(upbeat music) >> Welcome to "The Power of And," theCUBE's coverage of the HPE Aruba Pensando announcement. Antonio Neri is here and John Chambers to help us set up the day. Guys, great to see you. Thanks so much for coming on. >> Yeah, thanks for having us today. >> Dave, it's going to be fun. >> It sure is. So two years ago, you guys might recall, we were in the Goldman Sachs offices, overlooking Manhattan, and that's when you announced the investment in Pensando, the relationship. Two years, it goes by fast. How's it going? >> Yeah, definitely two years have gone by fast, and a lot has happened, right? A lot has happened since then. What I will say first and foremost, the partnership has grown stronger, much stronger, because as John and I and the team worked together, we validated the vision, the vision that ultimately the world would be way more distributed, that Edge to Cloud architectures would be required, and the original idea that John had with the Pensando team partnered with us to bring that Cloud experience to the Edge. It got stronger and stronger and stronger. At the same time, we also introduced new joint offers with the Pensando Silicon Software with our HP ProLiant servers. And since then we have learned quite a bit, right? So, which inform us what the next steps should be. And that's why we're here today, to talk about not just the work we have done around the distributive services cards, as we talk about it in the past, but now the distributed services switching, which we believe is another market in transition opportunity for us to disrupt as we go forward. >> So, John speaking of transitions, you've seen a number of industry transitions, dating back to my East Coast days. >> Yes. >> But so what was the wave, or the waves that you saw, that sort of led you to this new venture, to the partnership with HPE? >> Well, the exciting part is Antonio and I can almost finish each other's sentences. You compete against market transitions enabled by new technology. The biggest transition of all is the clouds moving to the Edge, the computes move into the edge, your storage security, your software applications, et cetera. And we saw this wave together, and when you talk about what's changed in the last two years, I think it exceeded both of our expectations. How our teams worked together? We outlined audacious goals of a hundred million in terms of orders within the first two years. And we hit and exceeded that. We said, we're going to be in a billion; after three years after we had a hundred million, we're on track for that. And if you watch our dream of democratizing the cloud, giving the capability for any major hyper scaler to compete with an Amazon web services or generally with them, and now bringing it down to any enterprise or any government agency be able to do it and the ability to do this as a team is what's unheard of. Innovation is hard to move with speed. Two companies to move together with innovation and more focused on the outcome than anything else. Our teams work even better than I thought we could. And I think you're seeing today, the next major phase that we make, where we take these concepts and we're going to revolutionize the switching industry. In every 10 to 12 years is a chance for a major change. And you either get through that and often the incumbents don't change. We're going to get through this, we think very, very well and we're again setting a tremendous challenge to the market with, literally software and Silicon and programmability throughout the whole architecture, and results that I think even surprised our engineers; a hundred times the scale of the nearest competitor in the market today at 10 times the performance at one third the total cost of ownership. Antonio and I can't even sell that with that type of capability. Our teams are functioning well. It's that ability to see markets and say, how does your partner win, that culture is so important to us in terms of the direction. >> So to chime in on this because you for years have been talking about the basically redefining cloud, not just a remote set of services, somewhere out there in the cloud, but connecting to on-prem and hybrid, multi-cloud out to the Edge. Is that the big wave that, that you see here? Is that what you're riding? >> Definitely one component of the wave. I think the other part is, remember what I said in 2018, when I became CEO of Hewlett Packard Enterprise, that the enterprise of the future will be a centric cloud enabled and data driven. And through the unfortunate events of the global pandemic, right? That has been validated, right? We live now in a much more distributed and enterprise than ever before. The original architectures that John obviously pioneered for, for the case, you know, you have the data center and you have the campus and the branch, now you have these extension called the micro branch. The micro branch is our homes, our home offices, right? But now what happens is that the cloud obviously scared to stay because it's all about speed and agility, but it's also important that we define cloud correctly, which is an experience that we should bring to, for all the applications and data. And what we see that the vast majority of the data is created at the Edge, where we live and work. Here we are, you and I, and John having a conversation. There is cameras everywhere taping this, there's a lot of bits being created. And those bits, I hope have value when people watch this. But, but to me, that's the, the big opportunity to really disrupt the cloud as we know it and bring that set of capabilities closer to where the action is. The second part of this, which I think is important is that what we saw with the consumption of IT, and this is where, you know, we have a, a vision to become the Edge supply platform that you can consume as a service. And that's our HPE Green Lake offer. But the- as a service offerings taken off to a level we have not imagined. And it's not just the fact that the public cloud is there, it's everything, whether it's in your own premises or at the Edge. And that's why I'm so excited about the partnership with Pensando to disrupt this age to cloud architectures, with the know how that we have, our go to market in the, as a service model to accelerate those markets in transition. >> You take the excitement of a company that's reinventing itself. And you think about HPE, they alerted the original Silicon Valley garage startup. So much of what is great about the Valley, they brought Lou Platt, who was the CEO at HP. When I came to Silicon Valley, nobody knew what Cisco was, much less the internet. They thought we were a food company. I called up Lou and I said, Lou I need help. I don't know the Valley, teach me about how you've been successful. He not only met with me once, he met with me for three years. At the end of the three years, he said, I said to him, now we're really cooking this time! We were growing out of control, becoming the most valuable company in the world for a while. And I said, Lou, what can I do to pay the HPE back? And he said, very simply, "John, give back to the next generation." That stuck with me forever. The values of a company, the leaders, whether it was Lou, whether it's original leaders of the company, or Antonio, their cultures and values are so much aligned. So we have a chance to change a market together. I was all in and, you know, while we competed a little bit, in, in the past, it was very little, and now we have a chance to change a whole market and take on the giants, and perhaps really disrupt a whole industry. That gets exciting. We've got a team that has built a $8 billion products per year, eight different times. Now we're going to do it a ninth and maybe a 10th together. And to share that is truly exciting with a world-class team at HPE. >> So let's talk a little bit about HPE, Aruba, and Pensando, where you guys are going. You started sort of at the core two years ago. And I think I, you know, I think Aruba, in some regards, is misunderstood. I mean, you're basically building a major cloud strategy around that. It stretches to the edge. So what is it that you are trying to disrupt here? Maybe give us a little insight as to the industry transitions that you're seeing. >> Antonio: Yeah. So first of all, Aruba is doing incredibly well, I mean, if you see the latest results grow in between 25 and 30% on a year over year basis. We have improved profitability, but what I'm really excited about is that our value proposition, our mobile first cloud first approach, is resonated with customers when it comes down to connectivity and analytics. So to me, that's an incredible value. And in order to become a cloud company, we leverage the Aruba infrastructure that was developed over the years to build a subscription based model to connectivity and extended all the way to what we call the cloud, which for us is the core business there. Now, with John and his team, we are changing the architectures around those, those components of there, there's the solution. So, Aruba has been incredible foundational, not only to grow the company, but also to give us the foundation technology to become that Edge to cloud company. So what we're doing with John, we have taken now this new architecture to the next level of the entire solution. So we started with the server business. We integrated these distributed service cards, and now we are taking it to their rack level architecture and eventually to the, you know, data center architecture in a true Edge to the cloud environment. And that means we are introducing the distributed service switching technology, which is, again, this is a joint innovation between the Aruba IP and the Pensando IP, which we think, which are, will change, again every 10 to 12 years, that switching market opportunity. >> And it's fun to take on the big competitors and bring them down, which I love doing. And it's also unique to see how fast our teams are moving together. Our cultures are very similar, and we set audacious goals for our team, and so far, they've been exceeding them. >> So you know a little bit about this networking market. Is this a, is this a new category of switch? Is this, how unique is this? >> John: Well, I think it's all the above. It's, Antonio used the word "platform and architectures" and distributed service platform that now is going into switching as well. It's ability to redefine everything with software in Silicon. And that's a lot different than what the industry seen before, and to move with speed in terms of software defined programmability everywhere, everything automated and simple, which makes it so easy to start- how simple? All you do is plug a server into the switch, and you look at what we're doing together already with the HPE servers and how you literally add value on top of it with the distributed services card and platform. So you see it all coming together. How big could it be? I think it will be the next generation, and truly not just the cloud moving to the Edge, but internet working security, how load balancing all comes together. That really is going to change an industry group. So I think it's going to be the next big product for the whole segment of the industry. >> Antonio: Yeah, and I think it will bring tremendous value from the company. Obviously we love the technology and this markets, but ultimately think about from the customer's perspective is less CapEx because they don't need to add log balancing, all these things that add costs, and actually friction points and point of failure, but also OPEX, because to the point that John said, right, it's all about simplicity and automation and awareness around the, the application. And also the, the infrastructure that ultimately we want this to be autonomous and intelligent, therefore is an OPEX reduction on the run time too. Go ahead, John. >> It's in many ways, future proof. It's an architecture for the future, not for the past. When you get your peers that talk about scale in low single digit thousands, and we talk about scale in millions, you talk about performance that literally is 10 fold, in order of magnitude better. And you build an architecture that allows the market to go where they want with ease of use for your customers. That's about innovation with speed. They can leave no small company or no large company probably could do by themselves. I think very few people in industry would have had the courage to do it, but probably not the culture to really make it work well. >> Dave: Talk About HPE, Pensando. I mean, you've got small company, big company, and you guys have been at this now for a couple of years. It seems to be gaining momentum. That, that is in an, in and of itself unique. Why HPE and Pensando? >> Antonio: Well, I think, again, it start with a thesis that John and I share about the future. As John said, it takes courage to do these things, and ultimately culture is everything. Well, we jointly realize that the way we think, the way we work is very similar. These are two companies that are very engineering driven in everything they do, but they put the customer at the center of how we think about the future. And it has been amazing to me. In fact, I, we connect every handful of weeks to check where we are and I keep, you know, in many ways the larger company, in many ways is pushing the smaller company to go further and faster. And to me, it's all about speed. >> So when you think about what makes a strategic partnership work, it has to be really material, both sides. In other words, it has to change an industry. HPE has done an amazing job. You've doubled your profits in the last four years, and you're reinventing yourself again and again, but it's a common vision of where the market's going to go, as Antonio articulated very well when it goes to the Edge, and Green Lake is going to be your delivery vehicle for it. It's about bringing together all these technologies into one, not individual appliances or approaches. You do load balance and you do security. You do scale and you do networking. And it's about the best of each company saying, how do you help the other company be successful? When our teams come together, other than their accents, you usually can't tell who's from HPE and who's from Pensando. >> Dave: How should we be evaluating the progress over the next several quarters, months, years? What are the, sort of, benchmarks we should be looking for? >> Well, I think the most important metric is customer relevance, in my mind. The financials generally tend to follow that because if you are relevant, is, is, you know, we were talking to all the teams, you know, are you important or are you strategic, right? Generally we are very important. What we do matters, but we want to be strategic. And I think this joint innovation will catapult us to be way more strategic in everything we do. So it's customer relevancy. Obviously from the financial perspective, we both have an idea to create multi-billion dollar businesses, otherwise, why do it, right? So, and the market is huge, is huge. I mean, you know that obviously we, we, we are living in an amazing time where data is exploding everywhere, right? And I think this is just a starting point, right? So we obviously start with an idea and a thought and a specific focus. But if you think about the next generation is create data fabrics that are secure, and then you can run these models with AI and machine learning at scale. The network fabric becomes the core of everything you do, right? >> So think about it the way you asked the question. It's been two years as of the announcement that we're making jointly. Since we made the announcement two years ago, we've over exceeded every expectation. It starts with the customers, as you said, Antonio, how many of the large customers do we have two years from now? Are we in the same leadership position like we are with the first-generation of the distributed services platform? And have we got a number of the very largest accounts in the world committed to us? And are we still one to two generations ahead of our nearest competitor two years from now like we are today with our current card capability and platform capabilities. >> Dave: Pretty cool partnership. Thanks so much guys, for helping us kick off the Power of And. Really appreciate it. >> Thank you, Dave. >> All right. Keep it right there. We've got a ton of content. 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