>> Commentator: Live from New Orleans. It's theCUBE. Covering VeeamON 2017. Brought to you by Veeam >> We're back, this is theCUBE. The leader in live tech coverage. We're here at VeeamON 2017 day two. Bill Philbin is here, Senior Vice President at Hewlett Packard Enterprise. And runs the storage business for HPE. Great to see you again my friend. >> Hey Dave, it's always good to see you. >> Really? >> Always look so fantastic. >> Thank you, where's the tie? >> There's no tie. >> I will say, you guys, those of you who didn't see it, Bill nailed the Keynote this morning. It was great, it was funny, self deprecating, and genuine. And essentially you resonated with me, 'cause I got four kids and you were talking about how you call your kids, you either get voicemail, or their voicemails full. >> Bill: That's right. >> You text them, at least your kids text you back. I got to Snapchat my kids to get a hold of them. So you got to get into Snapchat >> They have told me that texting and Facebook is so, you know, 20th century Dad. >> You email 'em, right? >> Yeah. >> You get some important email, you send it to 'em. Like, email? What are you kiddin' me? >> No you know it's not in >> Our lives are challenged, but nonetheless, you got some of your challenges of your own. You're running a big business now at HPE. You guys are making some serious moves in the marketplace. Give us the update on the HPE storage business. >> Yeah, so thanks Dave. >> Every squirrel finds a nut in the forest eventually, so I just had a pretty good day today. But, that was because we have a great story, frankly, to tell. And I think you know, as I was saying before, the storage business is changing. Rather dramatically. Now is it, is it self inflicted? Or is it you know, just a a course correction. I actually believe it's self inflicted in a sense that we've taken many of the capabilities that were previously on high end systems. And we brought 'em to the mid range. We've thinned it, we've de-uped it, we've compressed it, We've got it on SSDs. And so the whole business model, now is different than it was five years ago. Before you sold somebody an appliance, you chocked it full of spinning media. They ran out of IOPS, you sold another appliance, you chocked it full. It was a pretty good business model. That's how I kept Mrs. Philbin in the lifestyle she's grown accustomed, right? Well, now, you don't chock it full of spinning media, you chock it full of SSDs. IOPS are always on guarantee. And then you take all that compaction technology, and that has actually forced a fundamental change, I think, in the storage landscape. That we, including Hewlett Packard have inflicted upon ourselves. I think we take a look at that, and need to take a look at the storage landscape, the number of vendors that are out there. You know, I think that is changing as well, which is, you know, part of the reason why we decided to get into acquiring companies like SimpliVity and Nimble. >> Dave: And you've got a knife fight going on in All-Flash. I got to say, you know, what HPE did with 3PAR surprised me and probably a lot of people. >> Bill: Mhm. >> Most people didn't think you could quote, unquote "bolt on" flash into that architecture. Obviously it wasn't a bolt on, you guys have been very successful. When you talk to your competitors, certainly when you talk to customers they love it. When you talk to competitors they say "yeah, we can compete with company A, B, and C. It's 3PAR that we have trouble with. Because it's simple and it works. >> And some times enduring technologies actually extend beyond, you know, single generations, right? And so, we certainly have heard the story about the new versus the old, and being old maybe this is my perspective. But, you know, enduring technologies actually can transition across architectural and technology boundaries. And that's exactly what we've done, exactly what we've done with 3PAR. >> Now, having said that, you guys have been, I mean you saw 3PAR initially with you know, spinning, and hybrid. Took off, you know, justified the acquisition, made the transition to All-Flash >> Bill: Yeah. >> I've called it many times, 3PAR's the gift that keeps on giving. So how many times can you go to that well, right? So you guys have made some moves here. Not the least of which was Nimble, want to talk about that. And SimpliVity, so. Even though SimpliVity's not under your organization, you have an affinity there. Talk about those two moves and where they fit in the portfolio. >> So let's just start with the 3PAR, just the 3PAR comment just for a quick second. The pure plays versus sort of the, what they call the stayed play. So, it's hard to imagine that 3PAR as a stayed play technology, right? I don't agree with that statement. But that, the reason I don't agree with it is, we're actually going faster than the pure plays in the All-Flash market. We have more revenue than they do, so. I think it's comfortable for people to sort of set one technology off over another but the fact of the matter is, that we're growing faster. The other thing about the market is it generally gravitates toward technologies that are unique in purpose regardless of what they cost. Because the customer demands it. And All-Flash started with guys like Fusion-io and Violin Memory, and all of those guys, right? Eventually what happens though, is customers tire of those additional assets in their data center, right? One more thing they don't want in their data centers, is one more thing in their data center. And that's when the big guys eventually sort of overtake that position. So, I think what you're going to, you're starting to see in the storage landscape is compression at a company level, right? You're seeing the Neutonics and Pures out there. You're seeing then the next tier of companies trying to sort of, you know, make the big break. And the last time a company made a big break in the storage business, that's still independent today. It's a billion dollars of revenue or more, was? >> Dave: NetApp. >> NetApp. Because storage looks like it's easy goin' in but it's not easy when you think about bare metal and databases and transactional systems, and highly available. It's not that easy, and so, that's why a company like a Nimble, who has great technology, Infosite, the CASL file system, great people. To order scale that business, profitably, and have to go to market reach, it needs to align themselves with a company like Hewlett Packard. So, we're really, really excited about Nimble joining the family for sure. That now enables us to sort of take the flash portfolio further across the across the landscape. On SimpliVity, I think the way that you should think about our strategy at Hewlett Packard is it's all about choice. So, you're a customer who wants to sort of, you know, put assets in your data center, and have assets in Microsoft as your cloud we should enable that. If you think Software Defined's the right way to go, we should enable that. You have an appliance customer, we should enable that. If you want to co-locate applications in a simple easy to use interface with storage, we have that, that's SimpliVity. But that choice shouldn't come with operational complexity. So, one of the things that we have to do, and I was talking about this at the Keynote, is we have to somewhat hide ourselves behind the application and make it easier for customers to consume. Because that is what the web offers them. We ought to be able to federate the data, so that you can actually move your data around when your requirements change, or you've got to burst. And the administration ought to be really, really simple. So, our strategy around technologies like SimpliVity, or Nimble, or 3PAR, or you know, MSA, XP, is all around giving customers choice without the operational complexity of having lots of things to manage. >> Bill, I guess I'm trying to, for our audience, try to maybe compare and contrast a little bit >> Yeah. >> Against you know, what was formerly EMC, now Dell EMC, >> Uh-huh. >> Which the knock on them for many years has been, they've got so many products, they overlap. We've covered for many years how, you know, if I have 3PAR and some of the other HP, HPE storage products, I can move between them, is that the difference issues thing So even though if you have Nimble, plus SimpliVity, plus you know, 3PAR. >> So, three is less than seven. Let's just start with that answer. And maybe it's not seven anymore, you know, I've lost track. Second, I think if you're really talking about provisioning storage and networking compute from an application layer, really what you've doing is you want to have a conversation about the service level underneath that the storage provides. Maybe for certain applications you're okay with thinly provisioned or not thinly provisioned et cetera. So, one answer is, a lot of those capabilities are actually hidden by the application layer. However, we know that the thing that doesn't move all that well is data. And data has gravity. So, being able to move data in addition to moving your compute, is one of the reasons that they differentiation for us over the other guys. >> Dave: But, you know, let me just stay on that for a second Stu. We're all storage guys or quasi-storage guys. >> Bill: He's only a quasi-storage guy? >> He's really a networking guy. >> I worked at a storage company for ten years but, yeah. >> You're a newbie then. >> But if you look at history, it is shown that you actually have to have multiple architectures to increase the size of your TM, and penetrate the marketplace. I mean, NetApp is the exception that proves the rule. I mean, they could only go so far with WAFL. I mean you were there, and you know, And so even now NetApp makes a move for solid fire. Obviously EMC has been very successful with, I think it's 17, so not 7. But it actually works, and so, that dogma of oh we have to have one architecture is never proven to really be a winning strategy. >> And frankly, it is really hard to actually stress an architecture from top to bottom, right? So I don't disagree with the comment you made, but that is effectively, however the same problem with the storage startups today is if they do a single thing, only support virtualized environments, whatever it is, right. Only support VDI. The breath is what customers are looking for. And if you don't have the breath, or you're forced to go get the breath, by adding bolt-ons to try and get the breath. It's just going to make it very, very difficult for them to survive in the new world order. Both acquisitions SimpliVity and Nimble were great for the company. >> Bill, can you tie together for us HPE and Veeam, how those fit together. One of the big themes we've been covering is the extension of Veeam started very, very much virtualized now they're physical they're talking about all the cloud solutions. Expect there's a lot of fit between your strategies. >> There is, for years we've have a very, very strong technical partnership between the Veeam engineering team and the StoreOnce engineering team. I think, you know, that is like the basis of trust, I think is the best way to think about it. We've both sort of got competing road maps on occasion, but at the end of the day it's all about, sort of, what's best for the customer. Number one is technical people, second is we have the same view of the market. And I talked about this, this morning, which is, this highly available, always on sort of environment is the same story that we tell. So the messages are aligned. The third is that it's complimentary, we have our own sort of data protection technology with data protector. We have our own sort of snapshot management capability with RMC. The question is, how do we sort of you know, protect the entire environment. And Veeam is a critical asset in that. It's a great business partnership, great technology partnership. The fact that our folks kind of resell Veeam, has just launched the business forward . >> Well, the move to sell the software business to Micro Focus has just opened up new partnership opportunities for you guys. >> Bill: In regards to that we still have a very, very strong partnership with the software guys. You know there's, the largest connect that we have on a backup product today, is get a protector. So I don't expect that to change. But there are people who prefer, you know, to use Veeam and we have to support that. >> Dave: Yeah, but still I mean, if you got the your colleagues in data protector and you're out aggressively partnering with Veeam and it's part of HPE. Maybe you get an email or, you get a "hey, come on Bill, you know, give me a break here." And now I feel like you know, the gloves are off you can do independent of all that internal stuff, plumbing. It's what's right for the customer. Maybe I'm overstating that. >> Perhaps a bit, because we'll still have equity ownership in the new company. Again with all the sort of connect I have, I think that regardless of where the paychecks come from if you will, we have to have a really strong partnership with them. And it's no different than, you know, we also have a partnership with Symantec, I mean we have other partnerships that customers just have made a preference around. That we're not going to convince them, you know, to do something different. Therefore, we've got to have a strong partnership. >> Dave: Alright, so we're going to be at Discover, theCUBE will be there for, been there many years now. I think this is our seventh Discover. >> You've been there as many years as I have, >> So what are we looking forward to there. >> So I think there's a bunch of announcements, we've highlighted one of them today around the secondary flash array for Nimble. There's some new 3PAR announcements that are certainly coming. The Synergy guys are going to certainly have a thing or two to say, I'm thinking. Based on the strength of that platform, that platform's really starting to take off. And so I think you're going to see that, I think this will probably be really the first Discover where, you know, you'll start to see, and maybe Madrid Discover will be different. But you'll start to see the new Hewlett Packard Enterprise. We keep focusing on things that we've spin-merged out, but the thing I think we need to focus on is the fact that we're, this is like a Phoenix of a new company, right? Solely focused on enterprise infrastructure and the customer needs. We've rebranded the TS business and PointNext, which is all around transformation and technology services, so. It's almost like we're starting the clock over again. For the HP employees, we're not changing your service levels. But, for almost everything else, we're rebuilding a brand new company. And that is what Meg and the board are doing, it's really exciting. >> Well, it's true the last couple of Discovers there was a distraction with the split, there was a distraction with two spin-merges. But you've now seen the M&A activity focus on areas like storage, areas like converge, type or converge. >> I always tell this story 'cause you guys like my analogies which is, you know, when you've got lots of kids in your family, my family, my oldest I've got lots of pictures of. The middle kid, you know, some pictures of. The third one virtually no pictures of, right? 'Cause you go from man to man defense, to zone defense. Same is true with a CEO. When you've got seven or eight different things to manage, you're focused, it needs to be spread over seven different or eight things. Now, Meg is actually, got fewer children to manage if you roll the analogy out a little bit. We got a lot of her attention, and a lot of focus. And that I think is really, really important. >> Dave: And now all the pictures are digital, they're in the cloud, they're protected. >> Bill: Yeah. >> Bill, great to see you. >> Good to see you guys. >> Thanks very much for coming on theCUBE, we'll see you in Vegas. >> Bill: You bet. >> Alright, keep it right there everybody, we'll be back with our next guest right after this short break.