>> (narrator) Live from Las Vegas, it's the Cube, covering VMWorld 2018. Brought to you by VMware and its ecosystem partners. >> Welcome back to Las Vegas everybody. You're watching the Cube, the leader in live-tech coverage. My name is Dave Vellante and I'm here with my co-host, David Floyer. Good to see you again David. VMWorld day three, wall to wall coverage. We got sets going on. 94 guests. Patrick Osborne is here, he's the Vice President of Big Data and Secondary Storage at Hewlett Packard Enterprise. Patrick, it's great to see you again. >> Always a pleasure to be on the Cube. >> Big quarter, Antonio Neri early into his tenure. >> Yes. The earnings, raise guidance, great to see that. Got to feel good. Give us the update, VMworld 2018, what's happening with you guys? >> So Q3 was bang up quarter, for all segments of the business. It was great, you know. Obviously it's the kind of earnings you want to have from a CEO in a second quarter. Steering the ship here. I think everyone's jazzed up. He's brought a lot of new life to the company, in terms of technology leadership. He's someone who's certainly grown up, from the grounds up, starting off his career at HPE. So for us who have started off as a Product Manager, an individual contributor, making your way up to CEO is definitely possible. So that's been great and I think it's favorable micro economics and we're taking advantage of that. VMworld's been awesome. I think this whole story around Multicloud and obviously we talk about hybrid IT at HPE, so it fits very well. VMware Technology, partner of the year, again. Four years running, so it's been a really good show for us. >> As last year, data protection is the single, hottest topic. Data protection, obviously Cloud, The Edge, but The Edge is kind of new and it's hot, it's sexy. But in terms of actual business that's getting done, companies that are getting funded, companies getting huge raises, throwing big parties. We saw you back to back nights at Omnia, it's a lot happening in data protection. HPE has got a whole new strategy around data protection. Maybe talk about that a little bit and how it's going. >> So it's going really well, like you said, that part of the market, it's pretty hot right now. I think there's a couple of things playing into that, certainly this new style of IT, like applied to secondary storage. We saw that with primary storage the last few years. Multicloud, the move to all flash, low-latency workloads. And then, certainly a lot of the things, in that area, are disrupting secondary storage. People want to do it different ways, they want to be able to simplify this area. It's a growing area for data, in general. They want to make that data work for them. Test, Dev, workload placement, intelligent placement of data, for secondary and even tertiary storage in the cloud. So a lot of good things happening, from an HPE perspective. >> So not just back up? >> No, not just back up. >> I want more out of my insurance policy. >> Exactly. Something in the past that was moving from purely a TCO type of conversation. My examples are always like, who likes to pay their life insurance premium, right? Because at the end of the day, I'm not going to derive any utility from that payment. So now, it's moving into more ROI. So we have things like, the Hybrid Flash Array, from Nimble, for example. It allows you to put your workloads to work. We have a great cloud service, called HPE Cloud Volumes, that we use for our customers to be able to do intelligent DR, as a service, and be able to apply Cloud compute to your data. So there's a lot of things going on, in the space, that's just outside of your traditional move data from point A to point B. Now you want to make it work for you. >> And what about the big data portfolio? You hear a lot about data. You don't hear a ton about the Big Data, Hadoop piece of the world. I know Hadoop, nobody seems to be talking about that anymore. But everybody's talking about AI, Machine-Learning, Deep-Learning. Certainly The Edge is all about data. What's the Big Data story? >> So at HPE, we're definitely focused on the whole Edge to Core analytic story. So we have a great story and you can see in the numbers from Q3, The Edge business, The Edge line servers, Aruba, driving a lot of growth in the company, where a lot of that data is being created. And then back into the Core, so for Big Data, we see a number of customers, who are using these tools to affect digital transformation. They're doing it, we're doing it to ourselves. So they're moving from batch oriented, to now fast data, so streaming analytics. And then, incorporating concepts of AI and ML to provide better service or better experience for their customers. And we're doing that with, for example, InfoSight. So we have a great product, Nimble, 3PAR. And then we provide a service, on top of that, which is a SAS based service. It has predictive analytics and Machine Learning. And we're able to do that, by using Big Data analytics. >> You're offering that as a service, as a SAS service to your customers? >> Absolutely. And the way we're able to provide those predictive analytics and be able to provide those recommendations and that Machine-Learning across a entire portfolio and be able to scale that service, because it's a service, we got tens of thousands of users using the service on a daily basis, is moving from an ERP system, data warehouse, to batch analytics, to now we're doing Elasticsearch and Kafka and all these really cool techniques, so it's really helped us unlock a lot of value for our customers. >> So, the Nimble acquisision is interesting, it's bringing that sort of Machine-Learning and AI to infrastructure. You got a lot of automation in the portfolio and you can't really talk about Cloud without talking about automations. So talk a little about automation. >> In particular, even at the show here this week, we are a premier technology partner with VMware and I think more that you see in the VMware Ecosystem is all around Cloud and automation. That's really where they're going. And we've been day-zero partners on a lot of different fronts. So VMware Cloud Foundation integration, we do things on the storage level with Vvols and SRM and all these things that allow customers to essentially program that infrastucture and get out of the mundane tasks of having to do this manually. So for us, automation is key part of our story here. Especially with VMware. >> So going a little bit further with that, what sort of examples, what benefit is this to your customers? How are they justifying putting all this in? >> It's a hybrid world, so our customers are going to expect, from us, as a portfolio vendor, the ability to provide an automated solution, on premises, as automated as what you'd get in the cloud. So for us, the ability to have a sourcing experience, that we call GreenLake, so you can buy everything from us, from a solution perspective, in a pay-as-you-go elastic model where you can flex-up, flex-down. And then being able to, essentially provide a different view, depending on what persona you're coming from. Obviously we've been focused on the infrastructure persona, more often, we're getting into the DevOps persona, the Cloud engineer persona, providing all of our infrastructure, whether it's computer networking or storage, that plugs into all these frameworks. Whether it's Ansible, Chef and all these things that we do around our automation ecosystem, it's pretty ubiquitous. >> You're touching on all the Cloud basis and you're seeing a lot of discussion around that. What are you hearing from customers? Sometimes we have to squint through this, a lot of the guys here, we always like to say, move at the speed of the CIO, which sometimes is slow. At the same time, they're all afraid they're going to get disrupted. HPE, over the last two or three years, has really brought in and partnered with some of the guys your talking about. Whether it's containers and companies that do those types of offerings. How fast do the customers actually adopting, where they adopting them, how are they handling, you talked about a hybrid world; How are they bridging the old and the new? >> That's a great question. For a lot of our customers, it's always a brown field conversation. You do have these mission critical workloads that have to run, so there's no Edge to Core without your core ERP system, right? Your Core Oracle System or for smaller customers that are running their businesses on SQL and other things. But what we're seeing is that, by shoring up that Core and we provide a set of services and products that we feel are the best in the industry for that. And then allow them to provide adjacent services on top of that, it's exactly like the same example we had with InfoSight, where those systems use to call home, right now we're taking that data, we're providing a whole ancillary set of services and functions around it and our customers are doing that. Enormous customers, like British Telecom, folks like Wayfair, for example, they're doing this on premises and their disrupting their competitors, in the mean time. >> What do you make of some of the announcements we've heard this week? Obviously VMware making a big deal with what's going on with AWS. We're seeing AWS capitulate, David Floyer you made the call. Got to have an on-prem strategy. Many said no, that'll never happen. They just want to sweep the floor. So that's a tip to the hybrid cap. What are your thoughts on what's going on there? How does HPE sort of participate in those trends? >> I'd say it's, instead of battle and capitulate, we've been very laser-focused on the customers and helping them, along their way, on the journey. So you see a lot of acquisitions we've done around services, advisory service. CTP is a perfect example. So CTP has a whole cadre of experts who understand AGER, who understand ECS and all the services and functions that go along with them And we're able to help people, right size, right place, whatever you want to call it, within their infrastructure. Because we know, we've been in business for 75+ years and have a very loyal customer base, and we're going to help them along their maturity curve and certainly everyone's not on the same path, in the same race. It's been pretty successful so far. >> You guys tend to connect the dots between your HPE Discover in U.S., in Las Vegas and HPE Discover in December. So June to December, you're on these six month cycles, U.S. focus and Europe focus, Decembers in Madrid, again. Second year of Madrid. U.S. is always Vegas, like most of these conferences, what's the cadence that your on? What was the vibe like at Discover? What should we expect leading up to Q4, calendar Q4 in Madrid? >> I'd say that Discover was a big success in Vegas, always fun to spend time here. In Madrid, you'll see a focus around the value part of our business. So we've been growing in automation, we talked about hybrid IT, certainly the Core around storage. We're really focusing and very heavily invested in, not just storage, but intelligent data management. So we really feel that our offerings, especially doubling down and offering more services around InfoSight and some of those predictive and Cloud-ready user stories for our customers is something that definitely differentiates ourselves in the market. So we'll be very focused on the data plan, the data layer and helping customers transform in that area. >> So let's talk some tenor sax. >> (David laughs) >> This is not New Orleans. When we were down in New Orleans, we were at VeeamON, I think you had your sax with you, you jumped in. >> That's right, I played with the Soul Rebels. >> Playing with the Soul Rebels, you were awesome. Leonard, a big jazz man. Love it. I'm a huge TOP fan. What's new in that world? Are you still active? Are you still playing? >> Yeah, the band's still playing. Shout out to my buddies in Jolpe, sitting in with some friends at a Dead cover band coming up, in a couple weeks. So, should be fun. We're going to reenact The Grateful Dead and Branford Marsalis. >> That's wonderful. >> It should be fun. >> We've been getting a big dose of hip-hop this week. >> Yeah. But the new thing is that, in hip-hop, it's getting back to it's original roots, so a lot of folks in the jazz world, collaborating with the folks in the hip-hop world, so not very commercial, definitely underground, but pretty cool. >> I love it. That's right Leonard, you pointing out Miles Davis was one of the first to make that transformation. >> Yeah >> Good call. >> I'm going to get the numbers wrong, but it's about five percent technique and 95 percent attitude. (multiple laughs) >> Jazz, like hip-hop, there's a lot guys just doing their own thing. And somehow it all comes together. >> Absolutely. >> Okay Patrick, great to see you. >> Great to see you guys. Thank you Dave. Yeah, good to see you guys. >> Always a pleasure, go Sox. >> We got some time for talk stocks? >> Alright. >> What do you think? It's getting a little nerve wrecking. >> #Bucky Dent is trending in my Twitter. That's my problem, so hopefully we can..., I definitely don't want to be limping into the playoffs, and still not a fan of this one team wild card playoff, but I think we'll be alright. >> If we go deep... It's a great time to be a Boston fan. >> Celtics. >> Football starting, Celtics are coming in November, so awesome. Great to see you man. >> Thanks for having me. >> Keep it right there everybody, we'll be right back with our next guest. You're watching the Cube, live. Day three at VMWorld 2018, we'll be right back. (techno music)