>> From the SiliconANGLE Media Office in Boston, Massachusetts, it's theCUBE! Now, here's your host, Dave Vellante. >> Hi everybody, welcome to the special CUBE conversation on secondary storage and data protection, which is one of the hottest topics in the business right now. Cloud, multi-cloud, bringing the Cloud experience to wherever your data lives and protecting that data driven by digital transformation. We're gonna talk about that with Patrick Osborne, the Vice President and General Manager for big data and secondary storage at HPE, good friend and CUBE alum. Great to see you again. Thanks for coming on. >> Great, thanks for having us. >> So let's start with some of those trends that I mentioned. I think, let's start with digital transformation. It's a big buzzword in the industry but it's real. I travel around, I talk to customers all the time, everybody's trying to get digital transformation right. And digital means data, data needs to be protected in new ways now, and so when we trickle down into your world, data protection, what are you seeing in terms of the impact of digital and digital transformation on data protection? >> Absolutely, great question. So the winds of change in secondary storage are blowing pretty hard right now. I think there's a couple different things that are driving that conversation. A, the specialization of people with specific backup teams, right, that's moving away, right. You're moving away from general storage administration and specialized teams to people focusing a lot of those resources now on Cloud Ops team, DevOps team, application development. So they want that activity of data protection to be automated and invisible. Like you said before, in terms of being able to re-use that data, the old days of essentially having a primary dataset and then pushing it off to some type of secondary storage which just sits there over time, is not something that customers want anymore. >> Right. >> They wanna be able to use that data, they wanna be able to generate copies of that, do test and dev, gain insight from that, being able to move that to the Cloud, for example, to be able to burst out there or do it for DR activities. So I think there's a lot of things that are happening when it comes to data that are certainly changing the requirements and expectations around secondary storage. >> So the piece I want to bring to the conversation is Cloud and I saw a stat recently that the average company, the average enterprise has, like, eight clouds, and I was thinking, sheesh, small company like ours has eight clouds, so I mean, the average enterprise must have 80 clouds when you start throwing in all the saas. >> Yeah. >> So Cloud and specifically, multi-cloud, you guys, HPEs, always been known for open platform, whatever the customer wants to do, we'll do it. So multi-cloud becomes really important. And let's expand the definition of Cloud to include private cloud on PRM, what we call True Private Cloud in the Wikibon world, but whether it's Azure, AWS, Google, dot, dot, dot, what are you guys seeing in terms of the pressure from customers to support multi... They don't want a silo, a data protection silo for each cloud, right? >> Absolutely. So they don't want silos in general, right? So I think a couple of key things that you brought up, private cloud is very interesting for customers. Whether they're gonna go on PRM or off PRM, they absolutely want to have the experience on PRM. So what we're providing customers is the ability, through APIs and seamless integration into their existing application frameworks, the ability to move data from point A to point B to point C, which could be primary all-flash, secondary systems, cloud targets, but have that be able to be automated full API set and provide a lot of those capabilities, those user stories around data protection and re-use, directly to the developers, right, and the database admins and whoever's doing this news or DevOps area. The second piece is that, like you said, everyone's gonna have multiple clouds, and what we want to do is we want to be able to give customers an intelligent experience around that. We don't necessarily need to own all the infrastructure, right, but we need to be able to facilitate and provide the visibility of where that data's gonna land, and over time, with our capabilities that we have around InfoSight, we wanna be able to do that predictably, make recommendations, have that whole population of customers learn from each other and provide some expert analysis for our customers as to where to place workloads. >> These trends, Patrick, they're all interrelated, so they're not distinct and before we get into the hard news, I wanna kinda double down on another piece of this. So you got data, you got digital, which is data, you've got new pressures on data protection, you've got the cloud-scale, a lot of diversity. We haven't even talked about the edge. That's another, sort of, piece of it. But people wanna get more out of their data protection investment. They're kinda sick of just spending on insurance. They'd like to get more value out of it. You've mentioned DevOps before. >> Yep. >> Better access to that data, certainly compliance. Things like GDPR have heightened awareness of things that you can do with the data, not just for backup, and not even just for compliance, but actually getting value out of the data. Your thoughts on that trend? >> Yeah, so from what we see for our customers, they absolutely wanna reuse data, right? So we have a ton of solutions for our customers around very low latency, high performance optimized flash storage in 3PAR and Nimble, different capabilities there, and then being able to take that data and move it off to a hybrid flash array, for example, and then do workloads on that, is something that we're doing today with our customers, natively as well as partnering with some of our ISV ecosystem. And then sort of a couple new use cases that are coming is that I want to be able to have data providence. So I wanna share some of my data, keep that in a colo but be able to apply compute resources, whether those are VMs, whether they are functions, lambda functions, on that data. So we wanna bring the compute to the data, and that's another use case that we're enabling for our customers, and then ultimately using the Cloud as a very, very low-cost, scalable and elastic tier storage for archive and retention. >> One of the things we've been talking about in theCUBE community is you hear that Bromite data is the new oil, and somebody in the community was saying, you know what? It's actually more valuable than oil. When I have oil, I can put it in my house or I can put it my car. But data, the unique attribute of data is I can use it over and over and over again. And again, that puts more pressure on data protection. All right, let's get into some of the hard news here. You've got kind of a four-pack of news that we wanna talk about. Let's start with StoreOnce. It's a platform that you guys announced several years ago. You've been evolving it regularly. What's the StoreOnce news? >> Yes, so in the secondary storage world, we've seen the movement from PBBA, so Purpose-Built Backup Appliances, either morphing into very intelligent software that runs on commodity hardware, or an integrated appliance approach, right? So you've got a integrated DR appliance that seamlessly integrates into your environment. So what we've been doing with StoreOnce, this is our 4th generation system and it's got a lot of great attributes. It has a system, right. It's available in a rote form factor at different capacities. It's also available as a software-defined version so you can run that on PRM, you can run it off PRM. It scales up to multiple petabytes in a software-only version. So we've got a couple different use cases for it, but what I think is one of the key things is that we're providing a very integrated experience for customers who are 3PAR Nimble customers. So it allows you to essentially federate your primary all-flash storage with secondary. And then we actually provide a number of use cases to go out to the Cloud as well. Very easy to use, geared towards the application admin, very integrative. >> So it's bigger, better, faster, and you've got this integration, a confederation as you called it, across different platforms. What's the key technical enabler there? >> Yeah, so we have a really extensible platform for software that we call Recovery Manager Central. Essentially, it provides a number of different use cases and user stories around copy data management. So it's gonna allow you to take application integrated snapshots. It's gonna allow you to do that either in the application framework, so if you're a DVA and you do Arman, you could do it in there, or if you have your own custom applications, you can write to the API. So it allows you to do snapshots, full clones, it'll allow you to do DR, so one box to another similar system, it'll allow you to go from primary to secondary, it'll allow you to archive out to the Cloud, and then all of that in reverse, right? So you can pull all of that data back and it'll give you visibility across all those assets. So, the past where you, as a customer, did all this on your own, right, bought on horizontal lines? We're giving a customer, based on a set of outcomes and applications, a complete vertically-oriented solution. >> Okay, so that's the, really, second piece of hard news. >> Yeah. >> Recovery Manager Central, RMC, 6.0, right-- >> Yeah. >> Is the release that we're on? And that's copy data management essentially-- >> Absolutely. >> Is what you're talking about. It's your catalog, right, so your tech underneath that, and you're applying that now across the portfolio, right? >> Absolutely. So, we're extending that from... We've had, for the past year, that ability to do the copy data management directly from 3PAR. We're extending that to provide that for Nimble. Right, so for Nimble customers that want to use all-flash, they want to use hybrid flash arrays from Nimble, you can go to secondary storage in StoreOnce and then out to the Cloud. >> Okay, and that's what 6.0 enables-- >> Yeah, exactly. >> That Nimble piece and then out to the Cloud. Okay, third piece of news is an ecosystem announcement with Commvault. Take us through that. >> Yeah, so we understand at HPE, given the fact that we're very, very focused on hybrid Cloud and we have a lot of customers that have been our customers for a long time, none of these opportunities are greenfield, right, at the end of the day. So your customers are, they have to integrate with existing solutions, and in a lot of cases, they have some partners for data protection. So one of the things that we've done with this ecosystem is made very public our APIs and how to integrate our systems. So we're storage people, we are data management folks, we do big data, we also do infrastructure. So we know how to manage the infrastructure, move data very seamlessly between primary, secondary, and the Cloud. And what we do is, we open up those APIs in those use cases to all of our partners and our customers. So, in that, we're announcing a number of integrations with Commvault, so they're gonna be integrating with our de-duplication and compression framework, as well as being able to program to what we call Cloud Bank, right? So, we'll be able to, in effect, integrate with Commvault with our primary storage, be able to do rapid recovery from StoreOnce in a number of backup use cases, and then being able to go out to the cloud, all managed through customers' Commvault interface. >> All right, so if I hear you correctly, you've just gotta double click on the Commvault integration. It's not just a go-to-market setup. It's deeper engineering and integration that you guys are doing. >> Absolutely. >> Okay, great. And then, of course the fourth piece is around, so your bases are loaded here, the fourth piece is around the Cloud economics, Cloud pricing model. Your GreenLake model, the utility pricing has gotten a lot of traction. When we're at HPE Discover, customers talking about it, you guys have been leaders there. Talk about GreenLake and how that model fits into this. >> Yeah, so, in the technology talk track we talk about, essentially, how to make this simple and how to make it scalable. At the end of the day, on the buying pattern side, customers expect elasticity, right? So, what we're providing for our customers is when they want to do either a specific integration or implementation of one of those components from a technology perspective, we can provide that. If they're doing a complete re-architecture and want to understand how I can essentially use secondary storage better and I wanna take advantage of all that data that I have sitting in there, I can provide that whole experience to customers as a service, right? So, the primary storage, your secondary storage, the Cloud capacity, even some of the ISV partner software that we provide, I can take that as an entire, vetted solution, with reference architectures and the expertise to implement, and I can give that to a customer in an OpEx as a service elastic purchasing model. And that is very unique for HPE and that's what we've gone to market with GreenLake, and we're gonna be providing more solutions like that, but in this case, we're announcing the fact that you can buy that whole experience, backup as a service, data protection as a service, through GreenLake from HPE. >> So how does that work, Patrick, practically speaking? A customer will, what, commit to some level of capacity, let's say, as an example, and then HPE will put in some extra headroom if, in fact, that's needed, you maybe sit down with the customer and do some kind of capacity planning, or how does that actually work, practically speaking? >> Yeah, absolutely. So we work with customers on the architecture, right, up front. So we have a set of vetted architectures. We try to avoid snowflakes, right, at the end of the day. We want to talk to customers around outcomes. So if a customer is trying to reach outcome XYZ, we come with a recommendation on how to do that. And what we can do is, we don't have very high up-front commitments and it's very elastic in the way that we approach the purchasing experience. So we're able to fit those modules in. And then we've made some number of acquisitions over the last couple years, right? So, on the advisory side, we have Cloud Technology Partners. We come in and talk about how do you do a hybrid cloud backup as a service, right? So we can advise customers on how to do that and build that into the experience. We acquired CloudCruiser, right? So we have the billing and the monitoring and everything that gets very, very granular on how you use that service, and that goes into how we bill customers on a per-metric usage format. And so we're able to package all of that up and we have, this is a kind of a little-known fact, very, very high NPS score for HPE financial services. Right, so the combination of our point next services, advisory, financial services, really puts a lot of meat behind GreenLake as a really good customer experience around elasticity. >> Okay, now all this stuff is gonna be available calendar Q4 of 2018, correct? >> Correct. >> Okay, so if you've seen videos like this before, we like to talk about what it is, how it works, and then we like to bring it home with the business impact. So thinking about these four announcements, and you can drill deeper on any one that you like, but I'd like to start, at least, holistically, what's the business impact of all of this? Obviously, you've got Cloud, we talked about some of the trends up front, but what are you guys telling customers is the real ROI? >> So, I think the big ROI is it moves secondary storage from a TCO conversation to an ROI conversation. Right, so instead of selling customers a solution where you're gonna have data that sits there waiting for something to happen, I'm giving customers a solution that's consumed as a service to be able to mine and utilize that secondary data, right? Whether it's for simple tasks like patch verification, application rollouts, things like that, and actually lowering the cost of your primary storage in doing that, which is usually pretty expensive from a storage perspective. I'm also helping customers save time, right? By providing these integrated experiences from primary to secondary to Cloud and making that automatic, I do help customers save quite a bit in OpEx from an operator perspective. And they can take those resources and move them on to higher impact projects like DevOps, CloudOps, things of that nature. That's a big impact from a customer perspective. >> So there's a CapEx to OpEx move for those customers that want to take advantage of GreenLake. [Patrick] Yep. >> So certain CFOs will like that story. But I think the other piece that, to me anyway, is most important is, especially in this world of digital transformation, I know it's a buzzword, but it's real. When you go to talk to people, they don't wanna do the heavy lifting of infrastructure management, the day-to-day infrastructure management. A lot of mid-size customers, they just don't have the resources to do it anymore. >> Correct. >> And they're under such pressure to digitize, every company wants to become a software company. Benioff talks about that, Satya Nadella talks about that, Antonio talks about digital transformation. And so it's on CEOs' minds. They don't want to be paying people for these mundane tasks. They really wannna shift them to these digital transformation initiatives and drive more business value. >> Absolutely. So you said it best, right, we wanna drive the customer experience to focusing on high-value things that'll enable their digital transformation. So, as a vision, what we're gonna keep on providing, and you've seen that with InfoSight on Nimble, InfoSight for 3PAR, and our vision around AI for the data center, these tasks around data protection, they're repeatable tasks, how to protect data, how to move data, how to mine that data. So if we can provide recommendations and some predictive analytics and experiences to the customers around this, and essentially abstract that and just have the customers focus on defining their SLA, and we're worried about delivering that SLA, then that's a huge win for us and our customers. And that's our vision, that's what we're gonna be providing them. >> Yeah, automation is the key. You've got some tools in the toolkit to help do that and it's just gonna escalate from here. It feels like we're on the early part of the S-curve and it's just gonna really spike. >> Absolutely. >> All right, Patrick. Hey, thanks for coming in and taking us through this news, and congratulations on getting this stuff done and we'll be watching the marketplace. Thank you. >> Great. Kudos to the team, great announcement, and we look forward to working with you guys again. >> All right, thanks for watching, everybody. We'll see you next time. This is Dave Vellante on theCUBE. (gentle music)

>> From the SiliconANGLE Media Office in Boston, Massachusetts, it's theCUBE! Now, here's your host, Dave Vellante. >> Hi everybody, welcome to the special CUBE conversation on secondary storage and data protection, which is one of the hottest topics in the business right now. Cloud, multi-cloud, bringing the Cloud experience to wherever your data lives and protecting that data driven by digital transformation. We're gonna talk about that with Patrick Osborne, the Vice President and General Manager for big data and secondary storage at HPE, good friend and CUBE alum. Great to see you again. Thanks for coming on. >> Great, thanks for having us. >> So let's start with some of those trends that I mentioned. I think, let's start with digital transformation. It's a big buzzword in the industry but it's real. I travel around, I talk to customers all the time, everybody's trying to get digital transformation right. And digital means data, data needs to be protected in new ways now, and so when we trickle down into your world, data protection, what are you seeing in terms of the impact of digital and digital transformation on data protection? >> Absolutely, great question. So the winds of change in secondary storage are blowing pretty hard right now. I think there's a couple different things that are driving that conversation. A, the specialization of people with specific backup teams, right, that's moving away, right. You're moving away from general storage administration and specialized teams to people focusing a lot of those resources now on Cloud Ops team, DevOps team, application development. So they want that activity of data protection to be automated and invisible. Like you said before, in terms of being able to re-use that data, the old days of essentially having a primary dataset and then pushing it off to some type of secondary storage which just sits there over time, is not something that customers want anymore. >> Right. >> They wanna be able to use that data, they wanna be able to generate copies of that, do test and dev, gain insight from that, being able to move that to the Cloud, for example, to be able to burst out there or do it for DR activities. So I think there's a lot of things that are happening when it comes to data that are certainly changing the requirements and expectations around secondary storage. >> So the piece I want to bring to the conversation is Cloud and I saw a stat recently that the average company, the average enterprise has, like, eight clouds, and I was thinking, sheesh, small company like ours has eight clouds, so I mean, the average enterprise must have 80 clouds when you start throwing in all the sass. >> Yeah. >> So Cloud and specifically, multi-cloud, you guys, HPEs, always been known for open platform, whatever the customer wants to do, we'll do it. So multi-cloud becomes really important. And let's expand the definition of Cloud to include private cloud on PRM, what we call True Private Cloud in the Wikibon world, but whether it's Azure, AWS, Google, dot, dot, dot, what are you guys seeing in terms of the pressure from customers to support multi... They don't want a silo, a data protection silo for each cloud, right? >> Absolutely. So they don't want silos in general, right? So I think a couple of key things that you brought up, private cloud is very interesting for customers. Whether they're gonna go on PRM or off PRM, they absolutely want to have the experience on PRM. So what we're providing customers is the ability, through APIs and seamless integration into their existing application frameworks, the ability to move data from point A to point B to point C, which could be primary all-flash, secondary systems, cloud targets, but have that be able to be automated full API set and provide a lot of those capabilities, those user stories around data protection and re-use, directly to the developers, right, and the database admins and whoever's doing this news or DevOps area. The second piece is that, like you said, everyone's gonna have multiple clouds, and what we want to do is we want to be able to give customers an intelligent experience around that. We don't necessarily need to own all the infrastructure, right, but we need to be able to facilitate and provide the visibility of where that data's gonna land, and over time, with our capabilities that we have around InfoSight, we wanna be able to do that predictably, make recommendations, have that whole population of customers learn from each other and provide some expert analysis for our customers as to where to place workloads. >> These trends, Patrick, they're all interrelated, so they're not distinct and before we get into the hard news, I wanna kinda double down on another piece of this. So you got data, you got digital, which is data, you've got new pressures on data protection, you've got the cloud-scale, a lot of diversity. We haven't even talked about the edge. That's another, sort of, piece of it. But people wanna get more out of their data protection investment. They're kinda sick of just spending on insurance. They'd like to get more value out of it. You've mentioned DevOps before. >> Yep. >> Better access to that data, certainly compliance. Things like GDPR have heightened awareness of things that you can do with the data, not just for backup, and not even just for compliance, but actually getting value out of the data. Your thoughts on that trend? >> Yeah, so from what we see for our customers, they absolutely wanna reuse data, right? So we have a ton of solutions for our customers around very low latency, high performance optimized flash storage in 3PAR and Nimble, different capabilities there, and then being able to take that data and move it off to a hybrid flash array, for example, and then do workloads on that, is something that we're doing today with our customers, natively as well as partnering with some of our ISV ecosystem. And then sort of a couple new use cases that are coming is that I want to be able to have data providence. So I wanna share some of my data, keep that in a colo but be able to apply compute resources, whether those are VMs, whether they are functions, lambda functions, on that data. So we wanna bring the compute to the data, and that's another use case that we're enabling for our customers, and then ultimately using the Cloud as a very, very low-cost, scalable and elastic tier storage for archive and retention. >> One of the things we've been talking about in theCUBE community is you hear that Bromite data is the new oil, and somebody in the community was saying, you know what? It's actually more valuable than oil. When I have oil, I can put it in my house or I can put it my car. But data, the unique attribute of data is I can use it over and over and over again. And again, that puts more pressure on data protection. All right, let's get into some of the hard news here. You've got kind of a four-pack of news that we wanna talk about. Let's start with StoreOnce. It's a platform that you guys announced several years ago. You've been evolving it regularly. What's the StoreOnce news? >> Yes, so in the secondary storage world, we've seen the movement from PBBA, so Purpose-Built Backup Appliances, either morphing into very intelligent software that runs on commodity hardware, or an integrated appliance approach, right? So you've got a integrated DR appliance that seamlessly integrates into your environment. So what we've been doing with StoreOnce, this is our 4th generation system and it's got a lot of great attributes. It has a system, right. It's available in a rote form factor at different capacities. It's also available as a software-defined version so you can run that on PRM, you can run it off PRM. It scales up to multiple petabytes in a software-only version. So we've got a couple different use cases for it, but what I think is one of the key things is that we're providing a very integrated experience for customers who are 3PAR Nimble customers. So it allows you to essentially federate your primary all-flash storage with secondary. And then we actually provide a number of use cases to go out to the Cloud as well. Very easy to use, geared towards the application admin, very integrative. >> So it's bigger, better, faster, and you've got this integration, a confederation as you called it, across different platforms. What's the key technical enabler there? >> Yeah, so we have a really extensible platform for software that we call Recovery Manager Central. Essentially, it provides a number of different use cases and user stories around copy data management. So it's gonna allow you to take application integrated snapshots. It's gonna allow you to do that either in the application framework, so if you're a DVA and you do Arman, you could do it in there, or if you have your own custom applications, you can write to the API. So it allows you to do snapshots, full clones, it'll allow you to do DR, so one box to another similar system, it'll allow you to go from primary to secondary, it'll allow you to archive out to the Cloud, and then all of that in reverse, right? So you can pull all of that data back and it'll give you visibility across all those assets. So, the past where you, as a customer, did all this on your own, right, bought on horizontal lines? We're giving a customer, based on a set of outcomes and applications, a complete vertically-oriented solution. >> Okay, so that's the, really, second piece of hard news. >> Yeah. >> Recovery Manager Central, RMC, 6.0, right-- >> Yeah. >> Is the release that we're on? And that's copy data management essentially-- >> Absolutely. >> Is what you're talking about. It's your catalog, right, so your tech underneath that, and you're applying that now across the portfolio, right? >> Absolutely. So, we're extending that from... We've had, for the past year, that ability to do the copy data management directly from 3PAR. We're extending that to provide that for Nimble. Right, so for Nimble customers that want to use all-flash, they want to use hybrid flash arrays from Nimble, you can go to secondary storage in StoreOnce and then out to the Cloud. >> Okay, and that's what 6.0 enables-- >> Yeah, exactly. >> That Nimble piece and then out to the Cloud. Okay, third piece of news is an ecosystem announcement with Commvault. Take us through that. >> Yeah, so we understand at HPE, given the fact that we're very, very focused on hybrid Cloud and we have a lot of customers that have been our customers for a long time, none of these opportunities are greenfield, right, at the end of the day. So your customers are, they have to integrate with existing solutions, and in a lot of cases, they have some partners for data protection. So one of the things that we've done with this ecosystem is made very public our APIs and how to integrate our systems. So we're storage people, we are data management folks, we do big data, we also do infrastructure. So we know how to manage the infrastructure, move data very seamlessly between primary, secondary, and the Cloud. And what we do is, we open up those APIs in those use cases to all of our partners and our customers. So, in that, we're announcing a number of integrations with Commvault, so they're gonna be integrating with our de-duplication and compression framework, as well as being able to program to what we call Cloud Bank, right? So, we'll be able to, in effect, integrate with Commvault with our primary storage, be able to do rapid recovery from StoreOnce in a number of backup use cases, and then being able to go out to the cloud, all managed through customers' Commvault interface. >> All right, so if I hear you correctly, you've just gotta double click on the Commvault integration. It's not just a go-to-market setup. It's deeper engineering and integration that you guys are doing. >> Absolutely. >> Okay, great. And then, of course the fourth piece is around, so your bases are loaded here, the fourth piece is around the Cloud economics, Cloud pricing model. Your GreenLake model, the utility pricing has gotten a lot of traction. When we're at HPE Discover, customers talking about it, you guys have been leaders there. Talk about GreenLake and how that model fits into this. >> Yeah, so, in the technology talk track we talk about, essentially, how to make this simple and how to make it scalable. At the end of the day, on the buying pattern side, customers expect elasticity, right? So, what we're providing for our customers is when they want to do either a specific integration or implementation of one of those components from a technology perspective, we can provide that. If they're doing a complete re-architecture and want to understand how I can essentially use secondary storage better and I wanna take advantage of all that data that I have sitting in there, I can provide that whole experience to customers as a service, right? So, the primary storage, your secondary storage, the Cloud capacity, even some of the ISV partner software that we provide, I can take that as an entire, vetted solution, with reference architectures and the expertise to implement, and I can give that to a customer in an OpEx as a service elastic purchasing model. And that is very unique for HPE and that's what we've gone to market with GreenLake, and we're gonna be providing more solutions like that, but in this case, we're announcing the fact that you can buy that whole experience, backup as a service, data protection as a service, through GreenLake from HPE. >> So how does that work, Patrick, practically speaking? A customer will, what, commit to some level of capacity, let's say, as an example, and then HPE will put in some extra headroom if, in fact, that's needed, you maybe sit down with the customer and do some kind of capacity planning, or how does that actually work, practically speaking? >> Yeah, absolutely. So we work with customers on the architecture, right, up front. So we have a set of vetted architectures. We try to avoid snowflakes, right, at the end of the day. We want to talk to customers around outcomes. So if a customer is trying to reach outcome XYZ, we come with a recommendation on how to do that. And what we can do is, we don't have very high up-front commitments and it's very elastic in the way that we approach the purchasing experience. So we're able to fit those modules in. And then we've made some number of acquisitions over the last couple years, right? So, on the advisory side, we have Cloud Technology Partners. We come in and talk about how do you do a hybrid cloud backup as a service, right? So we can advise customers on how to do that and build that into the experience. We acquired CloudCruiser, right? So we have the billing and the monitoring and everything that gets very, very granular on how you use that service, and that goes into how we bill customers on a per-metric usage format. And so we're able to package all of that up and we have, this is a kind of a little-known fact, very, very high NPS score for HPE financial services. Right, so the combination of our point next services, advisory, financial services, really puts a lot of meat behind GreenLake as a really good customer experience around elasticity. >> Okay, now all this stuff is gonna be available calendar Q4 of 2018, correct? >> Correct. >> Okay, so if you've seen videos like this before, we like to talk about what it is, how it works, and then we like to bring it home with the business impact. So thinking about these four announcements, and you can drill deeper on any one that you like, but I'd like to start, at least, holistically, what's the business impact of all of this? Obviously, you've got Cloud, we talked about some of the trends up front, but what are you guys telling customers is the real ROI? >> So, I think the big ROI is it moves secondary storage from a TCO conversation to an ROI conversation. Right, so instead of selling customers a solution where you're gonna have data that sits there waiting for something to happen, I'm giving customers a solution that's consumed as a service to be able to mine and utilize that secondary data, right? Whether it's for simple tasks like patch verification, application rollouts, things like that, and actually lowering the cost of your primary storage in doing that, which is usually pretty expensive from a storage perspective. I'm also helping customers save time, right? By providing these integrated experiences from primary to secondary to Cloud and making that automatic, I do help customers save quite a bit in OpEx from an operator perspective. And they can take those resources and move them on to higher impact projects like DevOps, CloudOps, things of that nature. That's a big impact from a customer perspective. >> So there's a CapEx to OpEx move for those customers that want to take advantage of GreenLake. [Patrick] Yep. >> So certain CFOs will like that story. But I think the other piece that, to me anyway, is most important is, especially in this world of digital transformation, I know it's a buzzword, but it's real. When you go to talk to people, they don't wanna do the heavy lifting of infrastructure management, the day-to-day infrastructure management. A lot of mid-size customers, they just don't have the resources to do it anymore. >> Correct. >> And they're under such pressure to digitize, every company wants to become a software company. Benioff talks about that, Satya Nadella talks about that, Antonio talks about digital transformation. And so it's on CEOs' minds. They don't want to be paying people for these mundane tasks. They really wannna shift them to these digital transformation initiatives and drive more business value. >> Absolutely. So you said it best, right, we wanna drive the customer experience to focusing on high-value things that'll enable their digital transformation. So, as a vision, what we're gonna keep on providing, and you've seen that with InfoSight on Nimble, InfoSight for 3PAR, and our vision around AI for the data center, these tasks around data protection, they're repeatable tasks, how to protect data, how to move data, how to mine that data. So if we can provide recommendations and some predictive analytics and experiences to the customers around this, and essentially abstract that and just have the customers focus on defining their SLA, and we're worried about delivering that SLA, then that's a huge win for us and our customers. And that's our vision, that's what we're gonna be providing them. >> Yeah, automation is the key. You've got some tools in the toolkit to help do that and it's just gonna escalate from here. It feels like we're on the early part of the S-curve and it's just gonna really spike. >> Absolutely. >> All right, Patrick. Hey, thanks for coming in and taking us through this news, and congratulations on getting this stuff done and we'll be watching the marketplace. Thank you. >> Great. Kudos to the team, great announcement, and we look forward to working with you guys again. >> All right, thanks for watching, everybody. We'll see you next time. This is Dave Vellante on theCUBE. (gentle music)

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