>> Announcer: Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE. Covering HPE Discover 2017. Brought to you by Hewlett-Packard Enterprise. >> Okay, welcome back everyone. We're here live in Las Vegas for HPE, Hewlett-Packard Enterprise, Discover 2017. I'm John Furrier, co-host of theCUBE with Dave Vellante, and our next guest is Bill Philbin, who's the general manager of storage and big data for Hewlett-Packard Enterprise. Bill, welcome to theCUBE. Again, good to see you. I think you've been on since 2012, '13, '15. >> Is that right? What, are we carbon dating ourselves now or something? >> We've been tracking our CUBE alumni, but you're heading up the storage business-- >> Do I get a pen? >> We're working on that, Jerry Chen-- >> Seven of them >> Jerry Chen at Greylock wants to have, now, badge values. So, welcome back. >> Thank you, thank you for having me. >> You were just on theCUBE at VeeamON, which is an event Dave was hosting, I missed it in New Orleans. But a lot of stuff going on around stores, certainly. Virtualization has been around for a while, but now with Cloud; whole new ballgame. Programmable infrastructure, hybrid IT, Wikibond's true private Cloud report came out showing that private Cloud on Prim is $250 billion market. So nothing's really changing radically in the enterprise, per se, certainly maybe servers and storage, but people got to store their data. >> Bill: That's right What's the update from your perspective, what's the story here at HPE Discover? >> So I think there's really three things we're talking about amongst a number of announcements. One is sort of the extension of our All Flash environment for customers, who, as I was saying at Veeam, have the always-on. New world order is we expect everything to be available at a moment's notice, so I was in the middle of the Indian Ocean, using Google Voice over satellite IP on the boat, talking to San Jose, and it worked. That's always-on environment, and the best way to get that is, you know, with an All Flash [unknown], so that's number one. Number two, going back to the story about programmable infrastructures, storage also needs to be programmable, and so, if you've had Rick Lewis or Rick Lewis is coming he'll talk about composable infrastructures with Synergy, but the flip side of that is our belief that storage really needs to be invisible. And the acquisition of Nimble gets us a lot closer to sort of doing that in the same way that you have a safe self-driving car is all the rage. All that rich telemetry comes back, it's analyzed, fingerprinted, and sent out to customers to a point where it's, I call it the Rule of 85. 85% of the customers, the cases are raised by InfoSight and closed by InfoSight, and they have an 85 net promoter score. We're getting to a point where storage can be invisible, cause that's the experience you get on Amazon or as you swipe your credit card, say I want ten terabytes of storage, and that's the last time you have to think about it. We need to have the economics of the web, we need to have the programmability of the web, that's number two, and number three of what we talked about, and this is a big issue, a big thing we talked about with VeeamON, was data protection. The rules of data protection are also changing. Conventional backup does not protect data. I was with a customer a couple weeks ago in London. 120 petabytes; this is a financial services customer now. 120 petabytes of storage: not unusual. 40 of it was Hadoop, and they were surprised because it's unprotected, it's on servers, it's sort of the age of the client-server, and the age of Excel spreadsheets all over again. We realized that most businesses were running on Excel, so All Flash, a different way of supporting our customer support experience, and number three, it's all around how do you protect your data differently. >> What's the big trend from your standpoint, because a lot of that self-driving storage concept, or self-driving car analogy, it speaks to simplicity and automation. >> That's right >> The other thing that's going on is data is becoming more irrelevant, certainly in the Cloud. Whether that's a data protection impact or having data availability for Cloud-native apps, or in memory, or all kinds of cool stuff going on. So you got to lot of stuff happening, so to be invisible, and be programmable, customer's architectures are changing. What's the big trend that you're seeing from a customer standpoint? Are there new ways to lay out storage so that they can be invisible? Certainly a lot of people were looking at their simplification in IT operationally, and then have to prepare for the Cloud, whether that's Multicloud or hybrid or true private Cloud. What architects are you seeing changing, what are people doubling down on, what's the big trends in storage, kind of laying out storage as a strategy? >> So I think the thing about storage in the large, one of the trends obviously that we're seeing is sort of storage co-located with the server. When I started at HP now seven years ago, gen six to gen ten, which we've announced here at this show, the amount of locally attached storage in the box itself is massive. And then the applications are now becoming more and more responsible for data placement, and data replication. And so, even while capacities are growing, I think six or seven percent is what I saw from the latest IDC survey, the actual storage landscape, from a shared storage company, they're actually going down. And the reason is, application provisioning, application-aware storage is really the trend, that's sort of number one. Number two, you see customers looking at deploying the right storage for the right applications. hyperconverge with SimpliVity's a really good example of that, which is they're trying to find the right sort of storage to sort of serve up the right application. And that's where, if you're a single-PoINT provider company now in storage, and you don't have a software-only, a hyperconverge, an All Flash in a couple different flavors, including XP at the top, you're going to find it very, very difficult to sort of continue to compete in this market, and frankly, we're driving a lot of that consolidation, we put some bookends around what we're prepared to pay for. But if you're a PoINT providing storage company now? Life is a lot harder for you than it was a couple years ago. When we started with All Flash, I think it was like 94 All Flash companies. There are not 94 All Flash companies today. And so, I think that's sort of what we see. >> Well, to your point about PoINT companies are going to have a hard time remaining independent, and that's why a lot of 'em are in business to basically sell to a company like yours, cause they fill a need. So my question relates to R&D strategy. As the GM, relatively new GM, you know well that a large company like HPE has to participate in multiple markets, and in order to expand your team, you have to have the right product at the right time. One size does not fit all. So the Nimble acquisition brings in a capability at the lower end of the market, lower price spans, but it also has some unique attributes with regard to the way it uses data and analytics. You've got 3PAR Legendary at the high end. What's the strategy in terms of, and is there one, to bring the best of both of those worlds together, or is it sort of let 20 flowers bloom? >> So, I don't know if it's going to be 'let 20 flowers bloom', but I would probably answer a couple different ways. One is that InfoSight, you're right, is unique value proposition, is part of Nimble. I would bet if I come see you in Madrid, if you have me back for the, whatever, 13th time, [Laughing] that we'll be talking about how InfoSight and 3PAR can come together. So that's sort of the answer to number one. The answer to number two is, even though within the Nimble acquisition, one party acquired the other party, what we're really looking at is the best breed of both organizations. Whether that's a process, a person, a technology, we don't feel wedded to, "Just because we do it a certain way at HP, that means the Nimble team must conform." It's really, "Bring us the best and brightest." That's what we got. At the end of the day, we got a company, we got revenue, but we got the people, and in this storage business, these are serial entrepreneurs who have actually developed a product, we want to keep those people, and the way you do that is you bring 'em in and you use the best and greatest of all the technologies. There's probably other optimizations we'll look at, but looking at InfoSight across the entire portfolio, and one day maybe across the server portfolio, is the right thing to do. >> And just to follow up on that, Tom, if I may, so that's a hard core of sort of embedded technology, and then you've got a capability, we talk about the API economy all the time. How are you, and are you able to leverage other HPE activities to create infrastructure as code, specifically within the storage group? >> So if you look at us, at our converged systems appliances like our SAP HANA appliance, databases greater than six terabytes, we have 85% market share at Hewlett-Packard. And the way we do that, and that's all on 3PAR by the way, and the way we do that is we've got a fixed system that is designed solely to deliver HANA. On the flip of that, you have Synergy, which is a composable programmable infrastructure from the start, where it's all template-based and based on application provisioning. You provision storage, you provision the fabric, you provision compute. That programmable infrastructure also is supported by HP storage. And so, you have-- You can roll it the way you want to, and to some degree I think it's all about choice. If you want to go along, and build your own programmable infrastructure and OpenStack or VCloud Director, whatever it is, we have one of those. If you think simplicity is key, and app and server integration is important part of how you want to roll it out, we have one of those, that's called SimpliVity. If you want a traditional shared storage environment, we have one of those in 3PAR and Nimble, and if you want composable we have that. Now, choice means more than one, I don't know what it means in Latin or Italian, but I'm pretty sure choice means more than one. What we don't want to do is introduce, however, the complexity of what owning more than one is. And that's where things like Synergy make sense, or federation between SerVirtual and 3PAR, and soon we'll have federation between Nimble and 3PAR. So to help customers with that operational complexity problem, but we actually believe that choice is the most important thing we can provide our customers. >> I've always been a big fan of that compose thing, going back a couple years when you guys came and brought it out to the market. We're first, by the way, props to HP, also first on converged infrastructure way back in the day. I got to ask you, one of the things I love doing with theCUBE interviews is that we get to kind of get inspiration around some of the things that you're working on in your business unit. Back in 2010, Dave and I really kind of saw storage move from being boring storage, provisioning storage, to really the center of the action, and really since 2010 you've seen storage really at the center of all these converging trends. Virtualization, and hyperconverges, all this great stuff, now Cloud, so storage is kind of like the center point of all the action, so I got to ask you the question on virtualization, certainly changed the game with storage. Containerization is also changing the game, so I was telling some HP Labs guys last night that I've been looking at provisioning containers in microseconds. Where virtualization is extending and continuing to have a nice run, on the heels of that we got containerization, where apps are going to start working with storage. What's your vision and how do you guys look at that trend? How are you riding that next wave? >> It all comes down to an application-driven approach. As we were saying a little earlier, our view is that storage will be silent. You're going to provision an application. That's really the-- see, look at the difference between us and, let's say, Nutanix with SimpliVity. It's all about the application being provisioned into the hyperconverged environment. And if you look at the virtualization business alone, VMware's going to have a tough go because Hyper-V has actually gotten good enough, and it's cheaper, but people are really giving Hyper-V a much better look at than we've seen over the course of the last couple years. But guess what? That tool will commoditize, and the next commoditization point is going to be containers. Our vantage point, and if you look at 3PAR, you look at Nimble, we're already got it, we've already supported containers within the product, we've actually invested companies that are container-rich. I think it's all about, "What's the next--" >> And we at Dacron last year said, "We know you're parting with all the guys." But this is a big wave. You see containers as-- >> I see containers as sort of the place that virtualization sort of didn't ever get to. If you look at-- >> John: Well, the apps. >> On the apps absolutely, positively. And also it's a much simpler way to deploy an application over a conventional VM. I think containers will be important. Is it going to be important as the technology inflection point around All Flash? >> John: Flash is certainly very-- >> That I don't know, but I think as far as limiting costs in your datacenter, making it easier to deploy your applications, et cetera, I think containers is the one. >> What's the big news here, at HPE Discover 2017, for you guys? What's the story that you're telling, what's going on in the booth? Share some insight into what's happening here on the ground in Las Vegas from your standpoint. >> So I would say a couple of things. I think if you look out on the show floor, it seems more intimate and smaller this year. And there's a lot of concern, I think, that HP is chopping itself off into various pieces and parts, but I think the story that maybe we're not telling well enough, or that it gets missed, is out of that is actually a brand new company called Hewlett-Packard Enterprise, which is uniquely focused on serving enterprise infrastructure customers. And so I think, if I was going to encourage a news story, it's about the phoenix of that, and not the fact that we've taken the yes guys, and the software guys, and the PC guys. It's that company, maybe in Madrid we'll do this, and that company, that's really, really, really exciting. And as you said, storage; sort of in a Ptolemy versus Galileo approach. We believe everything, first of all, revolves around storage. We don't believe in Galileo. So if you look in here at the booth, we've announced the next generation of MSA platforms of 2052, we've got the 9450 3PAR -- three times as fast, more connectivity for All Flash solutions. We've talked about the secondary Flash array for Nimble, most effective place to protect your data is on an array, is on a type where the data came from, and that is the secondary Flash market. We're big into Cloud, we've talked about CloudBank here, which is the ability to keep a copy of your store-once data in any S3-compliant interface, including Scality. I don't know if I'm forgetting, I'm sure I'm forgetting something. >> John: There's a lot there. >> There's a lot there. >> I mean, you guys, I love your angle on the phoenix. We've been seeing that, we've been covering seven years now, and it is a phoenix. And the point that I think the news media is not getting on HP, there's a lot of fud out there, is that this is not a divested strategy. There's some things that went away that were the outsourcing business, but that was just natural. But this is HP-owned, it's not like it's like we're getting out of that, it's just how you're organizing it. >> And with a balance sheet that now is really a competitive weapon, if you will, you're going to see HP both grow organically and inorganically, and I think as the market continues to consolidate, the thing to remember also is there's fewer places to consolidate to. And so if you're a start-up, there's a handful of companies that you can go to now, and probably the best-equipped, right-sized, great balance sheet, great company, is Hewlett-Packard Enterprise. >> Well we had hoped to get Chris Hsu on, but I've always said the day we talk about the debates on management style, but I've always been a big believer as a computer science undergraduate, decouple highly cohesive strategy is a really viable one, I think that's a great one. >> Yeah, and there's still a good partnership with DXC, there'll be a great partnership with Micro Focus, and there's both financially as well as from a business perspective. But it's really an opportunity to focus, and if I was at another company, I would wonder whether or not if their strategy continues to be appropriate. >> Bill Philbin, senior Vice President and general manager of storage and big data at Hewlett-Packard Enterprises, theCUBE more live coverage after the short break. From Las Vegas, HPE Discover 2017, I'm John Furrier with Dave Vellante with theCUBE, we'll be right back after this short break.