>> Welcome everyone to "theCUBE's" coverage of "Compute engineered for your hybrid world," sponsored by HP and Intel. Today we're going to going to discuss how to transform your compute management experience with the new 4th Gen Intel Xeon scalable processors. Hello, I'm John Furrier, host of "theCUBE," and my guests today are Chinmay Ashok, director cloud engineering at Intel, and Koichiro Nakajima, principal product manager, compute at cloud services with HPE. Gentlemen, thanks for coming on this segment, "Transform your compute management experience." >> Thanks for having us. >> Great topic. A lot of people want to see that system management one pane of glass and want to manage everything. This is a really important topic and they started getting into distributed computing and cloud and hybrid. This is a major discussion point. What are some of the major trends you guys see in the system management space? >> Yeah, so system management is trying to help user manage their IT infrastructure effectively and efficiently. So, the system management is evolving along with the IT infrastructures which is trying to accommodate market trends. We have been observing the continuous trends like digital transformation, edge computing, and exponential data growth never stops. AI, machine learning, deep learning, cloud native applications, hybrid cloud, multi-cloud strategies. There's a lot of things going on. Also, COVID-19 pandemic has changed the way we live and work. These are all the things that, given a profound implication to the system design architectures that system management has to consider. Also, security has always been the very important topic, but it has become more important than ever before. Some of the research is saying that the cyber criminals becoming like a $10.5 trillion per year. We all do our efforts on the solution provider size and on the user side, but still cyber criminals are growing 15% year by year. So, with all this kind of thing in the mind, system management really have to evolve in a way to help user efficiently and effectively manage their more and more distributed IT infrastructure. >> Chinmay, what's your thoughts on the major trends in system management space? >> Thanks, John, Yeah, to add to what Koichiro said, I think especially with the view of the system or the service provider, as he was saying, is changing, is evolving over the last few years, especially with the advent of the cloud and the different types of cloud usage models like platform as a service, on-premises, of course, infrastructure is a service, but the traditional software as a service implies that the service provider needs a different view of the system and the context in which we need the CPU vendor, or the platform vendor needs to provide that, is changing. That includes both in-band telemetry being able to monitor what is going on on the system through traditional in-band methods, but also the advent of the out-of-band methods to do this without end user disruption is a key element to the enhancements that our customers are expecting from us as we deploy CPUs and platforms. >> That's great. You know what I love about this discussion is we had multiple generation enhancements, 4th Gen Xeon, 11th Gen ProLiant, iLOs going to come up with got another generation increase on that one. We'll get into that on the next segment, but while we're here, what is iLO? Can you guys define what that is and why it's important? >> Yeah, great question. Real quick, so HPE Integrated Lights-Out is the formal name of the product and we tend to call it as a iLO for short. iLO is HPE'S BMC. If you're familiar with this topic it's a Baseboard Management Controller. If not, this is a small computer on the server mother board and it runs independently from host CPU and the operating system. So, that's why it's named as Lights-Out. Now what can you do with the iLO? iLO really helps a user manage and use and monitor the server remotely, securely, throughout its life from the deployment to the retirement. So, you can really do things like, you know, turning a server power on, off, install operating system, access to IT, firmware update, and when you decide to retire server, you can completely wipe the data off that server so then it's ready to trash. iLO is really a best solution to manage a single server, but when you try to manage hundreds or thousand of servers in a larger scale environment, then managing server one by one by one through the iLO is not practical. So, HPE has two options. One of them is a HPE OneView. OneView is a best solution to manage a very complex, on-prem IT infrastructure that involves a thousand of servers as well as the other IT elements like fiber channel storage through the storage agent network and so on. Another option that we have is HPE for GreenLake Compute Ops Management. This is our latest, greatest product that we recently launched and this is a best solution to manage a distributed IT environment with multiple edge points or multiple clouds. And I recently involved in the customer conversation about the computer office management and with the hotel chain, global hotel chain with 9,000 locations worldwide and each of the location only have like a couple of servers to manage, but combined it's, you know, 27,000 servers and over the 9,000 locations, we didn't really have a great answer for that kind of environment before, but now HPE has GreenLake for computer office management for also deal with, you know, such kind of environment. >> Awesome. We're going to do a big dive on iLO in the next segment, but Chinmay, before we end this segment, what is PMT? >> Sure, so yeah, with the introduction of the 4th Gen Intel Xeon scalable processor, we of course introduce many new technologies like PCI Gen 5, DDR5, et cetera. And these are very key to general system provision, if you will. But with all of these new technologies come new sources of telemetry that the service provider now has to manage, right? So, the PMT is a technology called Platform Monitoring Technology. That is a capability that we introduced with the Intel 4th Gen Xeon scalable processor that allows the service provider to monitor all of these sources of telemetry within the system, within the system on chip, the CPU SOC, in all of these contexts that we talked about, like the hybrid cloud and cloud infrastructure as a service or platform as a service, but both in their in-band traditional telemetry collection models, but also out-of-band collection models such as the ones that Koichiro was talking about through the BMC et cetera. So, this is a key enhancement that we believe that takes the Intel product line closer to what the service providers require for managing their end user experience. >> Awesome, well thanks so much for spending the time in this segment. We're going to take a quick break, we're going to come back and we're going to discuss more what's new with Gen 11 and iLO 6. You're watching "theCUBE," the leader in high tech enterprise coverage. We'll be right back. (light music) Welcome back. We're continuing the coverage of "theCUBE's" coverage of compute engineered for your hybrid world. I'm John Furrier, I'm joined by Chinmay Ashok who's from Intel and Koichiro Nakajima with HPE. We're going to dive deeper into transforming your compute management experience with 4th Gen Intel Xeon scalable processors and HP ProLiant Gen11. Okay, let's get into it. We want to talk about Gen11. What's new with Gen11? What's new with iLO 6? So, NexGen increases in performance capabilities. What's new, what's new at Gen11 and iLO 6 let's go. >> Yeah, iLO 6 accommodates a lot of new features and the latest, greatest technology advancements like a new generation CPUs, DDR5 memories, PCI Gen 5, GPGPUs, SmartNICs. There's a lot of great feature functions. So, it's an iLO, make sure that supports all the use cases that associate with those latest, greatest advancements. For instance, like you know, some of the higher thermal design point CPU SKUs that requires a liquid cooling. We all support those kind of things. And also iLO6 accommodates latest, greatest industry standard system management, standard specifications, for instance, like an DMTF, TLDN, DMTF, RDE, SPDM. And what are these means for the iLO6 and Gen11? iLO6 really offers the greatest manageability and monitoring user experiences as well as the greatest automation through the refresh APIs. >> Chinmay, what's your thoughts on the Gen11 and iLO6? You're at Intel, you're enabling all this innovation. >> Yeah. >> What's the new features? >> Yeah, thanks John. Yeah, so yeah, to add to what Koichiro said, I think with the introduction of Gen11, 4th Gen Intel Xeon scalable processor, we have all of these rich new feature sets, right? With the DDR5, PCI Gen5, liquid cooling, et cetera. And then all of these new accelerators for various specific workloads that customers can use using this processor. So, as we were discussing previously, what this brings is all of these different sources of telemetry, right? So, our sources of data that the system provider or the service provider then needs to utilize to manage the compute experience for their end user. And so, what's new from that perspective is Intel realized that these new different sources of telemetry and the new mechanisms by which the service provider has to extract this telemetry required us to fundamentally think about how we provide the telemetry experience to the service provider. And that meant extending our existing best-in-class, in-band telemetry capabilities that we have today already built into in market Intel processors. But now, extending that with the introduction of the PMT, the Platform Monitoring Technology, that allows us to expand on that in-band telemetry, but also include all of these new sources of telemetry data through all of these new accelerators through the new features like PCI Gen5, DDR5, et cetera, but also bring in that out-of-band telemetry management experience. And so, I think that's a key innovation here, helping prepare for the world that the cloud is enabling. >> It's interesting, you know, Koichiro you had mentioned on the previous segment, COVID-19, we all know the impact of how that changed, how IT at the managed, you know, all of a sudden remote work, right? So, as you have cloud go to hybrid, now we got the edge coming, we're talking about a distributed computing environment, we got telemetry, you got management. This is a huge shift and it's happening super fast. What's the Gen11 iLO6 mean for architects as they start to look at going beyond hybrid and going to the edge, you're going to need all this telemetry. What's the impact? Can you guys just riff and share your thoughts on what this means for that kind of NexGen cloud that we see coming on on which is essentially distributed computing. >> Yeah, that's a great topic to discuss. So, there's a couple of the things. Really, to make sure those remote environment and also the management distributed IT environments, the system management has to reach across the remote location, across the internet connections, and the connectivities. So, the system management protocol, for instance, like traditionally IPMI or SNMP, or those things, got to be modernized into more restful API and those modern integration friendly to the modern tool chains. So, we're investing on those like refresh APIs and also again, the security becomes paramount importance because those are exposed to the bad people to snoop and trying to do some bad thing like men in a middle attacks, things like that. So we really, you know, focus on the security side on the two aspects on the iLO6 and Gen11. One other thing is we continue our industry unique silicon root of trust technology. So, that one is fortunate platform making sure the platform firmware, only the authentic and legitimate image of the firmware can run on HP server. And when you check in, validating the firmware images, the root of the trust reside in the silicon. So, no one can change it. Even the bad people trying to change the root of trust, it's bond in the chips so you cannot really change. And that's why, even bad people trying to compromise, you know, install compromise the firmware image on the HPE servers, you cannot do that. Another thing is we're making a lot of enhancements to make sure security on board our HP server into your network or onto a services like a GreenLake. Give you a couple of example, for instance, like a IDevID, Initial Device ID. That one is conforming to IEEE 802.1AR and it's immutable so no one can change it. And by using the IDevID, you can really identify you are not onboarding a rogue server or unknown server, but the server that you you want to onboard, right? It's absolutely important. Another thing is like platform certificate. Platform certificate really is the measurement of the configuration. So again, this is a great feature that makes sure you receive a server from the factory and no one during the transportation touch the server and alter the configuration. >> Chinmay, what's your reaction to this new distributed NextGen cloud? You got data, security, edge, move the compute to the data, don't move the data around. These are big conversations. >> Yeah, great question, John. I think this is an important thing to consider for the end user, the service provider in all of these contexts, right? I think Koichiro mentioned some of these key elements that go into as we develop and design these new products. But for example, from a security perspective, we introduce the trust domain extensions, TDX feature, for confidential computing in Intel 4th Generation Xeon scalable processors. And that enables the isolation of user workloads in these cloud environments, et cetera. But again, going back to the point Koichiro was making where if you go to the edge, you go to the cloud and then have the edge connect to the cloud you have independent networks for system management, independent networks for user data, et cetera. So, you need the ability to create that isolation. All of this telemetry data that needs to be isolated from the user, but used by the service provider to provide the best experience. All of these are built on the foundations of technologies such as TDX, PMT, iLO6, et cetera. >> Great stuff, gentlemen. Well, we have a lot more to discuss on our next segment. We're going to take a break here before wrapping up. We'll be right back with more. You're watching "theCUBE," the leader in high tech coverage. (light music) Okay, welcome back here, on "theCUBE's" coverage of "Compute engineered for your hybrid world." I'm John Furrier, host of the Cube. We're wrapping up our discussion here on transforming compute management experience with 4th Gen Intel Xeon scalable processors and obviously HPE ProLiant Gen11. Gentlemen, welcome back. Let's get into the takeaways for this discussion. Obviously, systems management has been around for a while, but transforming that experience on the management side is super important as the environment just radically changing for the better. What are some of the key takeaways for the audience watching here that they should put into their kind of tickler file and/or put on their to-do list to keep an eye on? >> Yeah, so Gen11 and iLO6 offers the latest, greatest technologies with new generation CPUs, DDR5, PCI Gen5, and so on and on. There's a lot of things in there and also iLO6 is the most mature version of iLO and it offers the best manageability and security. On top of iLO, HP offers the best of read management options like HP OneView and Compute Ops Management. It's really a lot of the things that help user achieve a lot of the things regardless of the use case like edge computing, or distributed IT, or hybrid strategy and so on and on. And you could also have a great system management that you can unleash all the full potential of latest, greatest technology. >> Chinmay, what's your thoughts on the key takeaways? Obviously as the world's changing, more gen chips are coming out, specialized workloads, performance. I mean, I've never met anyone that says they want to run on slower infrastructure. I mean, come on, performance matters. >> Yes, no, it definitely, I think one of the key things I would say is yes, with Gen11 Intel for gen scalable we're introducing all of these technologies, but I think one of the key things that has grown over the last few years is the view of the system provider, the abstraction that's needed, right? Like the end user today is migrating a lot of what they're traditionally used to from a physical compute perspective to the cloud. Everything goes to the cloud and when that happens there's a lot of just the experience that the end user sees, but everything underneath is abstracted away and then managed by the system provider, right? So we at Intel, and of course, our partners at HP, we have spent a lot of time figuring out what are the best sets of features that provide that best system management experience that allow for that abstraction to work seamlessly without the end user noticing? And I think from that perspective, the 4th Gen Intel Xeon scalable processors is so far the best Intel product that we have introduced that is prepared for that type of abstraction. >> So, I'm going to put my customer hat on for a second. I'll ask you both. What's in it for me? I'm the customer. What's in it for me? What's the benefit to me? What does this all mean to me? What's my win? >> Yeah, I can start there. I think the key thing here is that when we create capabilities that allow you to build the best cloud, at the end of the day that efficiency, that performance, all of that translates to a better experience for the consumer, right? So, as the service provider is able to have all of these myriad capabilities to use and choose from and then manage the system experience, what that implies is that the end user sees a seamless experience as they go from one application to another as they go about their daily lives. >> Koichiro, what's your thoughts on what's in it for me? You guys got a lot of engineering going on in Gen11, every gen increase always is a step function and increase of value. What's in it for me? What do I care? What's in it for me? I'm the customer. >> Alright. Yeah, so I fully agree with Chinmay's point. You know, he lays out the all the good points, right? Again, you know what the Gen11 and iLO6 offer all the latest, greatest features and all the technology and advancements are packed in the Gen11 platform and iLO6 unleash all full potentials for those benefits. And things are really dynamic in today's world and IT system also going to be agile and the system management get really far, to the point like we never imagine what the system management can do in the past. For instance, the managing on-prem devices across multiple locations from a single point, like a single pane of glass on the cloud management system, management on the cloud, that's what really the compute office management that HP offers. It's all new and it's really help customers unleash full potential of the gear and their investment and provide the best TCO and ROIs, right? I'm very excited that all the things that all the teams have worked for the multiple years have finally come to their life and to the public. And I can't really wait to see our customers start putting their hands on and enjoy the benefit of the latest, greatest offerings. >> Yeah, 4th Gen Xeon, Gen11 ProLiant, I mean, all the things coming together, accelerators, more cores. You got data, you got compute, and you got now this idea of security, I mean, you got hitting all the points, data and security big features here, right? Data being computed in a way with Gen4 and Gen11. This is like the big theme, data security, kind of the the big part of the core here in this announcement, in this relationship. >> Absolutely. I believe, I think the key things as these new generations of processors enable is new types of compute which imply is more types of data, more types of and hence, with more types of data, more types of compute. You have more types of system management more differentiation that the service provider has to then deal with, the disaggregation that they have to deal with. So yes, absolutely this is, I think exciting times for end users, but also for new frontiers for service providers to go tackle. And we believe that the features that we're introducing with this CPU and this platform will enable them to do so. >> Well Chinmay thank you so much for sharing your Intel perspective, Koichiro with HPE. Congratulations on all that hard work and engineering coming together. Bearing fruit, as you said, Koichiro, this is an exciting time. And again, keep moving the needle. This is an important inflection point in the industry and now more than ever this compute is needed and this kind of specialization's all awesome. So, congratulations and participating in the "Transforming your compute management experience" segment. >> Thank you very much. >> Okay. I'm John Furrier with "theCUBE." You're watching the "Compute Engineered for your Hybrid World Series" sponsored by HP and Intel. Thanks for watching. (light music)

>> 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)

>> Narrator: Live, from Madrid, Spain, it's theCUBE, covering HPEE 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, and we're here with my co-host Peter Burris, and this is day one of HPEE Discover Madrid. Susan Blocher is here, she's the vice-president of portfolio marketing at Hewlett Packard Enterprise, and Bruce Trevarthen joins her. He's the CEO and founder, I believe, of Layer X. Welcome back, both of you, to theCUBE. >> Thank you David. >> All right so Susan, big show for you guys, and we have these six months cadence of big messages >> Susan: Yes. >> And customer shows, so what are we going to hear this afternoon at the keynotes? >> Wow. I'll tell you we've got a lot of exciting news to talk about. First of all, the way customers are consuming IT is really changing, cloud is changing the game. We got some amazing announcements to talk about around how we're going to help customers in the hybrid IT space consume IT differently. We're going to talk about how we're helping them manage across multi-cloud environments. We're going to talk about bringing artificial intelligence and machine learning to the data center which is really transformational. So, lot's of exciting news here. >> Good, okay! So we'll be covering the keynotes here just actually in about a half hour or so, we kick off. Meg, Antonio >> Yes. you've got a new leader so we're going to hear from him, we've been hearing from him for some time now. >> Very exciting. >> Looking forward to hearing from him. Okay, Bruce. It's been awhile since we talked about layerX. Tell us what's transpired in the last couple years. Set up layerX, what you guys are all about and what's new. >> Sure, so it's a cloud service provider based out of New Zealand. Multiple platforms giving us that resilience. You know, that sort of general cloud people all know what cloud is these days. But really for us the journey it just continues. We keep, from a strategy point of view we keep looking at where is cloud adoption at, where is cloud going, are these hyperscale providers going to enter every country and every market? And really, sort of, make us, sort of in country boutique operators less relevant. So you're always asking that question and then you're sort of hit with this new wave of expectations down from the clients. Hybrid IT has been the big push in the last 12 months and what's really encouraging for us when we get hit with this new sort of level of interest and a slight tangent on this manage services delivery is that HPE already thinking the same way. They've already come up with a product line that's going to plug that gap. So we work very closely with HPE with their edge line and the OEM team globally, to deliver HPE hardware on customer site or on premise. And then we put our own software on that, we link it back into the core V-grid environment, and that really, for a customer they keep those workloads on site where they need to be. And then you've got that public cloud environment for the disaster recovery and the workloads that don't need to be on site. >> So let's unpack that a little bit. Tagline, Hewlett Packard Enterprises uses make hybrid IT simple, that's the objective. >> [Susan]- That's right. >> You know, IT is complicated, hybrid IT is complicated. What's the starting point to make it simple Bruce, from your perspective? Is it to make the infrastructure as invisible as possible, is it bringing the cloud upward model? Maybe talk about those steps. >> Sure. Well, I mean, one of the first things we try to do to make it simple is we don't mention cloud. We talk ultimately about what workload is the customer consuming and where do they belong? And so, we're invariably seeing more and more workloads that really shouldn't go centralized in a data center they should be on site. So, GPU accelerated desktops for oil and gas research, or some of our clients doing 3D engineering, you know, CAD design work. You can put that in a data center, and we have, but then you're at the mercy of the fiber connections. Speed of the fiber connection, the resilience of the fiber connection, and the cost absolutely. And so keeping some of those workloads on site just makes sense. But how can you then leverage the benefit of that centralized IT in the event of a disaster if all of your workloads are actually on site? And that's where it's got to be hybrid. You can have those workloads on site but all your files and all that capability is sort of mirrored in the cloud environment. So if you have a fiber cut, then you can use a cellular network to get there. Or if you have an on site disaster, then you can spend the equivalent resources in the data center, but on demand, rather than dedicated to you. >> We like to say that customers want or the way that we summarize it at Wikibon is, customers want the cloud experience where the data demands. >> Dave: 'cause we do talk about cloud >> 'cause we do talk about cloud periodically. Well, but you have to, because at the end of the day it's driving a new way of thinking. Not just about the technology, but how you solve business problems. And it comes back to how do you think about the business problem differently. I love New Zealand, I've been there a couple times. I've worked with a lot of customers and the minute that you said New Zealand I was like, right! How do, how does the cloud experience, how are you solving problems differently than you did a few years ago because of not only the HPEE partnership, but thinking differently about these problems? >> Thinking differently is definitely something you have to do to stay relevant, right, to keep up with the market. Almost ten years ago we thought what we felt was a little differently, when we adopted the HPEE 3PAR, and that really was a technology that gave us the ability to change our mind regarding storage. Spin forward now to 2017. In April this year we put in our first HPE Synergy platform. This month we're just putting in our second HPE Synergy platform. And Synergy gives us for compute what HPE 3PAR gave us for storage. The ability to change our mind, to be programmatic or autonomous with the deployment of resources for a customer need. And so for a public cloud environment, that's basically spinning up compute nodes as required for the demand within the clusters. But it also introduces by way of the technology capability, a new channel, or a new revenue opportunity. Because now we can actually programmatically spin up compute nodes of any flavor, for a customer in a private cloud environment. So this is physical tend to the customer opposed to virtual, you know, cloud. We can do that just as easily as we can a VN because of Synergy. >> And that's really exciting. I think what Bruce is really representing here is that he can focus on business outcomes for his customers. And you, Dave, you said it makes the infrastructure transparent. Transparent but underneath that is really differentiated capability and value like the ability to spin up and spin down composable infrastructure on demand. Like the ability to bring world class security to that infrastructure. So all of those things are underpinning the services that layerX is able to deliver. >> So I would think part of making Hybrid IT simple is not just throwing a bunch of products at your customers. >> Right. >> We heard on the last financial call that HPE is changing the way... >> Exactly. >> ...it reports. It's going to report hybrid IT, which is essentially your portfolio. >> Susan: Exactly. >> So it's server, storage, networking and relevant services around that >> That' right. >> Susan: And software. >> And software that powers all that, so talk about how you're going to market and how that aligns with how you guys want to buy. >> Yeah, well think about it from, let's talk about it from the layerX perspective. When you look at Synergy, that is not a piece of hardware, that is truly software defined intelligence built into innovative hardware. Based on our Gen 10 server platform, which in and of itself is the world's most secure industry standard server platform because we have built in silicon route of trust, and things like that, so what you get is all of that put together. All of that integrated. That software defined intelligence, the technology innovation, the infrastructure innovation. And wrappered with the services that both support the layerX company and their customers. >> Maybe talk about your customers a bit more. What are they really pushing you hard to do? What are the big challenges they face, and how are you addressing those? >> One of the most common conversations with cloud is obviously cost. Everyone's trying to commoditize this resource to the Nth degree every day, but the vGrid which is the our brand for our cloud platform, The vGrid position really is around performance and reliability and we back that up through HPE hardware platforms and a software stack that enables that. But our customers are really driving us to make sure that we stay relevant. Not only with that performance and reliability but still on cost. Even though we are giving them enterprise and beyond capabilities as an SMB, cost is still a major defective for an SMB. So for us to keep our overheads low we need automation. You know we're not going to go put in, no disrespect to the product line, but we're not going to go and put in maybe an Apollo or a CloudLine solution, we're going to stick with Synergy and previously the ProLion because of the added value wrapped around that that actually gives us the peace of mind and the operational efficiency through our engineering team to get the work done far more effectively. Now with Synergy takes it up to a whole new level because this is all composable now. My CTO mentioned to me the other day they just put in a new 8450 3PAR. And he said, "All I had to do "was create the CPG's in the 3PAR and OneView did the rest." He's like I don't have to go into all these other steps that he used to have to do. So, it saves time and time is expensive. Not only from a human resource point of view, but go to market speed. >> Well, converged hardware was about having a common set of support technologies. The whole notion of hyperconverge starting to converge the actual administrative tasks. But what I remember, the last time that I was in New Zealand and talked with large users, was a real emphasis on analytics because of New Zealand being an island with great resources in some respects and less resources in others, energy, telecommunications. How is the modern economy of New Zealand with some of the constraints that it faces driving the use of digital technology to lift up industry, services, and the quality of life in New Zealand? >> We're seeing that in a very far reaching kind of industry verticals. And more so now with obviously IOT's become a pretty hot topic, but IOT backed by all the smart and on-demand composable architecture is really making a difference to primary industries, making them more productive more effective, more efficient. But really the customers in New Zealand we're a nation of early adopters. We have 96% of our companies are six or less people. So, we're dealing with SMB's that have to box above their weight. They have to adapt, they have to do more with less. You know all of this cliches that really encumber the average small company, and we have a lot of them. So the demands from an IT perspective are give me what my enterprise counterparts have but at a per user, or resource unit per month kind of model so cloud just makes so much sense for them. >> Susan, big takeaways from Madrid? What do you want the world to walk away with? >> Well I think first of all, when we say we're going to help make hybrid IT simple, what we're talking about and really exemplified with layerX is we're talking about from the edge to the core to the cloud. So, really end to end. The other really exciting thing that we're here talking about is AI, artificial intelligence. Deep learning, machine learning. And you talked about it in the context of edge computing and IOT which is obviously super hot, but we are also bringing AI to the data center. So as we look at-- >> Peter: In other words, making data center operations, IT operations, >> Making the data center autonomous, self healing, self managing. You look at the automobile industry, autonomous cars, right? Well think about how that's going to be applied to autonomous data centers. That's what we're going to be talking about. >> Shoes for the cobbler's children. >> You got it. >> Well, and think about the impact that has on the business where you're allowing people not to spend money on whatever, lung provisioning, >> Right. >> And server management, but really focusing on some other more strategic aspects of their business whether it's digital transformation, AI, other data-oriented activities. >> Exactly. >> Sometimes the data has to be here and you want to make sure that when the data's there it has the same services are available to the business, >> Susan: Yes. >> to take advantage of that asset where it is. >> Real time analytics for the data that matters to our customers at the edge and in the cloud, as well as applying that same AI to the telemetry of the data center and using that to make the data center more efficient, more effective, more autonomous and self-healing. >> Awesome. So, keynotes are coming up very shortly. We'll be running those on our twitch channel twitch.com/siliconangle. You can check those out obviously at HPE as well, HPE.com Susan and Bruce, thanks very much for coming to theCUBE, >> Thank you so much, appreciate it. >> setting up the afternoon. Really appreciate your time. >> No problem. >> Thank you. >> Alright, keep right there buddy. We'll be back after the keynotes. This is theCUBE. We're live from HPE Discover, Madrid. (electronic music)

>> Announcer: Live from Madrid, Spain. It's theCUBE. Covering HPE Discover Madrid 2017. Brought to you by Hewlett Packard Enterprise. (upbeat music) >> Welcome back to Madrid everybody. This is theCUBE. The leader in live tech coverage. And this is day one of HPE Discover Madrid. The European version of the show that we cover in Las Vegas in the spring. My name is Dave Vellante. I'm here with my co-host Peter Burris. Bill Philbin, as the General Manager of the storage business unit And he's joined by Eugene DePrez, who's the Director of Systems Engineering at the Fox Group. Gentlemen, welcome to theCUBE. Thanks for coming on. >> Thanks Dave. >> Thanks. >> Bill, it's always a pleasure. I see you more than I see my wife sometimes. (laughing) >> You know, the last time we spoke about merit badges. You remember? It just came into my mind. Which is at seven or eight years in a row I thought I'd get a badge or something to offset my element here, on my lapel. I'm still waiting for it. >> You're there in terms of one of our most popular cube alums So, thanks again for coming back on. >> My pleasure. >> Well, give us the update on the event. We did some deep dives in Boston recently so, we got a good Kool-Aid injection from you guys. So, we're here at the show. What are you guys talking about? >> Well, you know, the wonders of the storage market continues. Transformation continues right? We're here six months ago, we were talking about so at that point the nimble, nimble acquisition. Now six months into that we continue to see sort of the business transform itself. There's really three things we're talking here at the show. One is, we're talking about InfoSight. But InfoSight in a much broader sense. Not sort of solely limited to Nimble, but InfoSight on 3Par, but more broadly InfoSight as a basis for AI and the data center. So if you think about sort of the experience our customers are looking at from on-prem vs off-prem models. They're having to look at things like your cost of delivery, ROI, et cetera. And InfoSight is much broader than just sort of an improved support model. It's all about how do we sort of take the on-prem experience and make it such that it's actually self managing and self-healing and that's where we're headed with InfoSight. Not only in storage but also across the whole, the whole data. So that is number one. Number two, we're focused on cloud ready. You know as customers are having to make this sort of decisions about what's on-prem versus off-prem. You and I were talking about this over dinner last night. How do we easily facilitate that and so the whole message from Hewlett Packard around hybrid IT is compute and data where you want, what's relevant to your organization. And then number three is, customers are looking at consumption based models. They want the, you know as they move data, they also want to change the way they consume storage or consume data center assets. So, CapEx and flexible OpEx models that parallel what they're seeing in web based properties. So, it's all about choice. It's all about giving them the same experience that they'd see in a web based property, but not without some of the downsize of data sovereignty, SLAs, data integrity, and sort of other issues. My friend here, Eugene, at Fox is a big supporter of storage. Of Hewlett Packard storage. And so I thought it would be interesting to sort of get, not only what the vendors view of the world is, but let's here it from a guy who's actually got the real life problem of deciding okay what's inside, what's outside, how does he consume our stuff differently. So, that was the rationale for bringing Eugene along today. >> Well we love to talk to customers. Eugene, let's here it from you. Well first help us understand your role at Fox and maybe let's get into some of the business drivers and how those trickle into IT. >> Sure, so my position is the Director on the Architecture Engineering team. And our responsibility is delivering services if you will. The idea of delivering a technology stack of servers or network or storage is blurred and now its delivering the service. People are not reaching out for this many CPUs or this type of disc or this many spindles anymore. They know what they need to do from a business perspective and it's our job to translate those business requirements to system requirements that we can then deliver our service with. >> So, what are the big drivers in your business and how are they, I mean you just sort of described how they're affecting IT, but what are the big drivers? >> So, entertainment is morphing dramatically and of course Fox is a leader in the entertainment industry. And, you know, competition is coming from new avenues and the way people consume media is changing dramatically. And, we need to adjust to all of those types of requirements. Whether it's new ideas in production or new media platforms for distribution. >> So, obviously part of that is speed, agility, time to market, flexibility, getting new products out faster. How do you hide the complexity of your infrastructure generally, maybe storage specifically, from the business? How do you make it not an inhibitor? >> So, historically people would actually buy their own components. They would be responsible for a capital budget tied to a project to acquire X number of spindles. And that's gone, that's gone. People are now more concerned with throughput requirements, but it's not along the lines of how many gigabytes per second. It's, I need 4K. We're going to use 4K transcoding. I need to have eight people to be able to view this simultaneously. And that's what they want. So, they don't want to know about the complexities of what's behind the mask, if you will, or behind the curtain. >> So it's more of a shared services model. You're trying to sort of deploy share services capability that's capable of scaling to meet the demands of your consumers. >> Exactly. And productions don't want to own the role of hardware anymore. They want an operational model. Where they have some costs associated with what their consumption is, for the duration of their production. And, from Fox's perspective, if we do this from a shared services centralized delivery model, then there's efficiencies in cost for that delivery. And there's immediacy. As soon as they need it, it's available. >> So, in that respect we use an architectural parlance. You are creating the business capability. Architecturally. That is facilitating the process of creating the digital assets that make Fox money. Make Fox profitable. >> Eugene: Exactly. >> And doing so in a way that the customer is not exposed to the underlying transaction cost associated with different infrastructure options. Is that kind of where you're going with this? >> Exactly, exactly. So, the productions can worry more about what they do which is creation. Right? And creativity. And less about what is underneath it that's enabling the storage and distribution of that media that they're creating. >> The whole media business, as you've articulated, is going through significant amount of change, but there is still a need to capture activity or capture things where it's happening so, talk a bit about how the relationship between storage and network, file size, file security, the ability to create an asset at the moment that it's being generated as opposed to a couple days later when it's being rendered. How is that all coming together so that data is dictating the model that you use to actually make all this happen? >> So we actually have mobile setups that are associated with, say motion capture stage. Then that has to be centralized. The transcoding will happen at Fox media services. And then distribution from the Fox media cloud. So, all of these different units have to be coordinated such that the data has an even flow from the capturing on stage to the transcoding and the editing to the final transcoding for the media for distribution and then off to the distributors of the content. >> Can you talk a little bit about? Dig more into the operating model. When you go back and look at your career you know, 10 to 15 years ago you had to get down and dirty, you're doing sort of unnatural acts to make infrastructure work. Fox I'm sure doesn't want to invest in that kind of heavy lifting. It wants to transform its business. How has the role of an infrastructure professional changed over the last five or 10 years? >> Well, so, we used to have issues where we would say as hardware aged the OpEx would go up and that would become a challenge. And they say, well drive down the OpEx. So, we would buy new hardware to drive down the OpEx and then that would drive up CapEx. And now, we're coming back around to let's get away from this CapEx model and get more towards a OpEx type model. And so, leveraging things like cloud storage and that flexibility to burst outward if we, our on-premise is insufficient. And, designing an infrastructure that is not dedicated to specific project or specific need but more general to performance level. So, this is where we're headed now. >> But as you look back someone in your role, someone like your role, was responsible for making sure the hardware assets were productive and taken care of and now it sounds like you're more focused on making sure the data assets are generating return for the business. That has an impact on your relationship to your key suppliers, like HPE. >> Sure. >> First off, if I got it right that your moving from a hardware focus to a data focus as you generate a return for the business and secondly, how is that impacting some of those strategic relationships with some of your key suppliers? >> Well, so, as we talk to Bill and we're talking the previous evening, we still are buying assets. We still have hard assets that are available locally, but we need to also be able to branch out and this is one of the things that, you know everybody talks about cloud. Let's get to the cloud and move things to the cloud. And we looked at like the gateway devices that were available and they seemed cumbersome. They were proprietary in nature. They used the term optimizing my data. But what that translated to was storing in a proprietary format that only they understood. And we didn't want to get locked into this gateway or that gateway and we were really looking to our vendor partners to say how do we integrate these new storage capabilities, new compute platforms, into our infrastructure that we have our hard assets that we have on-premise and that's why we're very excited about these new capabilities that we're rolling into the store ones. So, we're looking to continue to expand that capability with our partners and making those things innate to the storage platforms that we've purchased. >> So what specifically does HPE do to support that operating model? I mean is it the way it prices? Is it services? I wonder if we can unpack that a little bit. >> Eugene: Sure, sure. >> You want to talk a little bit about sort of your version of archiving versus backup and what's going to be projected as a cloud versus what's in the data center and how does cloud bank sort of support those? >> Well we're very exited about cloud, right? One of the challenges that we have with backups is you have to have on-premise and off-premise copies and if I'm doing all of this within StoreOnce I'm putting up two hard assets. I'm using dedicated circuits to connect between these assets and our consumption rate has doubled, if you will, right? >> Dave: It's expensive. >> It's expensive. So, and then we're looking to the hardware vendor, who's profiting from this expense, to say how do I drive this down? >> Dave: How do you make less money? (laughs) >> Exactly. >> It's not a good analogy. This is Phil, but he's not very happy with this this whole process. (laughter) >> So you can see, it's almost a conflict of interest for our partners, except for that, you know, I don't call them a vendor, I call them a partner. And we have a shared success model, right? I need to make sure that Fox has the capabilities, that it stays competitive in the marketplace that it competes in. And I need to work with the vendor to provide that solution in a cost effective way. And if Bill and HPE's interest is only in themselves and only in selling me hardware well then they're not my partner. Right? So, we, we meet with engineers and we talk about next generation capabilities and the things that are driving our business requirements and our business model. And HPE has been very generous to allow us early access to the different capabilities including call up data, which then allow us to develop and deliver that service that is necessary for Fox to be successful. >> So, you have to figure out, okay, how can I still invest in R&D >> Eugene: That's right. and run my operation and compete. >> So customers are going to cloud as we were talking about. Data used to have gravity. And now data and compute need to sort of come together and customers want the ability to sort of move data to where they see the need arise. >> Peter: Not uncovered by the infrastructure. >> Not uncovered by the infrastructure. And it's also not a bursting based model which occasionally I need to go to the web. No, there's assets that are perfectly acceptable to sort of be deposited in the web sort of ad nauseam or ad infinitum. Permanently right? And the way that you're looking at it is how do I sort of take an infrastructure copy that used to be in my data center, assuming power, and heating and cooling, right? And how do I sort of take a copy of that and make that available, but put it on a platform, which is cost effective? >> Exactly. >> And without though, however, the sort of huge operational running cost of knowing where that data is residing. So it's you know, how do I make it operationally efficient, cost efficient from a storage perspective, and have it be reliable and available? >> But also create new options for the business because that's how, certainly in a media company, that's how a media company is going to make more money is by putting in place infrastructure that creates new revenue options because you have a way of facilitating sharing in a secure manner that diminishes the invasiveness of the underlying infrastructure. >> Eugene: That's right, exactly. >> So I think the way you think about it is it's all about choice. If Eugene decides that he want to store asset X,Y and Z in the cloud and he wants to store asset one, two, three inside of his data center our obligation is to enable that transformation for him and recognizing that the better that we do that the better partnership we're going to have and the better way that we're going to sort of move our businesses forward or together. And between Fox and Hewlett Packard we have a rich history of partnering. When HP was in the PC and printer business and that's transformed now into the HP Enterprise. I think you said it right. There's a difference between a vendor and a partner. >> Right. >> A partner's there in the good times and in the bad times. Right? Who's there to help you with your transformation and isn't only in it for themselves and I think that's sort of, if I can sort of think about our relationship, that's what it is, right? >> That's exactly where we're at with HPE. Is a true partnership. Right? Where we share in each other's success and they understand what our business requirements are and how they're changing and they're incorporating those requirements into development of the next generation of the product. And we're very fortunate then to be able to get early access to those products and those offerings so that we can co-develop them and resolve issues that arise. And protect the product as it matures. >> So Bill I want to end on the storage business. The business that you run. You got to engineering background. You're now the leader of this business which is comprised as a component of hybrid IT. The new reporting structure that we're going to see in the future, but one of my takeaways from Andover, we had deep dive in Andover a couple months ago, was that you guys are in pretty good shape of the following. I'll summarize it, and I'd love for you to chime in. You're gaining share. You basically have to hold serve with 3Par. 3Par was, to me, was the savior you know years ago. >> Bill: That's right. >> It came in and really affected, it was the gift that kept on giving. But you could only go to that well so many times. You've now made a couple of key acquisitions in the form of Nimble, where you get >> Bill: SimpliVity. >> InfaSight, SimpliVity. >> Bill: That's right. So, you're going to basically hold serve with 3Par and you've got growth opportunities with both of those assets that we just mentioned. So, maybe, that was kind of my takeaway, was wow. That really came into focus a little bit. How do you sort of look at your opportunity going forward? >> So, the best way to think about it is when I joined Hewlett Packard now almost eight years ago, we were probably six or seven in the storage business. Today, we're sort of on the cusp of being number two. Neck and neck with NetApp. So, I think the growth has been tremendous. Second, that growth has been on organic as well as inorganic options. StoreOnce is a good example of an organic option we built. Inorganic, one can't argue about the success of 3Par. It's the number one mid-range brand in the world. Nimble brings with it a flare of sort of next generation storage capability with InfoSight across the top. InfoSight now deployed on 3Par means that we can start talking a much broader message about how we transform our customers ability to sort of run their businesses differently. So, I think that's important. And then when you look at SimpliVity. The focus around hyperconverge and how we sort of offer customers solutions there. I think if you take a look at the broad breadth of the portfolio, if you're an independent storage company with one thing to sort of shuck to the street you're going to have a problem. If you're an independent storage company without a connection to the rest of the data center with compute and networking, we think you're going to have a problem. If you don't have sort of the broad orchestration sort of story like Synergy or OneView or New Stack or other things that HP is now talking about we think you're going to have a problem. So storage sort of a Ptolemaic sort of viewpoint right which is we think everything revolves around us is uniquely positioned to actually help our customers transform but it comes down to choice without operational complexity with the breadth of the portfolio that allows a customer to make the right choices of on-prem, off-prem, hardware, software defined, hyperconverged, converged >> Peter: Today and in the future. >> Today and in the future. We think that Hewlett Packard storage is actually in a tremendous position to help our customers like Eugene and others out there to run their businesses effectively. >> Well guys, thanks for coming to theCUBE. Eugene, we always love to have the customer perspective, so Bill thanks for having him come with you. >> It was good seeing you guys. I'm looking for year number eight or nine. (laughs) If you're out there, buy some more storage so I can keep coming back and seeing Dave >> Dave: And they'll partner with you. (laughs) >> Yeah, exactly right. >> Really appreciate it. Okay, keep it right there, everybody we'll be back with our next guest right after this short break. This is theCUBE. We're live from Madrid, HPE Discover 2017. (upbeat music)

>> Narrator: Live, from Las Vegas, it's the CUBE, covering VM World, 2017. Brought to you by VMWare and its ecosystem partners. >> Welcome back to the CUBE's live continuing coverage of Vmworld 2017. We're on day two, I'm Lisa Martin. Thanks so much for joining. I'm joined by my cohost Keith Townsend and Keith and I are excited to be joined by CUBE first time visitor, Mike Flaum senior product manager to HPE. Welcome Mike. >> Thank you for inviting me here. I appreciate to have the opportunity. >> Great announcements over the last day and half. Tell us what's new with HPE and Vmware. >> Sure, so today our announcement went out, Vmware cloud foundation on top of Synergy. This is a follow on announcement that we had for Vmware cloud foundation on top of DL380 which is the industry leading rack based server. What we've done is we've now extended to our composable platform on Synergy and that was the announcement that went out earlier today. >> Composable infrastructure and Vmware cloud foundation, on paper doesn't kind of make sense. That you have this thing that's super flexible and what's supposed to be a reference kind of validated design, how does that work. >> It really accomplishes two things. What we're hearing from our customers very specifically is how do we make it easier. It's really not about technology, it's that how do people consistently do these deployments. So by using a composable platform it allows them to standardize and do the implementations. Then on top of that Vmware cloud foundation has its own installation appliance that installs to the Vsphere, the VSAN and the NSX. We're totally online with Vmware by making it easier for the customer implementations. Then the ongoing maintenance and support of it. >> Sorry, I was going to say from a go to market perspective, yesterday I think Pat Gelsinger had said 10,000 customers on VSAN, a huge install base with Vsphere. Talk to us about sort of the specific joint customer opportunities globally that you are seeing. >> Sure, so with the install base of Vsphere and then the VSAN install base, our customers are really asking for this. One of the things that we've done also is that we have OEM SKUs. We're actually taking the VCF and the VCN and you're able to buy these products directly from us, from Vmware. There's a synergy between, no pun intended, to actually have our customers be able to buy just from one vendor. So we're able to purchase the Vmware and the Synergy from HPE. That's been ongoing. >> Customer reaction in general? The concept is kind of abstract. We get Vmware on AWS. It took us awhile to get that. Are customers getting kind of, they can have that type of flexibility in their own data center? >> Absolutely. What happens is, is that when the DL380 announcement happened it was great for a rack based system. But that really doesn't scale super large. Customers think about customers that have multiple cabinets, multiple rows, multiple data centers, and that's really where the VCF on Synergy makes a huge difference. It's for the large data center deployments. Those customers are like wow we really see the value in VCF, but we really want to have it on Synergy for this platform because we have large data centers. That's really where. And the customers take those large data centers, they also want to be able to leverage VCF on AWS. They want to have this hybrid approach to having the workloads being both in the cloud and on premise. >> So let's talk a little bit about day two operations. What is it like, or what's the differentiator for Synergy and VCF versus any other solution? >> The difference is what makes it composable. On the Synergy platform we have an actual hardware that's the composure and it runs OneView. OneView has certain templates in order to make the compute, network and storage all run appropriately for the VCF on top of it. The part that the customers like about VCF is the SDDC manager, which is they look at this and wow that manages all the Vsphere, the NSX and VSAN. They need to have the composable and OneView management of the underlying hardware. That's where we come in from the composable side. >> One of the things that, I think it was Michael Dell that talked about this morning about this growing volumes of data. Everybody knows data is fuel and its pathway to other sources of economy within an organization. As we look at servers and storage, what is the sea level conversation around these technologies in terms of the benefits, like speeds and feeds and things like that. How is the HPE Vmware announcement today with composable, what are some of the key business problems that that's going to solve for a CEO, CIO, CTO? >> One of the things that happens is this proliferation of equipment. They buy a blade system. They buy a storage array. They buy networking. It ends up being on three different vendors. One of the benefits of doing it on Synergy, is that we're using the local storage. So the local storage is great but it requires the VSAN that comes from Vmware. Then the VCF is what puts it all together. It's not that you can't use Vsphere and NSX and VSAN separately, the benefit is to put it onto one system on the Synergy that combines it all together. For the CIO what happens is instead of buying three different equipment, three different vendors, managing three different firmware streams, now you have it all converged onto one system that's purpose built for this. So that's really the main difference. >> I hear cost reduction. Reduced CAPX, reduced OPX. Are you seeing customers be able to move resources around and be able to utilize resources for other strategies within their companies? >> Absolutely. On the Synergy we have a technology called Virtual Connect which is actually hardware. One of the things that it does when you run these composable templates on top of it, is that it makes it one resource pool. If you have compute resources or storage resources that are in different cabinets, it presents that to the VCF manager and you're able to move that as needed. It makes it easier because it sets it up as one giant computer. Whereas before it might be segmented based upon the cabinet level. That's really one of the main differences, have the fluid resource pools. But it really relies on having the VCF on top of it. >> Talking about that data center wide resource pool, I'm a customer, I have complicated data center, I have DL380s, I have DL580s, I have Synergy, I have original chassis. Help me move forward to this vision of VCF. What's the road map for a typical customer who has a diverse data center? >> This question comes up all the time. The customers say look we're on your existing products and we have those for years. What I tell them is if you just need to do an incremental add, then to buy that particular hardware platform. If you're building a new data center, you want to pick the next generation platform and so what you want to do is do your proof of concept on the Synergy and then build that for the future. It's not that the other platforms don't work. It's not that they're not going to continue to be supported. They will. But you're always taking a look at where do I want to be two years from now. That's the big difference is that I'm going to look at Synergy and leverage the Vsphere which I've been using for years. I'm going to use the VSAN which was just recently certified. But it's also a component of VCF and I'm able to leverage that local storage which compresses it all down into one hardware platform. That's where the customer's really get the added benefit. >> Terrific, well Mike thank you so much for joining us on the CUBE today and explaining from your perspective the impact that the announcement with HPE and Vmware on composable means today. We want to thank you for watching the CUBE again. I'm Lisa Martin with my cohost Keith Townsend. We are live on day two of VMWorld 2017. Keep watching, we'll be right back. (funky music)

>> Narrator: Live from Las Vegas it's theCUBE covering HPE Discover 2017 brought to you by Hewlett-Packard Enterprise. >> Hello and welcome back to Las Vegas for theCUBE's exclusive coverage of Hewlett-Packard Enterprise Discover 2017 or HPE Discover 2017. This is theCUBE, our flagship program from SiliconeANGLE media. We go out to the events, and extract the signal from the noise. I'm John Furrier, the co-founder of SiliconeANGLE. with my co-founder, Dave Vellante, my co-host. Our next guest, Jason Newton, Vice President of HP Marketing Pan-HPE Market cross HP, and Jim Jackson, Senior Vice President of Enterprise Group Marketing. The big dogs here at HP laying out the show here for 2017. Guys, great show again, our seventh year, appreciate it. But this year, more than ever, is a seminal moment, obviously everyone knows what's going on in the news, is a huge shift in the market place, what's happening at the show, set the scene for us, what's the backdrop? You guys lined up all the messaging, you have the whole set up to the show, tell us: what is this show about this year? >> First, welcome to Discover, guys! We're really excited to have you guys here. And you know, we got a lot going on at this show, so for example, yesterday, we had our Global Partners Summit so we brought out top 1300 partners, and we had an amazing session with them. This week starts Discover, so it's going to run for the next three days. We've exceeded our tenants targets, so we're feeling really good about it. I think what that shows is there's a lot of interest, a lot of energy, a lot of passion, for what Hewlett-Packard Enterprise can bring. You know, I'm not going to go through all the mechanics of the separation and the spin merger, but I would say that that was all designed to make us a faster, more nimbler company, and one that is really aligned to where we want to take our partners on their digital transformation journey. You know, what we're seeing today, is digital transformation is impacting every single customer and every single industry, and digital business is technology, and really, that's where we play and that's why we're so excited to get our story out. And when you look at over the last year, there's a lot that's happened at this company around really innovation, acquisitions, and ecosystem. Just look at some of the innovation that we've brought to the market, Synergy. Amazing innovation, it created a new category, it really enables our customers to now get a public cloud experience, but on PRIM. And we're hearing from a lot of customers, I want to leave my applications on PRIM, but I need that capability. So we're delivering that with that kind of innovation. Another one is HPC. High growing market, we're leading in that space. What we're doing in the storage flash space, we rebooted, and rebranded our services organization, it's not called Pointnext. We want to help our customers point next to whats' next for their business. When you look at the Edge, just amazing innovation happening there, whether it's Aruba technology, whether it's what we're doing with all of our Edge compute solutions, so just a tons of things happening and then when you layer on top of that all the acquisitions. SGI, we're already the leader in HPC, we have 140 of the top 500 systems, SGI makes our position that much stronger. That's a hot market, it's growing at six to eight percent. SimpliVity, when we brought our capabilities, our UI from our technology, combined it with the data services from SimpliVity, we now have the leading HC solution in the industry. When you look at Niara, that gives up additional capabilities at the Edge to help secure that. When we look at Cloud Cruiser, we can help customers understand and balance what's happening across their workloads. And then Nimble gives us just an amazing portfolio across storage. We're really the leader now in the storage space when you look at the ability to dress almost any use case, from MSA to SimpliVity, for customers looking for more of that hyperconverge play, to Nimble, to 3PAR. Our strategy, super simple. Make hybrid IT simple, power the Intelligent Edge, and it's not just the compute, it's to bring the analytics so that we can translate insight into action, and really to bring the services to help our customers on their journey. And those services are our Pointnext services complimented by our partner services. So, you know what, we're fired up, we're excited, there's a lot happening. >> You guys got so much going on and we've documented the whole spin merge thing 'till the cows come home, we've already done that. You guys got a lot going on, a lot of customers are talking a lot of people are talking about you in the industry, at an industry level, certainly at a partnership level, you guys have always been customer focused. We heard that, you mentioned that, they kind of want to know: what is HP going to do now? You're going to put the stake in the ground, they want to know what's happening, where is the phoenix coming from out from all this decoupling, and more agile messaging, it's a lot of corporate governance, corporate development, I get that, what's next? When are you guys going to put the stake in the ground, you going to be aggressive, when are we expecting to hear from Meg Whitman? >> This week, right, you're going to see it this week. I think that's why we're so excited, this is our opportunity to bring our story together and talk about the innovation and the outcomes that we're delivering for our customers. We are playing offense, and you're going to see that this week. You know, I think one of the themes about this whole week is really about outcomes. I just hosted a panel, with four amazing customers, we had Dreamworks on there, we had CenterPoint Energy, we had CallidusCloud, and I had one more, can't think of it, Merck. And just amazing stories in terms of their digital transformation journey and how HPE is helping to enable that. You're going to hear that on main stage, we're going to have additional customers, Symmetry, others, talking about their digital transformation journey. So, we're really fired up about the main stage, and the story that we're going to get out today. Backstage talking with the executives, they're ready to rock and roll. You know, we know we have a great story and we need to package it, we need to send it out there to the marketplace, and that's what's going to happen later today. In addition to the outcomes, and I think that's what's different about us maybe from some of our other competitors who come to these similar events and just have a bunch of products, we're really talking about how our technology is enabling outcomes but you're going to see a lot of innovation today as well really themed along our strategy. We're going to highlight and roll out the next generation of our compute experience. We're going to talk about how we're delivering the industry's most secure industry standard servers. That's complimented by a whole set of announcements we did last week on our storage portfolio, and the software defined space updates to our synergy solution to HP OneView, and then we're going to be previewing our multi cloud hybrid stack, which will be available later in the year. When you look at the edge, new campus solution, core solution, so what we're really doing is if you think of a data center course which we're bringing that to the campus, so we can essentially now manage from the ceiling, to the side, to the floor. So we're bringing all the capabilities. Asset tracking capabilities coming in as well. Pointnext, we're bringing in new innovations to the marketplace around Consume. Jason, maybe you can talk a little bit about some of the IOT Edge stuff that's coming out as well. >> Yeah, I mean we think, a core part of our strategy is to power the Intelligent Edge. We think that's where all the innovation is going and increasingly, you know, we think about data and getting insights from data, right? Going forward, we're going to start thinking about how do I take data and put it into action, right? The Edge is a place, and there's lot of different places that we can bring technology to bear to put into action and create value and so, tons of examples of what we'll be talking about with customers and really interwoven within that are the need for analytics, you know, big data, high performance computing, having a renaissance because of that, and the need for hybrid computing right because the stuff needs to be secure and it needs to be driven by applications, and so it really is a great way to try to exemplify why our strategy is the right strategy and why it's a winning one, because those are the unique elements that are going to power this world going forward, and we've got 'em. >> 43% of data will be analyzed at the Edge by 2020, so think about that, right. >> Yeah and we actually think that it'll be much higher over time, that moving around all this data is going to be challenging, I know you're working on the speed of light problem in the labs, and that number I think will increase. So, I wanted to ask you about messaging because messaging in very important. It clarifies your vision and it underscores your relevance to customers and previously a lot of the HP and now it's HPE, messaging was very product centric, and one tended to get lost in that. How have you sort of transformed your messaging architecture to address things like outcomes and business impacts. >> Yeah, you know customers today, it's really about outcomes, right, so technology matters but if you just look at making hybrid IT simple, as an example, that's a easy statement to say, hybrid IT is not simple. So when you, think of the messaging though, of how we're talking to our customers about that it's really at multiple different levels and let me give you a couple of examples. It's, first of all, the services from Pointnext, how do we come and engage them, and help them characterize their applications, understand their environment, and ultimately give them a roadmap with the right mix of technology, not only for today, but for the future. So, that's an example of leading much more with services in terms of our Pointnext services, in terms of how we're engaging our customers. Getting very disciplined in terms of when you think about okay how do I want to run my hybrid IT environment? We believe it runs best on a software defined infrastructure solution, Synergy gives us that. So, customers are telling us, hey I want to have more on PRIM, or I want to be able to run my applications on PRIM but I need the same experience that I can get from a public cloud, we can now do that with Synergy. Fully programmable, we're seeing amazing interaction with it we have almost 400 customers engaging, and that pipeline is continuing to grow. And then I think the third part of it, when you talk about solutions, again it's not just about technology, it's how do I want to consume this, right? So, we're hearing from our customers, you know, I need, not all of them want to just buy it from us and install it. So, we do amazing things here that we probably haven't gotten out to the market, and you're going to see us get a lot louder this week about that. For example, through our flexible financial services organization, we have amazing capabilities to really engage with other parts of the line of business, the CFO, and talk to them about how do you really want to finance this, what kind of business relationship are you looking for? With Flexible Capacity services, we bring amazing capabilities to help our customers get a public cloud experience on PRIM, so it's sitting on their environment, we're managing it, they only pay for what they use. The other part of it is, it is customers are telling us increasingly, hey you know what I want to actually have a network of service providers that I can get services from. We have done that through our Cloud28+ and our service provider partner ready program, we have a whole set of service providers optimized for infrastructure, for applications, many of them are located close to our customers, so just a few examples, I think of how we're trying to bring this all together, and a solution message is really elevating it and saying: what is the outcome you're trying to drive, starting there, and then looking at engaging them holistically across all of that. So you're seeing more and more of that. Our demos highlight that, that's the stuff we're trying to highlight at the show. >> Dave, can I pile on to the message piece, too, as well? His messaging guy here, for Jim. You know, there's a lot of noise also out on the marketplace, and I think one of the keys is the advantage of being a more focused company now, we can be much more simple, and forthright and direct in our messaging, right, in terms of who we are, what we're about, what's our strategy, what are the elements that we're putting in place to execute that strategy and it's I think it's really important because you don't get but 60 seconds, right, in front of a customer, or to grab their attention off a Twitter feed, or whatever and so, simplicity is really really important, and I think the advantage of an event like this is it brings our strategy and that message to life, I mean it's three dimensional out there right. It's living and breathing, we bring the customers forward first, that's the lead of every message because that's what other customers want to hear about, what are you going to do for me, right? >> Well, lets talk about the messaging and how it translate, from as I always say, if you got the sizzle you better have the steak, to use that old expression. Just as a random example, the user experience is changing significantly in IT, I mean yesterday I was delayed coming in Southwest coming from Silicone Valley and, you know they sold my seat, they didn't have to drag me off the plane, but you know I'm getting some help in the analog face to face but I got on Twitter, had to DM Southwest, instant channel to Southwest. That proves that the interface to technology in a digital business is changing. Now IT is transforming in a similar way, how are you guys taking the messaging of simplicity at the same time as the product evolution is shifting and architectures are changing. The people who have to consume and manage this stuff, their work is changing, so how do you guys talk about that because that's really where the meat on the bone is sitting that's where the rubber is hitting the road, your thoughts? >> I'll start, and maybe Jason you can pile on, you know I think Jason poked at it, we are a much simpler company today, so our strategy is very clean. It's to make hybrid IT simple, it's to power the Intelligent Edge, and it's to bring the services to help our customer go along that journey. So just starting with that simple message means that we can get out whole organization, our partner organization, on message in terms of what we bring and how we can help them to do that. I think the other part this that's really important is we view innovation today as really a team sport, and as we become more focused, we're actually leaning in a lot harder to our partner ecosystem. Whether it's our traditional partners, like Microsoft and SAP, whether it's new partners like Docker, Mesosphere, you know bringing the containerized environments, or actually curating a new set of partners for the future with Partner Next. Because it is about getting it down the simple thing of what's the outcome you're trying to drive, what's the technology, and the ecosystem and how can we be the company to help bring that forward? And I think that's a lot of the simplicity that you're going to see. You know on stage later today, I think why we're so excited about this is, you know you're going to hear Meg talk a little bit about the journey we've been on but more importantly the outcomes that we're delivering for customers and then what we're going to do is we're going to feature three customer scenarios, talking about what they have done, what their journey has been, their outcomes, their experiences and what they can do today, and then of course, how HP technology is enabling that. >> We had in our opening, Dave and I always talk about this, because we love the shiny new toy. Certainly I'm from Silicone Valley, he's from the east coast but the reality is that all this stuff about declining markets here and there is always a shift to another growth market, even on PRIM, you know, people might buy and consume and interface differently with technology but it doesn't mean that the data is slowing down, it doesn't mean that the value creation is changing, it's shifting. So I think that has really been something that I think you guys have had online, maybe lost in some of the tactical things but, you know, from new style of IT, to this, it's been kind of a cadence that you've been on it's not like you guys are groping for messaging. >> What goes down, yeah, and you can't just snap your fingers and be the transformed company that you want, right, but we're moving at break-neck speed on that and it does all go back to the advantage of that strategy, and the world you just described, right, you want to be nimble. You know, there may be something next month we've never heard of that disrupts the entire container market, right, containers become oh that's so yesterday, we want to be the company that's ready to pounce on the next thing, right, and we're geared to do that. You know, competitors - >> John: (mumbles) containers in microseconds is kind of a big deal, and it's coming out of the labs. >> Well you know, the other thing, I want to just add, so you talk about customers, you start with the customer the technology business is always moved faster pretty much than any business, but now, every customer is technology company, and so they're accelerating the pace, so you've got to accelerate that pace with them and be that provider. Digital transformation is all about data, it's all about becoming a technology company. So what's the message to your customers in terms of your role in helping them accelerate their transformation? >> Well, I think you pretty much hit it, right, in the statement that I use is digital business is technology. You are not going to seed with your digital transformation unless you have the right technology foundation and that's what we heard from those customers on the panel. It's about speed, it's about flexibility, it's about having the right technology that enables me to deliver services back to my internal clients at the speed I need to do it. And you know, that's where our innovation is really focused today, and that's why we're seeing a lot of customers coming to us and saying I want to understand how you did it for CenterPoint, or for Dreamworks and how we can take advantage of that. The other part of it is, technology is a big part of it but it's also the learning and the expertise that we can bring to actually make that technology work in that customer environment - we know how to do that. We're proven in doing that, and I think that's something because we're close to the technology, we not only have the right innovation, we have the right expertise to make it work for our customers, and that's important. >> I don't even think it's early innings either, Dave, I think it's not the game hasn't even started and I think you know one of the things that we believe and we're doing some research on is, we think asset evaluations is going to be completely data driven. Data will be an asset and that will impact the evaluation mechanism to >> Dave: Data is the new currency! >> John: To companies' value, so I think the shift is so early. So, riding the wave, guys thanks so much for coming on theCUBE we really appreciate it. Looking forward to the keynote from Meg Whitman to hear the messaging. Congratulations as you guys continue to - >> Dave: We're fired up! >> Jason: He's fired up. >> Dave: There's a lot of energy, Meg's fired up >> Jason: She's going to bring it today - >> Dave: Antonio is fired up, there's a lot of energy at the company, and you know, we're just excited to get our story out and engage customers. Thanks guys for the opportunity. >> Live here from HPE Discover, this is theCUBE's exclusive coverage, we'll be back with more live action. Three days of wall to wall coverage after this short break. (electronic music)

>> Narrator: Live from Boston, Massachusetts, it's theCUBE. Covering Red Hat Summit 2017. Brought to you by Red Hat. >> Welcome back to theCUBE's coverage of the Red Hat Summit here in Boston, Massachusetts. I'm your host, Rebecca Knight, along with my cohost, Stu Miniman. We are joined by Jay Jamison, he is the Vice President for Strategy Software Defined and Cloud Division at HPE. Thanks so much for joining us Jay. >> Oh thanks for having me. >> So I was just in your keynote session and you talked about making hybrid IT simpler. You talked about the imperative that you heard from customers to bring solutions not silos. Can you tell our viewers a little bit about the specific feedback you were hearing from customers that really made you want to tighten your focus? >> Yeah, I think that, so, first off thanks for having me, and I would say that, absolutely, customers have been very clear at the excitement and the opportunity that they see ahead of them in terms of digital transformation and moving to cloud and taking advantage of all these new capabilities and technologies that seem to be showing up all the time. Whether it's containers, whether it's Kubernetes, whether it's internet of things, all that stuff's super exciting, but at the same time customers are saying, "You know, look, I've got thousands of applications "in a traditional estate, or a virtualized estate "that aren't going to be moving to anything "like a cloud any time soon. "And what I need is a way to start thinking about "how do I manage that whole estate "so that I can get my existing footprint optimized, "I can keep that running smoothly, "make sure it's secure, make sure it's reliable, "make sure it's low cost? "While I want to continue to reduce budget "where possible there and I want to start spinning up "more of my new efforts and more of my new investment "onto these new things so that I can be more responsive "to the business that I'm trying to run. "I can get new products and services out to my customers, "I can engage partners and my existing customer base "in ways that they want to be engaged. "I can enter new businesses." And so that challenge of how do I manage that hybrid estate, whether it's a mix of on-prem or off-prem, whether it's a mix of traditional and virtualized applications and workloads with new cloud native or containerized, or even server-less now, those kinds of things, that is really what I see as the problem of hybrid IT today. And our customers tell us that, "Geez, it's complicated "and getting more so each and every day." And that presents a tremendous opportunity for HPE, and partners like Red Hat, to be able to come forward and say, "Look, we can start helping you with solutions "that start bringing together a comprehensive approach "to trying to solve for making that entire estate simpler, "make it more solution oriented, "and less a set of different silos and people "that are all kind of sort of stuck "in whatever technology stack they might be running with." >> Jay, very interesting point. One of the messages we heard from Red Hat is that application spectrum you talked about. I've got most enterprises hundreds if not thousands of applications. They have the new ones that they're modernizing and building but even the old ones we need to at least re-platform them. The term, we used to call it lift and shift, re-platform seems to be the cool new way to kind of talk about it. But, you know, really modernizing the platform that I'm on, being more software driven, being ready to take that, if I'm breaking it down, and componentizing, containerizing it, starting to build micro services, but how are you working with Red Hat? How does HPE cloud offerings and infrastructure pieces playing in that re-platforming and then moving up the spectrum? >> Yeah, so I think really across the board, I think there are a couple of pieces. I think first of all you're absolutely right that customers will say, "Look, I have "an existing estate of applications and workloads "that I absolutely have to use." So for example I often think about if you think about a mobile application that you might use a lot from a mainstream customer. Like think of your, like getting your flight reservation on your mobile phone. Of course there are parts of that mobile application that are going to be very modern. Like I can order an Uber from the mobile app that I use on my airline often, and that's, of course, very modern, I'm using APIs, I'm using all this nice stuff to plug in what Uber offers that airline vendor to be able to say, "You can have that transaction "flow through a partner flow." But things like what time's the flight taking off, whether it's delayed, those are existing systems that aren't newfangled if you will. And so what customers are telling me is, "Look, I've got a corpus of data, "a corpus of application logic "that I absolutely need to be able to access "and use and deliver in new ways." And so in many senses I think that resonates very strongly, this notion of, re-platforming it's going on and it's a reality of, again, how do I make this mix of data application tools that may exist, and the desires I have to do new stuff. How do I bring it together in a way that lands effectively for a customer so that they have a delightful experience? Now what we're doing with Red Hat I think is really exciting in terms of providing opportunities for, in manners, where together we're sort of taking the best of both worlds. So a great example that I talked about in my keynote is saying, "Look, we're trying to take", we're working very closely with Red Hat, and specifically their Ansible team, to say, "Look, what customers, what users of Ansible love "is building playbooks that enable them "to automate infrastructure using Ansible playbooks", that's what's it all about. And what Ansible has been great with those playbooks is setting up and running and automating virtual machines, well what we're doing, because HPE tends to have infrastructure and great infrastructure management tools that say, "Look, down at the hardware level "we want to make it easier and more fungible "for IT shops to be able "to manage that physical infrastructure." And so what we've done is we've partnered up with Ansible to say, "Look, we want your users of Ansible "to just have their playbooks and we will "connect our OneView APIs", which is our infrastructure management software that sits on top of hardware. Say, "It connects, and so when your users "build an Ansible playbook that wants "to change how the infrastructure works "we'll take care of it all in OneView. "It's not something that your users have "to change or learn anything new "it's just all of a sudden Ansible gets more powerful "because it's connecting to HPE hardware and providing "a richer more flexible infrastructure experience." And so that's some of the stuff that we're doing now to make our hardware more flexible and more modern in the context of an Ansible developer, or Ansible user, but over time that's going to get even better. So the stuff, the things that we're doing with Synergy, which is our new brand that is focused on building hardware infrastructure that has composability, which basically says, "Look". It looks like hardware device but from an operators point of view it's very fungible, you can refactor and make your blend of compute, or storage, or networking, kind of shift on the fly. So a very cloud-like experience with on-premises infrastructure. And what we're doing is we want to work with great technologies that are very cloud-centric such as OpenShift from Red Hat to say, "Look, we want to be able to enable customers "to using APIs spin up bear metal instances of OpenShift." Very powerful in terms of time to value message for a cloud native customer that says, "Look, I need to run cloud native applications, "I want to have containers but I want to do it on-premise" This solution will be something that we think is a really powerful message for, particularly our Red Hat OpenShift style customer looking to build applications. >> Jay, and I'm familiar with the Synergy platform and composable infrastructure, like the ideas, you can break that down into smaller components. What we hear all the time is, "I need to build distributed architectures", and, as they talked in the keynote, predicting and forecasting where that's going to go is tough. So big challenge customers always have is like, "I buy these boxes and three years "into it I'm only using 40% of it." The utilization inside of data centers is horrible. Even with server virtualization it helped a little bit but not as much as what you see server founders in clouds and the like. So where are we with the rollout with Synergy? Do you have any proof points of customers that are saying, "Oh, I'm getting better utilization, "my OP-X is much better"? >> Yeah, what I would say is, so first of all I would strongly agree with you in the sense that if you talk to most mainstream enterprise customers today about their data center utilization rates it's often very poor. And I think one of the big draws that customers have when they look at public cloud opportunities is they'll say, "Well a nice thing about a public cloud is "I feel as though I'm getting much higher utilization rates "because of the way the payment structures work and so on." Now that may not always be true, you'll have, at times people will say, "Well these things are sitting dormant." But that's the instinct, right? >> We had server sprawl, we have VM sprawl, and now we have cloud sprawl. >> Now you have cloud sprawl, exactly right. >> And server less will fix it all too right? >> Exactly right, but you absolutely have the challenge of under-utilized data centers. And so it's imperative for HPE, and I think really the industry, to say, "Look, the solutions that we're putting forward, "whenever we talk about hybrid cloud solutions, "or hybrid IT solutions, or private cloud solutions or whatever to me it comes down to look, am I able to show you in concrete terms how am I increasing the utilization of your data center and how am I helping you lower your costs? And Synergy will, over time, become a great solution and platform in that manner because, for a couple of reasons. One, you've described, the fungibility and the composability of resources makes that something that is very much simpler from a technology standpoint. But then at the same time when you couple it with pay as you go style business models, that HPE makes available to its customers through our financial services, you start to then say, "Look, you're not "just sort of writing us a big check in CAPEX "and waiting three years and then being disappointed." "What you're doing is you're going to start getting the notion "that says, "Look this is going to show up, "you'll have a small amount of POD, "you're paying as you use." And we're able to then work together to forecast when will capacity requirements get to a place where you absolutely need to add more capability and refresh that hardware, or extend that hardware, excuse me. On the customer adoption, it's a new platform, and it's just coming out and we're getting great early adoption, and I think particularly from users that were in the beta. We had very satisfied beta users and we're starting to see, I think, really strong early adoption of the product. We actually had someone at our most recent Discover talk where I was talking with them later and they were, I think it was Hudson Alpha, which is a biotech researching style institute that often tries many of our things. And what they were saying that I thought was really interesting point which I'd not heard of in the context of, "Hey, what does composability do and how does "this drive up utilization rates and many of these things?" One of the things that he was saying that I thought was really interesting is he was starting to use Synergy to deliver what he called spot instant style on-premise infrastructure where someone could run a workload for a period of time and then if someone else needed the infrastructure more badly and he had a way to sort of basically just blast away the old thing and put in the new thing there. And he said, "This is great because during the day "there's a certain set of workloads we have to do. "At night there are a different set of workloads "I want to do and Synergy gives me the capability "to do all of that very simply." And so I think that those kinds of capabilities, while still early, will be very powerful value propositions for customers that are looking to solve the problem you're describing of, "How do I get out of a data center "that's under 20% utilized? "I need to get more efficiency here in order "to lower the cost and be responsive "to what my customers need." >> Jay before you were at HPE you worked as a venture capitalist at Blue Run Ventures, in particular looking at opportunities in mobile and consumer internet enterprise software. If you could put on your investor hat here and talk a little bit about the cloud market and the cloud industry, what excites you and what gives you pause in terms of where you see the market heading and where companies are putting their money? >> Oh that's a really good question. I think that, well I would say that putting an investor hat on, I think that particularly in the enterprise space, I think it's a really exciting time, particularly for, and not to be super self serving for what HPE is doing, but I think there is a set of problems that are out there that are big and broad where there will be large companies that get created. One area that we're very interested in at HPE that I think is an area of investor interest, whether it's HPE making the investment or whether it's venture capitalists or what have you. It's really in the notion of what I describe as hybrid management. And what that basically means is, "Look, I'm a user that's going to have some VMware. "I'm going to have some cloud stuff running on AWS, "I'm going to have a desire to use Kubernetes, "and containers and so on." "Help me get one pane of glass that gives "me a way to think about seeing "those different applications, understanding how they're running. "I want one way to do things like firmware updates "for the stuff that needs firmware updates. "I want one way to do application firewalls, "I want one way to do this." And I think that's going to be a very interesting and sticky market to go off an win. So if I were in the investment space that would be an area that I would be looking at very deeply. Another area that I think is going to be really interesting and important, we talk a lot about AI and machine learning in the context of everything in the world of enterprise, seems to have this label of, "Hey, we're using AI and machine learning." But I think what you really have to get back to is what about artificial intelligence and machine learning is actually going to help you solve a problem? How is it going to make your business actually better? And I think that often we're, I think right now at a place where we're a little bit too over our skis in terms of saying, "Look, these are really interesting technologies, "AI's going to do everything and drive out cars "and basically make us little house pets in the corners "'cause they're doing so much in our lives." But I think that there tends to be, one customer was saying to me, "You know what's really interesting is "dozens of startups will come and tell me "about how AI's going to solve "a hundred problems I didn't know I have. "What I'd really like someone to come "and talk to me about is about, "I want them to talk to me about "one of the problems I know I have. "'Cause I've got a hundred problems "I know I've got that I want solutions to." And so I think a big opportunity is really to try and figure out how do these new technologies particularly in that space and around big data and so on, how do those become things that are really truly impactful to making a mainstream business that may have a hybrid estate, how does it make them more effective? And that can have an impact in terms of how to make their IT ops more efficient, how to predict outages, how to be more secure, all that sort of stuff, all the way to "How do I do a better job delighting my customers "and predicting where the next new markets are going to be?" So those are some of the areas that I'd be most interested in as an investor and really as an operator and a strategist at HPE. >> And yet you remain a little skeptical of what you're hearing about the AI and machine learning in terms of where it really truly is at right now and the opportunities that? >> Yeah, what I would says is, I think it's if it's, the technology's really exciting and developing very very quickly. That I have no question about. What I often have questions about and I hear customers questioning is is this a technology in search of a solution or is it just kind of, we're saying, "Hey this is a really cool new thing "that it can go solve everything "but I haven't thought specifically about how "to actually solve this specific problem "that exists at hand." And that's the challenge. It's ultimately, I think of it, to dig in a little deeper, it's really a product management question or problem of "Hey, do I really understand what problem "my customer's trying to solve "and am I using this tactic to do a great job?" As a quick example machine learning, those kinds of things are great for what computers do well. One thing a computer does really well is the same repetitive task thousands and thousands of times. So things like email marketing automation, or thinking about how you use a business development manager to reach, do outbound selling. That you can have a computer do a lot that imitates a human being to say, "Hey I'm going to send you an email "and try and sell you something "and get you interested in a call." I don't need to have a human being do a lot of that stuff. That to me is really straight down the fairway, really clear business problem that AI and machine learning can do a great job, bots, all that sort of stuff, can do a great job starting to have an impact on. But to think it's just going to do everything out of the box is something that you have to think about. Okay where does this tool and technology really provide the value that customers are going to see. >> Jay. We've had HPE on theCUBE lots of time. You were at Discover in London, so I think we're pretty close to where you cloud strategy is but I look at next week's Open Stack Summit, some in the industry was like, "Oh, HPE pulled out completely of Open Stack." You've got HPE Discover coming up in Vegas, soon after that, and we'll have theCUBE there also. I know John and Dave are really looking forward to it. Give our audience a little bit of an update as to where HPE is and isn't when it comes to Open Stack, specifically and just kind of cloud positioning in general. >> Yeah, right, so what I would say is I think that it's a really good question because I think there's been a lot of transition and I think that customers are still, and the market, are still trying to figure out, "Okay, what and where does, is HPE playing?" And I think that what I was talking about today in the keynote and what I think represents where we're going and what we are doing is we're really focused in on this notion of saying, "Look we want to build a set of solutions that make a customer's hybrid estate simpler" and that hybrid estate, as I describe it, cuts across proprietary virtualization technologies like VMware of like Hyper view with Microsoft, it's going to cut across openstack, it's going to cut across doctor, it's going to cut across public clouds, et cetera. And I would say that where HPE is most focused, short of, when we look at how do we help customers get better leverage and value across that whole mix of estate, what we would talk about is, we think we're moving a little bit more up stack into this sort of notion of saying we want to invest and be really great at managing across that estate, so when I was talking about areas that I'd be interested in as an adventure investor, you know, it wouldn't surprise you that HPE were really, we talked a little bit about this concept of new stack and it really is this notion of saying, we want to be great at managing a hybrid estate across public and private, across proprietary and open source. So what that generally means, what that means then, as it pertains to, okay, what are we doing with openstack what are we doing with respect to cloud founder in this case or redhat, open ship, it means we're a lot more partner centric, because our assertion is that we believe the customers love a mix of, it's not going to be an all openstack world within a data center, we think it's going to be a mix openstack's going to be part of the estate, we also think doctor is going to be part of the estate, we think VMware is going to be part of the estate, we think that's where things are going, and so if you've seen us do in terms of the work we're doing with, whether it's red hat, at some levels, whether it's SUSA, whether it's even VMware, whether it's Microsoft, whether it's doctor, we've done, worked in partnership with all of them, and I think you'll see that partner centric approach continue. We certainly are interested in helping support customers that are existing and we'll move forward with respect to openstack with cloud founder in terms of what we're doing there, but I think that, increasingly over time, there's going to be a deep alliance on partners as we look at those infrastructures, service paz layers, because we look at that and say, there's a tremendous amount of world class talent, that's off building off those distributions in the openstack communities and other big opensource communities and those areas where we can most likely partner and have those take advantage of things like our infrastructure management layer of one view, can be very well leveraged within our new stack product and project that we're working on and so on, so that's really where we're heading and how we're approaching it. >> Jay Jameson, thank you so much for joining us, it's been great. >> It's been a pleasure thank you so much. >> I'm Rebecca Knight for Stu Miniman and we will return with more of theCUBE after this.