michael Stonebraker. And, Verica started, really they started out as a SQL platform for analytics. It was the first, or at least one of the first, to really nail the MPP column store trend. Not only did Vertica have an early mover advantage in MPP, but the efficiency and scale of its software, relative to traditional DBMS, and also other MPP players, is underscored by the fact that Vertica, and the Vertica brand, really thrives to this day. But, I have to tell you, it wasn't without some pain. And, I'll talk a little bit about that, and really talk about how we got here today. So first, you know, you think about traditional transaction databases, like Oracle or IMBDB tour, or even enterprise data warehouse platforms like Teradata. They were simply not purpose-built for big data. Vertica was. Along with a whole bunch of other players, like Netezza, which was bought by IBM, Aster Data, which is now Teradata, Actian, ParAccel, which was the basis for Redshift, Amazon's Redshift, Greenplum was bought, in the early days, by EMC. And, these companies were really designed to run as massively parallel systems that smoked traditional RDBMS and EDW for particular analytic applications. You know, back in the big data days, I often joked that, like an NFL draft, there was run on MPP players, like when you see a run on polling guards. You know, once one goes, they all start to fall. And that's what you saw with the MPP columnar stores, IBM, EMC, and then HP getting into the game. So, it was like 2011, and Leo Apotheker, he was the new CEO of HP. Frankly, he has no clue, in my opinion, with what to do with Vertica, and totally missed one the biggest trends of the last decade, the data trend, the big data trend. HP picked up Vertica for a song, it wasn't disclosed, but my guess is that it was around 200 million. So, rather than build a bunch of smart tokens around Vertica, which I always call the diamond in the rough, Apotheker basically permanently altered HP for years. He kind of ruined HP, in my view, with a 12 billion dollar purchase of Autonomy, which turned out to be one of the biggest disasters in recent M&A history. HP was forced to spin merge, and ended up selling most of its software to Microsoft, Micro Focus. (laughs) Luckily, during its time at HP, CEO Meg Whitman, largely was distracted with what to do with the mess that she inherited form Apotheker. So, Vertica was left alone. Now, the upshot is Colin Mahony, who was then the GM of Vertica, and still is. By the way, he's really the CEO, and he just doesn't have the title, I actually think they should give that to him. But anyway, he's been at the helm the whole time. And Colin, as you'll see in our interview, is a rockstar, he's got technical and business jobs, people love him in the community. Vertica's culture is really engineering driven and they're all about data. Despite the fact that Vertica is a 15-year-old company, they've really kept pace, and not been polluted by legacy baggage. Vertica, early on, embraced Hadoop and the whole open-source movement. And that helped give it tailwinds. It leaned heavily into cloud, as we're going to talk about further this week. And they got a good story around machine intelligence and AI. So, whereas many traditional database players are really getting hurt, and some are getting killed, by cloud database providers, Vertica's actually doing a pretty good job of servicing its install base, and is in a reasonable position to compete for new workloads. On its last earnings call, the Micro Focus CFO, Stephen Murdoch, he said they're investing 70 to 80 million dollars in two key growth areas, security and Vertica. Now, Micro Focus is running its Suse play on these two parts of its business. What I mean by that, is they're investing and allowing them to be semi-autonomous, spending on R&D and go to market. And, they have no hardware agenda, unlike when Vertica was part of HP, or HPE, I guess HP, before the spin out. Now, let me come back to the big trend in the market today. And there's something going on around analytic databases in the cloud. You've got companies like Snowflake and AWS with Redshift, as we've reported numerous times, and they're doing quite well, they're gaining share, especially of new workloads that are merging, particularly in the cloud native space. They combine scalable compute, storage, and machine learning, and, importantly, they're allowing customers to scale, compute, and storage independent of each other. Why is that important? Because you don't have to buy storage every time you buy compute, or vice versa, in chunks. So, if you can scale them independently, you've got granularity. Vertica is keeping pace. In talking to customers, Vertica is leaning heavily into the cloud, supporting all the major cloud platforms, as we heard from Colin earlier today, adding Google. And, why my research shows that Vertica has some work to do in cloud and cloud native, to simplify the experience, it's more robust in motor stack, which supports many different environments, you know deep SQL, acid properties, and DNA that allows Vertica to compete with these cloud-native database suppliers. Now, Vertica might lose out in some of those native workloads. But, I have to say, my experience in talking with customers, if you're looking for a great MMP column store that scales and runs in the cloud, or on-prem, Vertica is in a very strong position. Vertica claims to be the only MPP columnar store to allow customers to scale, compute, and storage independently, both in the cloud and in hybrid environments on-prem, et cetera, cross clouds, as well. So, while Vertica may be at a disadvantage in a pure cloud native bake-off, it's more robust in motor stack, combined with its multi-cloud strategy, gives Vertica a compelling set of advantages. So, we heard a lot of this from Colin Mahony, who announced Vertica 10.0 in his keynote. He really emphasized Vertica's multi-cloud affinity, it's Eon Mode, which really allows that separation, or scaling of compute, independent of storage, both in the cloud and on-prem. Vertica 10, according to Mahony, is making big bets on in-database machine learning, he talked about that, AI, and along with some advanced regression techniques. He talked about PMML models, Python integration, which was actually something that they talked about doing with Uber and some other customers. Now, Mahony also stressed the trend toward object stores. And, Vertica now supports, let's see S3, with Eon, S3 Eon in Google Cloud, in addition to AWS, and then Pure and HDFS, as well, they all support Eon Mode. Mahony also stressed, as I mentioned earlier, a big commitment to on-prem and the whole cloud optionality thing. So 10.0, according to Colin Mahony, is all about really doubling down on these industry waves. As they say, enabling native PMML models, running them in Vertica, and really doing all the work that's required around ML and AI, they also announced support for TensorFlow. So, object store optionality is important, is what he talked about in Eon Mode, with the news of support for Google Cloud and, as well as HTFS. And finally, a big focus on deployment flexibility. Migration tools, which are a critical focus really on improving ease of use, and you hear this from a lot of customers. So, these are the critical aspects of Vertica 10.0, and an announcement that we're going to be unpacking all week, with some of the experts that I talked about. So, I'm going to close with this. My long-time co-host, John Furrier, and I have talked some time about this new cocktail of innovation. No longer is Moore's law the, really, mainspring of innovation. It's now about taking all these data troves, bringing machine learning and AI into that data to extract insights, and then operationalizing those insights at scale, leveraging cloud. And, one of the things I always look for from cloud is, if you've got a cloud play, you can attract innovation in the form of startups. It's part of the success equation, certainly for AWS, and I think it's one of the challenges for a lot of the legacy on-prem players. Vertica, I think, has done a pretty good job in this regard. And, you know, we're going to look this week for evidence of that innovation. One of the interviews that I'm personally excited about this week, is a new-ish company, I would consider them a startup, called Zebrium. What they're doing, is they're applying AI to do autonomous log monitoring for IT ops. And, I'm interviewing Larry Lancaster, who's their CEO, this week, and I'm going to press him on why he chose to run on Vertica and not a cloud database. This guy is a hardcore tech guru and I want to hear his opinion. Okay, so keep it right there, stay with us. We're all over the Vertica Virtual Big Data Conference, covering in-depth interviews and following all the news. So, theCUBE is going to be interviewing these folks, two days, wall-to-wall coverage, so keep it right there. We're going to be right back with our next guest, right after this short break. This is Dave Vellante and you're watching theCUBE. (upbeat music)

>> Live from San Francisco, it's theCUBE, covering Micron Insight 2018. Brought to you by Micron. >> Welcome back to San Francisco Bay everybody. You're watching theCUBE, the leader in live tech coverage. We're covering Micron Insight 2018. It's just wrapping up behind us. It's a day long of thought-leading content around AI, AI for good, how it's affecting the human condition and healthcare and the future of AI. I'm Dave Vellante, he's Peter Burris and that's the Golden Gate Bridge over there. You used to live right up that hill over there. >> I did. >> Dee Mooney is here. >> Until they kicked me out. >> Dee Mooney is here. She's the Executive Director of the Micron Foundation. Dee, thanks so much for taking time out of your schedule and coming on theCUBE. >> You bet, I'm very pleased to be here with you today. >> So, you guys had some hard news today. We heard about the 100 million dollar fund that you're launching, but you also had some news around the Foundation. >> That's right. >> The grant, you announced two winners of the grant. Tell us about that. >> That's right. So, it was a great opportunity for Micron to showcase its goodness and what a great platform for us to be able to launch the Advancing Curiosity grant. It is all around really focusing on that, on advancing curiosity, in the hopes that we can think about how might AI help for good, whether that's in business and health or life, and it's really a great platform for us to be able to be a part of today. >> So, what are the specifics? It was a million dollar grant? >> So, it was a million dollar fund and today we announced our first recipients. It was to the Berkeley College of Engineering, specifically their BAIR, which is Berkeley A, Artificial Intelligence Research lab, then also Stanford PHIND lab, which is the Precision, Health and Integrated Diagnostics lab. And then also a non-profit called AI For All, and really their focus is to get the next generation excited about AI and really help the underrepresented groups be exposed to the field. >> So with AI For All, so underrepresented groups as in the diversity culture-- >> Females, underrepresented groups that might not actually get the exposure to this type of math and science in schools and so they do summer camps and we are helping to send students there next summer. >> How do you decide, what are the criteria around which you decide who gets the grants, and take us through that process. >> Today, because we are all about goodness and trying to enhance and improve our communities, this was all around how can AI do some good. So, we are taking a look at what problems can be solved utilizing AI. The second thing we're taking a look at is the type of technology. We want students and our researchers to take a good look at how the technology can work. Then also, what groups are being represented. We want a very diverse group that bring different perspectives and we really think that's our true ability to innovate. >> Well, there's some real research that suggests a more diverse organization solves problems differently, gets to more creativity and actually has business outcomes. That may not be the objective here, but certainly it's a message for organizations worldwide. >> We certainly think so. The more people that are being involved in a conversation, we think the richer the ideas that come out of it. One more thing that we are taking a look at in this grant is we'd like the recipients to think about the data collection, the privacy issues, the ethical issues that go along with collecting such massive amounts of data, so that's also something that we want people to consider when they're applying. >> One of the challenges in any ethical framework is that the individuals that get to write the ethical framework or test the ethical framework, the ethics always works for them. One of the big issues that you just raised is that there is research that shows that if you put a certain class of people and make them responsible for training the AI system, that their biases will absolutely dominate the AI system. So these issues of diversity are really important, not just from a how does it work for them, but also from a very starting point of what should go into the definition of the problem, the approach and solution, how you train it. Are you going the full scope or are you looking at just segments of that problem? >> We'll take a look at, we hope to solve the problems eventually, but right now, just to start with, it's the first announcement of the fund. It's a million dollars, like we mentioned. The first three recipients were announced today. The other recipients that come along, we're really excited to see what comes out of that because maybe there will be some very unique approaches to solving problems utilizing AI. >> What other areas might you look at? How do you determine, curiosity and AI, how'd you come up with that and how do you determine the topics in the areas that you go after? >> The Micron Foundation's mission is to enhance our lives through our people and our philanthropy and we focus on stem and also basic human needs. So, when Micron is engaged in large business endeavors like today, talking about AI, it was the perfect opportunity for us to bring our goodness and focus on AI and the problems that can be solved utilizing it. >> Pretty good day today, I thought. >> Oh, yeah. >> I have to say, I've followed Micron for awhile and you guys can get pretty down and dirty on the technical side, but it was an up-level conversation today. The last speaker in particular really made us think a little bit, talking about are we going to get people to refer-- >> Max Tegmark, right? >> Was that Max Tegmark? Yeah. >> I think that's the name. I didn't catch his name, I popped in late. But he was talking about artificial general intelligence >> I know. >> Reaching, I guess a singularity and then, what struck me is he had a panel of AI researchers, all male, by the way, I think >> Yes. >> I noticed that. >> Yes, we did too. >> The last one, which was Elon Musk, who of course we all know, thinks that there's going to be artificial general intelligence or super intelligence, and he asked every single panel member, will we achieve that, and they all unanimously said yes. So, either they're all dead wrong or the world is going to be a scary place in 20, 30, 50 years. >> Right, right. What are your thoughts on that? >> Well, it was certainly thought-provoking to think about all the good things that AI can do, but also maybe the other side and I'm actually glad that we concluded with that, because that is an element of our fund. We want the people that apply to it or that we'll work with to think about those other sides. If these certain problems are solved, is there a down side as well, so that is definitely where we want that diverse thinking to come in, so we can approach the problems in a good way that helps us all. >> Limited time left, let's talk a little bit about women in tech. In California, Jerry Brown just signed a law into effect that, I believe it's any public company, has to have a woman >> On the Board? >> on the Board. What do you think about that? >> Well, personally, I think that's fantastic. >> Well, you're biased. (laughs) >> I might be a little biased. I guess it's a little unfortunate we now have to have laws for this because maybe there's not enough, I'm not exactly sure, 6but I think it's a step in the right direction. That really aligns well with what we try to do, bring diversity into the workplace, diversity into the conversation, so I think it's a good step in the right direction. >> You know, let's face it, this industry had a lack, really, of women leaders. We lost Meg Whitman in a huge Fortune 50 company, in terms of a woman leader, replaced by Antonio Neri, great guy, know him well, but that was one, if you're counting, one down. Ginni Rometty, obviously, huge presence in the industry. I want to ask you, what do you think about, I don't want to use the word quotas, I hate to use it, but if you don't have quotas, what's the answer? >> I don't know about quotas either. We do know that we help, our Foundation grants span the pipeline from young students all the way up through college and we see this pipeline. It starts leaking along the way. Fifth grade, we start seeing girls fall out. Eighth grade is another big-- >> In the U.S. >> In the U.S. >> Not so much in other countries, which is pretty fascinating. >> We are a global foundation and when we talk with our other partners, they're also interested in having stem outreach into their schools because they want to bring in the critical thinking and problem-solving skills, so, I used to think it was quite just a U.S. problem, but now being exposed to other cultures and countries, definitely they have a different approach, but I think it's a problem that we all strive to overcome. >> Well, it's pretty good research that shows that governance that includes women is generally more successful. It reaches better decisions, it reaches decisions that lead to, in the case of Boards, greater profitability, more success, so if you can't convince people with data, you have to convince them with law. At the end of the day, it would be nice if people recognized that a diverse approach to governance usually ends up with a better result but if you can't, you got to hit 'em over the head. >> I guess so, I guess so. >> Well, obviously, with the Kavanaugh confirmation, there's been a lot of talk about this lately. There's been some pretty interesting stuff. I've got two daughters, you have a daughter. Some pretty interesting stuff in our family chat that's been floating around. I saw, I think it was yesterday, my wife sent me a little ditty by a young woman who was singing a song about how tough it is for men, sort of tongue-in-cheek and singing things like, I can't open the door in my pajamas, I can't walk down the street on my phone at night, I can't leave my drink unattended, so tough for men, so tough for men, so on the one hand, you have the Me Too movement, you have a lot more, since Satya Nadella put his foot in his mouth at the Grace Opera event, I don't know if you saw that, he said-- >> I didn't. >> He said, a couple years ago >> He's the CEO of Microsoft. >> Said a couple years ago, a woman in the audience, Grace Opera, big conference for women, asked, "If we're underpaid, should we say anything?" and he said, no, that's bad kharma, you should wait and be patient, and then of course, he got a lot of you know what for that. >> That probably didn't work for them. And then, he apologized for it, he did the right thing. He said, you know what, I'm way off base and then he took proactive action. But, since then, you feel like there's been certainly much more attention paid to it, the Google debacle of last summer with the employee that wrote that Jerry Maguire tome. >> Right, right. >> Now the Me Too movement, then you see the reaction of women from the Kavanaugh appointment. Do you feel like we've made a lot of progress, but then you go, well, hmm, maybe we haven't. >> It sometimes feels like that. It sometimes feels like that. In my career, over 20 years, I have had a very positive experience working with men, women alike and have been very supported and I hope that we can continue to have the conversations and raise awareness, that everyone can feel good in their workplace, walking down the street and, like you mentioned, I think that it's very important that we all have a voice and all of us bring a different, unique perspective to the table. >> So do you feel that it's two steps forward, Dee, and maybe one step back every now and then, or are we making constant progress? >> It kind of feels like that right now. I'm not sure exactly why, but it seems like we're talking a lot about it more now and maybe just with a lot more attention on it, that's why it's seeming like we're taking a step back, but I think progress has been made and we have to continue to improve that. >> Yeah, I think if you strip out the politics of the Kavanaugh situation and then focus on the impact on women, I think you take a different perspective. I think that's a discussion that's worth having. On theCUBE last week, I interviewed somebody, she called herself, "I'm a Fixer," and I said, "You know, here's some adjectives I think of in a fixer, is a good listener, somebody who's a leader, somebody who's assertive, somebody who takes action quickly. Were those the adjectives that were described about you throughout your career, and the answer was, not always. Sometimes it was aggressive or right? >> True, true. >> That whole thing, when a woman takes swift action and is a leader, sometimes she's called derogatory names. When a man does it, he's seen as a great leader. So there's still that bias that you see out there, so two steps forward, one step back maybe. Well Dee, last thoughts on today and your mission. >> Well, we really hope to encourage the next generation to pursue math and science degrees, whether they are female or male or however they identify, and we want them to do great and hopefully have a great career in technology. >> I'm glad you mentioned that, 'cause it's not just about women, it's about people of color and however you identify. So, thanks very much for coming on theCUBE. We really appreciate it. >> You bet, thank you. >> Alright, keep it right there everybody. Back with our next guest right after this short break. We're live from Micron Insight 2018 from San Francisco. You're watching theCUBE. (techno music)

>> Host: Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE, covering Dell Technologies World 2018, brought to you by Dell EMC and its ecosystem partners. >> Welcome back to theCUBE. We are live, day three of Dell Technologies World. I'm Lisa Martin, back hosting with Dave Velante and we're very excited to welcome back to theCUBE Karen Quintos, Chief Customer Officer at Dell EMC. Hey, welcome back. >> Thank you, thank you. It's great to be here with you both. >> Dave: Good to see you again. >> So, we saw you on stage on Monday, recognizing innovators and trailblazers. I always love, as a marketer, when customers are recognized for their achievements because the voice of the customer is the best brand validation that you can get. Talk to us about the customer awards program and highlight a few of the winners that were on stage. >> Well, first of all, I agree with you, Lisa, that the best way to talk about your products and your solutions is to do it through the eyes of the customer, so being able to honor eight of our super most inspiring customers on stage was great. We had hundreds of submissions from our sales teams working with our customers. We really wanted to bring the transformation stories to life. The stories that we were able to tell and the evolution that these customers have done in their industry and their business, was remarkable, so, you think about Ford and the autonomous car. You think about J and J and the work they're doing around securing their customer data. You think about Volvo and Zenuity, and the opportunities that they have had with technology and then some of my favorite, Arrowfarms, >> Love that. >> Teleconnected farm, and they're using technology in Newark, New Jersey, to transform the way that farming is done, conserving our natural resources, using 95% less water, and being able to do it, and, this, the IOT of farming, they're just all super rich and really really great stories. >> And then, you got, I have to ask you to say it, to pronounce, I loved your pronunciation of, Unidad, come on, help me. >> I know it was the first one, right? >> Dave: Unidad de Conocimiento. (laughing) >> Yes, yeah, you got it right, you got it right. >> Okay. >> They're a great story, too, right, I mean, here's an organization in Colombia that is a consolidation of different industries that are providing these services across Colombia and Latin America. They've absolutely figured out how to take a country like Columbia out of the perils of what has happened there with the drug cartel, really thrive on economic prosperity and they're absolutely kicking butt when it comes to the services that they're providing to all of their, their customers, so it's... >> And the state bank of India, was that the other one? >> State bank of India. >> They really had a global representation, it's awesome. >> Well, we looked hard for that. We looked hard for the global representation. We also looked really really hard and gave extra points to companies that had a purpose and a soul, so what they were doing, either with the technology or with the services that they're providing to their end customers, what's that, that purpose side? And, you know, you saw that in a number of these really awesome organizations. >> I'm going to ask you, so I'm going to ask a leadership question. When we first met, I think it was at Dell World. It might have been 2012, I think you were CMO of Dell at the time, so you, like a lot of leaders, you chair hop, that's kind of what you do. So you've now, playing it up. >> But 18 years at Dell, so, you know. >> Right, but, right, so, you take your best leaders and you say, alright, go fix this problem, go fix this problem, go, go inspire some people to do that, so, you've been, and also it's the, is it the chief customer office that you started? >> I did. Well, actually, Michael started it. >> A year and a half ago? >> Right. >> Well, what's that all about? How's the progress going? Give us the update there. >> Well, you know, I have to tell you, I give a ton of credit to Michael because he saw an opportunity in something that was quite new and quite novel, and now you look a year and a half later at what some of our competitors and others are doing. You know, Microsoft just named somebody that sits at their executive leadership team meeting, recognizing that customer relationships are the ultimate prize. Our ability to deliver a great customer experience is going to be the, is the next battleground, and, we've been leading in that area now for a year and a half, so, I'm the first chief customer officer ever at Dell Technologies, and our mission is really to make sure that we continue to push the needle, and drive an even better end to end customer experience. We're doing a lot around taking our top, most important customers, and there's a couple of thousand of them at Dell. I'm not talking about five or six, I'm talking about like thousands of customers that have consistently honored us with their business over the years so how do we put high touch, high loyalty kind of programs in place? The customer awards were a great way to recognize some of those top customers and put them on the stage and tell their story, and the piece that gets me even more excited is what we're doing around our customer data, so, how do we unleash the power of our customer data? How do we integrate it? How do we automate it? How do we put real time predictive analytics? By looking at a customer end to end and being able to figure out if that account is going to go red, because they've had a combination of things, go figure out what are the sources of value for them and unleash those, so, we're living in this AI big data world and living it realtime with, under the remit of the chief customer office. >> And if I heard you correctly, at the leadership team, you're kind of the voice of the customer? >> I am, I am. There's a lot of voices for the customer. >> Well, yeah, because the head, the head of sales are going to be doing that and. >> But they all come with their own bias, right? Or their own lens, right, so, we're actually, my team is a very very strong partner to our heads of sales, because sometimes heads of sales, I mean, they see these things clearly the same way that we do, but sometimes the voice around, well, this isn't working, we need to get better at this, our customers want us to go faster here, tends to get lost in, you know, business performance and close rates and all of that, and we have this unique ability to look at this end to end, and help to really advocate on behalf of customers and really do the right thing for them at the end of the day. >> Independent of the transaction metrics, is what you're saying. >> Yes. >> And it's different perspective, right? We talked about the voice of the customer being an objective brand validation, and you come from a different perspective. One of the things that, we had your CIO on earlier today, Bask, and he said, "We drink our own champagne." And then we had Ravi Pentaconti and he says, we eat our own dog food, we're right next to the therapy dogs. So I like that, but from what you're saying, you're using customer data to help make Dell Technologies differentiated, be able to revolutionize the customer experience, listening to those customers is key. Can you tell us a little bit more about how some of that data is being applied to revolutionize that experience? >> Sure, so, some of it's basic, some of it can be pretty transformational, so, and by the way Baz Guyer has been a significant partner with me on this journey, because he understands it. Listen, Dell's the only technology company out there today that has the rich, direct data that we have, combined with rich channel partner data. So, we have all of it, right? And some of our competitors do everything through the channel, a few of them do everything all direct, we do both. So, we have a huge advantage when it comes to that. We can look at the amalgamation of all of the listening posts that we have for our customers. We have a booth here, where we've brought in hundreds, thousands of customers, and we've asked them a series of questions. We have voice of the field surveys that we do with our sales team, we do NPS surveys, this survey, all of that. We can bring all of that together using big data and insights and we can prioritize the big things that matter. So one of the things that I see a lot of my peers at other companies get caught up in, is they're chasing 15 or 20 things. You know, at any given moment, we're chasing 3 to 5. And we want to move the needle on those 3 to 5 and then we want to get, capture and address the next ones. So that's what I would call kind of the basic, fundamental pieces. What I think is exciting, is, we can now take a view of a customer, a complete view of that customer, we know what they bought, we know who they bought it from, we know the number of escalations they've had, we know what their delivery performance has been, we know how many times they've changed the AE on the account we know what their corporate responsibility priorities are, and we can look at that in totality, and we can put an outreach kind of program in place for them, or, we can look at it and go, this one is about to go south, and we need to put our best people to go call on the account and help the account executive, who in a lot of ways sees this also, and help to figure out how to turn it around. >> So, and you can do that across the integrated company today? >> We have piloted across the integrated set of companies, and in the Q3 period of time, working closely with Baz, we're going to automate this and turn it into like an Amber Alert, early warning type of system, so that we can help the AE and our customers before things happen. And the other piece that we can do, is we know, we know the ten levers of customer value. And, you know, for the most part we do those generally well. But in some cases, some of the reasons that our customers come back to us is because we've discovered things at their account that they didn't even know was happening. So we're, we've got this power of big data sitting right in front of us with Chief Customer Office that can really, really light it up. >> Well the other thing you said is the account teams know when there's a problem, but the executive teams, they have limited resources. So you don't know where to prioritize. >> Right, and some of our AE's have more than one account. >> Dave: Yeah, right. >> So, you know, some of them are handling 20 accounts. So where this thing becomes really interesting is as you think about scaling it, down through the organization, not just at the top ones. The top accounts, they're one to, one-to-one kind of engagement, and those types of things. It gets really interesting when you start to get below that and you start to really use it in a more scaleable way. >> Plus, as you go more channel, right, and you go more to edge, you get all these complexities beyond just product portfolio. You're dealing with that stuff, but then the channel complexities, and then the new markets that are emerging, particularly in edge, and the channels that that's going to precipitate. >> Right, right. >> To me, this is even more important. >> So 18 months into this new role that Michael Dell created, lots of accomplishments, it sounds like you're really leveraging it to partner with customers to help, not just them, but also your internal teams, be able to identify where there needs to be escalations. What are some of the things that you're opening up with respect to diversity and inclusion, because that's also under your purview? >> That's right, that's right Lisa. What I think is really interesting is how much our sales teams now is coming to my team, to use some of these other platforms to open doors and have conversations with CIOS that they could not get before. So I'll give you a perfect case in point. The sales leader in the U.K. came to me and said, "I have a particular account in London, "I haven't really been able to make any progress, "the CIO is a woman, their head of infrastructure is a woman "you're going to be there in London, would you send her a note "and let's have a conversation around some of the things "that we have some mutual interest in." Technology being one, as well as getting more women involved in to technology. So we had this conversation, an hour in, she said, you know, if Dell would host a session with other female CIOs in the U.K area, I will open up my Rolodex and we will get other women to come. Two months later, we did it, in London in January. I was there, Michael was there, our heads of sales were there, we had about 15 or 20 of these super impressive women in the public sector, the private sector, higher education universities, big brands, we just did a similar one here at Dell Technologies World. We just hosted, as a matter of fact yesterday, 20 women, we actually had a couple of men that were there, too, all just coming together talking about areas that we deeply care about. How do we get more women and minorities interested in these technology fields. >> And here we are in 2018, this is still such an issue, and it's something that's still surprising when we get to see females on stage in keynotes, like yourself, like Allison Doo who was just chatting with you, Dave, and Stu. It's still, we're actually kind of going, hey, we're starting from a deficit whereas 20 30 years ago we were kind of going up. What are some of the things that you hear from your male peers in terms of the importance of showing multiple generations of girls and women you do belong here, if this is something that you're interested in, do not be afraid. >> Yeah, what I find remarkable in these conversations is there's clearly a number of key themes that are emerging. One of the biggest ones is, this is an economic imperative. You think about, there's going to be 1.1 million jobs in the computer science technology field over the next ten years. 45% of those jobs are going to be filled by U.S. college grads. It's a gap 55%. Women that are graduating in the area of computer science and technology is down, significantly, from like 30% down to like 18% right now. You are simply not going to have enough of what has been the traditional workforce in order to fill these jobs. So, that's one, and that's one that we at Dell care about a lot. Second piece that we care about, is, we just know that when you bring together a diverse group of individuals, always get to a better answer for your customers, you do. Research has proven it, we can prove it, we can see it, all of that. And then the third piece is, I just think women bring unique skills in a collaborative global context that can really bust through some of the big, complex, thorny opportunities that corporations are working through. >> So, ladies, let me jump in here, if I may. So there's two sides to this coin is, one is yes, we've got to get young women excited, but the other is you've got to promote women to leadership positions. Obviously Dell does a good job of that, clearly IBM gets high marks for that, I mean one of the sad things about seeing Meg Whitman go was that you had a dynamic woman leader. Maybe not the greatest speaker in the world, but one-on-one, super strong, and I think an inspiration to a lot of young women. And I think our industry clearly, Silicon Valley, Boston, just not doing enough. Particularly in smaller companies, larger companies I think do a better job, so your thoughts on that? >> My thought on that is it's a hard problem, but at its very basic, it's actually quite simple. And these are the things that we're doing at Dell, it takes commitment from the top, and at all levels of the company to make change, drive the accountability, set goals. To your point, go place some bets on the younger generation up-and-coming diverse talent, put them in roles, and then surround them with a support system that they need to be successful. And, we've done that, you know, Michael has done that, he did it with me. When, six or seven years ago, he called me and said how'd ya like to be Dell's next Chief Marketing Officer? And then you know, called me 18 months ago and said, how'd ya like to be Dell's first Chief Customer Officer. You need people that see things in that talent and you need that commitment. You need a culture that supports that. You need more role models. You need to get rid of and totally eliminate the harassment and the bullying and the old boys kind of club. You've got to create places where women and minorities feel like they can be themselves. Culture plays a huge, huge, huge role. And then, you know, communities play a huge role. So we have a very, very growing and thriving employee resource group set of networks. We have 14 of them across Dell and Dell EMC. And they're just a safe haven for where people of color, women, LGBT, veterans, disabilities can come and just be themselves, and be with others that they feel safe with. So, some level, it's not that hard. It really does take the commitment and the wherewithal and the sense of urgency that says we've got to fix it, and we have to fix it now. >> I feel like 2017 was a milestone year, I'd love to know what your thoughts are. You had that incident in the tech industry, with that poor misguided soul from Google who decided to write this Jerry Maguire memo and just brought a lot of attention to the issue, and then the #MeToo movement, so I feel like 2018 is a more optimistic year, but still, a lot of that stuff that you were talking about goes on, and it needs to be exposed. Again, I think the #MeToo movement brings that out and a lot of people are thinking uh-oh, wow. This really has to stop. Your thoughts, do you agree with that, or do you just think, no Dave, we're still way too far away. >> I think what #MeToo has done is opened a lot of eyes around how pervasive all of this is. I know, in the case of Dell, we have a zero tolerance zero tolerance policy when it comes to all of that. What was so shocking to us is how pervasive it still was in either other companies or other industries. To me, what is encouraging now, is the conversation is going beyond harassment, to aggression and bullying and culture and some of the things that have happened over the years, and by the way, it happens across all genders. There's articles that are being written now about women that are bullying and have bullied, so. This is something that all corporations need to be setting the tone around what are the right behaviors and those types of things, and we've been doing that now, for years. The other piece that I feel very strongly about, is, if men retreat from this conversation, that is a huge problem, a huge problem. Leaders like you have to be part of it. They have to be part of, this has to change. I want to be part of the solution. I have daughters, or wives, or nieces or whatever it is that I know that they have just as much capability as boys and men do, and my job is to help them. So I love it, I love the way that men and women are both coming together and engaging in this conversation. And we are seeing progress. I think everybody wants it to be faster, but we are seeing progress. Hey, yesterday at this CIO round table that we have, one of my favorite quotes, we got into this whole conversation around, well what is the next generation feeling? And one of the women that was there said, "hey, my daughter told me three weeks ago, "you know mom, she goes, I really think, "to me it's really simple. "I want to be a mom and I want to be a CEO." It's that simple. >> Wow, I love that. So in the last few seconds or so, Karen, you've made a tremendous amount of progress impact as the Chief Customer Officer in 18 months. What are you looking forward to accomplishing the rest of 2018? >> Well I think the thing that gets me really energized, too is how we're applying our technology in the area of corporate responsibility and innovation. So, you know, you saw our plastic bottle demo that we had here, that fish moves from one event to another, we got really serious around how do we play a really key role in stopping the plastics from entering the ocean? So there's 86 million metric tons of plastic that is in the ocean today. By the year 2050, there will be more pieces of plastic in the ocean than there are fish. You have to stop the plastic from entering the ocean, which is a pilot project that we did about a year ago, and we recently announced an expansion of that called next wave, where we have our customers that are partnering with us to figure out how do we scale that? So, General Motors, Herman Miller, are just a couple of examples. And then, at CES this year, we announced an effort that we're doing around how do you extract gold out of motherboards, and using that, and recycling that back into our motherboards and using it in jewelry manufacturing. So we partnered with a jewelry manufacturer out of the West Coast, Nikki Reed. She is creating this jewelry, these rings, through recycled gold, and it's 99% more environmentally friendly. So, I love the fact that we can use our technology to innovate, change the world, use, reuse the stuff that we're putting into the economy. So, scaling these is a big, big priority for me in 2018. >> Dave: Awesome. >> Wow, momentum is the only word I can think of to describe what you've achieved, what you're doing so far. Karen, thank you so much for stopping by and chatting with Dave and me, and congratulations on what you've accomplished, and we look forward to talking to you next year. >> Thanks, thank you. >> We want to thank you for watching theCUBE we are live, finishing up day three at Dell Technologies World in Las Vegas, I am Lisa Martin for Dave Vellante, thanks for watching.

>> Announcer: Live from Madrid Spain, it's theCUBE covering HPE Discover Madrid 2017. Brought to you by Hewlett Packard Enterprise. >> We're back. This is theCUBE that you're watching, the leader in live tech coverage. We're at HPE Discover 2017 in Madrid. My name is Dave Vellante, I'm here with my co-host for the week, Peter Burris. Peter, it's been great working with you this week. >> Indeed, it's been great. >> We're winding down, and we're really excited to have Ric Lewis, >> Great ideas. >> Senior Vice President and General Manger of the Software Defined and Cloud Group. Many time CUBE guest with HPE, and Jeff Wike of Dreamworks. CTO, thanks for coming on. >> Yeah. Thank you. Thanks for having me. >> Great to see you. You're welcome. Been a good week? >> It's been a fantastic week. >> Things are coming into focus? >> They are. >> You killed it on the keynote, how are you feeling? >> Feeling really good, feeling really good. I mean, the momentum in the software defined and cloud arena is just fantastic. You know, there were times when I used to visit with you guys and we were only talking about what's coming in the future. Now we're talking a lot about what we have, what customers are buying, where we have momentum. And still introducing new things, so it's just a whole lot of fun. >> Jeff, Senior Vice President, CTO, can we talk a little bit about your role? What the scope is? >> Sure. Sure, so Dreamworks Animation, you may have heard of it. >> Yeah. We do we make animated films. >> Good friend Kate Swanberg's been on a number of times. >> Kate's, love her. We make animated films, we do a lot more than that. We're a digital content creation company. So we, we're the largest TV animation studio in the world. We're doing theme park ride work, cause we've got, we're now under NBC Universal. So we're doing a lot of projects, it's a very busy time for us. >> So, Synergy, we talked about Synergy a lot, there's nothing >> Yeah. >> like Synergy we've heard. >> Yeah, yeah. >> Fluid pools of infrastructure. >> Yeah, it just gets better. >> Wait and see and so, what can you tell us? How's the momentum? >> Yeah let's talk a little bit about that. So the momentum on Synergy is fantastic. We started shipping in volume at this conference last year, basically December of last year. And the response has been fantastic. We've looked at Momentum for new infrastructure plays. You know if you look back at our history, whether it was the C7000 or whether it was UCS from Cisco or whether it was VCEs built on UCS, Nutanix. If you kind of look at the first year of a new infrastructure play, Synergy looks like it's the fastest growing thing ever. It's just fantastic, really growing for us. We have over 1100 customers on Synergy now. You know, and that's in 11 months of shipping. And the business, it just continues to grow quarter by quarter. Just really thrilled with the progress there, so happy. >> And you guys are customers? >> We're big customers, if we're not the biggest customer, we're certainly the biggest fan. >> One of the biggest, one of the biggest customers, maybe the biggest fan. >> Certainly the biggest fan. >> Okay so Jeff, tell us, take us back to sort of pre-Synergy, you know, what was it like before and after and what has it done for your business in particular? >> Well one of the things that that we face going forward is we developed, in our infrastructure, and inner data center, we do a lot of rendering to make a movie. That's our largest high performance compute. You know, 80 million render hours, CPU hours to make one of these films. And we're making a lot of them at the same time. We really defined that work flow, and how we optimize the data center hardware to be able to go through that work flow and be able to be as efficient as possible. The issue came with we have a lot of other projects that are coming in, and since we are now under NBC Universal, there's a lot of other work that's happening there. And also, different types of media that's coming, you know, around the corner. And we want to be able to prepare for that. What we would have done traditionally would be to buy to peak, you know because it is rather cyclical, and that's what we would do that on prem, peak. But if we had a special project, we might buy or segment a portion of that and say, you know, this is for this purpose. This is for that purpose, but that's very inefficient. So with Synergy, the beauty of it is we can purchase you know that hardware, but then if we want to be able to use it for another project, we can do that. And we can do that very very quickly. >> You said you repurpose that across your application portfolio. Or your project portfolio. >> Yeah. Yeah, it gives us, I like to say it future proofs us. Because now no matter what the parent company or our own creative ambitions are, we can handle that. We can't say no, well we never say no. We usually say not right now, or wait a couple of weeks or a couple of months to be able to provision that. And now it's, it's instantaneous. >> And I know what Ric's answer would be to this, but I want to hear from the customers. Is this really different than other products that you've experienced. >> It's totally unique. We haven't experienced it before. And I'll give you, I'll give you a little example. We just got our order. We got about 200 servers of Synergy that arrived a couple of months ago. And within seven working days, we were using it in production. And I just want to say, we took, I don't know if I told you this story, but we were able to provision all of that from the time we mounted in the racks within five hours, which is incredible. It would have taken us easily three weeks before. In fact, it took us longer to take it out of the cartons than it did to provision. >> Well, so let me see if I... You're talking about maybe 200 servers. You're probably talking about 8,000 individual tasks configured. To get it done in five hours you probably perform what, 40, 50 tasks? Administrative steps? >> By the way, first time doing it. And our engineers were saying, we could've used more parallelism. We could've done it faster. You know, it's almost a challenge to see just how easy you can do this. >> But I got that right? Is it really like 98 percent reduction in the administrative tasks? >> Absolutely. >> Really? >> That's incredible. >> It is. >> Huh, alright. >> That's before you start flexing work, flexing resources against different workloads and dynamically reprovisioning. This is just provisioning the first time. But it, if you think about it, if you're gonna do it dynamically, it can't take forever, so you've gotta make it, the first time it's gotta be super fast. >> Okay. >> So, I have to admit I'm a little stunned, I didn't know that. So, and as you said, the whole point is that you can reprovision >> Yes. >> Over and over. Which means that the... There's something in economics and technology that's known as an asset specificity. And an asset has high specificity when you buy it and can appropriate it to a specific purpose. And about the only thing in tech that makes something an asset specificity is the administrative tasks of changing it to prepare it to do something else. And you just told me that I can remove nearly 100% of the transaction costs associated with taking an asset from this and applying it to that. >> If you're gonna destroy silos in the data center, that's what you have to do. >> But that's... >> Right, so silo is this asset specificity. If you can repurpose it immediately. >> So I'm excited, that's my second question. How did your people respond to this? Because I talked to a lot of other CIOs that say one of the biggest challenges I'm having, or CTOs, one of the biggest challenges I'm having is I'm able to converge hardware, I'm able to converge to some software, I'm able to converge Administrative tasks, but my people don't like converge. What, they don't like to converge. How are you walking your people through some of these changes to liberate these opportunities? >> Well we've been moving toward, from more traditional, we'll call it IT for now. From traditional IT to dev ops environment and, you know what, it's change. So we've been bringing people along in that you know, to, and some people adapt to it. They say wow this is gonna be great for my career. And engineers want to always use the new stuff, so from that aspect of I know how I work, and I know what I do, to here's a better way of doing it to be more automated, it's been a good experience for people. And you know what, the chance of human error in configuring things... If I look to my long history at Dreamworks, 21 years, I look at any down time we've had or any problems, 90% of that has been from misconfiguration. And it's usually from somebody fat fingering, you know a parameter in the set up of the servers. And now, that's virtually eliminated. >> Did you have to go through some kind of organizational, internal sort of discussion, transformation, whatever you want to call it to actually get to the point where you could buy this way, buy a sort of single SKU of Synergy? Because you maybe previously you were buying bespoke, kind of roll your own components. A little server here, maybe some storage over there, maybe some networking here. Now maybe it's all HP that made it simpler, but you probably had specialist in each of those areas, did you not? >> We did. >> How did you deal with that organizational friction? >> You know, that was an issue as and by the way, there's so many, there's so much technology that's being developed some of it open source, some of it in this partner ecosystem that you have. And trying to stay abreast of that has been a real challenge. And one of the things that we always dreamed of is wouldn't it be nice if there was one way that you could control that. The single pane of glass, which is you know, to be able to have an API layer that everybody could hook in to. I think you've got a company like Hewlett Packard Enterprise that has that dominance in the market place to be able to dictate, I'm using that word. >> Yeah. >> Maybe dictate isn't the right word. >> Offer. >> Offer. (group laughing) >> That's the word we use. Enable. >> Enable, you know those APIs. And all of those are being developed you know almost in parallel. >> Yeah, yeah, yeah. >> So this stuff is really coming in. Now we have our own... We're a snowflake like everybody else is to your point. And what we've done is we brought in the Pointnext team to go in and write those northbound APIs so that we can hook in to one view. To be able to manage all of our legacy, I'll call it legacy, our previous infrastructure along with you know, the new tech that we're buying. So that it makes it easy to manage. >> They made it match the composable API that we put into Synergy. It's natively integrated. All the ecosystem partners are adapting to it. And they said we'll just use that as our standard to even manage our legacy infrastructure. Plus, since Oneview runs on legacy infrastructure, all of the HPE stuff, it just adapts like that. So it's been a very good, good project. >> So you've got a lot of experience with this now. Can you share with, maybe you can quantify it, maybe you can't, but even subjectively the developer impact or the animator impact, the business impact to Dreamworks? >> So the biggest impact... Well I have three things that are my, actually I got this from Meg Whitman, I had a list of 12 objectives for the studio for technology and she said at one of the CIO summits, you've gotta have three. So I said okay, I've gotta pare it down to three. And one of those is provide the technology, the software and infrastructure to meet the creative needs. The second one was innovate for competitive advantage. And the third one was drive efficiency into operations. And if you look at what Synergy provides, it hits every single one of those. So we've actually, you know, over the past year or two, we've actually reduced the number of people that we have maintaining our infrastructure, which is amazing if you consider the fact that this year we doubled the size of our infrastructure. In what other business, in what other area can you actually reduce the amount of people that are maintaining something while you're doubling the amount that you're maintaining. That never happens. And I think it's because of this software defined infrastructure and the fact that you can write these recipes or profiles, whatever you want to call them, personalities. >> Yep, yep, yep. >> To be able to... And test them and harden them. And by the way, that reminds me, one of the things I really like about this is our ability to do proofs of concept, to try different workflows and all that without having to take away resources from the main thing that we're doing which is the artistic community. So we can actually say, you know what? We're gonna go in, reimage these servers. We're gonna do that at night to run this test, in the morning they're back, they're back in the pool. And that's an amazing thing. >> That's dynamic provisioning. No one else can dynamically provision. >> Yeah. >> All the converge systems, all the hyper converge, they're provisioned a certain way. They run VMs a certain way. They stay that way for their lifetime. This stuff dynamically reprovisions, and you guys, you're not even talking about kind of doing containers with VMs and containers with your bare metal, you can dynamically reprovision across that as well. >> Yeah, what he said. (laughter) >> Listen, we're just getting started so just relax, okay. These guys are telling me we gotta wrap. We're not gonna wrap. >> No. >> We haven't even gotten to One Sphere yet. >> We have other topics. Exactly. >> So let's get to One Sphere. >> Yeah. >> Yeah I want to talk about One Sphere. But I do want to say. >> Go ahead, last thought. >> One more thing, so you talked about artists, but the other part of it is for developers so one of the things we don't want the engineering teams to be a hindrance to the developers. Because they want to be able to move quickly, they want to be able to be assessing, and I think one of the things that's not just an impact on our artists, to be able to do these new projects, but also it makes our developers more efficient. They don't have to wait. >> Yeah. >> Okay, great. Now let's talk multi cloud. >> Yep. >> A lot of complexity, the more things get simple, the more complex they seem to get. So, One Sphere. You guys announced yesterday. >> Yeah, so. A core pillar of the HP strategy, make hybrid IT simple, right. And you can see from this conversation we're making hybrid IT simple on-prem. Not only do we have Synergy, but we have a fantastic offering in our Simplivity space. And that platform's over 2,000 customers and growing like crazy as well. But after we did that, we said look, we've got fantastically simple virtualization clusters in Simplivity, we've got great dynamic reprovisioning and composable infrastructure, but customer are not... That's part of their hybrid IT problem, that's the on-prem part. They're also wrestling with I've got multiple cloud instances, I need to get insights into where I'm spending my money, where workloads are deployed and all that. So we started this program, HPE OneSphere. We've had it going for almost three years. We had a small team on it early on. We ramped up the staffing a couple years ago. And what it really does, it's pretty simple. It allows you to build clouds, deploy apps, and gain insights extremely fast. So it's designed for IT ops to be able to build and deploy a private cloud as fast as they can and assemble that with their public cloud assets. And provide one place to look at all of those. For developers, it provides a common multi-tenant environment that has all the services and tools they need to be able to deploy an application whether it's on-prem or off-prem, and you can choose, you can build applications that have some of both inside that developer environment. And then for the business, it shows insights into where's the money being spent? Where are those workloads running and what's it costing me? So, think of it almost as composable at that next level where it's not just resources within chassis, now it's resources across the hybrid IT estate. It actually is public cloud assets from any of the public clouds, whether it's AWS, Azure, Google, Cloud28+, as well as your private cloud assets. And it automates the life cycle stuff that we were just talking about through this application into OneView. It's a SaaS environment, so actually OneSphere is software as a service. It lives in the cloud, it's a subscription that our customers buy, and it does all of this capability to simplify their hybrid environment and taps into the capabilities we just talked about. It's fantastic, nobody has anything like it. >> Okay well we've heard that before, but now... >> Exactly. >> You're putting your money where your mouth is. >> So I was right on that one. >> Okay but it's early days for OneSphere. >> Okay. >> And your private cloud is what we call a true private cloud. >> Which you said on stage yesterday. >> I did that's exactly right. >> It's evidence by your ability to reduce staff to manage infrastructure. >> It's a con experience wherever the data requires is how we put it. >> Yes, yes. We want the simplicity of management and the availability of apps that you get in public cloud in the private cloud. >> And the pricing. Yeah? >> Well, yeah, well... No, cause it's actually more expensive to go public cloud. >> I mean pricing models. >> Oh yes, yeah. >> The consumption is what you're basically talking about, yeah. >> And so you, Jeff you guys are OneSphere or OneSphere betas? >> Yeah, you bet. >> So what were you trying to learn? What were you kicking the tires on, testing? Where'd you focus? >> We, you know, if we look at the future, we're not gonna be on-prem forever, and I certainly don't want to be on-prem forever, I want to take advantage of flexing to public cloud, but again, for our films, you know, we want to be able to provide the producers of those movies, what is that gonna cost me? What is that, how can I tell you what that costs? And where can we move as we start to do more different types of projects? Which ones should go to the public cloud? Which ones should stay inside? And be able to understand that. The other thing that made us nervous about public cloud. Was what they call the zombie cloud instances, you know where you went in, you provision something and then you forget about, and you, but you're paying, you know. And that's, a lot of money is made. >> Kind of like app subscriptions. >> Group: Yes, exactly. >> I'm still paying for that? (laughter) >> Exactly but this gives you all of that... >> 4,000 dollars a month. >> A little different right. >> Or 15,000 a month. (laughter) >> Yeah, that's for sure. That visibility is something that all... We talk about it, CFOs hate this thing... Some of the consumption model is shifting from cap ex to op ex, but CFOs hate surprise op ex. And that's where they're actually surprised by oh my gosh look at that bill. Well this provides visibility into all of those assets, whether they're on-prem or off-prem and what they're costing you. And it's always up to date, and it's always consistent across your entire farm, so you can choose and say that's costing me too much, I want to move those apps over here. And immediately do it. And for a lot of our customers, they're over-provisioned so they have spare capacity on-prem they're not taking advantage of. Why not use some of that and it's instantly provisioned. >> And that's where you initially, anyway, see the business value of OneSphere. >> Well, look, it's OneSphere to rule them all. And I believe whether it's private, public, you know we really want to have what is my total resource availability? So in the future, we never say no anymore. Really, we can tell them how much, but you don't have to say no. And the other thing is we can do this stuff instantly. So, we don't even say when, we just go now here's what you have to pay if you want to do it, we can provide those options. It's a new world. >> I love the demo of, I don't know if you guys saw it, there's a demo with Pong, you know, it's the IT guy of the past. >> Yeah the guy saying no. >> And then they made it vertical. It's the IT guy of the future. So, alright my last question. What cool movies can we anticipate? What's coming? >> Well you know what, How to drain... How to Train, how to drain your tragon I was gonna say. (laughter) How to Train Your Dragon 3 is our next film out and it's gonna be unbelievable. >> I'll bet. >> So my last question. Am I gonna have to continue to sit through 15 minutes of IT credits at the end of future Dreamworks movies as a consequence of Synergy? >> There's less, cause there's less resources required to manage your Synergy hardware. So it's less people. >> I know you don't sit through the credits. (laughter) >> I do. (laughter) I love credits. Alright guys, thanks very much for coming on. >> Thank you. >> It's been a great pleasure. >> Thank you, always fun. >> Alright keep it there everybody, Peter and I will be back to wrap up HPE Discover 2017 from Madrid, you're watching theCUBE. (upbeat music)

(upbeat music) >> Announcer: Live from Madrid, Spain it's The Cube, covering HPE Discover Madrid 2017. Brought to you by Hewlett-Packard Enterprise. >> Welcome back to Madrid, everyone. This is The Cube, the leader in live tech coverage. We're here, this is Day Two of of HPE Discover 2017. My name is Dave Vellante and I'm here with my co-host for the week Peter Burris. Ana Pinczuk is here, she's the Senior Vice President and General Manager of HPE Pointnext Group. >> That's right, that's right. >> Welcome back to The Cube. >> Glad to be here. >> Many time Cube alum. >> That's right, that's right. >> Pre-HPE and second time since, when did you start, in February? >> Yes, I know it's been nine months, I'm a veteran. >> You're a vet, right. (laughs) How's the gig going, you hitting your groove swing? >> Yes. >> Dave: Looked great up on stage yesterday. >> Thank you so much, yeah I appreciate it. Yeah I think we are, I came on board in February and it's been a run ever since. We launched a brand in February, so that's when I think when we sort of talked last. And then since then, we've just launched another brand which is HPE GreenLake for flexible consumption model stuff. And we've been doing a lot of great things, we've been doing partnerships with folks, I've been going out to each one of the regions talking to different customers, it's been going really well. >> Well so Pointnext has become a linchpin of HPE strategy. After the spin-merges, things became more clear when you talk about making hybrid IT simple, getting to the intelligent edge, services is now front and center. Meg talks about it, Antonio talks about it. >> That's right. >> Why is services so important and how do you see that scaling in the organization? >> So first of all, I definitely believe the world is turning to be a services-led world and I tell folks that it's really two things, it's services-led and then advisory-led, really advisory. And particularly because our customers want to really undergo these new digital journeys. I was just on stage talking to one of our customers, the Tottenham Hotspurs, and they're redoing their whole stadium and they're trying to increase the interaction and the engagement that they have with fans. So that's where services come in, and so we're really services-led that way and the second thing that's a phenomenon is really the cloud has really helped us learn to want everything instantaneously and to want things when we need them and when we think we need them. And so a lot of services is really about enabling those experiences in a consumption model. So that's the transformation I think that HPE is going through right now, just being a product company, but really moving to being services-led to deliver these digital experiences. >> Well one of the things that we've observed over the years, as folks who work with customers in thinking about their technology, is that there's a co-mingling, a bringing together of the idea of invention. And one of the things that's most attractive to me about a services-led, or acknowledging the role of services, is it really, innovation, is a two-part process. There's an invention, which is the engineering element, and enters the innovation, which is the social, the change. And one of the beauties of taking a services as opposed to a product approach, is that you end up focusing on the social change. >> That's right. >> You end up focusing on what does it mean to use this, apply it, make it happen, and it accelerates the innovation process. I'm wondering if by having a more services-approach, HP's able to look at this significant new range of problems you're going to try to address, but address them as a social innovation challenge as opposed to just getting product into market. >> Yeah, no and that's absolutely right. I'll give you another cool example, we have a customer Yoox Net-A-Porter, and they're a digital sort of online experience provider. They support brands like all of the expensive luxury brands that we know and love. And they're trying to help stores innovate, so let's say you're Prada or Marni or Louis Vuitton, they're helping provide a social experience to their luxury brand consumer. And being able to do that, not just mirroring what you would get in a store, but really innovating in how do you engage with that kind of a consumer online. And so for example, they allow you to shop online but then they'll bring the product to you, it'll be all wrapped really nice, they wait for you to try it on to make sure it's okay. So that's an example of social innovation, not just thinking about how to provide product to enable a website, but how do you actually then help a customer innovate in that whole engagement model? >> It's innovation that is made possible by a whole lot of technology combined with simple ways of introduce change, not just to consumers, but also the people who are ultimately responsible for providing that service. >> Ana: That's right, that's right, that's exactly right. >> Peter: Is that one of the basis then for thinking about Pointnext? >> It is, yeah, it is because people ask me, you know we've always done services and a lot of our services were product-attached services, you do support services, operational services, data center care, those sorts of things. And then we decided to sort of launch Pointnext, and the idea is that this is more than just what we've traditionally done as product-attached. This is really coming at it from a completely different angle, which is recognizing that there is an element of social and management of change that comes through digital. And that's why we talk about advisory-led. Part of that advisory-led is really helping companies figure out what is that new phenomenon, how do I actually shift the experience that I want to enable and how do I bring social innovation with a set of partners, too, because experiences really require us to work not just with our own products, but with software providers, with inside and others. >> Peter: And your customer's partners too. >> And our customer's partners as well, I mean who the customer is is shifting as we put this together. I'll give you an example, when we work with automotive companies, we've gotta think not just about, let's say, the car company and their connected car, but we also have to think about how the consumer of the car is going to interact with the IT environment in the car. >> How the dealers are going to sell it, >> Ana: And how the dealers are gonna sell it. >> how they're gonna make money, the whole thing. >> How they're gonna do predictive maintenance on it >> Exactly. >> So you start to think not just about one experience, but all the elements that come from that single experience. >> Well we just had Deloitte on talking about retail experiences and transforming brick and mortar stores, so that's a key part of it. So partnerships is also something critical, 'cause you can't do everything. >> Ana: That's right. >> So I want to come back to some of the invention piece. When you were up on stage talking about flexible consumption models, you know, cloud, when we went into the downturn it was kinda a tap on the shoulder. Coming out of the downturn it became a kick in the butt to a lot of tradtional IT players. So you've had to respond to that. And you have, flexible consumption models, pay-as-you-go models. So I started to make a list because we've been talking all week about two ends of the spectrum. We've got here at HPE Discover, AWS re:Invent's going on this week, completely different philosophies about what customers want and how to serve those customers. And so you've got to a great degree mimic the cloud experience. And you can't do it 100%. At the same time, the cloud can't mimic what you guys can do. So I kinda wanted to go through a list and think about where have you closed those gaps, where do you still have advantages for customers. So things like pay-as-you-go, flexible capacity, you've done a lot of work there. Can you give us the update on that and how big is that gap when you talk to customers? >> So first of all, it's interesting because when some of our competitors talk about pay-as-you-go, they start by talking about just a leasing arrangement. They say "Okay, it's a lease." And this is far beyond a lease. I think I can eliminate quite a few of our competitors, (laughs) not cloud competitors, just by saying we've gone beyond that, right. And we provide a full service. So it's the hardware, the software, the data center care, the operational management. And then we turn that service into a pay-as-you-go model. So that's the first sort of innovation and differentiation. And we do that on-prem or in a hosted environment, that's the first thing. The second thing is that part of what we do is we help to manage that environment for the customer. So in a flexible capacity model, we over-provision in a sense and we have a buffer and we understand where the customer's going, how much their utilization is, and then we automatically sort of manage that whole thing for them, up or down depending on what happens. I think the third thing, which is part of the innovation, which is a little different, is we also do the integration of other technologies into the offer. So yesterday I was talking about private backup as a service. There we've got the hardware, the software, it could be Commvault let's say backup software, all the management associated with that, including the support that you need for that, offered in an outcome-based service. So what we're doing there is we're also innovating in the metering, what we're saying is we're going to really provide you an outcome, and that outcome is a successful backup. So you don't actually have to worry about the equipment, you don't have to worry about is it infrastructure-as-a-service? You know, AWS, whatever, we're actually providing a full solution in an outcome-based. And I think that's a little bit of what differentiates us from maybe some of the solutions that are out there, from others. That said, I view this as providing the right mix to our customers, so although, yes, you can say that we're competing with the public cloud, because customers have choice, at the same time part of what we're trying to do also is bring those two together, which I think is unique for us. >> Makes more same philosophy, different approaches. >> Different approaches, and by the way, if you're customer-centric, then what you wanna do is provide customer choice and do the right thing for the customer, and to say where does it make sense to be on the public cloud, or in a private environment, and optimize for the customer benefits that you're going after. >> Well I think it's fair to say that the world has learned a lot from what AWS has done, and said "Hey, we can take that "and we can apply it to our customers' businesses "on-prem or in a hybrid environment." >> And by the way, AWS, especially with our CTP acquisition, they've been a long-term AWS partner and we're having conversations with AWS that say okay, if we're going to really focus on customers, and we're really customer-centric, then how do we work together? Not just AWS, but Microsoft and Google and others, how do we work together and look at where we can optimize our solutions to be able to do the right thing for the customer. >> So our clients are sick and tired of hearing me say this, or us say this, but we believe that where we're going is the cloud experience for your data demands. >> That's right. >> So the way we think about it and I'm wondering if you would agree, is that the first conversation we have with a customer is what's the outcome, what data is required to serve that outcome, how're you gonna package it up as a workload, and where do you naturally need to run that based on latency, other types of issues. Is that kind of how Pointnext is working with customers as well? >> Yeah absolutely right, so we wanna come in, customer in, so you wanna be able to say "What is it that you're trying to do from an outcome?" I described a backup outcome, another outcome might be I'm trying to accelerate my ability to roll out new agile solutions, or microservices-based applications. So we have that conversation with a customer, we then say okay, for that kind of workload, what are you requirements? What are you trying to do? We might also come in and actually, 'cause sometimes what people think they do and what they actually do in their environment is different. So we can come in and say okay, let me actually measure what you're doing and see what you're doing and then bring that information back to them. And then have a conversation about what to do with your workload and what makes sense. So I think it's a very close engagement with the customer, it's based on real data about what the customer's trying to do. And frankly that was one of the reasons that we made the CTP acquisition, as well, because it started to complement our portfolio. A lot of the capabilities that we had were very robust, in particular around private cloud, but just having the public cloud angle there and sort of strengthening that piece was super important to be able to have that conversation and truly enable the right mix. >> Well now that brings up the topic of multi-cloud, which kinda, to use a sports analogy, it's jump ball. It's kind of a free-for-all, everybody wants that business. I guess with the exception of some of the big cloud guys aren't interested. But certainly, Hewlett-Packard >> Peter: Well don't believe it, want to avoid it. >> Yeah well, but that's the reality is there's gonna be multiple clouds, we know this. Particularly with SaaS. So a company like Hewlett-Packard Enterprise, obviously has to play in that space. So I wonder if you could talk about the strategy there, why you feel confident that HPE is in a good position. >> Yeah well a couple things, first of all I think it's really good to be, we're somewhat independent, we're not totally independent because we've got a whole set of products, but we're somewhat independent in the sense that if we wanna be truly hybrid and enable other public and private solutions, we wanna be able to give customers choice in terms of the public domains that they can work with. And so we're sort of in a great position as a large provider and with the relations that we have in the enterprise in particular, with our customer base, to be a little bit of Switzerland and be able to say, okay, let's have that conversation about the right mix and enable these multi-cloud solutions, that's the first thing. The second thing is we have relationships and great partnerships with many of these providers. So take Microsoft, we've got an Azure relationship, an Azure stack opportunity, so we've got the ability and by the way, we do many of their applications as well. So we've got the ability to help have that conversation with our customers to say okay, do you wanna be on-prem or do you wanna be in the cloud? Even with one provider, and to do that, and so we have the opportunity to provide robust solutions even with one private and public provider. And on top of that, we've got a consultancy with our professional services. We wanna be responsive to our customers, we've got now HPE OneSphere. And with HPE OneSphere we can be data-driven and actually provide our customers a view of their environment and help to be a little bit of that Switzerland to say look, here's what would be best for you and help to have workload mobility together with OneSphere. So I think we're well-positioned, I tend to call it my stairway to Heaven. In a sense we start out at the bottom talking about infrastructure and support, and we've got great relationships there with our customers. If I launch the flexible capacity offers, we're starting to deliver outcome-based solutions. When I bring in CTP, we'd go up the stack and we now provide advisory and the consumption solutions. And with OneSphere now you go up the stacks just a little bit more and say not only are we gonna advise you and provide you those executables with consumption models, but we now have capabilities that allow you to sort of optimally choose what's the right thing for you. So I think we're well-positioned, by the way, with CTP we've got sort of a managed, sort of cloud sort of capability as well. We manage compliance and other elements. So we're able to have in our portfolio sort of value-added services above and beyond that help with multi-cloud and making sure that customers can be compliant, secure, and have the right experience on a multi-cloud environment. >> Yeah I think a lot of people that don't know CTP don't understand how deep their expertise is. They're only a few hundred people, if that. But they're rockstars. >> They're over 200 people. >> Serious thought leaders with real deep connections. I've gotta change subjects to the last topic area. As you know, The Cube from day one has always been a fan of having women on, and promoting women in tech. We first met you at the Anita Borg Institute of the Grace Hopper Conference. Meg Whitman is obviously a woman leader in tech and she's leaving HP. We've got Meg and we've got Ginni. And Ginni's coming to the end, I don't know, she's getting to the age where typically IBM retires its CEOs. You've got two prominent women in tech now leaving. Now maybe IMB will replace Ginni with a woman. HPE has chosen Antonio, great choice. But your thoughts on a leader like Meg, obviously has done some great work. But we're losing one. >> I know, and so >> How do you feel about that? >> I mean, you know, I'm very conflicted if I've gotta be honest. One one hand, as I joined HPE I had never worked for a female CEO so I've really enjoyed watching. You know it's always great to have mentors and to have people that are advocating for women, so I really enjoyed being part of Meg's organization, I'm really sorry to see her go. And she's an icon as well, so she does a lot, in fact this afternoon we're gonna be doing a session for women just here at the conference. So very sad to see her go, at the same time I think we as women, and men by the way, have a responsibility to build the next generation of leaders. And I think that's where I focus my energy and I know that I'm gonna be sort of a high profile female in the HPE environment so I feel that sense of responsibility, not just within HPE, but within the industry, to help to cultivate an environment that takes advantage of half of the population and enables innovation through them as well. So I think we've gotta get more women up there. I think part of it is really bringing up the next generation and frankly this next generation, they don't have tolerance for waiting for things, whatever, and they feel like they're super entitled to have the right and the choice >> Peter: They are. >> And they are, right. But that seems like an easy thing to say, but in some sense we come from a generation, many women as well, which have had challenges especially in the tech world, in terms of really breaking that glass ceiling. And I think we've got some amazing women and some amazing leaders as well. I'm part of the Anita Borg Board of Trustees as well, and we were at Grace Hopper and we had Debbie Sterling, some really great women that are coming up the ranks that are CEOs, that are CTOs, that are really leading the way and so I'm very hopeful that the conversation, by the way, about women in tech is really prominent right now. And that I think it'll open up opportunities for women to shine going forward and I think that should happen for HPE as well. In fact right now its me and then Archie Deskus is the CIO for HPE. So we're trying to do our part to sort of make sure that there's other women in leadership as well. >> Well you're a great example of a current and future leader. >> Thank you so much. >> Really appreciate you coming onto The Cube, Ana. >> I appreciate it, thank you. >> Great to see you again. >> Great to see you, great to see you, thank you so much. >> Alright keep it right there everyone. This is The Cube, we're live from HPE Discover Madrid, we'll be right back. 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>> (Narrator) Live from Madrid, Spain it's theCUBE. Covering HP Discover Madrid 2017. Brought to you by Hewlett Packard Enterprise. >> We're back in Espana. theCUBE, the leader in live tech coverage is here covering HPE Discover Madrid, day one. I'm Dave Villante with my cohost, Peter Burris. Well, it's all coming into focus, Peter. >> It is, it actually is. >> It is, I mean, it better be after five or six years. It's taking longer than I had hoped. But, the story is consistent now. The last four Discovers, despite some of the distractions of spin merges and so forth the story of hybrid IT, the Intelligent Edge, bringing automation is somewhat new to the data center. Services lead starts to actually make sense. >> Peter: Through private cloud. >> Yep, and you know, we talked about at the top of the show today, the spectrum. We're running AWS re:Invent, we got a big presence there. Obviously its affected the entire industry, and then you've got HPE, the likes of HPE, Dell EMC, to a certain extent IMB basically not given up, say wait a minute, these are our customers, they want Cloud on prem, we're gonna deliver to them. They want Cloud in the Cloud, we'll help them get there. >> Peter: Oracle. >> Oracle as well. Oracle, different strategy. We should talk about that a little bit. But, summarize, you know synthesize your take on the day, and where we're at with HPE. >> So I would say that the... What we talked about this morning was, when Meg first took over the reins, she stopped a whole bunch of stuff, and HP stopped spending and behaving like a company that believed that it had to get scale as fast as possible because that was the only way to win. And she ended up going back to, look, lets focus on the customers and what the customers are trying to do, and not how we're trying to leverage our assets. And it kind of took a pause, and for a while you could kind of see them start putting things back together, and you kind of had a sense of where it was all gonna go. But this has been kind of the coming out party for what the last five years have been about. As you said, I think we've seen the three core messages that certainly line up, you know, with a little bit of cavat here. Their story is very much aligned with what we think the industry needs to see right now. At least, our research suggests. Gonna need true private Cloud, the ability to put the Cloud service where your data requires, and not force your business to move it's data to some Clouds location. You're gonna need increased automation within your IT organization, because you're not going to be able to support these more complex workloads if you don't find ways to increase the productivity of your people, and even more importantly, dramatically reduce even the possibility of a failure, and that's what AI inside IT's all about. And very importantly, the idea that you gotta put more intelligence at the Edge, that that interface between the real world and the digital world is really what's gonna drive the dynamic in the computing industry over the next few years. And HP has shown up and they're not just talking about it, they're showing it. And it's nice to be there. >> Well it's interesting, Meg Whitman came by and was talking to us, and we were talking about the Aruba acquisition. She said, look, we bought this because it was a nice business, it could show some growth. And it was, you know, a way to compete with Cisco and differentiate, because, hey were trying to compete head to head with Cisco and it was going okay, but not great. Aruba gave them a clear differentiator. And then all of the sudden, the Edge became this tailwind. And it kinda got them there early. >> Well, lets remember what Mark Hurd talked about. He said, well, why are you going after the network world. I like their 67% gross margins. Okay, so... >> Dave: Talking about 3Com. >> He's talking about 3Com, he's talking about all the things that HP did as it tried to get into the networking business. >> Dave: Cisco, right, yeah. >> It was purely driven by gross margin. They didn't quite have the customer story down. Aruba has always been a great customer story. They've always say, look, this is your business challenge. You know, are you sick and tired of dropping your connection as you go from one conference room to another. This is your security issues. On, and on, and on. They had three or four concrete value propositions that just worked for customers. That acquisition at that time it happened, it happened about the same time that HP was starting to rededicate itself back to thinking about it's customer base. So, it's not surprising to me that that integration, or that merger has been one of the more successful that HP's undertaken. >> So again, the spectrum. You know, you got Andy Jassy on one end who started this whole thing, and you got the likes of HPE on the other end. And you're right, it does align with a lot of things that we've been saying around true private cloud and so forth. Jassy doesn't buy it. He flat out says, this is old guard thinking trying to hang on to the past. But, our analysis suggests it's not just old guard thinking. It's customer thinking because they can't just move their business into the Cloud. Thoughts. >> Totally agree. So I'd say there are a couple of things about it. It's customer thinking based on the realities of the data assets that they're trying to leverage as they transform into a digital business. Data is real, and it has, it's gonna weigh in on how your infrastructure looks. And the Edge is gonna have characteristics that mean you're gonna have to do automation right there, right where the action is. You're not gonna be able to send it up to the Cloud all the time. There's gonna be a lot of business events that take place in that core, in that second tier. So, it's not that it's... It's not that it's old versus new guard. And here's why I say that, Dave. It's because in many respects, we're giving some props to HP right now, which is great. But, in many respects, the story that HP is telling today is a story that is still being largely, has largely been told, largely fashioned by what AWS has done over the last 10 years. And that is, here's what the Cloud experience is. And now HP's adding, "And you want that Cloud experience whatever your data demands." The difference, therefore, between the old guard and and the new guard, or the old way and the new way, on premise, is that it used to be, it was pretty clear to me, and I think it was pretty clear to us, that the old, that the talk about private Cloud was simply a way of thinking about how to put new marketing spin on the enhancement, upgrade, replacement cycle for servers and storage. And that did not work. It just flat out didn't work. >> Well it worked in the sense that it froze the market a little bit. >> Eh, it froze the market a little bit. But, overall, for the past five or six years our growth has been slowing down pretty dramatically. So, I would say, that the data is pretty unassailable. You're not gonna move everything to a central location. But, you're gonna want that Cloud experience. And so, the question is, are we gonna see great Cloud experience where the physics, the legality, and inertia property governance demands that you put your data. >> Well, I thought Jesse St Laurent was gonna talk about the next wave. He mentioned Multi-Cloud. >> Peter: He's CTO of... >> Of SimpliVity, now HPE Hyperconverged. >> Peter: Right. >> I thought he was talking about, he said the next wave is Hyper-V. Okay, check. I mean, like, that's like to me a feature of the product. And then he sort of talked about Multi-Cloud. And that really where I thought he was gonna go, because when you look at what AWS is doing, and I've always contended, they're years ahead, we can debate how many. Five, seven, three. Probably closer to five than three. But where they're headed is serverless, you know, functional programming. Stateless, new programming models. It's all about the developer to those guys. And that's the parlance that they speak in. The Hyperconverge guys all talk in VM terms. And that's not how Amazon talks or thinks. So, you know, the question is, is that a next wave, and can the Enterprise guys >> Peter: Talk developer? >> Yeah, can they catch that wave? >> So, I think... Look, lets be honest. AWS is a great company. There's no question about it. They've done things that a lot of old style infrastructure jocks thought couldn't be done. And they did it. And they continue to, they continue to demonstrate that they are really engaging their customers and turning that insight and knowledge into great services. So, this is not, this is not a knock on AWS. But what ultimately has to, and I think AWS is recognizing this as well, because they're starting to talk a lot about IoT and their approach to IoT, recognizing that not all the data is gonna be sourced up in the Cloud. The data is gonna be generated in a lot of other places and they have to participate there as well. So, from our perspective ultimately, we would say that Multi-Cloud, the ability to, the ability to naturally place your data where the data needs to be placed, which is increasingly is gonna be closer to the event that needs to be automated, that needs to have that high quality experience, is gonna be the way, is gonna be the dominant factor in determining the characteristics of the application infrastructure that you put in place. And, we'll see what happens. Serverless, yeah, serverless is great. You can do a lot with it. But, you can also still build junky applications with serverless. Microservices are great, yeah. But you can still build junky applications with Microservices. >> A lot of those services aren't so micro as Neil Raden would say. >> That's exactly right. So you can still do bad stuff in the Cloud. So, at the end of the day, the whole point is to get a new compact between business who have the vision of the digital services and digital capabilities they want, IT professionals and developers who are gonna generate, create that value, and then infrastructure people who are not who are allowing the data and the workload to fall where is naturally should fall, and then making it possible for the industry to work together, because that's what users want. >> Okay, so let me ask the question differently. You agree that the Cloud guys generally, Amazon specifically, is ahead of the Enterprise guys when it comes to infrastructures and servers. >> Peter: Yeah, there's no question there. >> Okay, is the lead extending, or is it dwindling. Amazon's lead in your view. >> Well, so look, you have Amazon's lead, first of you have to think about Amazon's lead relative to Microsoft, Oracle, and others. And, they're not as far ahead as, they're not that far ahead of Microsoft. >> Dave: Right. >> So there's a real battle raging there. Google has at least as good a relationship with a lot of developers as Amazon does. When you think about what a lot of developers are building in the Cloud experience, they're using Kubernetes, they're using TensorFlow, they're increasingly going to use Istio. I mean, so, it's not, There's gonna be increased energy being put forward to try to talk about how that Cloud innovation's gonna happen. >> So those are the three Hypercloud guys. >> Those are three Hypercloud guys. And, as we talked about, they are increasingly defining what the Cloud experience is. I think what we're seeing now, is the Enterprise guys stepping back and saying, you know what, we have to define our roll in the Cloud experience, and not presume that we're gonna tell everybody what the Cloud experience is. Which is what they were doing for many years, and they failed at it. >> And you could make an argument that HPE as a smaller company with less assets to encumber them, can actually deliver that through partnerships, maybe not as profitably, most definitely not as profitably, but actually can deliver that outcome for customers as a more agile customer. >> We'll see, we'll see, because... >> Dave: You could make that argument is all I'm saying. >> Well, you could make that argument, but remember, we're moving from, and even HP announced some stuff today with Greenlake, moving from a product orientation increasingly to a service orientation. And there's demonstration that you can do things with your business model that may allow you to do things in different levels of profitability at somewhere, you know, when you take more of a services approach to things. So, I think the most important message that we can leave from today is that, our observation on that notion of a spectrum, from, you know, public put it on public, to a true private orientation which is hybrid where an on premise play is gonna be essential. That spectrum seems to be real, number one. Number two, however, it doesn't mean that AWS in particular is not going to be successful at driving the definition of the Cloud experience, and number three, we're now seeing at least one company, but we're also starting to see indications of others, acknowledge that their roll in all of this will be to take whatever the leaders in Cloud are talking about and make it possible, that experience possible where the data requires and that will include on premise. >> So, and I agree with you, AWS is defining that Cloud experience. So, as Ana Pinczuk was speaking, I just wrote down, I jotted down, AWS Cloud experience, which they've defined, and HPE Cloud experience. So I've got pay as you go, you know this kind of flex capacity, kind of. I mean it's as close as you can probably get. >> Peter: Greenlake. >> Yeah, Greenlake Kind of. >> Something we all need to learn more about. But, it's getting there, it's getting there. >> But it will never get there entirely, right? Because, they're gonna require to be, you know, buy a years worth of capacity, thresholds, you're gonna have thresholds above and threshold below. >> Except, we also heard, again I think there's more, I don't wanna, I think you're right. >> It's nuanced, it's not 100% of the way there. >> You start throwing the balance sheet and finances in there and how you're gonna do it. >> We'll come back to that. So, elastic? Again, kind of. You know, to a point. Integrated services? Like tons of them, like thousands a year? Some of those, but as I was saying before, HP's ecosystem play, allows them to pick and choose. >> Yeah, but remember Dave, okay keep going, keep going. >> Security, sort of, let's call it the Amazon way. Here's our security, it's good. But take it or leave it. And then, the HP approach is your way. HPE, you have security your way. If that's the edict of the organization, we can map to that. One Cloud versus Multi-Cloud. Obviously, HPE has a Multi-Cloud strategy, Amazon doesn't. They don't care about managing Multi-Clouds. They care about managing their Cloud. And then services as a service. HPE can deliver that and, Amazon I got a question mark, it's their ecosystem that's delivering those services. So I guess the point is, that I'm making is, maybe it's not the exact replica of the Amazon experience, but there are attributes of it, which appeal to Enterprise IT. >> Peter: That's right. >> Which Amazon is really not interested in delivering. >> Peter: Right. >> Ergo, the assumption is, my assumption is that, that business, that on prem business will be here for a long, long time. >> Peter: Absolutely. >> Indefinitely. >> And we would agree with that. In fact we think, ultimately, that there's gonna be enough uniqueness about how businesses use their data and treat their data that we expect to see this notion of true private Cloud actually be a bigger overall piece of the marketplace than the one size fits all, with a degree of customization possible, that Amazon's providing. But, again, this is, we have to be careful here. Because as analysts, we're sort of naturally falling into this trap of setting up AWS and HPE or any of these folks in opposition. There are companies that have very, very different opposed visions of how this is gonna play out. Specifically, we can talk about Amazon saying it's all gonna be IaaS, we're gonna out paths in there. And then, increasingly obviously, Microsoft and Oracle saying, oh no, we're gonna have application Clouds. You're gonna buy and application Cloud, and you're gonna do a whole bunch of stuff in that. What we see today is not in opposition, >> Dave: Right. >> to the AWS vision, it's not. It is a, okay, great. But for this type of work, this type of data, this type of workload, this type of reality, chances are, you're gonna need to put this type of stuff here, and have it fit into the overall motion of Cloud experience, and it doesn't have to be a complete substitute. It just has to work for that class of workload. >> Well, but, bringing it back to HP, and we gotta wrap, is HPE does not have an application Cloud, right? >> Peter: They don't. >> And as a result, it's going to be in a knife fight. With Amazon, with Dell EMC, and with China. >> It's gonna be in a knife fight with companies that are like it. China, you know, Huawei, Dell EMC, Cisco. >> You're right, you're right. Amazon's setting the pricing tone and the business model tone. >> Look, right now it's Amazon and Microsoft, are helping to set the stage of what this is all gonna look like. >> So, again, bottom line is, it's not a 60% gross margin company, Mark Hurds vision of going to compete with Cisco. It's a 25 to 32% gross margin business. >> Peter: That's really focused on customer problems. >> Focus on customer problems throws off a couple billion dollars of cash, it can eke out a little bit of growth. You know, that's what it is. >> Not a bad business. >> No, it's a great business, actually. Alright, Pete, thanks the wrap on day one. We'll be back tomorrow 8:30 am local time, right? >> Man: Sure. >> Roughly. >> Man: 8:45. >> 8:45 local time. Check out theCUBE.net, where you'll see this show, you'll see the other shows that we're doing including re:Invent John Furrier and the crew are over there today. That's a wrap for day one, this is theCUBE. We'll see you tomorrow. (upbeat music)

>> Announcer: Live from Madrid, Spain, it's theCUBE, covering HPE Discover Madrid 2017, brought to you by Hewlett Packard Enterprise. >> Welcome back to Madrid, everybody, this is theCUBE, the leader in live tech coverage. My name is Dave Vellante, I'm here with Peter Burris, this is day one of HPE Discover Madrid. Olivier Frank is here, he's the Worldwide Senior Sales Director for Alliances for IoT at HPE, and Kurt Bayer, otherwise known as Bager in English, in America. He's Vice President of IoT Solutions for EMEA PTC, did I get that right? >> Yeah you did it. >> Bayer? All right, well thank you for sharing that with me. Welcome to theCUBE, gentlemen. Olivier, let me start with you. The relationship between PTC and HPE is not brand new. You guys got together a while back. What catalyzed that getting together? >> Yeah, it's a great question, and thank you for inviting us, it's great pleasure to be on theCUBE, and for me the first time, so thank you for that. >> Welcome. >> Yeah, you know, the partnership is all about action and doing things together, so we did start about a year ago with, you may remember flow serve and industrial pump that we showcased, and since then we've been working very closely together to actually allow our customers to go an test the technology themselves. So I would say the partnership has matured, we now have two live environments that customer can visit, one in Europe, in Germany, in Aachen, with the RWTH University, and one in the US, near Houston, with Texmark who you know because you also came to the show. >> Right, okay, Kurt give us the update on PTC. Company's been in business for a long time, IoT is like a tailwind. >> It is, that's right. PTC is mostly known for CAD and PLM, so for 30 years they made 3D CAD software for when you design and make an aircraft or car engine. But over the last five years, PTC have moved heavily into IoT, spent a billion on acquiring and designing software platform that can connect and calculate and show in augmented reality. >> So let me build on that, because PTC as a CAD company, as a PLM company, has done a phenomenal job of using software and technology to be able to design things to a level of specificity and tolerance that just wasn't able to be done before, and it's revolutionized how people build products. But now, because technology's advanced, you can leverage that information in your drawings, in your systems to create a new kind of an artifact, a digital twin that allows a business that's working closely with you to actually render that in an IoT sense and add intelligence to it. Have I got that right? >> You got it exactly right. So making the copy. We can draw it and we can design the physical part, and we can make the digital twin of the physical part with sensors. So in that way you can loop back and see if the calculation, the design, the engineering you have made is the right fit, or you need to change things. You can optimize product with having the live digital twin of the things that you've designed physically. >> So it's like a model, except it's not a model. It's like a real world instantiation. Model is an estimate, right? A digital twin is actual real data. >> It's feeded by live data, so you have a real copy of what's going on. And we use it for not only closing the loop of designing products, but also to optimize in the industrial fold, to optimize operation and creating manufacturing of things, and we use it to connect things, so you can do predictive maintenance or you can turn products to be a service, instead of selling an asset, the company can buy by click, by use, plus the product are connected. >> I want to really amplify this, Dave, 'cause it's really important, I want to test this with you, 'cause the whole concept of using technology, IoT technology to improve the operational efficiency, to improve the serviceability, to evolve your business models, your ability to do that is tied back to the fidelity of the models you're using for things that are delivering the services, and I don't think the world fully understands the degree to which it's a natural leap from CAD and related technologies, into building the digital artifacts that are gonna be necessary to make that all work. Have I got that right? >> You got it completely right. So it is moving from having live informations from the physical object. So if you go to augmented reality, so you have the opportunity to look at things and get live information about temperature, power, streaming of water, and all these things that goes on inside the product, you also have the opportunity to understand if there's something wrong with the product, you can click on it and you can be directed on how to change and service things like when the augmented reality, all built by the CAD drawing in the beginning that is combined with sensor information and >> And simulate, and test, and all the other things that are hard, but obviously to do that, you need a whole bunch of other technology, and I guess that's where HPE comes in. >> Exactly. >> Absolutely. In fact to bounce on that thought, we talk a lot about connected operation, where you know, we are showing the digital twin, but one of the new use case that we're showing on the floor here is what we call smart product engineering. So we're basically using the CAD environment of (mumbles), running on that edge line with edge compute, you know, enterprise compute capability, manageability and security, and running on that same platform then, simulation from companies like Ensys, right, and then doing 3D printing, print prototyping, and basically instrumenting the prototype, we're using a bike, the saddle stem of a bike showcase, and they are able to connect and collect the data, we're partnering with National Instruments who are also well-known, and reinject the real data into the digital model. So again, the engineers can compare their thought and their design assumptions with the real physical prototype, and accelerate time to market. >> PTC's been a leader in starting with the CAD and then pulling it through product life cycle management, PLM. So talk about this is going to alter the way PLM becomes a design tool for digital business. If I'm right. >> You're right, it becomes industrial innovation platform from creating the product to the full life cycle of it. >> Peter: All the way up to the business model. >> All the way up to the business model. And talking about analytics, so if you have a lot of data and you want to make sure you get some decision made fast about predictive maintenance, that's an area where we are partnering with HP so we have a lot of power close in the edge, close to the products that can do the calculations from the devices, from the product, and do some fast results in order to do predictive maintenance and only send the results away from the location. >> So what are some of the things you guys are most excited about, Olivier? >> Well, really excited about making those use cases, being the smart product engineering, or the predictive maintenance, you know, work for our customers so behind the scenes we have great solutions, now we're partnering on the sales front to kind of go together to customers, we have huge install base on both sides, and picking the right customers interested in this digital transformation, and make it real for them, because we know it's a journey, we know it's kind of the crawl, walk, run, and it's really about accelerating, you know, turning insights into information and into actions, and that's really where we are very much excited to work together. >> So it's not just, so the collaboration's extending to go to market is what I'm hearing. And so what's the uptake been like, what are customers, customers must be asking you, "Where do I start?" What do you tell them? >> Before you start, it's important that you have a business case, a business value, you understand what you wanted to achieve, by integrating an IoT solution. That's important. Then you need to figure out what is the data, what is the fast solution I need to take, and then you can start deciding on the planning of your implementation of the IoT. >> Can I go back one step further, >> Yep. >> You tell me if I got that. And that one step further is, look, every... Innovation and adoption happens faster when you can take an existing asset and create new value. >> Kurt: Exactly. >> So isn't PTC actually starting by saying, hey, you've already got these designs, you've already got these models. Reuse them, create new life, give 'em new life, create new value with 'em. Do things in ways that now you can work with your customers totally differently, and isn't that kind of where it starts? >> It does, and you already have a good portion of what you need, so in order to make a fast value out of your new product or the new thing you can do with the product, connecting the products, then PTC and HP is a good platform to move on. >> Yeah but the pretesting, precertify, packaging, the software with the hardware, is allowing our customer to go faster to proof of concept and then to production. So we have a number of workshops, customers can come, again as I mentioned at the beginning, in Germany, in Aachen or in Houston at our Texmark facility, where we can basically walk the talk with customers and start those early POCs, defining the business success factors, business value they want to take out of it, and basically get the ball rolling. But it's really exciting because we have, we're touching really some of the key digital transformation of our enterprise customers. >> And don't forget that you need a partner that can do a good job in service, because you need a organization that can help you get it through, and HP are a strong service organization too. >> Well this idea of the intelligent edge has a lot of obviously executive support at Hewlett Packard Enterprise, that keeps buzzing at theCUBE today, Meg Whitman's in the house, she's right next door, and we're gonna do a quick cutaway to Meg, give her a shoutout, trying to get her over here to talk about her six-year tenure here, but you know, that top-down executive support has been so critical in terms of HPE getting early into the edge, IoT, intelligent edge you call it, Tom Bradicich obviously a leader, he's coming on. You mentioned National Instruments, PTC, you guys were first, really, from a traditional IT business to really get into that space. >> We're also the first to converge OT and IT, so we're showing on the floor what we're doing in end of line quality testing for automotive for example, taking PX higher standard, which is like instrumentation and real-time data position into our converged systems. So what I found is really amazing. You take the same architecture, and we can do it edge to core to cloud, right, that's very powerful. One software framework, one IT architecture that's pan out. >> Peter: Not some time in the future, but right now. >> Yeah, right now. >> So we talk about a three, maybe even a 3A, four-tier data model, where you've got data at the edge, real time, maybe you don't persist all of it or a lot of it. >> We call it experience data or primary data at the edge. vet data, or secondary data, and then business optimization data at the top level, that's at the cloud. >> So let's unpack that a little bit and get your perspective. So the edge, obviously you're talking about real time decision making, autonomous cars, you're not gonna go back to the cloud to make that decision. That, well you call it core, that's what did you call it? >> The hybrid IT. >> The vet, the vet. That's an aggregation point, right, to collect a lot of the data from the edge, and then cloud maybe is where you do the deep analysis and do the deep modeling. And that cloud can be on-prem, or it can be on the public cloud. Is that a reasonable data model for the flow of data for edge and IoT? >> I believe it is, because some of these products generate a lot of data, and you need to be able to handle that data, and honestly, connectivity is not for free, and sometimes it's difficult if it's in the industry floor, manufacturing floor, you need good connectivity, but you still have limitations. So if you can do the local analytics and then you only send the results to the core, then it's a perfect model. And then there's a lot of regulations around data, so for many countries, and especially in Europe, there's boundaries around the data, it's not all that you can move to a cloud, especially if it's out of the country. So the model makes a good hybrid in between speed, connectivity, analytics and the legislation problem. >> Dave: And you've both got solutions at each layer? >> Absolutely, so in fact... So PTC can run at the edge, at the core or in the cloud, and of course we are powering the three pillars. And I think what's also interesting to know is that with the advance in artificial intelligence, as was explored during the main session, there it is pivotal you need to keep a lot of data in order to learn from those data, right? So I think it's quite fascinating that we're going to store more and more data, probably make some useful right away, and maybe store some that we come back to it. That's why we're working also with companies like OSIsoft, an historian, which is collecting this time stamp data for later utilization. But I wanted also to say that what's great working with PTC is that it's kind of a workflow in media, in terms of collecting the data, contextualizing them and then visualization and then analytics. But we're developing a rich ecosystem, because in this complex world of IoT, again it's kind of an art and a science, and the ability to partner ourselves, but also our let's say friendly partners is very, very critical. >> Dave: Guys, oh good, last word. >> I will say we started with a digital twin, and for some companies they might be late to get the digital twin. The longer you have had collecting data from a live product >> The better the model gets >> The stronger you will be, >> Peter: Better fidelity. >> The better model you can do, because you have the bigger data. So it's a matter of getting the data into the twin. >> That's exactly what our research suggests. We've got a lot of examples of this. >> It's the difference between sampling and having an entire corpus of data. >> Kurt: Exactly. >> Kurt, Olivier, thanks very much for coming on the theCUBE. >> Thank you. >> Thank you so much. >> Great segment guys. Okay, keep it right there everybody, Dave Vellante for Peter Burris, we'll be back in Madrid right after this short break.

>> Narrator: Live from Madrid, Spain. It's theCUBE. Covering HPE Discover Madrid 2017. Brought to you by Hewlett Packard Enterprise. >> Hi everybody. Welcome to Madrid, Spain. This is theCUBE, the leader in live tech coverage and we're here at the conference center in Madrid covering HPE Discover 2017. This is HPE's European conference for years. We've been covering not only the US version of this show but also the European version. Frankfurt, Barcelona, London and now move to southern Europe and central Spain. I'm here with Peter Burris. My co-host for the next two days. >> Peter. >> Hi, Dave. >> Good to see you. Good to be here in Spain and we're going to be covering the, we've been covering the transformation of HPE under the guise of, the guidance of Meg Whitman for the last six years, of course it was announced recently that Meg is stepping down and Antonio Neri's going to take over so we're going to be reviewing that, we're going to be covering all the innovations that these guys are announcing, talking to customers and very importantly, something that you've been talking about is juxtaposing HPE as a long time enterprise company with a lot of customers. Juxtaposing that strategy with the other end of the spectrum this week at AWS reinvent Amazon obviously, growing very fast. Many of the decisions that Meg and her team made they are a direct result of the cloud effect and other things that we will be talking about. So, welcome. >> You bet. >> Thanks for coming on. >> No, I, Madrid's a wonderful city and this is a great place to be running the conference like this. It's one of the transformational cities in the world. >> So, let's start by looking at Meg's tenure. When she came on and she inherited a mess, everybody knew about the acquisition issues that they had with autonomy. So, she inherited that from Leo Apotheker and really kind of took one for the Silicon Valley team, really and set the time, look it's going to take us five years to transform this company. So, it started with an organizational, sort of, look and you know, took some time to get that right. To understand who her team leaders were going to be and they made some missteps and sort of had to shuffle the deckchairs a little bit. So, they did that. They had a public cloud misstep but eventually they got that right. And they decided that they would split the company in two, HP INC and HPE. At the time it was believed that HPE would be the growth engine, HP INC would be the cash flow engine, it hasn't totally worked out that way but one of the things that came out of that was a much better balance sheet. HPE's got about $5.8 billion in cash now. It's started to make those, some acquisitions. That we'll talk about but essentially Peter, it emerged from that split as a much more focused company. As I say, a better balance sheet, much smaller company, with a focus on essentially a lower margin business to be able to compete with the cloud and with essentially China. Your take on the last five or six years under Meg Whitman? >> Well, I think you summarized it pretty nicely. I guess I'd say a couple of things. The first thing is that I think it philosophically, HPE was one of those companies that believed it's size was its own virtue in the technology industry. >> Dave: Mhm. >> And while that's certainly true in certain domains, it's not necessarily true in all. The complexity and the interplay of technology, solutions, software, hardware is such that one of the places where you get the most leverage out of something like that is at the customer interface. Are you capable of pulling together all that's possible in the tech industry and present it to the customer in a form that the customer then can turn into value. So HP for a long time, just presumed its size was its own virtue. Focused on acquiring as much stuff as it possibly could to feed that and probably left the customer a little bit on the sideline and didn't really focus on the customer. I think that was probably Meg's first good move is to step back and say, let's not act as though size is its own virtue. Let's stop the acquisition, let's focus on what we have which is mainly this large portfolio of customers and refocus on the company on that. That's a good thing. So, I think the first thing that they was they went back to the simple observation that HP's always had, that we don't exist if we don't have, if we don't take care of our customers. Second thing I think that they did as you said, they, the Leo era was about, oh we're going to be a software company and I think they strongly pulled away from that. Where the idea was to just get as many software assets as possible and try to figure out how to weave them together. They pulled away from that although we agree that it's a misnomer that HP got out of the software business. Clearly, they got rid of a bunch of assets that they couldn't use. They've reinvested in other assets that are more true to their heritage. We're going to see some big announcements this week about that. >> And that's really focused on, you know, making infrastructure better, right? >> Exactly, and ultimately the, it's interesting that there's no question that AWS is crafting the new look of the computing industry but it's not a complete picture and it's not going to be a complete picture. There's going to be plenty of room for companies to move and some of those companies are easily going to be tens of billions of dollars in size and so, the vision that HP has, the direction HP seems to be going has the potential to be very complimentary to that other vision. As we like to say, the goal is for customers, is the COD experience where the data demands. And that we know that the data's going to be at the edge and we know that the data's going to be, a lot of it's going to be on premise. And so as a consequence of that, there will be a play for a strong; multiple strong companies who are focusing on delivering at the edge, great technology, great management capabilities, and delivering true private cloud into a company where they got to put their proprietary data assets. >> Okay, so what that really says is HPE and its competitors who sell on prem actually need to mimic to the extent that they can, that cloud experience. >> Yeah. >> So we're going to be unpacking that. I mean, HPE talks a lot about flexible capacity. We're going to try to unpack that to see how cloud like it really is. I mean it's not identical but it certainly gets to be much more of an opex versus a capex model. >> Peter: It's moving in that direction. >> As well as the ability to deploy quickly and let's cut to the chase, reduce non differentiated IT labor costs and that's something that we're going to unpack with some of the customers here who you know, maybe used to be in the business of provisioning infrastructure and tuning infrastructure. You know likely moving toward a role in digital business. >> Peter: Mhmm. >> So, you know just some of the financials, HPE, the new HPE is roughly a $30 billion company. You know, the stock's done okay since the split but it's still trading at less than $1 from evaluation standpoint, a revenue dollar. So, you know trading, it's evaluation is well under that $30 billion, probably in the low 20's. So there's a lot of upside, you know certainly a company like HPE, if it can show some growth which it eeked out, ya know, a constant currency about a 1% growth last quarter. If you take out the Tier 1 sever business that it's exiting, the growth is actually a little bit better and there are some bright spots. Certainly, Aruba has been growing like crazy and it's interesting Peter. HPE is going to put forth a new financial reporting structure, next quarter. So, they're going to eliminate the whole, 'member it was EG and it was networking, et cetera. They're going to bundle everything into much of the core business into hybrid IT, that's going to be their biggest business, server storage and core networking and services and they're going to have, essentially, The Edge is going to be it's second category. Which is going to comprise Aruba and edge services and all the wireless stuff and the third category interestingly is, financial services which has been growing like crazy. It grew about over 20% last quarter. So, HPE is now saying, okay this is the face that we're going to present to the street and they're going to try to present it as a growth company and certainly the largest business is going to be hybrid IT and then you got two growth businesses, The Edge and financial services which is really about creating that cloud experiences to a great degree through some financial engineering. >> Yeah and look that's smart because as we were talking about that the whole concept of where the scale is going to be in the future, is where Amazon is at putting all this stuff together and putting all these assets behind the wall so you get a service out of it or in the customer engagement side of things and the only way that HP is going to be successful at replicating or putting forward this notion of, what we call true private cloud that, where you do get the cloud experience but you get it on premise where your data requires, is by looking at things just in that way. Sources at the edge, finance that allows you to buy as you go and then great server technology that can run the workloads where they need to be run based on the availability of the data. >> So last thing I'll say. So, I asked the question five years ago. Can HPE, can HP get back to its roots? Remember the old logo, invent. I sort of tweeted out, I didn't think HP's strategy was to get there. I thought at the time that was sort of an imperative and I had a little discussion with somebody from HP on twitter where they suggested, hey there's a lot of innovation here and we've talked about the difference between innovation and invention and if you look at some of the acquisitions that HPE has made, SGI, SimpliVity, Nimble, some of the smaller acquisitions around, cloud technology partners. >> These are really focused acquisitions. >> Yeah, very focused tuck-ins and a lot of innovation there is I guess what I'd say and we're going to again, unpack that innovation, we had HP-- >> Peter: Lot of invention. >> Folks from labs coming on as well and we're going to talk about invention, innovation, we're going to talk about that all week. So, keep it right there everybody. This is theCUBE. We're live from HPE Discover Madrid. We'll be back right after this short break.

(futuristic music) >> Hello and welcome to theCUBE Studios here in Palo Alto, CA I'm John Furrier, co-host of theCUBE and co-founder of Silicon Angle Media, Inc. I'm joined here with Tom Joyce, Cube alumni. Some big news, new role as the CEO of Pensa. Welcome back to the Cube. You've been freelancing out there as an entrepreneur in residence, CEO in residence, you've been on theCUBE commentating. Great to see you. >> Good to see you, too. Thanks for having me back. You know, fully employed. >> Congratulations. You know, finding where you land is really critical. I've talked to a lot of friends, and they want to get a good fit in a gig, they want to have a good team to work with it's a cultural issue, but also you want to sink your teeth into something good, so you found Pensa. You're the CEO now of the company and you've got some news which we'll get to in a minute, but what's going on? Why the change, why these guys? >> You know, last time we talked, last time I was in here, I was running a consulting business, and I did that for almost a year so that I could look at a lot of options and you know, kind of reset my understanding of where the industry is and where the problems are. And it was good to do that. These were some of the best people that I met, and I got interested in what they were doing. They're smart, technical people, I wanted to work with them It was a good fit in terms of skills because when I joined Pensa just a couple of months ago now they were all technical people, and they'd been heads-down developing core technology and some early product stuff for almost three years. So they needed somebody like me to come in and help them get to the next level and it was a really good fit. And the other thing is, frankly, in my last job I was running an IT shop and I also had a thousand people out there selling, and about 300 pre-sales people, and when I saw this, I saw a product that I could've used in both of those areas. So sometimes when you resonate with something like that you start to think well geeze, this is something that I could, that a lot of people are going to need. And so there are many aspects of the technology that are interesting, but ultimately, I saw that this is a useful thing that I could go make a big business out of. So that's why I did it. >> You've had a great career, you know we know each other going way back, EMC days, and certainly at HP, even during the corporate developments work that Meg Whitman was doing at HP but involved in a lot of M&A activities, so you seen the landscape, you are talking about all the VCs, and all the conversations we've talked about in the past on other interviews you can check it out on YouTube, Tom Joyce, if you're interested in checking those conversations out. Worth looking at. So you landed at Pensa. What do they do? What was the itch for you? What was the, why are they relavant? What do they doing? >> Well, the first thing is, the company was founded about three years ago by people that had hardcore experience in big networking and virtualization environments. And they've been tackling some of the hardest problems in virtual infrastructure as you move from the hardware to everything being virtualized on multiple clouds. These guys were tackling the scale problem. And they'd also drilled down into how to make this work in the largest network environments in the world. So they had gotten business out of one of the largest service providers in the world as their first customer. So you look at that, and you say, alright these are smart people. And they're focusing on hard problems and there's a lot of, a lot of longevity in the technology that they're going out and building. And basically, what they're trying to do is help customers go to the next level with all software-based or software-defined, if you will, infrastructure, so that you can take technology from a whole bunch of different sources. It's going to be VMware, OpenStack, DevOps, the DevOps Stack as well as the whole constellation of people in the security industry. How do you make all those software parts work together at scale, with the people that you have? Rather than going out an hiring a whole new IT staff to plug all this stuff together and hope it works, these guys wanted to solve that. So it's without a lot of expertise, this product can go design, validate that it works, build and deploy complete software-defined environments, and it can do it faster than you could do it any other way that I'm aware of, and I've been around this industry for a long time. So that's what I saw when I said, geeze, I could have used this before, I could have used it in my own IT where our exposures were things like we had all this old software that we needed to update and we're scared to touch any of it, right? You look at things like Equifax. I was exposed in the Equifax breach, and that was exactly that scenario. >> Yeah, and they had four months in there playing around. Who knows what they got? >> To be honest with you, in my business we were doing the same thing because we weren't comfortable with upgrading our software cause we couldn't validate that it worked. How do you move from the old stuff to VMware six-dot-five and make sure nothing else breaks? We're kind of in the era of needing machine learning, intelligent technologies, autonomous kinds of ways to deploy this stuff, cause you can't hire enough smart people to go do it. And that's what I saw. >> Well, we'll do a breakdown or a tear-down, however you want to look at it, of the company in a second, but you guys have some news. Let's get to the news. What's the big news that you're sharing today? >> Okay, great. Well, there's a couple of key parts of it. First, we're formally launching the company. We've been heads down in development and I've been there for a few months, but the company hasn't been launched. So we're doing that, we're introducing Pensa to the world and the new website is Pensa.ai. The second thing is we've completed our Series A financing so we've got the financing under our belt. Third thing is we've been hiring a team. We've brought in certainly me, I've brought in a fella named Jim Chapel as the VP of marketing, long-time industry guy in both large and small software companies. And we're rolling out the first product. So the technology is called-- >> In terms of shipping? >> Yeah, it's going to be shipping as a SaaS offering and it's available now. It's built on our technology which is called Maestro, which is this smart machine, and the first offering is called Pensa Lab. And I can describe to you what it's used for, but it's for helping people go figure out how do I design, build, run, try new scenarios, and roll out stuff that's actually going to work and do it a lot faster than people can do with traditional technologies. >> Congratulations for launching the company, congratulations on the new role, great job. I'm looking forward to seeing you, But let's get into company, Pensa. >> Alright. >> So let's just go in market you guys are targeting. Take a minute to go into the market. What's the market, what's going on in the market, what trends, what's the bet in the market for you guys? >> With a early company like this, there's always a lot of things you can do and the battle is figuring out what is the first thing we're going to do? So I think over time we're going to be relevant to a lot of people, the first customers we're going to be focusing on are people in IT that are trying to manage complex virtualized networks. So a lot of them are people using VMware today. >> So the category is virtualization cloud? What's the category? >> It's a SaaS product for design, build, run. So it's really designing autonomous IT systems that are built on software-defined environments. So it's VMware, OpenStack, DevOps stack, and being able to kind of bring all those parts together in a way that from an operational standpoint you can deploy quickly. In the first version of the product is going to be designed for test in depth. And next year, we intend to bring out production versions of it, but virtually every one of these folks has environments for test today to figure out alright, I want to go do my update, my upgrade, my change I want to try a different security policy, cause I've got a hack happening and I want to do that fast, we're going to go after that. The other side of it is folks in the vendor community. Almost anybody that's selling a solution, again, like me and the job that I used to have, has people out there doing proofs of concept, demos, building systems for customers. And what we can do is give you the ability to spin up complete working environments and do it (snaps finger) basically like that. If you got a call this afternoon to go show VMware NSX running with some customer application with some other technology from a third we can make that work for you, and then you can tear it down and do the next one at four o'clock in the afternoon. >> So that a VMware customer-based you're targeting, I mean, it sounds like, and clarify if I don't get this right, you don't really care if it's private cloud, or hybrid cloud, or public cloud. >> We don't care. No, we don't. And there's a lot of folks-- >> And VMware, is that a target market, VMware buyers? >> Absolutely. Yup. And frankly, we've had people inside of VMware working with us as a number of the beta testers on this and demonstrating that they can spin up their own environments faster, so that kind of proof point is what we're after. Then there's a lot of folks in DevOps, right? DevOps is one of the hot targets for our business and a lot of businesses and what we see is folks that are focusing on the app development side of DevOps and then they get to the point where they got to call IT and say alright, give me a platform to run my new application on and they get the old answers. So a lot of these folks are looking for the ability to spin up environments very very quickly, with a lot of flexibility where they don't need to be and expert in alright, how's the storage going to work and how do I build a network, right? >> So are you targeting IT and DevOps hybrid, or is it one of the other DevOps developers? >> It's both. >> Okay and you don't care which cloud so you're going to draft off the success that VMware's seeing right now with their cloud strategy with AWS >> Absolutely. I mean look, there's a lot of ways >> Software design is booming. >> We can help those customers figure out how do I do VSAN faster? How do I do NSX faster? How do I set up applications that I can move to AWS faster? It's kind of bringing-- >> So software-defined clouds, software-defined data center, all this is in your wheelhouse. >> Yes, that's exactly right. >> This is what you're targeting. >> And that's the opportunity and the challenge. Again when you're doing a small company, the world is your oyster but you have to kind of focus on the first thing first. So we're going to go in and try to help people that have, are dealing with alright, I need to kind of update my software so that I don't have an Equifax, or I need to fix my security policies, I need an environment like, today that I can use to test that. Or, I want to go from the old VMware to to the new VMware, I got to make sure it works. That's good for the customer, that's good for VMware, it's good for us. >> And the outcome is digital productivity for the developer. >> Absolutely. >> OK, so let's talk about the business, and the business model. So you guys raised some money, can you talk about the amount, or is that confidential? >> It's confidential at this point and we have some additional-- >> Is it bigger than 10 million? Less than 10 million? >> It's been less than 10 million. We're going to go lean and mean, but we're set up to make the run we need to run. >> OK, good I got that out of the way. Employees, how many people do you guys have? What's the strategy? >> Just over 20 now, and we have a few more folks that we're going to be adding. We're going to go fairly lean from here. >> Okay, in terms of business model, you said SaaS Can you just explain a little bit more about thee business model, and then some of the competition that you have? >> Yeah, this product was designed from day one to be a SaaS product, so we're not going to go on-premise software or old models, we're going with a SaaS model for everything we're doing now and everything we intend to do in the future, so the product sits in the cloud, and you can access it basically on demand. We're going to make it very easy for people to get in and give this a try. It's going to be simple pricing, starting at about 15 hundred dollars a month. >> So a little bit of low-cost entry, not freemium, so it's going to some cost to get in, right? Try before you buy, POC, however that goes, right? >> Yeah, it's see a demo, do a trial, give it a shot. I'll give you an example, right. When I was at my last job, I had 300 pre-sales people >> Where's this? >> This was at Dell Software. >> Dell Software, okay, got it. >> Now it's called Quest. They would go out and they'd use cloud-based resources to spin up their demo environment. Well, I'm going to give them, and I'm calling them, by the way, the ability to buy it for a very short amount of money and you're not committed to it forever, you can use it as much as you want. And get the ability to say alright, let's spin up VMware, let's spin up OpenStack, let's spin up F5 Palo Alto Networks whatever security I want, get my app running on that without being an expert in all those parts. >> You can stand up stuff pretty quickly, it's a DevOps ethos but it's about the app and the developer productivity. >> Right. And from a business model standpoint, it's how do I make this really, really easy? Because the more of those folks that use it in this phase, next year, when we get to say alright, let's punch that thing you built into production on your cloud, we'll be ready to go. Our goal is to grab space quickly. >> Talk about competition. >> I think the competition for this part of it this kind of dev test lab spin up scenario, the Pensa lab that I just described, the biggest competition is going to be people that build their own. So in the corner you've got your test environment running on your old hardware, right? So that doesn't come with this automated software capability. The other ones are going to be people like Skytap, as an example, that a lot of people use, and I've used in the past, that gives you a platform to run on, but again, a lot more cost and not the automated software capabilities. So there are a lot of scenarios like that that we can go after, and it's almost universal. Everybody's got a need to have some sort of a test or dev environment, right? And we are going to prove to them that the software is better. >> So not a lot of competition. It's not like there's a zillion players out there. >> No, it's a big target, but there's not a lot of players. And for the most part, you're going to go into scenarios where customers have something they've cobbled together that isn't working as well as they'd like. >> And Pensa AI hints a little bit of a automation piece which is really all our people know in the enterprise. Let's talk about the technology. What's under the hood, is there AI involved, also you've got the domain name .ai, which I love those domain names, by the way, but what's the tech? What's driving the innovation and story differentiation? >> To be honest with you, inside that's something you debate because that's what it is. If AI is a way to use technology, to do things as well or better than people used to do before, that's what it is. And if you take all the hype, and nonsense out of the conversation, you say it's not about SkyNet and computers taking over the world, it's really about doing stuff better than we can do and making people more effective, that's what we have. Now, under AI there's a bunch of different techniques and we're going to be focused on primarily modeling and the core IP of this is how we build the model for all of those components and how they interact and how they behave, and then machine learning. How do we apply techniques to actually-- >> So you're writing software that's innovating on technology and configuration, tying that together and then using that instrumentation to make changes and/or adaptive-like capabilities-- >> Exactly, but rather than go spend a month building the template that you're going to go deploy the system will build that for you. And that's where the smarts are. And we'll use machine learning techniques over time to make that model better. So that's kind of where we're digging, and frankly it's a big problem for people. >> So software you're main technology. >> It's 100% a software platform. >> Okay, well, Wikibon Research was going viral at VMworld and I'll make a note cause I think this is important cause automation is our and it's a key point of your thing is that Wikibon showed that about 1.5 billion dollars are going to be taken out of the market as automation takes non-differentiated labor out of the equation, which essentially is stacking servers and racking, stacking and racking. That plays right into your trend. >> That's exactly what we're doing. And what we want to do is-- >> By the way that value shifts, too, all the parts. >> Yeah, and I think we're trying to focus-- automation isn't new. It's not new in IT. Certainly there's been a lot of focus on it the last 10 years. The question is how do you make the automation smarter? So you don't have to do the design and say push play. Cause the problem with automation in these really complicated microservices, multi-- the problem is, if you automate it, if you build that template wrong, you can make the same mistake a thousand times in a row. And I've had products in the past where they've worked great as long as that template was correct. Well what if the template changes? What if I need to put new security policies in there, changes? Maestro is going to build it for you. That's what the story is all about. >> That's your product, that's your product name. >> Yep. >> Well, that's what DevOps is all about. Programming the infrastructure, and that's always going to change. So that's really the DevOps ethos. >> Yeah, and that's why if you expand out from the first play run, this test dev scenario, well, frankly, we'll learn a lot. We'll learn a ton about different patterns that we see, we'll learn a lot about the Interop environment that customers want, I want you to add this or add that, the system is going to get smarter to the point where when we punch it into production, it's going to know a lot more than it does today. >> Well congratulations on the launch. My final question for you is really the most important one which is, if I'm a customer, why do I care? What's in it for me? What's the value? Why should I pay attention to Pensa.ai? What's going on, what's the value to me, why should I care, why should I call you? Gimme that bottom line. >> It's about risk reduction. It's about making sure that the things you need to change you can actually do it without it blowing up in your face. And it's also, frankly, the other side of the AI-- >> What, the infrastructure blowing up in my face? Or just apps? >> If you make changes to your environment and you're not sure if they're going to work, but you know, again, take the Equifax thing. If they had made those changes and put them into their environment, it wouldn't be on the front page of every newspaper in the world. Frankly, my information wouldn't have been hacked. >> What would you guys have done if I was Equifax and I knew that potentially I had to move fast? How could you guys solve that problem? >> If you have a problem, upgrade the software today. And what we would've done is give them the ability-- >> Do you think they knew they had a problem? >> Uh... I don't know if they did or not, but you can see this scenario over and over and over again in other companies, where they say, we know we need to do an update, but we're not doing it. We're going to wait for the six months-- >> Cause it breaks stuff. >> Cause we're scared. >> Scared, or that it breaks stuff, or both? >> It breaks stuff and we need to test it, right? So we're going to bring test velocity into that, we're going to bring intelligence to make sure the design is right, right? So that you can do it more quickly. In many different scenarios. >> It's interesting in the old days, it was like, patch management was a big thing, that was the on-premise software, but with DevOps, you need, essentially, test and dev all the time on? >> You do. If you're developing these applications with DevOps in the front end, and you're dropping new versions of 'em in hours, rather than quarters, the infrastructure in the back end has to kind of speed up to DevOps speed. And that's where we're going to focus our attention. >> Alright, here's the hard question for you and we'll end the segment, is when does a customer, your potential customer, know they need you? What's the environment look like? What's the pain points? What are the signals that they need to be calling Pensa.ai? What's the deal there? >> Yeah, I think we're going to talk to the DevOps people that are looking to get their applications out and get them built and deployed-- >> So, need for application pushing, that's one. >> That's one. The other ones are going to be folks inside any IT organization that need better velocity, need to be able to test one and take money, cost out of it, cause we're going to do it for a lot less than what it costs you to do now. And the third one is the vendor community. Folks out there selling software. VARs, pre-solicit people. >> So I guess the question is more specific. What is the signs inside the customer that make them want to call you? Stuff's breaking, upgrades not happening fast enough, I'm trying to get to the heart of it. If I'm a customer-- >> On the IT customer side, it's all about velocity. We need to push our apps faster, we need infrastructure faster, we need to test security policies faster, we're not going fast enough-- >> So basically if you're going slow, not getting the job done, they call you. >> Pretty much, that's our guys. >> Tom, congratulations on the launch, congratulations on the new CEO job, we'll be tracking you guys. Series A funding, congratulations, who's the VC involved? >> We have The Fabric, which was the seed funding source, and then March Capital has been very helpful to us in this A round. >> Great, well they got a great pro in you as CEO. We'll keep in touch. Cube alumni, good friend Tom Joyce here inside theCUBE Studios on the conversation around the launch of the company, Series A funding, new team members, and Pensa.ai. This is theCUBED. Cubed.net is our URL, check it out. Siliconangle.com and wikibon.com is where you can go check out our stuff. I'm John Furrier, thanks for watching. (futuristic music)

>> Narrator: Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE covering VMworld 2017 brought to you by VMware and its ecosystem partners. >> Hi, I'm Stu Miniman here with Keith Townsend, and you're watching theCUBE SiliconANGLE Media's production of VMworld 2017 here in Las Vegas. For the last few years, hyper-converged infrastructure has been one of the hot topics, and I'm happy to welcome back to the program Jesse St. Laurent, who is the chief technologist of hyper-converged software group-- Sorry, software-defined hyper-converged and cloud group at Hewlett Packard Enterprise. A slightly longer title than last time I interviewed Jesse. Thanks so much for joining us. >> Yeah, thanks Stu, it's great to be here. >> Alright, so hyper-converged has had a lot of hype. Hyper-converged has also had a lot of customers, a lot of dollars. First of all, I have to say, I think it's the-- You're the first employee of SimpliVity that we've had on since the acquisition. We've had the pleasure of knowing-- I've known you since before SimpliVity, but we've been watching SimpliVity since stealth mode, a $650 million acquisition in cash for HPE, so congratulations on that. >> Thanks. >> Stu: What have you been doing since the acquisition? >> I think one of the biggest changes, really, is going from being a product company, where, in reality, startups, if you're going to be successful, you have to focus on one thing, and you have to do it well. And for SimpliVity, well, we spent a lot of time building technology that was much more broadly applicable from an industry perspective. Taking it to market, it had to be narrow, and that's why we focused specifically on hyper-convergence. But we always felt that, and you and I have talked about this long ago, that some of the underpinnings of our technology really were about this concept of a data fabric. So, fast-forward to today, SimpliVity is no longer a single-product company, right? We're part of a portfolio company that has technology that spans the entire hybrid IT marketplace. >> Jesse, I want you to look back for a little bit for us. >> Sure. >> As I've said, you've ridden this wave. I sometimes joke, I'm still yet to find a CIO that had a convergence problem. (Keith laughs) But you're solving real customer problems. Obviously, you've got a lot of customers. As you look back, what have you learned along the way? What are some of those key drivers that kind of got you to where you are, and what's changed in the conversations recently for your customers? >> I think it's always been about simplification. The strange thing is SimpliVity always talked about simplifying IT, right? Whenever any of us talked about what the company did, the first slide was, "Our mission is to simplify IT," and I didn't know it prior, but after the acquisition, HP's, one of the core strategies of the company, is to simplify hybrid IT, which aligns remarkably well. I think that's the common thread for SimpliVity, is we've seen the product evolve, and the use cases of all of early on, smaller customers, much larger enterprises over time, different use cases, ranging from data centers to kind of extreme robo examples. I think, really, the thread through that is hybrid IT's complicated, right, and what I think is a common thread through all of what we see on the floor here, for the most part, is IT is really hard. I always use the term, "the messy middle." In the end of the day, vendors like to make the world seem binary, right? It's either, you're either public cloud or you're private cloud, or you're either x or y, and the reality is no customer I've ever seen has come in in the morning and said, "You know what? "Today, we're going to flip this switch, "and everything is going to go from the mainframe "to open systems, or open systems, you know, bare metal, "to virtualization, or virtualization to containers." Customers live in a very messy world, and that's where simplification is that theme. >> So Jesse, no matter the technology, technologists, we love to say scale break stuff. SimpliVity is used to scale, but coming into HPE, much different sized organization, organization that looks at the industry a little bit differently than SimpliVity does, how has things changed for your view now that you're inside of HP? >> Yeah, I mean one of the things that is a huge change is we're everywhere, right? SimpliVity talked about being in tens of countries before, and we were excited about that, and for a startup, the number was huge. >> Keith: Right. >> It paled in comparison to the footprint of Hewlett Packard Enterprise. In one of the first couple weeks of the acquisition, I was presenting to some customers, and Meg Whitman was part of the discussion as well, and I said, "One of the biggest changes will be "we will be in 90% of the opportunities "where somebody's talking about hyper-convergence," and Meg stopped me and said, "No, no no. "We will be in 100% of the opportunities where someone's talking about hyper-convergence." And just to a scale perspective, that's a scale that no startup has ever experienced. You can't be everywhere, and that's a huge transition just in terms of enabling a global sales force to be able to be everywhere. >> Jesse, I'd like to get your take. People talk about software's eating the world. We live in a software-defined world right now. You know, cloud's a lot of software, but hardware still has an impact. We all know virtualization, boy, you know, some of those underlying things. The devil's in the details on networking and storage specifically. Hewlett Packard Enterprise, obviously your solution is predominantly software, but now you have a lot more hardware that goes with it. I know you've done a lot of the integration on that. What, has anything changed as to how you think of the software and hardware? And I'd love to hear a little insight as to that integration work. Anything surprise you or excite you coming into the HPE family? >> Yeah, I think, let me talk about a little bit of the SimpliVity hardware view and how that's evolved because I think it's an interesting transition, which is we've always based our technology on one, our accelerator that just made everything faster and more predictable. It was a core part of our technology, but we've always talked about having a software-optimized version of the stack, as well, and doing that across a whole suite of hardware platforms was never a simple thing to do because there was one SimpliVity, and there were a lot of hardware platforms out there. What we've seen now is, we're going into an environment where there's one suite of hardware technology, and it's a company that has a massive amount of expertise in Hewlett Packard Enterprise, developing hardware technologies. So where SimpliVity had an accelerator, one of the things that I didn't think about in advance of the acquisition is a whole bunch of people coming to us, saying, "We've got some really interesting ideas "on how to take what you've built around this accelerator, "and make it really fast." You imagine when you own the chassis, when you own the motherboard, when you own everything about the platform, the idea of putting a card in, well, yeah, well that's easy, but what else can you do? When you have an army of people that can build hardware, you can do all sorts of really cool stuff. So I think what you'll see is, actually, us doing two separate things more. You'll continue to see a hardware-optimized version of everything SimpliVity's done for years now. It seems a little strange to say "years," but years now. That's not going to go away, in fact, it's going to get even better, but at the same time, there're form factors and there're places where you want to run in software, whether it's to be extra small, whether it's to bounce down the road in a Humvee, whether it's to be in an airplane; there's a whole bunch of reasons you want to do that. So you'll actually see us having a portfolio that embraces both sides of that. >> So one last question around that hardware and software abstraction. HPE, while a lot of expertise, you have to be a little bit overwhelmed. DL380, which you guys are supporting now, DL580, Synergy, where are we going to see SimpliVity next in HPE's massive hardware profile? >> Yeah, my hope is you see it everywhere, but it takes time to get there. I think one of the things that's most exciting about this transformation that SimpliVity will go through is really becoming a data fabric company. So hyper-convergence isn't going away, and hyper-convergence will come to other platforms, whether it's a one-year platform or a four-year platform, more sockets, higher density. I think you'll see all those things over time. You'll also see, what does it mean to be part of a software-defined stack, living in a composable world, right? I think those things fit together really well, and you'll see a lot of cool stuff coming around that. We're seeing the biggest boost in terms of exposure in the market. It has caused huge SimpliVity product growth in the market. Now what we want to do is broaden that portfolio to be in a lot of other places in the market. >> Alright, well Jesse, we really appreciate catching the update. We're surely going to be watching as to how composable infrastructure and the portfolio of the HPE offerings fit in with SimpliVity, so thanks so much for joining us. For Keith Townsend, I'm Stu Miniman. We'll be back with lots more coverage here from VMworld 2017 Las Vegas. You're watching theCUBE. (upbeat music)

>> Announcer: Live from Las Vegas, it's The Cube, covering HPE Discover, 2017 brought to you by Hewlett Packard Enterprise. >> Okay, welcome back everyone. We're here live in Las Vegas for our exclusive three day coverage from The Cube Silicon Angle media's flagship program. We go out to events, talk to the smartest people we can find CEOs, entrepreneurs, R&D lab managers and of course we're here at HPE Discover 2017 our next two guests, Andrew Wheeler, the Fellow, VP, Deputy Director, Hewlett Packard Labs and Kirk Bresniker, Fellow and VP, Chief Architect of HP Labs, was on yesterday. Welcome back, welcome to The Cube. Hewlett Packard Labs well known you guys doing great research, Meg Whitman really staying with a focused message and one of the comments she mentioned at our press analyst meeting yesterday was focusing on the lab. So I want ask you where is that range in the labs? In terms of what you guys, when does something go outside the lines if you will? >> Andrew: Yeah good question. So, if you think about Hewlett Packard Labs and really our charter role within the company we're really kind of tasked for looking at things that will disrupt our current business or looking for kind of those new opportunities. So for us we have something we call an innovation horizon and you know it's like any other portfolio that you have where you've got maybe things that are more kind of near term, maybe you know one to three years out, things that are easily kind of transferred or the timing is right. And then we have kind of another bucket that says well maybe it's more of a three to five year kind of in that advanced development category where it needs a little more incubation but you know it needs a little more time. And then you know we reserve probably you know a smaller pocket that's for more kind of pure research. Things that are further out, higher risk. It's a bigger bet but you know we do want to have kind of a complete portfolio of those, and you know over time throughout our history you know we've got really success stories in all of those. So it's always finding kind of that right blend. But you know there's clearly a focus around the advanced development piece now that we've had a lot of things come from that research point and really one of the... >> John: You're looking for breakthroughs. I mean that's what you're... Some-- >> Andrew: Clearly. >> Internal improvement, simplify IT all that good stuff, you guys still have your eyes on some breakthroughs. >> That's right. Breakthroughs, how do we differentiate what we're doing so but yeah clearly, clearly looking for those breakthrough opportunities. >> John: And one of the things that's come up really big in this show is the security and chip thing was pretty hot, very hot, and actually wiki bonds public, true public cloud report that they put out sizing up on prem the cloud mark. >> Dave: True private cloud. >> True private cloud I'm sorry. And that's not including hybrids of $265 billion tam but the notable thing that I want to get your thoughts on is the point they pushed was over 10 years $150 billion is going to shift out of IT on premise into other differentiated services. >> Andrew: Out of labor. >> Out of labor. So this, and I asked them what that means, as he said that means it's going to shift to vendor R&D meaning the suppliers have to do more work. So that the customers don't have to do the R&D. Which we see a lot in cloud where there's a lot of R&D going on. That's your job. So you guys are HP Labs, what's happening in that R&D area that's going to off load that labor so they can move to some other high yield tasks. >> Sure. Take first. >> John: Go ahead take a stab at it. >> When we've been looking at some of the concepts we had in the memory driven computing research and advanced development programs the machine program, you know one of the things that was the kick off for me back in 2003 we looked at what we had in the unix market, we had advanced virtualization technologies, we had great management of resources technologies, we had memory fabric technologies. But they're all kind of proprietary. But Silicon is thinking and back then we were saying how does risk unix compete with industry standards service? This new methodology, new wave, exciting changing cost structures. And for us it was that it was a chance to explore those ideas and understand how they would affect our maintaining the kind of rich set of customer experiences, mission criticality, security, all of these elements. And it's kind of funny that we're sort of just coming back to the future again and we're saying okay we have this move we want to see these things happen on the cloud and we're seeing those same technologies, the composable infrastructure we have in synergy and looking forward to see the research we've done on the machine advanced development program and how will that intersect hardware composability, converged infrastructure so that you can actually have that shift, those technologies coming in taking on more of that burden to allow you freedom of choice, so you can make sure that you end up with that right mix. The right part on a full public cloud, the right mix on a full private cloud, the right mixing on that intelligent edge. But still having the ability to have all of those great software development methodologies that agile methodology, the only thing the kids know how to do out of school is open source and agile now. So you want to make sure that you can embrace that and make sure regardless of where the right spot is for a particular application in your entire enterprise portfolio that you have this common set of experiences and tools. And some of the research and development we're doing will enable us to drive that into that existing, conventional, enterprise market as well as this intelligent edge. Making a continuum, a continuum from the core to the intelligent edge. And something that modern computer science graduates will find completely comfortable. >> One attracting them is going to be the key, I think the edge is kind of intoxicating if you think about all the possibilities that are out there in terms of what you know just from a business model disruption and also technology. I mean wearables are edge, brain implants in the future will be edge, you know the singularities here as Ray Kersewile would say... >> Yeah. >> I mean but, this is the truth. This is what's happened. This is real right now. >> Oh absolutely. You know we think of all that data and right now we're just scratching the surface. I remember it was 1994 the first time I fired up a web server inside of my development team. So I could begin thinning out design information on prototype products inside of HP, and it was a novelty. People would say "What is that thing "you just sent me an email, W W whatever?" And suddenly we went from, like almost overnight, from a novelty to a business necessity, to then it transformed the way that we created the applications for the... >> John: A lot of people don't know this but since you brought it up this historical trivia, HP Labs, Hewlett Packard Labs had scientists who actually invented the web with Tim Berners-Lee, I think HTML founder was an HP Labs scientist. Pretty notable trivia. A lot of people don't know that so congratulations. >> And so I look at just what you're saying there and we see this new edge thing is it's going to be similarly transformative. Now today it's a little gimmicky perhaps it's sort of scratching the surface. It's taking security and it can be problematic at times but that will transform, because there is so much possibility for economic transformation. Right now almost all that data on the edge is thrown away. If you, the first person who understands okay I'm going to get 1% more of that data and turn it into real time intelligence, real time action... That will unmake industries and it will remake new industries. >> John: Andrew this the applied research vision, you got to apply R&D to the problem... >> Andrew: Correct. >> That's what he's getting at but you got to also think differently. You got to bring in talent. The young guns. How are you guys bringing in the young guns? What's the, what's the honeypot? >> Well I think you know for us it's, the sell for us, obviously is just the tradition of Hewlett Packard to begin with right? You know we have recognition on that level even it's not just Hewlett Packard Labs as well it's you know just R&D in general right? Kind of it you know the DNA being an engineering company so... But it's you know I think it is creating kind of these opportunities and whether it's internship programs you know just the various things that we're doing whether it's enterprise related, high performance computing... I think this edge opportunity is a really interesting one as a bridge because if you think about all the things that we hear about in enterprise in terms of "Oh you know I need this deep analytics "capability," or you know even a lot of the in memories things that we're talking about, real time response, driving information, right? All of that needs to happen at the edge as well for various opportunities so it's got a lot of the young graduates excited. We host you know hundreds of interns every year and it's real exciting to see kind of the ideas they come in with and you know they're all excited to work in this space. >> Dave: So Kirk you have your machine button, three, of course you got the logo. And then the machine... >> I got the labs logo, I got the machine logo. >> So when I first entered you talked about in the early 1980s. When I first got in the business I remembered Gene Emdall. "The best IO is no IO." (laughter) >> Yeah that's right. >> We're here again with this sort of memory semantics, centric computing. So in terms of the three that Andrew laid out the three types of sort of projects you guys pursue... Where does the machine fit? IS it sort of in all three? Or maybe you could talk about that a little bit. >> Kirk: I think it is, so we see those technologies that over the last three years we have brought so much new and it was, the critical thing about this is I think it's also sort of the prototyping of the overall approach our leaning in approach here... >> Andrew: That's right. >> It wasn't just researchers. Right? Those 500 people who made that 160 terabyte monster machine possible weren't just from labs. It was engineering teams from across Hewlett Packard Enterprise. It was our supply chain team. It was our services team telling us how these things fit together for real. Now we've had incredible technology experiences, incredible technologist experiences, and what we're seeing is that we have intercepts on conventional platforms where there's the photonics, the persistent memories. Those will make our existing DCIG and SDCG products better almost immediately. But then we also have now these whole cloth applications and as we take all of our learnings, drive them into open source software, drive them into the genesys consortium and we'll see you know probably 18, 24 months from now some of those first optimized silicon designs pop out of that ecosystem then we'll be right there to assemble those again, into conventional systems as well as more expansive, exo-scale computing, intelligent edge with large persistent memories and application specific processing as that next generation of gateways, I think we can see these intercept points at every category Andrew talked about. >> Andrew: And another good point there that kind of magnifies the model we were talking about, if we were sitting here five years ago, we would talking about things like photonics and non-volatile memory as being those big R projects. Those higher risk, longer term things, that right? As those mature, we make more progress innovation happens, right? It gets pulled into that shorter time frame that becomes advanced development. >> Dave: And Meg has talked about that... >> Yeah. >> Wanting to get more productivity out of the labs. And she's also pointed out you guys have spent more on R&D in the last several years. But even as we talked about the other day you want to see a little more D and keep the R going. So my question is, when you get to that point, of being able to support DCIG... Where do you, is it a hand off? Are you guys intimately involved? When you're making decisions about okay so member stir for example, okay this is great, that's still in the R phase then you bring it in. But now you got to commercialize this and you got 3D nan coming out and okay let's use that, that fits into our framework. So how much do you guys get involved in that handoff? You know the commercialization of this stuff? >> We get very involved. So it's at the point where when we think have something that hey we think you know maybe this could get into a product or let's see if there's good intercept here. We work jointly at that point. It's lab engineers, it's the product managers out of the group, engineers out of the business group, they essentially work collectively then on getting it to that next step. So it's kind of just one big R&D effort at that point. >> Dave: And so specifically as it relates to the machine, where do you see in the next in the near term, let's call near term next three years, or five years even, what do you see that looking like? Is it this combination of memory width capacitors or flash extensions? What does that look like in terms of commercial terms that we can expect? >> Kirk: So I really think the palette is pretty broad here. That I can see these going into existing rack and tower products to allow them to have memory that's composable down to the individual module level. To be able to take that facility to have just the right resources applied at just the right time with that API that we have in one view. Extend down to composing the hardware itself. I think we look at those edge line systems and want to have just the right kind of analytic capability, large persistent memories at that edge so we can handle those zeta bytes and zeta bytes of data in full fidelity analyzed at the edge sending back that intelligence to the core but also taking action at the edge in a timeframe that matters. I also see it coming out and being the basis of our exoscale high performance computing. You know when you want to have a exoscale system that has all of the combined capacity of the top 500 systems today but 1/20th of their power that is going to take rather novel technologies and everything we've been working on is exactly what's feeding that research and soon to be advanced development and then soon to be production in supply chain. >> Dave: Great. >> John: So the question I have is obviously we saw some really awesome Gen 10 stuff here at this show you guys are seeing that obviously you're on stage talking about a lot of the cool R&D, but really the reality is that's multiple years in the works some of this root of trust silicon technology that's pretty, getting the show buzzed up everyone's psyched about it. Dreamworks Animation's talking about how inorganic opportunities is helping their business and they got the security with the root of trust NIST certified and compliant. Pretty impressive. What's next? What else are you working on because this is where the R&D is on your shoulders for that next level of innovation. Where, what do you guys see that? Because security is a huge deal. That's that great example of how you guys innovated. Cause that'll stop the vector of a tax in the service area of IOT if you can get the servers to lock down and you have firmware that's secure, makes a lot of sense. That's probably the tip of the iceberg. What else is happening with security? >> Kirk: So when we think about security and our efforts on advanced development research around the machine what you're seeing here with the proliance is making the machines more secure. The inherent platform more secure. But the other thing I would point to you is the application we're running on the prototype. Large scale graph inference. And this is security because you have a platform like the machine. Able to digest hundreds and hundreds of tera bytes worth of log data to look for that fingerprint, that subtle clue that you have a system that has been compromised. And these are not blatant let's just blast everything out to some dot dot x x x sub domain, this is an advanced persistent thread by a very capable adversary who is very subtle in their reach out from a system that has been compromised to that command and control server. The signs are there if you can look at the data holistically. If you can look at that DNS log, graph of billions of entries everyday, constantly changing, if you can look at that as a graph in totality in a timeframe that matters then that's an empowering thing for a cyber defense team and I think that's one of the interesting things that we're adding to this discussion. Not only protect, detect and recover, but giving offensive weapons to our cyber defense team so they can hunt, they can hunt for those events for system threats. >> John: One of the things, Andrew I'll get your thoughts and reaction to this because Ill make an observation and you guys can comment and tell me I'm all wet, fell off the deep end or what not. Last year HP had great marketing around the machine. I love that Star Trek ad. It was beautiful and it was just... A machine is very, a great marketing technique. I mean use the machine... So a lot of people set expectations on the machine You saw articles being written maybe these people didn't understand it. Little bit pulled back, almost dampered down a little bit in terms of the marketing of the machine, other than the bin. Is that because you don't yet know what it's going to look like? Or there's so many broader possibilities where you're trying to set expectations? Cause the machine certainly has a lot of range and it's almost as if I could read your minds you don't want to post the position too early on what it could do. And that's my observation. Why the pullback? I mean certainly as a marketer I'd be all over that. >> Andrew: Yeah, I think part of it has been intentional just on how the ecosystem, we need the ecosystem developed kind of around this at the same time. Meaning, there are a lot of kind of moving parts to it whether it's around the open source community and kind of getting their head wrapped around what is this new architecture look like. We've got things like you know the Jin Zee Consortium where we're pouring a lot of our understanding and knowledge into that. And so we need a lot of partners, we know we're in a day and an age where look there's no single one company that's going to do every piece and part themselves. So part of it is kind of enough to get out there, to get the buzz, get the excitement to get other people then on board and now we have been heads down especially this last six months of... >> John: Jamming hard on it. >> Getting it all together. You know you think about what we showed first essentially first booted the thing in November and now you know we've got it running at this scale, that's really been the focus. But we needed a lot of that early engagement, interaction to get a lot of the other, members of the ecosystem kind of on board and starting to contribute. And really that's where we're at today. >> John: It's almost you want it let it take its own course organically because you mentioned just on the cyber surveillance opportunity around the crunching, you kind of don't know yet what the killer app is right? >> And that's the great thing of where we're at today now that we have kind of the prototype running at scale like this, it is allowing us to move beyond, look we've had the simulators to work with, we've had kind of emulation vehicles now you've got the real thing to run actual workloads on. You know we had the announcement around DZ and E as kind of an early early example, but it really now will allow us to do some refinement that allows us to get to those product concepts. >> Dave: I want to just ask the closing question. So I've had this screen here, it's like the theater, and I've been seeing these great things coming up and one was "Moore's Law is dead." >> Oh that was my session this morning. >> Another one was block chain. And unfortunately I couldn't hear it but I could see the tease. So when you guys come to work in the morning what's kind of the driving set of assumptions for you? Is it just the technology is limitless and we're going to go figure it out or are there things that sort of frame your raison d'etre? That drive your activities and thinking? And what are the fundamental assumptions that you guys use to drive your actions? >> Kirk: So what's been driving me for the last couple years is this exponential growth of information that we create as a species. That seems to have no upper bounding function that tamps it down. At the same time, the timeframe we want to get from information, from raw information to insight that we can take action on seems to be shrinking from days, weeks, minutes... Now it's down to micro seconds. If I want to have an intelligent power grid, intelligent 3G communication, I have to have micro seconds. So if you look at those two things and at the same time we just have to be the lucky few who are sitting in these seats right when Moore's Law is slowing down and will eventually flatten out. And so all the skills that we've had over the last 28 years of my career you look at those technologies and you say "Those aren't the ones that are going "to take us forward." This is an opportunity for us to really look and examine every piece of this, because if was something we could of just can't we just dot dot dot do one thing? We would do it, right? We can't just do one thing. We have to be more holistic if we're going to create the next 20, 30, 40 years of innovation. And that's really what I'm looking at. How do we get back exponential scaling on supply to meet this unending exponential demand? >> Dave: So technically I would imagine, that's a very hard thing to balance because the former says that we're going to have more data than we've ever seen. The latter says we've got to act on it fast which is a great trend for memory but the economics are going to be such a challenge to meet, to balance that. >> Kirk: We have to be able to afford the energy, and we have to be able to afford the material cost, and we have to be able to afford the business processes that do all these things. So yeah, you need breakthroughs. And that's really what we've been doing. And I think that's why we're so fortunate at Hewlett Packard Enterprise to have the labs team but also that world class engineering and that world class supply chain and a services team that can get us introduced to every interesting customer around the world who has those challenging problems and can give us that partnership and that insight to get those kind of breakthroughs. >> Dave: And I wonder if there will be a tipping point, if the tipping point will be, and I'm sure you've thought about this, a change in the application development model that drives so much value and so much productivity that it offsets some of the potential cost issues of changing the development paradigm. >> And I think you're seeing hints of that. Now we saw this when we went from systems of record, OLTP systems, to systems of engagement, mobile systems, and suddenly new ways to develop it. I think now the interesting thing is we move over to systems of action and we're moving from programmatic to training. And this is this interesting thing if you have those data bytes of data you can't have a pair of human eyeballs in front of that, you have to have a machine learning algorithm. That's the only thing that's voracious enough to consume this data in a timely enough fashion to get us answers, but you can't program it. We saw those old approaches in old school A.I., old school autonomous vehicle programs, they go about 10 feet, boom, and they'd flip over, right? Now you know they're on our streets and they are functioning. They're a little bit raw right now but that improvement cycle is fantastic because they're training, they're not programming. >> Great opportunity to your point about Moore's Law but also all this new functionality that has yet been defined, is right on the doorstep. Andrew, Kirk thank you so much for sharing. >> Andrew: Thank you >> Great insight, love Hewlett Packard Labs love the R&D conversation. Gets us a chance to go play in the wild and dream about the future you guys are out creating it congratulations and thanks for spending the time on The Cube, appreciate it. >> Thanks. >> The Cube coverage will continue here live at Las Vegas for HPE Discover 2017, Hewlett Packard Enterprises annual event. We'll be right back with more, stay with us. (bright music)

>> Announcer: Live from Las Vegas, it's The Cube covering HPE Discover 2017. Brought to you by Hewlett Packard Enterprise. (techno music) >> Welcome back, everyone. We're here live in Las Vegas for theCube's exclusive three days of coverage of HPE Discover 2017. This is SiliconANGLE's flagship program. We go out to the events and extract the signal from the noise. I'm John Furrier, and my cohost, Dave Vellante. Partner in crime here. Our next guest is Ana Pinczuk, Senior Vice President, General Manager, HPE Pointnext, the new organization >> Ana: That's correct. Yeah. >> John: Anyways, welcome to theCube. Good to see you again. >> Thank you. Really nice to see you as well. Yeah, excited to be here with you guys. >> Cube alumni also. Part of the Grace Hopper Community as well with women in tech. Great work there. Just want to give you props. >> Ana: Thank you, yeah. >> Shout out there. Okay, so you're in the new job here. You're a seasoned veteran. >> Ana: Yes. >> You know the industry. Your thoughts? I mean, you're coming in fresh. >> Ana: Yeah, I'm coming in fresh. So, first of all, three whole months here, you know. So, it's been kind of a whirlwind since we came onboard. We announced the new brand. So HP Pointnext is the new brand for really our future-facing services organization, right. And we've got this great opportunity, you know? We've got customers that are really undergoing tremendous digital transformation, right, and they need help, and we're the arm of HP that can really help them through that journey. All the way from sort of advice and transform services, professional services, like design and implementation services, and then when we go to operational support services as well, so. >> John: One of the things that Meg Whitman was talking about, I want to get your thoughts and reaction to, is, she said it's a cleaner positioning with HPE now. Because the partner relationships have always been center. We had the Chief Channel Officer on earlier, Denzel. 70 percent of the revenues comes from partners. >> Ana: That's right. >> And so, having Pointnext the way it's structured makes it cleanier. What is she-- Cleaner, for everyone to understand what's happening. What does she mean by that? And give us your perspective. >> Ana: Yeah. Well, I'll give you, you know. Look, before, we had a huge outsourcing business, right. And with the DXC business moving off, we've got the opportunity to really partner with the Accentures, the DeLoyds, the WhitPros, the Tatas of the world, right? We provide mostly technology services, so, to the extent that they go and they help customers with applications and really figuring out their business processes, then we come together with them and then figure out how to translate that business architecture to the technology architecture and then how to do that technology road map for them, right. So, um, it's really positioned us much closer to different kinds of SI's, both sort of the traditional SI's as well as other ecosystem partners. And today, I mean, if you think about mostly every vertical is transforming, right, so. Whether you're in retail or transportation, et cetera. And frankly with DXC, you know, really going off focusing on outsourcing, we're still a huge partner of theirs, you know. They're a customer of ours. But at the same time, it opens up huge opportunities to go after other verticals and other solutions as well. >> Dave: Yeah, it's kind of a strange TAM expansion for the core of Hewlett-Packard Enterprise. >> Ana: Yeah, it is. >> You sort of concede the outsourcing business. Okay, we're out of that business. >> Ana: That's right. >> But now you've got so many other partners that really could boost your core business. >> Ana: Yeah. And, you know, um, I mean. Nobody owns advise and transform, right? I mean, nobody owns the whole digital transformation journey. The opportunity there greatly, sort of, outweighs the constraints that we have in that space, right. And so, you know, it's really important for us to go with the Accentures or the Deloyds, other partners, and be able to come with them and provide those solutions to customers. >> John: Ana, I'd like to get your thoughts on the trend and the particular question if it's going to be around the cloud transformation, which is the driver. You got big data, you've got IOTs, you have, obviously you have your hybrid IT solutions here, but, you know, cloud computing in general and big data point to a new set of applications. Dave and I always comment on theCube as we go to all these different events that we're old enough to remember the 80's and 90's. >> Ana: You're not that old. >> The 80's and 90's, the ERP generation. The mini computer was a massive opportunity for service providers. >> Ana: That's right. >> You know you had the big six accounting firms back in the day. Now you have thousands of partners. That was a big movement. That was a big wave. >> Ana: It is. >> This wave is almost bigger than that, but different. >> Ana: It is. >> What's different now as the new apps come out? >> Ana: Yeah. >> John: And we've seen this movie before in a way. >> Ana: Yes. >> John: With the ERPs of the world and CRMs. >> Ana: Yeah. >> John: What's different now with cloud that makes this bigger, and what's your thoughts on this opportunity? >> Ana: Well, I think, two things for me. One is-- In fact, over the last couple of days, we've been talking to a lot of customers about not what I would consider traditional, but even S, you know, SAP HANA, right? And those migrations. Those are like, a little bit like, still the old wave, you know. With new, sort of a new flavor to it as people go more into big data and analytics as well. But the biggest thing is that, you know, think about the world of the future. Everything's going to communicate with everything else. Everything is going to compute, right? And so, you know, the patterns of communications are really shifting, you know, as well. It used to be very data center, centric, and those traditional models, or the old IBM models of the 80's, right. >> John: Big iron, all the-- >> Ana: Big iron, everything in the servers and the data center. But think about, you know, your toaster talking to you, you know. Think about smart meters out there. Think about your car being really a roaming, you know, office and entertainment center, right. >> John: Yeah. >> So I think that's what's really shifting. It's just the magnitude of data that's going to be, you know, computable, in a sense, at the edge, and that's really helping us think about whole new different applications that we didn't have, you know, back then. >> Dave: So cloud is obviously this huge megatrend, and everybody, I think Hewlett-Packard Enterprises included, is trying to substantially mimic the cloud experience on-prim, create hybrid. And it seems like you're having a great deal of success there, at least early, some early wins. The other component of that is the business model side of things. >> Ana: Yes. >> The whole as a service piece of it. >> Ana: Yes. >> And as you transition into that, you know, cloud-like world, what happens on the business model side? I mean, we've heard a lot about flex capacity and things of that nature, but it feels like the services business can transform dramatically into that model. I wonder if you can comment on that. >> No, it's true. I mean, just think about it. In the more traditional world, we've been mostly a product company with sort of services attached. You know, you sell a hardware box and you attach support to it and some installation services. We're completely shifting the model, right? So we're really services led and hardware attached, right, of the model going forward. And, so that's one thing that's shifting. And then the business models are really outcome based. You know, so, I'll give you an example. You know, I was talking to a customer, in fact, earlier this morning, about providing retail store as a service. That's a very different model, right. That means that we're looking at the whole architecture for them. We're looking at what value constitutes in a retail store. You know, how do they make money. What that outcome should be, right. Then how do you deliver that as a solution on a per, you know, something basis. Per outcome basis. So completely shifts the way that we think about delivering services. >> Dave: And so has it become services as a service? I mean do you go to-- >> Ana: I call it-- Yeah, I mean, I've been calling it, you know, experience as a service, and it is service as a service or outcome as a service. I mean, in a sense what the customer cares about is the value that they get out of that thing that you delivered to them, right. And so-- >> John: It's important to them. >> It's important to them. >> John: It's their business. >> I think, that's their business. That's what they care about. You know, I'll give you an example. Data is so important. Backing up your data is really important. But what the customer cares about is not whether they have back up, but it's whether the back up actually worked, you know. >> Dave: And can I recover. >> Ana: And can I recover from it, restore it, right. And so, when you think about that, you know, experience as a service. The experience is, gees, you know, that I get my data backed up and can I restore or recover from it. And then that becomes the outcome that they want. >> John: Which is the digital transformation. I mean, digital transformation has been around for awhile. It's been that buzzword. Certainly center stage here. But you're talking about business transformation. You're talking about really changing how companies are doing business. >> Ana: That's correct. >> John: Chop line revenue driven by digital services or digital apps or-- >> That's right, that's right. >> John: Interfaces, experiences. Whether it's feeling good or actually delivering something. >> Ana: That's right. And, you know, what's happening. I mean, think about the retail store of the future, right. I mean, you know, you have, you have a teenage daughter or a teenage son as I have. You know, you want to make it really interesting for them to go into a store and have a different kind of experience, right? And so, you know, location based services, all these, all these things that you can enable in terms of, you know, helping them buy new things or getting, you know, I don't know, some sort of discount when they go into the store. Or really seeing what it looks like when it's on. You know, those are the experiences of the future that are going to make that retailer relevant, you know, especially moving on. >> John: Well, we're going to have my daughter-- She's down in the front desk. She's interning for us. She's a Berkeley student. Say hi to her. She's going to come in and tell us about what she thinks of HPE as a youngster. >> Ana: Oh, good. >> John: But more importantly, this is a big trend. I mean, we're seeing-- I want to talk about the women in tech piece of what you're involved in because, you know, we were having a conversation at dinner two nights ago that, you know, people consume technology, whether they're the end user, and that word to even exist. End user, or consumer. >> Ana: That's right. >> End user isn't even a word anymore. >> Ana: Isn't that, yeah-- Who is that? >> John: Who do we call end user? >> Ana: I know. Or end thing. >> John: But people who are-- >> Ana: In the future. >> We're all connected, right? >> Ana: That's right. >> So, so this makes up this-- 50 percent of the population's women. >> Ana: That's right. >> And they're not making the products as much, so the percentage of women in tech is a big issue. I know you're, you're involved with Grace Hopper. >> Ana: Yes. >> Your thoughts on women in tech, because we need more women building products or being involved in the design or something. >> Ana: Yeah, yeah. It's a great, as you know, a great passion area for me. And we've got about-- You know, if you think about computing, we've got about 17 percent or 18 percent of the graduates come out in computer science, right. But if you think about technology in general, you know, because everything is going to be digital, because everything is going to compute, you now have, for example, women that are going into tech that have, sort of, a real different variety of backgrounds, right? I mean, they could be designers, because your fabrics are going to be, sort of, lit up with, you know, with sensor technologies. Your knees will be, you know, will have capabilities that are computational. You know, so. What we're seeing is the opportunity to open up the space for women because some of the things that are out there that are going to be technology are going to be much more interesting generally to, to women. >> John: So if I get this right, you're saying is that it's, "Okay, we want more people, more women in software." Except that's not the restriction. It should be computer science, now, is broader. >> Ana: That's right. >> John: And in analytics, I mean, we see a lot of women who are crushing it and being great data scientists. >> Ana: That's right. >> Bring some creativity to it or expertise. >> Dave: In that stat, you said 17 percent with a degree and a small, a much smaller percentage actually enter the technology field, correct? >> Yeah, you know, yeah. What happens, I mean, especially, we get about 17 to 22 percent or so that enter the technology field, but then many of them don't stay. You know, especially those, you know-- There's attrition as you go up the, up the chain as well. >> Okay, so maybe this new dynamic >> Ana: Yeah. >> Changes that. >> Ana: Yeah, well, I mean, I think the kinds of degrees that people are getting. You know, every degree will have a technology aspect to it, right? You're in textiles or you're in, you know, design. >> John: Healthcare. Science, everywhere. >> Or you're in healthcare. And, you're in-- Yeah, you know, you're a doctor, you're a lawyer. Every degree will have an aspect of tech, that means, frankly, that we as a tech industry have to open up the kinds of people that we attract, right? We've got to look for, not just computer science people, but people that understand business processes. You know, people that understand industry verticals, because digital's going to all these different, sort of, you know, places. >> John: And you're an inspiration. Thanks for all that work. And we agree. Science is everywhere now. >> Ana: Yeah, that's right. >> And whether it's block chain or some sort of medical breakthrough, >> Ana: That's right. >> You don't have to be a hardcore programmer. >> Ana: That's right, that's right. >> Ana, thanks so much for coming on theCube. Really appreciate you sharing your insight. >> Thank you. Thanks for having me. >> John: Congratulations on the new opportunity. >> Yeah, appreciate it. >> John: And Pointnext is, points to what's next. >> The place to be. That's right. As I try to tell people. (laughter) >> John: It's like dabbing and pointing at the same time. Thanks so much, really appreciate it. >> Ana: Thank you so much. >> John: I'm John Furrier, Dave Vellante, live coverage of HPE Discover 2017. Our 7th year covering HP Discover, now HPE Discover in it's 2nd year. Be right back with more live coverage after this short break. (upbeat music)

>> Announcer: Live from Las Vegas. It's the CUBE. Covering HPE Discover 2017. Brought to you by Hewitt Packard Enterprise. >> Welcome back everyone. We are live in Las Vegas for HPE Discover 2017. This is the CUBE's exclusive three days of coverage. Day three here on the floor in Las Vegas. I'm John Furrier. My co-host Dave Vellante with Silicon Angle the CUBE. Our next guest is Denzil Samuels. Who's the Global Chief Channel Officer for HPE. Welcome to the CUBE. >> John, thank you. Good to be here, thank you. >> So we... Dave and I like to talk about the channels. I have a history with HP. Everyone knows I've worked there for a good almost nine years. And a lot of that time in the channel business. A lot of people also know that HP has always been channel friendly. >> It has. >> Really for a long time. >> Absolutely, we were born in the channel. >> Now more that ever with the cloud here. And the cloud really being multi cloud and pervasive. The channel part is going to be a huge opportunity. And they're close to the customers. They're on the front lines. What is the mix of business? What is the strategy? How are you guys taking the transformation message? The digital transformation to the channel and what are they doing with it? >> Wow, there's a lot of questions thrown in there. (laughing) Let me start with the channel business. The channel business is 70% of Hewitt Packard's revenue. We have 87,000 channel partners around the world. Every region of the world. Many, many countries. And you're right John. We were born in the channel. Right, so we're channel centric. We're channel friendly. We've got the best partner program in the world. And it's not us saying that. It's the partners telling us and industry analysts telling us that as well. In terms of the opportunity right now. You know, the cloud wars are still going on between the cloud players. But I think that what that's done is it's changed the model with respect to the fact that we're now looking more to congeal model. Right, where customers want to buy on a consume basis. Pay as you go. Pay as you use it. And that represents an incredible opportunity for the channel. And the channel has really embraced that. They realize that they've got to be more than just valueated resellers. They've realized they've got to morph and evolve into being service providers as well. And we're seeing that transition occur at a fairly accelerated pace. >> I'm assuming the channel guys would... And you see the global systemic race. Clearly lining up. They see that opportunity and a lot of transformation conversations. But as you go into the long tail of the channel. You said a ton of partners. They've always been hungry for services because that's where their gross profits are. Right, so you know, they take in hardware. The solutions. Very solution centric. But as the business model shifts to the customers renting versus buying per say. They're kind of teed up for the services. How has that specific transition taken place? I'm sure that they've probably been eager for being more of a service provider. >> Yeah. >> With the sense of actually maybe having their own cloud service or a variety of other services. What's the makeup and how is that going? >> Well, what they love about our message is the fact that we know that the customers are not only going to go to pure cloud. We also know the customers want a choice. They want to know if they can actually have their processing. Their compute done. Not just in their data centers. Or maybe even on Prime but even at the edge. And so because we have really the only simple hybrid IT strategy out there. That's why the channel partners love us. Because they're giving their customers a choice. They're saying it doesn't matter where your processing this. Whether it's on a consumption basis. Whether it's on the edge. In the cloud. On Prime, off Prime. We can do that for you and we can do that with HP. So they're embracing that. They love the consumption model. They love our flex capacity offerings. And our HP financial services offerings as well. So it's exciting for them. >> So my simple mental model of the channel. You talked about transformation before. As you've got sort of box sellers. I know it's kind of a pejorative. But it's still probably the largest component of the business. You've got solution providers and then I guess cloud service providers. Maybe ISV's are sort of a separate channel. You could make that argument. Maybe the hoodies are becoming a new channel as well. But, thinking about box sellers and solution providers. The box sellers have to transform. We all know that. They got big boats. Big houses. A lot of them are happy. They're going to retire. But the up and comers, they better transform. Solution providers, it used to be okay was it SAP or Oracle. Now it's IoT Solutions and different solutions. My specific question is. What's happening with that transformation from box seller to solution provider? And how is HP sort of helping it's channel get there? >> Great question Dave. I think one of the things that I love about it is that it's been going on for a few years. So it's not new. I talked, for example, to a partner yesterday in New Zealand. And I said, hey how's your transition to service provider been going? Cause they were a traditional evaluated reseller or box seller as you say. And they said, "Oh yeah, we became a service provider nine years ago." (laughing) And I talked to a distributor in Germany yesterday. And they said, I said. How many resellers are you actually converting to or helping transform their business into becoming service providers. And they said, "About 20 a week." So the shift has been going on for a few years. And there's a lot of information out there. There's white papers, there's training. There's sales plans, compensation plans have been modified. A lot of that material is there. We've helped through a lot of it. We have a playbook for making that transition. We have a service offering that we offer them. To help them if they don't know. But for the most part, the distributors. And the big evaluated resellers, they know it. It's the smaller guys that are making that change. >> And if we're starting a business. The three of us starting a business tomorrow. We'd say okay, let's build a subscription business. And we'll have a monthly revenue steam. Okay which is great. But if you're already used to the heroin of the big heap up front. Transitioning that model. The same is true for Hewitt Packard Enterprise I would imagine. As you're customers shift to a ratable model. You've got to change your financial model. You see a number of cases on Wall Street where companies are trying to make that transformation. Particularly software companies. >> Yeah. >> What kind of discussions are you having with the channel with regard to that pay as you go model. And how that affects their cash flow and income statements. >> Yeah, I think that what we're doing is, to help that. In terms of leasing options with the HP financial solutions. But I'm also helping with our flex capacity offerings. Those are two great triggers for the channel. They love that. They also like the fact that we're trying to be one step ahead of them, right. So I think the power of this is really around what the customer's buying. And they know that if they don't sell the way the customer's buying. They're going to be irrelevant. >> Denzil, can you explain how a flex capacity is not just renting. >> Yeah, I think one of the big, see... When you're rent you're buying. You're buying a size. Right, and you may use to the full size of your needs. Or you may not. But you're buying that. Whatever your capacity is that you're buying. You're buying that up front. If you don't use it, you loose it. Flex capacity is the opposite. You're actually paying for what you use. And some months you may use more. And some months you may use less. But you're paying for what you need. That's a huge advantage to the end customer. >> And HPE has figured out how to make a profitable business out of accommodating that. Cause you have to put the capacity there. Whether it's used or not. If it doesn't get used. You take the margin hit. Right? But you've figured out how to sort of maximize your profitability in that model. >> Yeah, we haven't just figured out how to do it. We've actually got a consulting practice that allows other to forget how to do it. So we actually help our. We actually help our partners morph to that as well. >> Is that just experience or is it some kind of magic analytics. >> I think it's a combination of a bunch of things. But let me tell you one thing that's really important in this transition to service providers. We used to do when we were dealing with the box sellers. The traditional certifications, right. You get a certification on a product. A product type. And you measure it on that. As part of the partner program. We've changed and evolved that partner program to say. Hey, listen. It's not just certifications on product. It's competencies. Right, data central analytics would be a competency. Understanding SAP HANA. How to implement that is a competency. So, as you move a program to embrace service providers away from traditional resellers. Having those competencies is huge. Understanding verticals is huge. And that all plays in to the usage question that you asked. >> This is a really great opportunity I think for partners. And this is what we've been kind of talking about on the CUBE. And a variety of different events we go to is. The cloud is really a amazing enabler because it's horizontally scalable but you need specialism in those unique domains. >> That's exactly right. >> Whether it's SAP. And big data highlights this. So you got to have that scale. And then you can also be specialized. So this opens the door up for a huge opportunity for your partners. So I totally get that. So I want to ask you guys how HP's changed? How you engage with your partners with digital? Because now you have to then be more efficient. >> Yes. >> With these guys. It's going to be there's 1,000 flowers are blooming and all these ridicules and these industries. >> Right. >> How are you guys using digital specifically to make yourself more efficient to move the market forward? >> That's a great question. So first, let me answer that by saying in the world of digital transformation. There isn't a single partner category. We're not just talking about service providers. We're not just talking about valued resellers or distributors. We're talking about independent software vendors and developers. We're talking about systems integrators. Sentiment manufacturers, device manufacturers. >> IoT opens a huge door. >> IoT. And let me tell you something. There may be partner categories we don't even know about today. But they'll be partner categories tomorrow. So the program we've built encompasses all of that. It encompasses all of these partner categories. Every region, every vertical, everywhere around the world. In terms of the digital piece of it specifically. The transformation. There's some interesting things going on with companies like GE Digital. You know, they've got jet engines now that they can actually transmit information on the wear and tear of every single blade within that jet engine. We can connect. We can connect that and collect and connect that data. We can analyze it. We can run inserts on it. And we can feedback powerful information that makes then drive outcomes to the customer, right. And all of that is linked through the IRT technology. Our edge technology and our hybrid IT approach. >> So you guys have the ABB cloud like in the sense of. Standing up programs with automation so we see Tesla self driving cars. Are you going to have a self driving channel? I mean. (laughing) At the end of the day you need to have these agile capabilities. This is kind of what you have to kind of get on right? >> You know, I think everyone has to do that. And I think there's no company right now in my mind that's more positioned to do that better than we are. And let me tell you why. We have billions of dollars of cash in the bank. We have no debt. Meg, over the last few years, has trimmed us down to be nimble to take advantage of this. The last thing you want to be in a market that's moving at this speed is be slow. And what we're seeing with some of our competitors is that they're getting very, very big. Very, very fat. And a lot in their burden with debt. That is not where you want to be in a market that's moving at the pace that this is moving in. You want to have the ability and the cash to invest. And as you say, do things real time. Do things that are just at speed of light. >> Well, if you guys can. I mean, talk about Dell and MC obviously. They think bigger is better. But I think your point is if you can be nimble. And by the way, decentralize the way the organizational structure is. You can ride many waves. >> You can ride many waves. And we don't have the 50 billion dollars of debt that Dell and MC have. >> Right. >> Right. >> Denzil, thanks so much for coming on the CUBE. I really appreciate it. And you know the strategic nature of the channel. Again 70% of the business probably will grow. And again, that's always been the good mix. And a lot of leverage there. Cost of sales is lower. Everyone is making money. That's the key thing too, right? >> That is the key thing. That's the key thing. >> And the channel part is profitability. >> Yeah. I agree. It's 70% of our business that will continue to grow. What will change though, is the mix. Right, we'll move. We'll move from the 80% box sellers. And we'll move more and more. So that will be probably 60% of our business over the next two to three years. And we're going to see 40% of the channel businesses it's going to be the value at. >> We'll be watching you guys. And of course as Meg Whitman says the right mix. Is her message here. >> Yes. >> HPE Discover. We're going to check in and see how that evolves. Thanks for coming and sharing your insights here at the CUBE. >> Awesome. >> Really appreciate it. Live coverage here from HPE Discover. I'm John Furrier with David Vellante. You're watching the CUBE. Stay with us for day three as it continues. Our three days of wall to wall coverage. Thanks for watching. We'll be right back. (tech music)