>> 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 Las Vegas, it's theCUBE. Covering HPE Discover 2017. Brought to you by Hewlett-Packard Enterprise. >> Okay, welcome back everyone. We are here live in Las Vegas for SiliconANGLE Media's, theCUBE's exclusive coverage for three days for HPE Discover 2017. We're on day three, down to the wire here. I'm John Furrier with SiliconANGLE with my co-host Dave Vellante, my partner in crime with Wikibon. Our next guest, Ric Lewis. Software Defined Cloud Senior Vice President, President and GM of HPE, welcome back to theCUBE. >> Thank you. >> And Kate Swanborg, Senior Vice-President Tech Communications and Strategic Alliances, DreamWorks Animation. Welcome back as well. >> Thank you. >> John: Great to have you guys back. >> It's good to be here. >> So obviously DreamWorks, you guys are a big customer, Ric you are now leading up the team for Software Defined infrastructure, as we call it programmable infrastructure, a lot of great things. >> Ric: Yeah. >> Synergy we talked heavily about last year. >> Ric: Yeah. >> I kind of was geeking out with you on that in terms of all that programming ability and automation. Meg story this week was simplifying hybrid IT, which is the key part of where Software's coming in. >> That's exactly right. >> And so we got DreamWorks here, what's your vision in how that's going to happen? How do you take that simple message and put it into practice? >> Yeah so, we're completely about making hybrid IT simple, and we have three primary vectors that we're driving in order to make that happen. The first is our hyperconverged appliances that we deliver, and the second is HPE Synergy, our composable, and the third is our hybrid IT management stacked software that we have. And we've got momentum across all of those. In Hyper Converged, you guys know we acquired SimpliVity, it closed in February. Got a lot of customers on that. We had Red Bull on-stage here at Discover talking about their use case of that in their racing. It was a packed house, people completely interested in all the things we're doing in hybrid IT. That's SimpliVity. Synergy, we now have almost 400 customers that have adopted Synergy. We started shipping in volume in December, and DreamWorks Animation is one of those customers, and real excited for you to hear a little bit about how they're using it, but we had, I think we had around 10 customers from Synergy across all kinds of verticals and use cases, including service providers that were on-stage here. And the final thing is our hybrid IT management stack, a program that we introduced here at Discover called Project New Stack. So, that's what's going on in Software Defined & Cloud, it's a lot right now. >> And we had a SimpliVity customer on by the way, they were really glowing. >> Yeah. >> Great to see that happen. >> That was a great story. >> Great story, Kate, so DreamWorks, you guys have a business, you've got to put a product out there and so you got to look at technology, make it work for you, and sometimes you got to get in the weeds, there's pieces and pieces, at the end of the day you got a product to deliver. How are you guys taking some of the things that are coming out at HPE and putting them into action? What are some of the things you're doing? >> Well, I think one of the things that is often surprising to people is just how much technology we consume to make a CG feature animated film. These films take 80 million compute hours to render the images, petabytes of storage and we're typically working on five or six active films in production because they take us four or five years to make. And so we want to be able to have the capability of releasing two or three films a year, we must have simultaneous production. But of course, not all of the productions are exactly the same, and we've also got other media opportunities, whether it's television or theme park. And so, what's critical to us is that we're actually able to provision the right amount of digital resource to the right project quickly and easily so that as those creative inspirations are growing and burgeoning at the studio, we've got the resource behind it in an effortless fashion. >> And how are you making that happen with the Synergy for example, because last year we were looking at thinking well this has got a lot of potential. I mean you can do it through the orchestration, making the management work kind of takes that, abstracts away a lot of the complexity. How are you guys dealing with that, I mean how have you put that into action? >> Well, we've been working within a hybrid environment for years now, so the idea of a hybrid environment isn't new to us. The key however, is that it's labor intensive. It's time-consuming. In order to get all of the right configurations of the networking and the storage, the compute to actually work in a realtime environment for our artists, that has taken us an enormous amount of effort over the years. What we're looking for in the Synergy deployment is to reduce those weeks down to days and those days down to hours. Once we're able to do that, our engineers can go off and focus on the niche technology solutions that actually matter to the artists. And that's where we want to get the business benefit. >> And with Synergy, compute, storage and fabric all managed under the same management domain. >> That's right. >> Single API that you can get access to all those resources, so it makes it super easy. It's the world's easiest way to do infrastructure as a service, it's built into the platform natively. >> That's right, and one of the things that's been so impressive to us is that we've been working with the Pointnext team to come in and actually configure this for our environment. Everybody uses a high-performance compute environment, but nobody's is exactly the same. The configure ability of this and the customability of this to our environment has been critical, and we've seen incredible benefits from that. >> So Ric, we kind of pushed you in theCUBE last year, cause you were saying "there's nothing like this in the marketplace". We said, okay define what's different. (John laughs) One of the things you touched on was the fluid pools of infrastructure. >> Yes. >> And Kate, what you just described is bringing technology to different digital teams. >> The dynamicism if you will. >> Absolutely. >> Being able to dynamically configure the thing, yes. >> So, let's test it. I mean, it sounds like that's exactly what you're doing, and how is this different than the infrastructure that you used to have? >> So, the reason that it's different is that we've got, we've got a simply said, a single infrastructure. We've got a compute farm, we've got storage, and historically what we had to do was actually partition off certain pieces of that for certain productions in order to protect their resources. The problem with that is that any given day, particularly in a creative environment, maybe they're using all of it, maybe they need more, maybe they need less. The challenge is is that historically if they needed less we can't reprovision that to another production in order to take advantage of their inspiration and their business motivations. Now we can. Now we have the opportunity to actually have the infrastructure be as dynamic as our creative environment, and that's saying a lot. >> And you can reconfigure those resources three clicks, five minutes, you literally can deprovision -- >> Kate: That's it. >> So the old way they're like bitchin and moanin, where's the servers? >> Absolutely. >> Right. >> And running around scrambling. >> They're on order. (all laugh) >> Six weeks. No this what we're talking about. >> Yeah. >> This is about speed, right? I mean this is -- >> It absolutely is. >> Alright, so I want to ask you a question about the HPE event. You mentioned you're here. So, a lot of people go to these events and they try and extract all the action. You've heard a lot of firsts, last year was Synergy first, big claim there. We're hearing some security stuff with servers here. >> Ric: Yeah. >> As a practitioner that comes to these shows, what's your strategy when you come to an event like HPE Discover, and obviously the schmooze is going on and getting wined and dined by HP, a big customer, but like when you go in there, what are you looking for, how do you connect the dots, what tea leaves do you read, what's your strategy? >> Well, I'll tell you, one of the things that really interests me about Discover is we've got a deep partnership with Hewlett-Packard Enterprise. We're talking to Hewlett-Packard Enterprise all the time. So we might actually think that we know what's going on. It's not true, there's so much innovation happening that when we bring our team to this show, we learn things that could really help our business. I'll give you a great example, so we learned this week about SimpliVity. Now, we had sort of heard about it, but we had not taken our time out of our schedules to really understand how that could help our VM environment. Our team's sitting in one of the panels this week, and he's texting other engineers on our team going "We have got to look at this next week at DreamWorks Animation". That's the kind of environment this is. I'll tell you something else, New Stack, we're going to lean heavy into New Stack because we believe that the innovation that we're seeing in that space is really, finally going to deliver on this promise of cloud that's been out there. >> What specifically about New Stack do you like? I want to just double down on that. Is it the rule of your own, is it the flexibility, what's the big thing there? >> Well, again this is one of those things where our team today is actually writing code and creating architectures that are sort of New Stack-like, but we're having to do it, we're having to invest our own time. It's trial and error, some of the things work some of the things don't, and that time is not being spent focused on our animation productions. The fact of the matter is, here's Hewlett-Packard actually doubling down and making sure that there is going to be a robust solution that works, that we can bring into our environment. >> We're in enterprises across the world every day. We're having these conversations, and most enterprises are doing kind of a roll-your-own cloud kind've thing. >> That's right. >> They're playing with OpenStack, they're playing with Kubernetes, they're playing with all these tools, they got a bunch of custom code, but we're really what we're trying to do with New Stack is take the best of what they're all trying to do, constrain that down, take our standard Software Defined infrastructure as the base, put a stack on top of that that they can count on to do a private cloud with bridge-to-hybrid capabilities, that's standard, that ships, that delivers and has updates, so that they're not messing around with it. Their developers don't want to spend time doing that, they just want to have a private cloud installation that has hybrid capabilites and have it installed. >> This is super relevant, this is super relevant, and we call you a tech athlete because you want to go out there and deliver value to your group and actually build products, right? >> That's right. >> The film. But Dave's team just put out the True Private Cloud Report which shows on PRAM, cloud-like environment, $260 billion dollar TAM, but the notable thing is that the labor costs were non-differentiated spend is going up by a $150 billion shifting in 10 years. >> Yeah. >> That's exactly the point here that you're talking about, is my guy's aren't working on the product that they need to be building. They're doing the R&D, so the OpenStack and all these things you're talking about, they're doing the R&D. Here, you're doing the R&D, delivering the product to the customer. >> Well and when we deliver that, we're still going to leverage all of those technologies. OpenStack is a key part of New Stack. Kubernetes is a key part of New Stack, but what we're doing is pulling that together so that they don't have to curate their own private cloud. >> Kate: That's right. >> We create that, deliver it in a way that's an appliance-like way, just like we deliver Hyper Converged today, in a controlled plane that manages that hybrid IT estate and gives them visibility into public cloud uses and private cloud, and it's really going to help them a lot, and it's going to help a whole lot of other customers cause we're making it standard and easily deployable. >> Well, we've seen this story unfold over this decade, where the corner office has said I don't want to spend money on that caching and provisioning. Okay, so go to the cloud. And then IT said, well, eh, we can't do that. (laughs) Okay, and so they get in with Hewlett-Packard Enterprise and others say what's the answer? Okay, but what you've described is this horizontal infrastructure capability that you can throw any workload at. >> That's right. >> And so my question is, what does it mean for the business? Does it mean you can do things faster, you have happier animators, you can do more movies, what does it mean? >> I think it means a couple of things. First of all, opportunity cost. In our business, a new opportunity for a creative endeavor, that comes up all the time, and the key is is that you want to be able to explore that as quickly as possible. Creative ideas work out sometimes, sometimes they don't, but they key is is that if takes you time and effort and money to just explore it, you've got an opportunity cost you don't want. >> Yeah, yep. >> Something like Synergy will allow us to provision resources to new ideas and new potentials quickly enough, easily enough, and at a cost-effective measure, so that we can actually determine which creative endeavors are going to work more quickly in our environment. That's a huge deal. >> So you were missing opportunities because of the infrastructure limitations, is that right? >> That's -- >> The mockups and everything have to get done. >> That's right! >> All the CG work. >> Again, when our filmmakers have a new idea for a new sequence, a new character, those types of characters, they take tremendous amounts of resources. I often talk about the dragon in Shrek. Back in 2001 we released Shrek, and it had this beautiful, huge pink dragon in it. And she was fantastic, but frankly she was so complex and so computationally heavy, we actually had to cut her out of parts of the film because we couldn't produce the shots she was in. Fast forward a few years, and we decide to make a movie called How to Train Your Dragon that's nothing but dragons. The key is is that we never want to be in a position again where we're tabling a great creative idea because we can't resource for it. And solutions like SimpliVity and Synergy and particularly where we're going with New Stack and the ability to actually harness the cloud without having to do all the work ourselves, that's going to bring that potential to reality. >> John: And then you know, your application in this opportunity cost is for your business. Other companies have apps, right? So their opportunity costs are very similar. >> That's right. >> John: This is the classic how shadow IT was born. >> Oh, yes! >> And people want to experiment, show proof of concept. Not a PowerPoint, an actual demo of real working product. It may not have the scale there, but you get to that point of where it's workable. >> Look, every business is facing some element of this right now, and I will tell you the other reason of the two reasons that I think that this is going to make a difference. It's future-proofing our environment. >> Ric: Yeah. >> The world is so dynamic right now, things are changing so quickly. Even in our environment with media and entertainment, the world of what people want to consume and how they want to consume it and the nature of how we're looking at innovation in both filmmaking techniques, as well as new media opportunities, the key in all of that is is that we have to be dynamic in order to be future-proofed. These types of solutions give us the confidence that we're actually putting the money in the right place. It's an investment in our future. >> Earlier you mentioned Pointnext services, and the narrative from Hewlett-Packard Enterprise is my inference is it's more cloud-like. Do different types of business models. Are you seeing that? I mean, is it more than just a new name, a new brand, are you starting to see an evolution of the way in which you engage with Hewlett-Packard services? >> We absolutely are, and it's one thing to talk about strategy, but at the end of the day, you don't call up your technology and have a conversation with it, you call up people. And what we're seeing is that Hewlett-Packard Enterprise is investing in a level of expertise within the Pointnext services organization that is unparalleled. That is a massive change over the course of the last five, six, 10 years. These folks are coming into our environment now and we're finding that we are inspired by their strategies. We're not having to teach them about our business, they're actually coming in with all of these other learnings that they've gotten from all of these corporations and they're looking at our ambitions and going hey, we think we've got some ideas here. I'll tell you, our engineers are hard to impress. >> That's the truth. >> They are used to, what was your phrase, rolling it on their own. >> Yeah. >> They are used to being responsible, and they have very little tolerance for actually giving other people time within our organization. Pointnext has blown them away. We could not be doing the work that we're doing on Synergy as quickly and as effectively, installation and strategy around that without the Pointnext team. >> Well, that's the proof, that is the proof in the pudding in my opinion when your people who are, I won't say cocky, but they're kind of, sounds like they're pretty cocky. (laughs) >> Ric: Confident. >> But that you're in a, you're in media entertainment. It is one of the most disruptive, being disrupted markets right now. Smart Cities, IoT, media entertainment it's, you're the leading trend in IT right now, media entertainment. >> And in our team, there's simply no tolerance at DreamWorks Animation for technology getting in the way of the business. The fact of the matter is technology always has to be enabling the storytellers, enabling the filmmakers, enabling the business and ambition. And the key is is that our engineering team, they feel responsible to that. One of the things that we're finding with the new Hewlett-Packard Enterprise, the Pointnext team, Ric's team with the Synergy deployments, is that we actually feel like we've got a partner that can up our own game. >> John: Good. >> And we do deep beta programs with them on everything that we're doing to make sure that we're meeting that next generation of what they need. It's a fantastic partnership. >> Well Ric, congratulations on the success, and Kate thanks for sharing all the great stories and your experience DreamWorks Animation. Great to see that trend, again media entertainment, you guys are doing great stuff. We're doing our share with digital TV here, we're not a, we live on the edge of the network with theCUBE here at HP Discover. With DreamWorks Animation, I'm John Furrier, Dave Vellante, stay with us for more day three coverage here in Las Vegas at HP Discover. We'll be right back. (tech music)