>> Narrator: Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE, covering HPE discover, 2017, brought to you by Hewlett Packard Enterprise. >> Everyone, we are live here in Las Vegas with SiliconANGLE Media's, theCUBE, our flagship program where we go out to the events, and strike the cylinders, talk to the thought leaders the experts, folks making it happen. I'm John Furrier with my cohost Dave Vellante. Our next guest is Pete Murray, worldwide Vice President of OEM sales and IoT go to market for HP enterprise. Pete welcome to theCUBE. >> Thank you. >> So OEM people basically, Original Equipment Manufacturing they basically take your stuff and put it in their solutions. Why are they interested in doing that? Obviously you have a good product and IoT's hot. This is a new journey and a lot of people are figuring it out. What's the premise behind the growth and the business opportunity for you guys? >> We see IoT as a great opportunity. Whichever analyst you talk to, they're all consistent on one thing and that is, there are going to be billions of devices connected. If you talk to some of the estimates they're anything between 20 and 30 billion by 2020. All that does is create great opportunities and really exciting things can happen when you connect the unconnected, which is today. We're working with OEMs and we've got a successful program for many many years and a lot of our OEMs are starting to look at the marketplace and see great potential to enhance what they offer to their customers. And ultimately deliver additional business value. >> We would agree with you, we think it's hot, in fact Dave and I are coming in Meg Whitman's key note. We think the numbers she was stating in terms of date in IoT understated. We think our numbers show a little higher but that speaks to the pressure for folks to add value, solutions, to providers to go to market with an IoT solution. What is the profile of your customer that's OEMing the HPE products? Is it apps, is it striving? Is it the driver on the app size, is it verticals? Can you share some insight into the landscape? >> Yeah, sure, by the way, our data figure we use is about 44 zeta bytes by 2020. But who knows it could be much bigger. We're focused mainly by industry, and we're working with a lot of our OEMs in industries such as, the healthcare business, telecommunications, transportation. We basically spend time allowing them to focus on what they're really good at. Bringing their intellectual property to solve business problems in their industry. What we bring is what we're really good at which is providing an innovative, quality based, compute based solution with a world class supply chain and global support. We think that's a really really good combination. And it naturally extends in the IoT world, because a lot of our OEMs are operational technology partners who have got something to say in that marketplace. And usually they've got the expertise in an industry segment to enable IoT, enable benefits to be seen and we want to really help them to do just that. >> Can you give an example and specifically the issue of why HPE versus the potentially other choices out there, or growing their own? What are the reasons why they come to you guys? What's the benefits? >> Well first of all, we think we've got a great OEM program, so it's a great base to start. Offering quality innovation and global presence. But on top of that when you look at the IoT world, we think we've got some really compelling assets. We've got assets around conductivity, security, location based capability, we've got the ability to computer the edge where we think there's a lot of significant reasons and benefits to do so. And lastly, we've got our own IoT platform called the universal IoT platform, and that can also deliver great benefits. If you put that together with a partnering co-system to be able to solve problems, we think it's pretty compelling. >> So Pete, take us through the cycle OEM sales cycles tend to be very long, they beat you up and stress test you a million different ways. What's it like, in your IoT world you mentioned healthcare, tel co and some others, what's that qualification cycle look like? >> Well we usually start with a business problem, whatever the OEM is trying to solve. And then we work out how we can best work with them to help them deliver it. Ultimately, the most important focus is their customer to deliver a good solution. So we go through the technology cycles, make sure that we can deliver to the service levels that they're interested in, and then we start thinking about the technology if there's additional innovation that's required. So our technology teams will be working closely together, and then we start looking at where they plan to deploy from a geography prospective, which region, which customers, which targets. And then we figure out how we can support them in that how we can obviously supply and ultimately, make sure that we can provide a great service to their clients. So the cycle can take a while but planning is critical, because when you actually start ramping volume, you want to make sure you've got the right plan in place. >> Well a company like yours has some advantages there like you said, your global distribution. How much of the work that you're doing and expect to be doing is custom activity? >> I'm sorry? >> Custom, how much is custom versus selling the same solution multiple times? And how does that business scale? >> What we tend to find is, we've actually got some pretty strong offerings that our customers use off the shelf and so, in a lot of cases customization is relatively small. But as we're moving into the IoT world a lot of the fundamental business problems we're trying to tackle are the same but each implementation is just slightly different. So we're seeing a little bit more customization as a result of that, but a lot of the time our customers are really interested in our core offerings, because we think that they're both industry leading and also solid. >> So it's maybe some special enabler? As opposed to some heavy engineering effort right? >> Yeah, I mean, typically in the OEM program we'll work with customers if they want to rebadge or rebrand or they're looking for the equipment to be in a certain different format. Or they want the packaging or the distribution documentation to be different, it's those sort of customizations as well as the base technology, if there is a requirement to do that. >> And how do you go to market? Do you have sort of an OEM sales force? And is it direct to those OEMs? There's not sort of a two-tier? I was wondering if you could describe that a little bit. >> So we've got an OEM sales force worldwide. We break it down by the three regions, we work with our NU's as sales teams. We also work with partners that are dedicated to sell OEM based solutions as well. So it's both a direct and indirect route to market our OEM sales teams will be working with our NUs sales teams also. Because there's a certain amount of knowledge and expertise that's needed. And our NUs sales teams won't necessarily have that. That's what we bring to the table. And we've got many many years of experience of doing just that, so it's a combination but we do have dedicated resources for a sales side. The second thing we have is, we've got program managers and technologists that are dedicated to OEM, so when we start working with an OEM customer we make sure that we can bring in people who understand, the product life cycles, they also understand the technology so that we can go through that innovation curve with them as well. >> So talk about the life cycles a little bit I said the sales cycles tend to be very long which is generally true of OEM business but the life cycle times are often times very compressed, so you're under a lot of pressure to keep innovating. So, talk about that. Is that the case in sort of the used cases that you're entering and how are you dealing with that? >> With IoT it can be very varied to a product cycle that can be down to six to 12 months to some cycles that can be 10 years or more. So if you think about it, if a customer's designing a piece of sophisticated equipment and they want an embedded computer solution within it what they don't want to do is see lots and lots of change. So sometimes the design can be current for five, 10, even 15 years. We're asked to support for those types of life cycles. So actually it's quite a mix, and as long as the product is competitive in the marketplace, we're really really happy to work with our OEMs and support that. >> And you need a scalable architecture, you've got to support the head room. What's your observation on that? And how are your customers on the OEM side, approaching that because they have to also put a compelling product out there allows the head room. What's the current state of the art, if you will, in terms of the tech? >> Well, one of the things is once they build a solution they don't really want to change it too many times unless it's innovating and offering more to their clients base directly. And so what we try to do is, we work to change management cycle to allow that to be as easy as possible. But when we bring new generations of technology along, so here at discover we're talking about generation 10 as our new offering on our compute service side, which I'm sure you've heard about. We work with our OEM customers to actually plan when they will implement it in their life cycle. And obviously what they try to do is to marry it up to providing additional innovation and benefit to their clients. So it needs to be planned, but when it's planned correctly it really can make the difference. >> So take us through a conversation, I think this is interesting because you guys have a lot to bring to the table, portfolio wise, you've got Aruba. >> Male: Yep. >> You've got the hardware, you've got the converged software, infrastructure, all that great stuff. When you talk with the customers, what are they comparing you to? I mean, competition wise, there's a lot of noise out there, certainly in IoT. We heard from DeLloyd, talking about some of the things that their customers are facing on the joint solutions. There's a lot of decisions, there's a lot of obstacles there. How do you guys compare and what are those conversations like? >> The conversations we have, they start with, what's the business problem? What are we trying to solve? And the usual areas that people focus on are how do you drive efficiency as cost saving? Number one business challenge. The second is how do you innovate and drive additional differentiation against your competition? So we start there, and then we start looking at potential ways to solve those problems. So we start looking at used cases around things like preventive maintenance, condition monitoring, location based functionality, we're looking at things like smart city solutions. And then what we try to do is come down to the assets that we've got and the capabilities we've got as a company to solve those problems. We never start with the technology, we always start with the business problem that we're trying to solve. >> And how do you compare, at the end of the day, when the customer lays out the solution vis-a-vis the competition, where do you guys shine? >> We think we shine really well. We think we've got a compelling proposition, we've got some great IoT assets, we've got some innovation that we're bringing, particularly when you look at some of the security features of our connectivity, when you look at our ability to compute at the edge. We think that we've actually got a strong message to say, compared to some of our competitors on the block, so we think we've got a strong story. And we think we've got a reason to have customers come talk to us. >> We talked in Intel recently at Mobile World Congress and then at South by Southwest and they have the pillars of societal changes. Autonomous vehicles, smart cities, music and entertainment, smart homes. They're kind of corpulous for the five G and how all this network transformation is happening. Where do you guys, outside of media entertainment which you guys do do business in. But those are, other areas like smart cities, autonomous vehicles and intelligent home. Those are I0o havens, right? I mean, you guys see those as really big markets? >> Yeah we do, I guess the biggest market that we're looking at is really around manufacturing right now because we see opportunities to drive, as I mentioned earlier, on efficiencies and cost savings out by collecting up and using the data which their currently generating but their actually not looking at the business insights within it. So manufacturing is a key opportunity for us. We're working with some really interesting customers to drive some great business outcomes. We're also looking at smart city, this week we're announcing some work we've been doing with Tata Communications in India. Connecting over 400 million of their citizens, and delivering additional service value on top of the platforms that we build around security, around healthcare and other things. But we think one of the biggest markets right now is around manufacturing. And that's where we're trying to put a lot of energy. >> I wanted to as you, Pete, about the data because data's abundant but the insights around that data are very scarce. And so when you think about an OEM business how do you think about the data play? It sounds like, I inferred from what you said that you're helping people get value out of the data. Are you also utilizing that data in other ways in your business? Whether it's predictive maintenance, or some kind of aggregate or talk about that data. >> So, the answer is yes in all counts. The data is absolutely critical. When you're building a preventive maintenance solution in order to get to condition monitoring you've got to collect enough data, look at the trends, and then be able to take action based on it. We're working with companies that are really really experts at doing that. So we've got relationships with the likes of GE digital, with their predicts platform. So we're doing a lot of ghost market activities with those. We're working with other customers like Natural Instruments and PTC that have got that data insight and that history and that level of industry touch and expertise. But when you work with them in partnership you can actually drive some significant data insights for customers. So for us it's about getting the right partnerships in those areas to generate the business insights and ultimately address the business challenges associated with them. >> Pete, we really appreciate you coming on theCUBE and we're going to keep monitoring the progress. Certainly, customer adoption there's always a great metric. And IoT is hot, low hanging fruit, manufacturing, some of these industries are ripe 'cause they're all set up for it, but it certainly the network transformation that's happening and congratulations on great progress. Thanks for coming on theCUBE. More CUBE action, live, here at HPE Discover 2017 in Las Vegas. I'm John Furrier with Dave Vellante. Stay with us, for more day one coverage after this short break. (techno music)