>>The Cube Presents HPD Discovered 2020 >>two. >>Brought to You by H. P E >>Good >>Morning Live from the Venetian Expo Centre Lisa Martin Day Volonte Day two of the Cubes Coverage of HP Discover 22 We've had some great conversations yesterday. Today, full day, a content coming your way. We've got one of our alumni back with us. Neil MacDonald joins us, the executive vice president and general manager of Compute at HPD Neale, Great to have you back on the Cube. >>It's great to be back. And how cool is it to be able to do this face to face again instead of on zoom. Right. So >>great. Great. The keynote yesterday absolutely packed, so refreshing to see that many people eager to hear what HP has been doing. It's been three years since we've all gotten together in person. >>It is, and we've been busy. We've been busy. We've got to share some great news yesterday about some of the work that we're doing with HB Green Lake Cloud Platform and really bringing together all the capabilities across the company in a very unified, cohesive way to enable our customers to embrace that as a service experience we committed to Antonio three years ago, said we were gonna deliver everything we do as a company as a service through Green Lake and we've done it. And it's fantastic to see the momentum that that's really building and how it's breaking down the silos from different types of infrastructure and offer to really create integrated solutions for our customers. So that's been a lot of fun. >>Give us the scope of your role, your areas of responsibility. And then I'd love to hear some feedback. You've been a couple of days here around customers. What some of the feedback help us understand that. >>So at HP, I lead the Compute business, which is our largest business. That includes our hardware and software and services in the compute space. Both, um, what flows through the green late model, but also what throws flows through a traditional purchase model. So, um, that's, uh, that's about $13 billion business for the company and the core of so much of what we do, and it's a real honour to be leading a business that's such a a legacy in a franchise with with 30 years of innovation for our customers in an ocean of followers. Um and it's great to be able to start to share some of the next chapters in that with our customers this week. >>Well, it's almost half the business H p e and as we've talked about, it's an awesome time to be in the computer business. What are you seeing in terms of the trends? Obviously you're all in on as a service. But some customers say, Tell me I got a lot of capital. Yeah, absolutely. I'm fine with Capex. What are you hearing from customers in that regard? And presumably you're happy to sell them in a kind of Capex model? >>Absolutely. And in the current environment, in particular with with some of the economic headwinds that we're starting to stare down here, it's really important for organisations to continue to transform digitally but to be able to match their investments with the revenues as they're building new services and new capabilities. And for some organisations, the challenge of investing all the Capex up front is a big lift and there's quite a delay before they can really monetise all of that. So the power of HP Green Lake is enabling them to match their investment in the infrastructure on a pay as you go basis with the actual revenue they're going to generate from their new capability. So for lots of people that works. But for many other customers, it's it's much more palatable to continue in a Capex purchase, but and we're delighted to do that. A lot of my business still is in that mode. What's changing the or what are the needs, whether you're in the green light environment or in the Capex environment? Um, increasingly, the edge has become a bigger and bigger part of all of our worlds, right, the edges where we all live and work. We've all seen over the last couple of years enormous change in how that work experience and how the shape of businesses has changed, and that creates some challenges for infrastructure. So one of the things that we've announced and we shared some more details of this week is HP Green Light for Computer Ops Management, which is a location agnostic, cloud based management set up that enables you to automate and lifecycle, manage your physical compute infrastructure wherever it lies, so that might be in a distributed environment in hotel locations or out at the edge for so much more data is now being gathered and has to be computed on. So we're really excited about that. And the great thing is because it's fully integrated with HP. Green Light Cloud Platform is in there alongside the storage, alongside the connectivity alongside all the other capabilities. And we can bring those together in a very cohesive infrastructure view for our customers and then build workloads and services and tops. And that's that's really exciting. How have >>your customer conversations evolved, especially over the last couple of years as the edge has exploded? But we've been living in such uncertain times. Are you seeing a change there in the stakeholders rising up the C suite stack in terms of how do we really fine tune this? Because we've got to be competitive. We've got to be a data company. >>Well, that's so true because everybody has seen seen data as a currency and is desperately innovating and Modernising their business model, and with it, the underlying infrastructure and how they think about development. And nowhere is that truer than in enterprises that really becoming digital. First, organisations more and more companies are doing their own in house full stack, cloud native development and pivoting hard from a more traditional view of in house enterprise i t. And in that regard, >>let's >>start to look a lot like a Saas company or a service provider in terms of the needs of the infrastructure you want linear performance scaling. You want to be very sensitive not just to the cost, as you call it, but also to the environmental cost and the power efficiency. And so yesterday we were really thrilled to announce the HBP Reliant are all 300 General Live in, which is the first of our general living platforms. And that's in partnership with Ampere is the first of several things that we're gonna go do together. We're looking forward to building out the rest of our Gen 11 portfolio broadly with all of our industry partners in the in the coming quarters. But we're thrilled about the feedback that we're starting to get from some of our customers about the gains in power efficiency that they're getting from using this new server line that we've developed with amber. >>So, you know, this is an area that I'm very interested in what I write about this a lot. So tell us the critical aspects of Gen 11, where ampere fits, is it is it being used for primarily offloads and there's a core share with us. So >>if you look at the opportunity here is really as a core compute tool for organisations that are doing that in house full snack cloud native development and in that environment, being able to do it with great power efficiency at a great cost point is the great combination. The maturity of the ecosystem, um, is really, really improving to the point where is much, much more accessible for those loads? And if you consider how the infrastructure evolves underneath it, the gains that you get from power efficiency multiply. It's a TCO benefit. It's obviously an environmental benefit, and we all have much, much more to do as an industry on that journey. But every little helps, and we're really excited about being able to bring that to market. The other thing that we've done is recognising the value that we bring in the prelim experience, everything with our integrated lights out management, all of the security, the, uh, hardware root of trust, the secure boot chains, all of that Reliant family values we brought to that platform, just as we do with our others. But we've also recognised that for some of our service provider customers, there's a lot of interest in leveraging open BMC and being able to integrate the management plane and control that in house and tie it to whatever orchestrations being done in the service product. So we have full support for open BMC out of the box out of the gate with Janna Levin. And that's one of the ways that we're evolving. Are offering to meet our customers where they are, including not just the assassin service providers but the enterprises who are starting to adopt more and more of those practises as they build out digital. First, >>tell us more about the architecture. If you would kneel. I mean, so where does ampere and that partnership add value? That's incremental to what you what you might think is a traditional server architecture. How's that evolving? >>Well, it's another alternative for certain workloads in that full stack in house proud Native Development model. Um, it's another choice. It's another option and something that's very excited about >>That's the right course for the horse, for the course that was back in internal development because it's just more efficient. It's lower power, more sustainable. All those things exactly. >>And the wonderful thing for us in the uh in this juncture in the market is there is so much architectural innovation. There are so many innovators out there in the industry creating different optimizations in technology with the lesson silicon or other aspects of the system. And that gives us a much broader palette to paint from as we meet our customers' needs as their businesses involving the requirements are evolving, we can be much more creative as we bring this all together. It's a real thrill to be able to bring some of these technologies into the HP reliant space because we've always felt that compute matters. We've always known that hardware matters, and we've been leading and innovating and meeting these needs as they've evolved over the decades, and it's really fun to be able to continue to do that. Hardware still >>matters. It doesn't matter. We know that here on the Cube, talk about the influence of the customer with so much architectural innovation. There's a lot of choice for customers in every industry. When you're in customer conversations, how are you helping them make decisions? One of the key differentiators that you articulate that's going to really help them achieve outcomes that they have to achieve? >>Well, I think that's exactly as you say. It's about the outcome. Too often, I think the conversation can get down into the lower level details of component, tree and technology and our philosophy. HP has always been focused on what it is that the customer is trying to achieve. How are they trying to serve their customers? What are their needs? And then we can bring an opinionated point of view on the best way to solve that problem, whether that's recommendations on the particular Capex, infrastructure and architecture to build or increasingly, the opportunity to serve that through HP Green Lake, either as hard or as a service. Or is HP Green Lake services further up the stack? Because when you start talking about what is the outcome you're trying to achieve, you have you have a much, much better opportunity to focus the technology to serve the business and not get wrapped up in managing the infrastructure and that's what we love to do. >>So where? Give us the telescope vision. Maybe not to tell a binocular vision as to where compute is going. We're clearly seeing more diversity in silicon. Uh, it's not just a you know x 86 CPU world anymore. There's all these other supporting components new workloads coming in. Where do you you mentioned Edge, whole new ballgame ai inference sing. And that was kind of new workloads, offloads and things of that. Where do you see it all going in the next 3 to 5 years? >>I think it's gonna be really, really exciting time because more and more of our data is getting captured to the edge. And because of the experiences that companies are trying to deliver and organisations are trying to deliver that requires more and more stories are more and more compute at the edge. The edge is not just about connectivity, and again, that's why with the F B green light cloud platform, the power of bringing together the connectivity with the compute with the storage with the other capabilities in that integrated way gives us the ability to serve that combined need at the edge in a very, very compelling way. The room moves a lot of friction and a lot of work for our customers. But as you see that happen, you're going to see more and more combining of functionalities. The silos are going to start to break down between different classes of building block in the data centre, and you've already seen shifts with more and more software to find more and more hybrid offerings running across a computing substrate. But perhaps delivering storage services are analytic services or other workloads, and you're gonna see that to conduct that continue to evolve. So it's gonna be very fun over the next few years to see that, uh, that diversification and a much more opinionated set of offers for particular use cases and workloads and at our job and value is going to be simplifying that complexity because choices great right up to the point where you're paralysed by too many choices. So the wonderful thing about the world that's been done here is that we're able to bring that opinionated point of view and help guide, and again it's all about starting with what are you trying to achieve. What are the outcomes you're trying to deliver? And if you start there were having a great time helping our customers find the right path forward. >>Wow, it sounds like a fun job. Talk to me about, you know, maybe one of your favourite examples that you really think articulates the value of of the choice and the opportunities that HP can deliver to customers, maybe favourite customer example where you think we really nailed it here and they're achieving some incredible outcomes. >>Well, we're really excited about this week as I was chatting with the CEO of Cloud Sigma, which is a global ideas and pass provider who's actually been using our new HP per client moral 300 general live in Are you on purpose? Server line? And, uh, their CEO was reporting to me yesterday that based on his benchmarking, they're seeing a significant improvement in power efficiency, and that's that's that's cool to an engineer. But what's even better is the next thing, he said. That's enabling them to deliver better cost to their customers and advanced their sustainability goals, which is such a core part of what we as an industry and we as society are going to have to continue to make stepwise progress against over the next decade in order to confront those challenges in the environment so that that's that's really fulfilling, not just to see the tech, which is always interesting to an engineer but actually see the impact that it's having an enabling that outcome foreclosed signal >>so many customers, including Cloud Sigma and customers in every industry. E S G is an incredibly important initiative. And so it's vital for companies that have a core focus on E. S G to partner with companies like HP who will help them facilitate that actually demonstrate outcomes to their own users. >>It's such an important journey and it's gonna be a journey of many steps together. But I think it's one of the most critical partnerships that as an industry and as an ecosystem, we still have a lot of work to do and we have to stay focused on it every day, continuing, moving the bar. >>You >>know, to your point about E. S G. You see these E s G reports. Now that they're unbelievable, the data that is in them and the responsibility that organisations mid and large organisations have to actually publish that and be held accountable. It's actually kind of daunting, but there's a lot of investments going on there. You're absolutely right. The >>accountability is key, and it's it's it's necessary to have an accountability partner and ecosystem that can facilitate that. Exactly. >>We just published last week our Own Living Progress report this year, talking about some of the steps that we're making the commitments that we pulled in in time. Um, and we're looking forward to continue to work on that with our customers and with the industry, because it's so critical that we make faster progress together on that >>last question. What's your favourite comment that you've heard the last couple of days being back in person with about 8000 customers, partners and execs? It's >>not. It's not the common. It's the sparkles in the eyes. It's the energy. It is so great to be back together, face to face. I think we, uh, we've soldiered through a couple of tough years. We've done a lot of things remotely together, but there's no substitute for being back together, and the energy is just palpable and it's it's fantastic to be able to share some of what we've been up to in the interim and see the excitement about getting adopted by customers and partners. >>I agree the energy has been fantastic. We were talking about that yesterday. You brought it today, Neil, Thank you so much for joining us. We're excited about Antonio coming up next, going to unpack all the announcements. Really good customers. Perspective from the top of H P E for Neil and Dave Volonte. I'm Lisa Martin joins us in just a few minutes as the CEO of HP, Antonio Neary joins us next.