>>Hey everyone. Lisa Martin of the cube here, HPE and AMD better together with Shi is the name of our segment. And I'm here with four guests. Please. Welcome Charlie Mulrooney global presales engineering manager at Athi John saws also of Shi joins this global pre-sales technical consultant. And back with me are Terry Richardson, north American channel chief and Dr. John Fry, chief technologist, sustainable transformation at HPE. Welcome gang. Great to have you all here. >>Thank you, Lisa. Thanks. You good to be here? >>All right, Charlie, let's go ahead and start with you. Keeping the earth sustainable and minimizing carbon emissions. Greenhouse gases is a huge priority for businesses, right? Everywhere. Globally. Can you talk Charlie about what Shi is seeing in the marketplace with respect to sustainable? It? >>Sure. So starting about a year and a half, two years ago, we really noticed that our customers certainly our largest enterprise customers were putting into their annual reports, their chairman's letters, their sec filings that they had sustainability initiatives ranging from achieving carbon neutral or carbon zero goals starting with 2050 dates. And then since then we've seen 20, 40, and 2030 targets to achieve net neutrality and RFPs, RFIs that we're fielding. Certainly all now contain elements of that. So this is certainly top of mind for our largest customers, our fortune two 50 and fortune 500 customers. For sure. We're, we're seeing an onslaught of requests for this. We get into many conversations with the folks that are leading these efforts to understand, you know, here's what we have today. What can we do better? What can we do different to help make an impact on those goals? >>So making an impact top of mind, pretty much for everyone, as you mentioned, John SAS, let's bring you into the conversation. Now, when you're in customer conversations, what are some of the things that you talk about with respect tohis approach to sustainability, sustainable it, are you seeing more folks that are implementing things tactically versus strategically what's going on in the customer space? >>Well, so Charlie touched on something really important that, you know, the, the wake up moment for us was receiving, you know, proposal requests or customer meeting requests that were around sustainability. And it was really around two years ago, I suppose, for the first time. And those requests started coming from European based companies, cuz they had a bit of a head start over the us based global companies even. And what we found was that sustainability was already well down the road and that they were doing very interesting things to use renewable energy for data centers utilize the, they were already considering sustainability for new technologies as a high priority versus just performance cost and other factors that you typically have at the top. So as we started working with them, I guess at beginning it was more tactical cuz we really had to find a way to respond. >>We were starting to be asked about our own efforts and in regards to sustainability, we have our headquarters in Somerset and our second headquarters in Austin, Texas, those are lead gold certified. We've been installing solar panels, reducing waste across the company, recycling efforts and so forth charging stations for electric vehicles, all that sort of thing to make our company more sustainable in, in, in our offices and in our headquarters. But it's a lot more than that. And what we found was that we wanted to look to our vast number of, of customers and partners. We have over 30,000 partners that would work with globally and tens of thousands of customers. And we wanted to find best practices and technologies and services that we could talk about with these customers and apply and help integrate together as a, as a really large global reseller and integrator. We can have a play there and bring these things together from multiple partners that we work with to help solve customer problems. And so over time it's become more strategic and we've been as a company building the, the, the, the, the forward efforts through organizing a true formal sustainability team and growing that, and then also reporting for CDP Ecova and so forth. And it's really that all has been coming about in the last couple of years. And we take it very seriously. >>It sounds like, and it also sounds like from the customer's perspective, they're shifting from that tactical, maybe early initial approach to being more strategic, to really enabling sustainable it across their organization. And I imagine from a business driver's perspective, John saws and Charlie, are you hearing customers? You talked about it being part of RFPs, but also where are customers in terms of, we need to have a sustainable it strategy so that we can attract and retain the right investors we can attract and retain customers. Charlie, John, what are your thoughts on that? >>Yeah, that's top of mind with, with all the folks that we're talking to, I would say there's probably a three way tie for the importance of attracting and retaining investors. As you said, plus customers, customers are shopping, their customers are shopping for who has aligned their ESG priorities and sustainable priorities with their own and who is gonna help them with their own reporting of, you know, scope two and ultimately scope three reporting from greenhouse gas emissions and then the attracting and retaining talent. It's another element now of when you're bringing on new talent to your organization, they have a choice and they're thinking with their decision to accept a role or not within your organization of what your strategies are and do they align. So we're seeing those almost interchangeable in terms of priorities with, with the customers we're talking to. And it was a little surprising, cuz it, we thought initially this is really focused on investors attracting the investors, but it really has become quite a bit more than that. And it's been actually very interesting to see the development of that prioritization >>More comprehensive across the organization. Let's bring Dr. John Fry into the conversation and Terry your next. So stay tuned. Dr. Fry, can you talk about HPE and S H I partnering together? What are some of the key aspects of the relationship that help one another support and enable each other's aggressive goals where sustainability is concerned? >>Yeah, it's a great question. And one of the things about the sustainability domain in solving these climate challenges that we all have is we've got to come together and partner to solve them. No one company's going to solve them by themselves and for our collective customers the same way. From an HPE perspective, we bring the expertise on our products. We bring in sustainable it point of view, where we've written many white papers on the topic and even workbooks that help companies implement a sustainable it program. But our direct sales forces can't reach all of our customers. And in many cases we don't have the local knowledge that our business partners like Shi bring to the table. So they extend the reach, they bring their own expertise. Their portfolio that they offer to the customer is wider than just enterprise products. So by working together, we can do a better job of helping the customer meet their own needs, give them the right technology solutions and enhance that customer experience because they get more value from us collectively. >>It really is better together, which is in a very appropriate name for our segment here. Terry, let's bring you into the conversation. Talk to us about AMD. How is it helping customers to create that sustainable it strategy? And what are some of the differentiators that what AMD is doing that, that are able to be delivered through partners like Shi? >>Well, Lisa, you used the word enabling just a short while ago. And fundamentally AMD enables HPE and partners like Shi to bring differentiated solutions to customers. So in the data center space, we began our journey in 2017 with some fundamental design elements for our processor technology that were really keenly focused on improving performance, but also efficiency. So now the, the most common measure that we see for the types of customers that Charlie and John were talking about is really that measure of performance per wat. And you'll continue to see AMD enabled customers to, to try to find ways to, to do more in a sustainable way within the constraints that they may be facing, whether it's availability of power data center space, or just needing to meet overall sustainability goals. So we have skills and expertise and tools that we make available to HPE and two Shi to help them have even stronger differentiated conversations with customers. >>Sounds like to me, Terry, that it's, that AMD can be even more of an more than an enabler, but really an accelerator of what customers are able to do from a strategic perspective on sustainability. >>You you're right about that. And, and we actually have tools, greenhouse gas, TCO tools that can be leveraged to really quantify the impact of some of the, the new technology decisions that customers are making to allow them to achieve their goals. So we're really proud of the work that we're doing in partnership with companies like HPE and Shi >>Better together. As we said at the beginning in just a minute ago, Charlie, let's bring you back in, talk to us a little bit about what Shi is doing to leverage sustainable it and enable your customers to meet their sustainability goals and their initiatives. >>So for quite a while, we've had some offerings to help customers, especially in the end user compute side. A lot of customers were interested in, I've got assets for, you know, let's say a large sales force that had been carrying tablets or laptops and, you know, those need to be refreshed. What do I do with those? How do I responsibly retire or recycle those? And we've been offering solutions for that for quite some time. It's within the last year or two, when we started offering for them guarantees and assurances assurances of how they can, if that equipment is reusable by somebody else, how can we issue them? You know, credits for carbon credits for reuse of that equipment somewhere else. So it's not necessarily going to be e-waste, it's something that can be recycled and reused. We have other programs with helping extend the life of, of some systems where they look at well, I have a awful lot of data on these machines where historically they might want to just retire those because the, the, the sensitivity of the data needed to be handled very specifically. We can help them properly remove the sensitive data and still allow reuse of that equipment. So we've been able to come up with some creative solutions specifically around end user compute in the past, but we are looking to new ways now to really help extend that into data center infrastructure and beyond to really help with what are the needs, what are the, the best ways to help our customers handle the things that are challenging them. >>That's a great point that you bring up. Charlie and security kind of popped into my head here, John Saul's question for you when you're in customer conversations and you're talking about, or maybe they're talking about help us with waste reduction with recycling, where are you having those customer conversations? Cause I know sustainability is a board level, it's a C level discussion, but where are you having those conversations within the customer organization? >>Well, so it's a, it's a combination of organizations within the customer. These are these global organizations. Typically when we're talking about asset life cycle management, asset recovery, how do you do that in a sustainable green way and securely the customers we're dealing with? I mean, security is top sustainability is right up there too. O obviously, but Charlie touched on a lot of those things and these are global rollouts, tens of thousands of employees typically to, to have mobile devices, laptops, and phones, and so forth. And they often are looking for a true managed service around the world that takes into consideration things like the most efficient way to ship products to, to the employees. And how do you do that in a sustainably? You need to think about that. Does it all go to a central location or to each individual's home during the pandemic that made a lot of sense to do it that way? >>And I think the reason I wanted to touch on those things is that, well for, for example, one European pharmaceutical that states in their reports that they're already in scope one in scope two they're fully net zero at this point. And, and they say, but that only solves 3% of our overall sustainability goals. 97% is scope three, it's travel, it's shipping. It's, it's, it's all the, the, all these things that are out of their direct control a lot of times, but they're coming to us now as a, as a supplier and as, and, and we're filling out, you know, forms and RFPs and so forth to show that we can be a sustainable supplier in their supply chain because that's their next big goal >>Sustain sustainable supply chain. Absolutely. Yes. Dr. John Fry and Terry, I want to kind of get your perspectives. Charlie talked about from a customer requirements perspective, customers coming through RFP saying, Hey, we've gotta work with vendors who have clear sustainability initiatives that are well underway, HPE and AMD hearing the same thing Dr. Fry will start with you. And then Terry >>Sure, absolutely. We receive about 2,500 customer questionnaires just on sustainability every year. And that's come up from a few hundred. So yeah, absolutely accelerating. Then the conversations turn deeper. Can you help us quantify our carbon emissions and power consumption? Then the conversation has recently gone even further to when can HPE offer net zero or carbon neutral technology solutions to the customer so that they don't have to account for those solutions in their own carbon footprint. So the questions are getting more sophisticated, the need for the data and the accuracy of the data is climbing. And as we see potential regulatory disclosure requirements around carbon emissions, I think this trend is just gonna continue up. >>Yeah. And we see the same thing. We get asked more and more from our customers and partners around our own corporate sustainability goals. But the surveying that survey work that we've done with customers has led us to, you know, understand that, you know, approximately 75% of customers are gonna make sustainability goals, a key component of their RFIs in 2023, which is right around the corner. And, and, you know, 60% of those same customers really expect to have business level KPIs in the new year that are really related to sustainability. So this is not just a, a kind of a buzzword topic. This is, this is kind of business imperatives that, you know, the company, the companies like HPE and AMD and the partners like I, that really stand behind it and really are proactive in getting out in front of customers to help are really gonna be ahead of the game. >>That's a great point that you make Terry there that this isn't, we're not talking about a buzzword here. We're talking about a business imperative for businesses of probably all sizes across all industries and Dr. Far, you mentioned regulations. And something that we just noticed is that the S E C recently said, it's proposing some rules where companies must disclose greenhouse gas emissions. If they were, if that were to, to come into play, I'm gonna pun back to Charlie and John saws. How would Shi and, and frankly at HPE and AMD be able to help companies comply if that type of regulation were to be implemented. Charlie. >>Yeah. So we are in the process right now of building out a service to help customers specifically with that, with the reporting, we know reporting is a challenge. The scope two reporting is a challenge and scope three that I guess people thought was gonna be a ways out now, all of a sudden, Hey, if you have made a public statement that you're going to make an impact on your scope three targets, then you have to report on them. So that, that has become really important very quickly as word about this requirement is rumbling around there's concern. So we are actually working right now on something it's a little too early to fully disclose, but stay tuned, cuz we have something coming. That's interesting. >>Definitely PED my, my ears are, are, are perk here. Charlie, we'll stay tuned for that. Dr. Fry. Terry, can you talk about together with Shi HPE and AMD enabling customers to manage access to the da data obviously, which is critical and it's doing nothing but growing and proliferating key folks need access to it. We talked a little bit about security, but how are from a better together perspective, Dr. Fry will start with you, how are you really helping organizations on that sustainability journey to ensure that data can be accessible to those who need it when they need it? And at these days what it's real time requirements. >>Yeah. It's, it's an increasing challenge. In fact, we have changed the H HP story the way we talk about H HP's value proposition to talk about data first modernization. So how often do you collect data? Where do you store it? How do you avoid moving it? How do you make sure if you're going to collect data, you get insights from that data that change your business or add business value. And then how long do you retain that data afterward and all of that factors into sustainable it, because when I talk to technology executives, what they tell me again, and again, is there's this presumption within their user community, that storage is free. And so when, when they have needs for collecting data, for example, if, if once an hour would do okay, but the system would collect it once a minute, the default, the user asks for of course, once a minute. And then are you getting insights from that data? Or are we moving it that becomes more important when you're moving data back and forth between the public cloud or the edge, because there is quite a network penalty for moving that equipment across your network. There's huge power and carbon implications of doing that. So it's really making a better decision about what do we collect, why do we collect it, what we're gonna do with it when we collect and how we store it. >>And, and for years, customers have really talked about, you know, modernization and the need to modernize their data center. You know, I, I fundamentally believe that sustainability is really that catalyst to really drive true modernization. And as they think forward, you know, when we work with, with HPE, you know, they offer a variety of purpose-built servers that can play a role in, you know, specific customer workloads from the largest, super computers down to kind of general purpose servers. And when we work with partners like Shi, not only can they deliver the full suite of offerings for on premise deployments, they're also very well positioned to leverage the public cloud infrastructure for those workloads that really belong there. And, and that certainly can help customers kind of achieve an end to end sustainability goal. >>That's a great point that, that it needs to be strategic, but it also needs to be an end to end goal. We're just about out of time, but I wanted to give John saws the last word here, take us out, John, what are some of the things Charlie kind of teased some of the things that are coming out that piqued my interest, but what are some of the things that you are excited about as HPE AMD and Shi really help customers achieve their sustainability initiatives? >>Sure. Couple comments here. So Charlie, yeah, you touched on some upcoming capabilities that Shi will have around the area of monitoring and management. See, this is difficult for all customers to be able to report in this formal way. This is a train coming at everybody very quickly and they're not ready. Most customers aren't ready. And if we can help as, as a reseller integrator assessments, to be able to understand what they're currently running compare to different scenarios of where they could go to in a future state, that seems valuable if we can help in that way. That's, those are things that we're looking into specifically, you know, greenhouse gas, emissions, relevant assessments, and, and, and within the comments of, of, of Terry and, and John around the, the power per wat and the vast portfolio of, of technologies that they, that they had to address various workloads is, is fantastic. >>We'd be able to help point to technologies like that and move customers in that direction. I think as a, as an integrator and a technical advisor to customers, I saw an article on BBC this morning that I, I, I think if, if we think about how we're working with our customers and we can help them maybe think differently about how they're using their technology to solve problems. The BBC article mentioned this was Ethereum, a cryptocurrency, and they have a big project called merge. And today was a go live date. And BBC us news outlets have been reporting on it. They basically changed the model from a model called power of work, which takes a, a lot of compute and graphic, GPU power and so forth around the world. And it's now called power of stake, which means that the people that validate that their actions in this environment are correct. >>They have to put up a stake of their own cryptocurrency. And if they're wrong, it's taken from them. This new model reduces the emissions of their environment by 99 plus percent. The June emissions from Ethereum were, it was 120 telos per, per year, a Terra terat hours per year. And they reduced it actually, that's the equivalent of what the net Netherlands needed for energy, so comparable to a medium sized country. So if you can think differently about how to solve problems, it may be on-prem, it may be GreenLake. It may be, it may be the public cloud in some cases or other, you know, interesting, innovative technologies that, that AMD HPE, other partners that we can bring in along, along with them as well, we can solve problems differently. There is a lot going on >>The opportunities that you all talked about to really make such a huge societal impact and impact to our planet are exciting. We thank you so much for talking together about how HPE AMD and SSHA are really working in partnership in synergy to help your customers across every organization, really become much more focused, much more collaborative about sustainable it. Guys. We so appreciate your time and thank you for your insights. >>Thank you, Lisa. Thank you. My >>Pleasure. Thank you, Lisa. You're watching the cube, the leader in high tech enterprise coverage.

(futuristic music) >> Hey everyone. Lisa Martin here for theCUBE back with you, three guests join me. Dan Molina is here, the co-president and chief technology officer at NTH Generation. And I'm joined once again by Terry Richardson, North American channel chief for AMD and Dr. John Fry, chief technologist, sustainable transformation at HPE. Gentlemen, It's a pleasure to have you on theCUBE Thank you for joining me. >> Thank you, Lisa. >> Dan. Let's have you kick things off. Talk to us about how NTH Generation is addressing the environmental challenges that your customers are having while meeting the technology demands of the future. That those same customers are no doubt having. >> It's quite an interesting question, Lisa, in our case we have been in business since 1991 and we started by providing highly available computing solutions. So this is great for me to be partnered here with HPE and the AMD because we want to provide quality computing solutions. And back in the day, since 1991 saving energy saving footprint or reducing footprint in the data center saving on cooling costs was very important. Over time those became even more critical components of our solutions design. As you know, as a society we started becoming more aware of the benefits and the must that we have a responsibility back to society to basically contribute with our social and environmental responsibility. So one of the things that we continue to do and we started back in 1991 is to make sure that we're deciding compute solutions based on clients' actual needs. We go out of our way to collect real performance data real IT resource consumption data. And then we architect solutions using best in the industry components like AMD and HPE to make sure that they were going to be meeting those goals and energy savings, like cooling savings, footprint reduction, knowing that instead of maybe requiring 30 servers, just to mention an example maybe we're going to go down to 14 and that's going to result in great energy savings. Our commitment to making sure that we're providing optimized solutions goes all the way to achieving the top level certifications from our great partner, Hewlett Packard Enterprise. Also go deep into micro processing technologies like AMD but we want to make sure that the designs that we're putting together actually meet those goals. >> You talked about why sustainability is important to NTH from back in the day. I love how you said that. Dan, talk to us a little bit about what you're hearing from customers as we are seeing sustainability as a corporate initiative horizontally across industries and really rise up through the C-suite to the board. >> Right, it is quite interesting Lisa We do service pretty much horizontally just about any vertical, including public sector and the private sector from retail to healthcare, to biotech to manufacturing, of course, cities and counties. So we have a lot of experience with many different verticals. And across the board, we do see an increased interest in being socially responsible. And that includes not just being responsible on recycling as an example, most of our conversations or engagements that conversation happens, 'What what's going to happen with the old equipment ?' as we're replacing with more modern, more powerful, more efficient equipment. And we do a number of different things that go along with social responsibility and environment protection. And that's basically e-waste programs. As an example, we also have a program where we actually donate some of that older equipment to schools and that is quite quite something because we're helping an organization save energy, footprint. Basically the things that we've been talking about but at the same time, the older equipment even though it's not saving that much energy it still serves a purpose in society where maybe the unprivileged or not as able to afford computing equipment in certain schools and things of that nature. Now they can benefit and being productive to society. So it's not just about energy savings there's so many other factors around social corporate responsibility. >> So sounds like Dan, a very comprehensive end to end vision that NTH has around sustainability. Let's bring John and Terry into the conversation. John, we're going to start with you. Talk to us a little bit about how HPE and NTH are partnering together. What are some of the key aspects of the relationship from HPE's perspective that enable you both to meet not just your corporate sustainable IT objectives, but those of your customers. >> Yeah, it's a great question. And one of the things that HPE brings to bear is 20 years experience on sustainable IT, white papers, executive workbooks and a lot of expertise for how do we bring optimized solutions to market. If the customer doesn't want to manage those pieces himself we have our 'As a service solutions, HPE GreenLake. But our sales force won't get to every customer across the globe that wants to take advantage of this expertise. So we partner with companies like NTH to know the customer better, to develop the right solution for that customer and with NTH's relationships with the customers, they can constantly help the customer optimize those solutions and see where there perhaps areas of opportunity that may be outside of HPE's own portfolio, such as client devices where they can bring that expertise to bear, to help the customer have a better total customer experience. >> And that is critical, that better overall comprehensive total customer experience. As we know on the other end, all customers are demanding customers like us who want data in real time, we want access. We also want the corporate and the social responsibility of the companies that we work with. Terry, bringing you into the conversation. Talk to us a little about AMD. How are you helping customers to create what really is a sustainable IT strategy from what often starts out as sustainability tactics? >> Exactly. And to pick up on what John and and Dan were saying, we're really energized about the opportunity to allow customers to accelerate their ability to attain some of their more strategic sustainability goals. You know, since we started on our current data center, CPU and GPU offerings, each generation we continue to focus on increasing the performance capability with great sensitivity to the efficiency, right? So as customers are modernizing their data center and achieving their own digital transformation initiatives we are able to deliver solutions through HPE that really address a greater performance per watt which is a a core element in allowing customers to achieve the goals that John and Dan talked about. So, you know, as a company, we're fully on board with some very public positions around our own sustainability goals, but working with terrific partners like NTH and HPE allows us to together bring those enabling technologies directly to customers >> Enabling and accelerating technologies. Dan, let's go back to you. You mentioned some of the things that NTH is doing from a sustainability approach, the social and the community concern, energy use savings, recycling but this goes all the way from NTH's perspective to things like outreach and fairness in the workplace. Talk to us a little bit about some of those other initiatives that NTH has fired up. >> Absolutely, well at NTH , since the early days, we have invested heavily on modern equipment and we have placed that at NTH labs, just like HPE labs we have NTH labs, and that's what we do a great deal of testing to make sure that our clients, right our joint clients are going to have high quality solutions that we're not just talking about it and we actually test them. So that is definitely an investment by being conscious about energy conservation. We have programs and scripts to shut down equipment that is not needed at the time, right. So we're definitely conscious about it. So I wanted to mention that example. Another one is, we all went through a pandemic and this is still ongoing from some perspectives. And that forced pretty much all of our employees, at least for some time to work from home. Being an IT company, we're very proud that we made that transition almost seamlessly. And we're very proud that you know people who continue to work from home, they're saving of course, gasoline, time, traffic, all those benefits that go with reducing transportation, and don't get me wrong, I mean, sometimes it is important to still have face to face meetings, especially with new organizations that you want to establish trust. But for the most part we have become a hybrid workforce type of organization. At the same time, we're also implementing our own hybrid IT approach which is what we talk to our clients about. So there's certain workloads, there are certain applications that truly belong in in public cloud or Software as a Service. And there's other workloads that truly belong, to stay in your data center. So a combination and doing it correctly can result in significant savings, not just money, but also again energy, consumption. Other things that we're doing, I mentioned trading programs, again, very proud that you know, we use a e-waste programs to make sure that those IT equipment is properly disposed of and it's not going to end in a landfill somewhere but also again, donating to schools, right? And very proud about that one. We have other outreach programs. Normally at the end of the year we do some substantial donations and we encourage our employees, my coworkers to donate. And we match those donations to organizations like Operation USA, they provide health and education programs to recover from disasters. Another one is Salvation Army, where basically they fund rehabilitation programs that heal addictions change lives and restore families. We also donate to the San Diego Zoo. We also believe in the whole ecosystem, of course and we're very proud to be part of that. They are supporting more than 140 conservation projects and partnerships in 70 countries. And we're part of that donation. And our owner has been part of the board or he was for a number of years. Mercy House down in San Diego, we have our headquarters. They have programs for the homeless. And basically that they're servicing. Also Save a Life Foundation for the youth to be educated to help prevent sudden cardiac arrest for the youth. So programs like that. We're very proud to be part of the donations. Again, it's not just about energy savings but it's so many other things as part of our corporate social responsibility program. Other things that I wanted to mention. Everything in our buildings, in our offices, multiple locations. Now we turn into LED. So again, we're eating our own dog food as they say but that is definitely some significant energy savings. And then lastly, I wanted to mention, this is more what we do for our customers, but the whole HPE GreenLake program we have a growing number of clients especially in Southern California. And some of those are quite large like school districts, like counties. And we feel very proud that in the old days customers would buy IT equipment for the next three to five years. Right? And they would buy extra because obviously they're expecting some growth while that equipment must consume energy from day one. With a GreenLake type of program, the solution is sized properly. Maybe a little bit of a buffer for unexpected growth needs. And anyway, but with a GreenLake program as customers need more IT resources to continue to expand their workloads for their organizations. Then we go in with 'just in time' type of resources. Saving energy and footprint and everything else that we've been talking about along the way. So very proud to be one of the go-tos for Hewlett Packard Enterprise on the GreenLake program which is now a platform, so. >> That's great. Dan, it sounds like NTH generation has such a comprehensive focus and strategy on sustainability where you're pulling multiple levers it's almost like sustainability to the NTH degree ? See what I did there ? >> (laughing) >> I'd like to talk with all three of you now. And John, I want to start with you about employees. Dan, you talked about the hybrid work environment and some of the silver linings from the pandemic but I'd love to know, John, Terry and then Dan, in that order how educated and engaged are your employees where sustainability is concerned? Talk to me about that from their engagement perspective and also from the ability to retain them and make them proud as Dan was saying to work for these companies, John ? >> Yeah, absolutely. One of the things that we see in technology, and we hear it from our customers every day when we're meeting with them is we all have a challenge attracting and retaining new employees. And one of the ways that you can succeed in that challenge is by connecting the work that the employee does to both the purpose of your company and broader than that global purpose. So environmental and social types of activities. So for us, we actually do a tremendous amount of education for our employees. At the moment, all of our vice presidents and above are taking climate training as part of our own climate aspirations to really drive those goals into action. But we're opening that training to any employee in the company. We have a variety of employee resource groups that are focused on sustainability and carbon reduction. And in many cases, they're very loud advocates for why aren't we pushing a roadmap further? Why aren't we doing things in a particular industry segment where they think we're not moving quite as quickly as we should be. But part of the recognition around all of that as well is customers often ask us when we suggest a sustainability or sustainable IT solution to them. Their first question back is, are you doing this yourselves? So for all of those reasons, we invest a lot of time and effort in educating our employees, listening to our employees on that topic and really using them to help drive our programs forward. >> That sounds like it's critical, John for customers to understand, are you doing this as well? Are you using your own technology ? Terry, talk to us about from the AMD side the education of your employees, the engagement of them where sustainability is concerned. >> Yeah. So similar to what John said, I would characterize AMD is a very socially responsible company. We kind of share that alignment in point of view along with NTH. Corporate responsibility is something that you know, most companies have started to see become a lot more prominent, a lot more talked about internally. We've been very public with four key sustainability goals that we've set as an organization. And we regularly provide updates on where we are along the way. Some of those goals extend out to 2025 and in one case 2030 so not too far away, but we're providing milestone updates against some pretty aggressive and important goals. I think, you know, as a technology company, regardless of the role that you're in there's a way that you can connect to what the company's doing that I think is kind of a feel good. I spend more of my time with the customer facing or partner facing resources and being able to deliver a tool to partners like NTH and strategic partners like HPE that really helps quantify the benefit, you know in a bare metal, in terms of greenhouse gas emissions and a TCO tool to really quantify what an implementation of a new and modern solution will mean to a customer. And for the first time they have choice. So I think employees, they can really feel good about being able to to do something that is for a greater good than just the traditional corporate goals. And of course the engineers that are designing the next generation of products that have these as core competencies clearly can connect to the impact that we're able to make on the broader global ecosystem. >> And that is so important. Terry, you know, employee productivity and satisfaction directly translates to customer satisfaction, customer retention. So, I always think of them as inextricably linked. So great to hear what you're all doing in terms of the employee engagement. Dan, talk to me about some of the outcomes that NTH is enabling customers to achieve, from an outcomes perspective those business outcomes, maybe even at a high level or a generic level, love to dig into some of those. >> Of course. Yes. So again, our mission is really to deliver awesome in everything we do. And we're very proud about that mission, very crispy clear, short and sweet and that includes, we don't cut corners. We go through the extent of, again, learning the technology getting those certifications, testing those in the lab so that when we're working with our end user organizations they know they're going to have a quality solution. And part of our vision has been to provide industry leading transformational technologies and solutions for example, HPE and AMD for organizations to go through their own digital transformation. Those two words have been used extensively over the last decade, but this is a multi decade type of trend, super trend or mega trend. And we're very proud that by offering and architecting and implementing, and in many cases supporting, with our partners, those, you know, best in class IT cyber security solutions were helping those organizations with those business outcomes, their own digital transformation. If you extend that Lisa , a Little bit further, by helping our clients, both public and private sector become more efficient, more scalable we're also helping, you know organizations become more productive, if you scale that out to the entire society in the US that also helps with the GDP. So it's all interrelated and we're very proud through our, again, optimized solutions. We're not just going to sell a box we're going to understand what the organization truly needs and adapt and architect our solutions accordingly. And we have, again, access to amazing technology, micro processes. Is just amazing what they can do today even compared to five years ago. And that enables new initiatives like artificial intelligence through machine learning and things of that nature. You need GPU technology , that specialized microprocessors and companies like AMD, like I said that are enabling organizations to go down that path faster, right? While saving energy, footprint and everything that we've been talking about. So those are some of the outcomes that I see >> Hey, Dan, listening to you talk, I can't help but think this is not a stretch for NTH right? Although, you know, terms like sustainability and reducing carbon footprint might be, you know more in vogue, the type of solutions that you've been architecting for customers your approach, dates back decades, and you don't have to change a lot. You just have new kind of toys to play with and new compelling offerings from great vendors like HPE to position to your customers. But it's not a big change in what you need to do. >> We're blessed from that perspective that's how our founders started the company. And we only, I think we go through a very extensive interview process to make sure that there will be a fit both ways. We want our new team members to get to know the the rest of the team before they actually make the decision. We are very proud as well, Terry, Lisa and John, that our tenure here at NTH is probably well over a decade. People get here and they really value how we help organizations through our dedicated work, providing again, leading edge technology solutions and the results that they see in our own organizations where we have made many friends in the industry because they had a problem, right? Or they had a very challenging initiative for their organization and we work together and the outcome there is something that they're very, very proud of. So you're right, Terry, we've been doing this for a long time. We're also very happy again with programs like the HPE GreenLake. We were already doing optimized solutions but with something like GreenLake is helping us save more energy consumption from the very beginning by allowing organizations to pay for only what they need with a little bit of buffer that we talked about. So what we've been doing since 1991 combined with a program like GreenLake I think is going to help us even better with our social corporate responsibility. >> I think what you guys have all articulated beautifully in the last 20 minutes is how strategic and interwoven the partnerships between HP, AMD and NTH is what your enabling customers to achieve those outcomes. What you're also doing internally to do things like reduce waste, reduce carbon emissions, and ensure that your employees are proud of who they're working for. Those are all fantastic guys. I wish we had more time cause I know we are just scratching the surface here. We appreciate everything that you shared with respect to sustainable IT and what you're enabling the end user customer to achieve. >> Thank you, Lisa. >> Thanks. >> Thank you. >> My pleasure. From my guests, I'm Lisa Martin. In a moment, Dave Vellante will return to give you some closing thoughts on sustainable IT You're watching theCUBE. the leader in high tech enterprise coverage.

foreign [Music] Lisa Martin of the cube here hpe and AMD better together with Shi is the name of our segment and I'm here with four guests please welcome Charlie mulrooney Global pre-sales engineering manager at SHI John saw is also of shi joins us Global pre-sales Technical consultant and back with me are Terry Richardson North American Channel Chief and Dr John Fry Chief technologist of sustainable transformation at hpe welcome gang great to have you here all here Thank you Lisa thank you good to be here all right Charlie let's go ahead and start with you keeping the Earth sustainable and minimizing carbon emissions greenhouse gases is a huge priority for businesses right everywhere globally can you talk truly about what Shi is seeing in the marketplace with respect to sustainable I.T sure so starting about a year and a half two years ago we really noticed that our customers certainly our largest Enterprise customers were putting into their annual reports their Chairman's letters their SEC filings that they had sustainability initiatives ranging from achieving carbon neutral uh or carbon zero goals starting with 20 50 dates and then since then we've seen 20 40 and 2030 targets to achieve net neutrality and rfps rfis that we're Fielding certainly all now contain elements of that so this is certainly top of mind for our largest customers our Fortune 250 and Fortune 500 customers for sure where we're seeing an onslaught of requests for this we get into many conversations with the folks that are leading these efforts to understand you know here's what we have today what can we do better what can we do different to help make it an impact on those goals so making an impact top of Mind pretty much for everyone as you mentioned John Sal's let's bring you into the conversation now when you're in customer conversations what are some of the things that you talk about with respect to shi's approach to sustainability sustainable I.T are you seeing more folks that are implementing things tactically versus strategically what's going on in the customer space well so Charlie touched on something really important that you know the the wake-up moment for us was receiving you know proposal requests or customer meeting requests that were around sustainability and it was really around two years ago I suppose for the first time and those requests started coming from european-based companies because they had a bit of a head start uh over the U.S based global companies even um and what we found was that sustainability was already well down the road and that they were doing very interesting things to uh use renewable energy for data centers uh utilized they were already considering sustainability for new technologies as a high priority versus just performance costs and other factors that you typically had at the top so as we started working with them uh I guess that beginning was more tactical because we really had to find a way to respond uh we were starting to be asked about our own efforts and in regards to sustainability we have our headquarters in Somerset and our second Headquarters in Austin Texas um those are the gold certified we've been installing solar panels producing waste across the company recycling efforts and so forth charging stations for electric vehicles all that sort of thing to make our company more sustainable in in uh in our offices and in our headquarters um but it's a lot more than that and what we found was that we wanted to look to our vast number of supply of customers and partners we have over 30 000 partners that would work with globally and tens of thousands of customers and we wanted to find best practices and Technologies and services that we could uh talk about with these customers and apply and help integrate together as a as a really large Global uh reseller and integrator we can have a play there and bring these things together from multiple uh partners that we work with to help solve customer problems and so over time it's become more strategic and we've been uh as a company building the uh the the the forward efforts through organizing a true formal sustainability team and growing that um and then also reporting for CDP echovatus and so forth and it's really that all has been coming about in the last couple of years and we take it very seriously it sounds like it also sounds like from the customer's perspective they're shifting from that tactical maybe early initial approach to being more strategic to really enabling sustainable I.T across their organization and I imagine from a business driver's perspective John saws and Charlie are you hearing customers you talked about it being part of rfps but also where are customers in terms of we need to have a sustainable I.T strategy so that we can attract and retain the right investors we can attract and retain customers Charlie John what are your thoughts on that yeah that's top of mind with uh with all the folks that we're talking to uh I would say there's probably a three-way tie for the importance of uh attracting and retaining investors as you said plus customers customers are shopping their customers are shopping for who has aligned their ESG priorities in sustainable priorities uh with their own and who is going to help them with their own reporting of you know spoke to and ultimately scope three reporting from greenhouse gas emissions and then the attracting and retaining Talent uh it's another element now of when you're bringing on a new talent to your organization they have a choice and they're thinking with their decision to accept a role or not within your organization of what your strategies are and do they align so we're seeing those almost interchangeable in terms of priorities with with the customers we're talking to it was a little surprising because we thought initially this is really focused on investors attracting the investors but it really has become quite a bit more than that and it's been actually very interesting to see the development of that prioritization more comprehensive across the organization let's bring Dr John Fry into the conversation and Terry your neck so stay tuned Dr Frey can you talk about hpe and Shia partnering together what are some of the key aspects of the relationship that help one another support and enable each other's aggressive goals where sustainability is concerned yeah it's a great question and one of the things about the sustainability domain in solving these climate challenges that we all have is we've got to come together and partner to solve them no one company's going to solve them by themselves and for our Collective customers the same way from an hpe perspective we bring the expertise on our products we bring in a sustainable I.T point of view where we've written many white papers on the topic and even workbooks that help companies Implement a sustainable I.T program but our direct sales forces can't reach all of our customers and in many cases we don't have the local knowledge that our business partners like Shi bring to the table so they extend the reach they bring their own expertise their portfolio that they offer to the customer is wider than just Enterprise Products so by working together we can do a better job of helping the customer meet their own needs give them the right Technology Solutions and enhance that customer experience it's because they get more value from us collectively it really is better together which is a very appropriate name for our segment here Terry let's bring you into the conversation talk to us about AMD how is it helping customers to create that sustainable I.T strategy and what are some of the differentiators that what AMD is doing that that are able to be delivered through Partners like Shi well Lisa you use the word enabling um just a short while ago and fundamentally AMD enables hpe and partners like Shi to bring differentiated solutions to customers so in the data center space We Begin our journey in 2017 with some fundamental Design Elements for our processor technology that we're really keenly focused on improving performance but also efficiency so now the the most common measure that we see for the types of customers that Charlie and John were talking about was really that measure of performance per watt and you'll continue to see AMD enable um customers to to try to find ways to to do more in a sustainable way within the constraints that they may be facing whether it's availability of power data center space or just needing to meet overall sustainability goals so we have skills and expertise and tools that we make available to hpe and to Shi to help them have even stronger differentiated conversations with customers sounds like to me Terry that it's that AMD can be even more of an more than an enabler but really an accelerator of what customers are able to do from a strategic perspective on sustainability you're right about that and and we actually have tools greenhouse gas TCO tools that can be leveraged to really quantify the impact of some of the the new technology decisions that customers are making to allow them to achieve their goals so we're really proud of the work that we're doing in partnership with companies like hpe and Shi Better Together as we've said at the beginning and just a minute ago Charlie let's bring you back in talk to us a little bit about what Shi is doing to leverage sustainable I.T and enable your customers to meet their sustainability goals and their initiatives so for quite a while we've had uh some offerings to help customers especially in the end user compute side a lot of customers were interested in I've got assets for you know let's say a large sales force that had been carrying tablets or laptops and you know those need to be refreshed what do I do with those how do I responsibly retire or recycle those and we've been offering solutions for that for quite some time it's within the last year or two when we started offering for them guarantees and Assurance assurances of how they can if that equipment is reusable by somebody else how can we issue them you know credits for uh carving credits for reuse of that equipment somewhere else so it's not necessarily going to be E-Waste it's uh something that can be recycled and reused we have other programs with helping extend the life of of some systems where they look at boy I have an awful lot of data on these machines where historically they might want to just retire those because the the sensitivity of the data needed to be handled very specifically we can help them properly remove the sensitive data and still allow reuse of that equipment so we've been able to accomplish some Creative Solutions specifically around end user compute in the past but we are looking to new ways now to to really help extend that into Data Center infrastructure and Beyond to really help with what are the needs what are the the best ways to help our customers handle the things that are challenging them [Music] that's a great point that you bring up Charlie and the security kind of popped into my head here John saw his question for you when you're in customer conversations and you're talking about or maybe they're talking about help us with waste reduction with recycling where are you having those customer conversations I know sustainability is a board level it's a c-level discussion but where are you having those conversations within the customer organization well so it's a it's a combination of um organizations within the customer these are these Global organizations typically when we're talking about asset like cycle management asset recovery how do you do that in a sustainable Green Way and securely the customers we're dealing with I mean security is top sustainability is right up there too obviously but uh um Charlie touched on a lot of those things and these are Global rollouts tens of thousands of employees typically to to have mobile devices laptops and phones and so forth um and they often are looking for a true managed service around the world that takes into consideration things like the most efficient way to ship products to to the employees and how do you do that in a sustainable way you need to think about that does it all go to a central location um or to each individual's home during the pandemic that made a lot of sense to do it that way I think the reason I wanted to touch on those things is that well for for example one European pharmaceutical that the states and their reports that they are already in scope one in scope two they're fully uh Net Zero at this point and and they say but that only solves three percent of our overall sustainability goals uh 97 is scope three it's travel it's shipping it's it's uh it's all the all these things that are out of their direct control a lot of times but they're coming to us now as a as a supplier and ask and and we're filling out forms and rfps and so forth uh to show that we can be a sustainable supplier in their supply chain because that's their next big goal so sustainable supply chain absolutely Dr John Fry and Terry I want to kind of get your perspectives Charlie talked about from a customer requirements perspective customers coming through RFP saying hey we've got to work with vendors who have clear sustainability initiatives that are well underway hpe and AMD hearing the same thing Dr Fry will start with you and then Terry sure absolutely we receive about 2500 customer questionnaires just on sustainability every year and that's come up from a few hundred so yeah absolutely accelerating then the conversations turn deeper can you help us quantify our carbon emissions and power consumption then the conversation has recently gone even further to when can hpe offer Net Zero or carbon neutral Technology Solutions to the customer so that they don't have to account for those Solutions in their own carbon footprint so the questions are getting more sophisticated the need for the data and the accuracy of the data is climbing and as we see potential regulatory disclosure requirements around carbon emissions I think this trend is just going to continue up yeah and we see the same thing uh we get asked more and more from our customers and partners around our own corporate sustainability goals but the surveying that the survey work that we've done with customers has led us to you know understand that you know approximately 75 percent of customers are going to make sustainability goals a key component of their rfis in 2023 which is right around the corner and you know 60 of those same customers really expect to have business level kpis uh in the new year that are really related to sustainability so this is not just a a kind of a buzzword topic this is this is kind of business imperatives that you know the company the companies like hpe and AMD and the partners like Shi that really stand behind it and really are proactive in getting out in front of customers to help are really going to be ahead of the game that's a great point that you make Terry there that this isn't we're not talking about a buzzword here we're talking about a business imperative for businesses of probably all sizes across all Industries and Dr Farr you mentioned regulations and something that we just noticed is that the SEC recently said it's proposing some rules where companies must disclose greenhouse gas emissions um if they were if that were to to come into play I'm going to come back to Charlie and John saws how would Shi and frankly at hpe and AMD be able to help companies comply if that type of Regulation were to be implemented Charlie yeah so we are in the process right now of building out a service to help customers specifically with that with the reporting we know reporting is a challenge uh the scope 2 reporting is a challenge and scope three that I guess people thought was going to be a ways out now all of a sudden hey if you have made a public statement that you're going to make an impact on your scope three uh targets and you have to report on them so that that has become really important very quickly uh as word about this requirement is rumbling around uh there's concern so we are actually working right now on something it's a little too early to fully disclose but stay tuned because we have something coming that's interesting definitely peaked my ears are are parked here Charlie well stay tuned for that Dr Brian Terry can you talk about together with Shi hpe and AMD enabling customers to manage access to the data obviously which is critical and it's doing nothing but growing and proliferating key folks need access to it we talked a little bit about security but how are from a Better Together perspective Dr Fry will start with you how are you really helping organizations on that sustainability journey to ensure that data can be accessible to those who need it when they need it and these days what is real-time requirements yeah it's an increasing challenge in fact we have changed the HP Story the way we talk about hpe's value proposition to talk about data first modernization so how often do you collect data where do you store it how do you avoid moving it how do you make sure if you're going to collect data you get insights from that data that change your business or add business value and then how long do you retain that data afterward and all of that factors into sustainable I.T because when I talk to technology Executives what they tell me again and again is there's this presumption within their user community that storage is free and so when when they have needs for collecting data for example if if once an hour would do okay but the system would collect it once a minute the default the user asks for of course is once a minute and then are you getting insights from that data or are we moving it that becomes more important when you're moving data back and forth between the public cloud or the edge because there is quite a network penalty for moving that equipment across your network there's huge power and carbon implications of doing that so it's really making a better decision about what do we collect why do we collect it what we're going to do with it when we collect and how we store it and for years customers have really talked about you know modernization and the need to modernize their data center you know I fundamentally believe that sustainability is really that Catalyst to really Drive true modernization and as they think forward um you know when we work with with hpe you know they offer a variety of purpose-built servers that can play a role in you know specific customer workloads from the larger supercomputers down to kind of general purpose servers and when we work with Partners like Shi not only can they deliver the full Suite of um offerings for on-premise deployments they're also very well positioned to leverage the public Cloud infrastructure for those workloads that really belong there and that certainly can help customers kind of achieve an end-to-end sustainability goal that's a great point that that it needs to be strategic but it also needs to be an end-to-end goal we're just about out of time but I wanted to give John saws the last word here take us out John what are some of the things Charlie kind of teased some of the things that are coming out that piqued my interest but what are some of the things that you're excited about as hpe AMD and Shi really help customers achieve their sustainability initiatives sure um a couple of comments here um so Charlie yeah you touched on some upcoming capabilities uh that uh Shi will have around the area of monitoring and management see this is difficult for all customers to be able to report in this formal way this is a train coming at everybody very quickly and um they're not ready most customers aren't ready and if we can help um as as a reseller integrator assessments to be able to understand what they're currently running compared to different scenarios of where they could go to in a future state that seems valuable if we can help in that way that's those are things that we're looking into specifically uh you know greenhouse gas emissions relevant assessments and and um and what in the comments uh of Terry and John around the power per watt and um the vast um uh portfolio of technologies that they that they had to address various workloads is uh is fantastic we'd be able to help point to Technologies like that and move customers in that direction I think as a as an integrator and a technical advisor to customers I saw an article on BBC this morning that I I think if we think about how we're working with our customers and we can help them maybe think differently about how they're using their technology to solve problems um the BBC article mentioned this was ethereum a cryptocurrency and they have a big project called merge and today was a go live date and BBC US news outlets have been reporting on it they basically changed the model from a model called The Power of work which takes a a lot of compute and graphic GPU power and so forth around the world and it's now called a power of stake which means that the people that validate that their actions in this environment are correct they have to put up a stake of their own cryptocurrency and if they're wrong it's taken from them this new model reduces the emissions of their um uh environment by 99 plus percent the June emissions from ethereum were it was 120 uh terawatts per per year terawatt hours per year and they reduced it um actually that's the equivalent of what the Netherlands needed for energy so the comparable to a medium-sized country so if you can think differently about how to solve problems it may be on-prem it may be extremely it may be that may be the public cloud in some cases or other you know interesting Innovative Technologies that the AMD hpe other partners that we can bring in along along with them as well we can solve problems differently there is a lot going on the opportunities that you all talked about to really make such a huge societal impact and impact to our planet are exciting we thank you so much for talking together about how hpe AMD and sha are really working in partnership in Synergy to help your customers across every organization really become much more focused much more collaborative about sustainable I.T guys we so appreciate your time and thank you for your insights Thank you Lisa thank you my pleasure for my guests I'm Lisa Martin in a moment Dan Molina is going to join me he's the co-president and chief technology officer of nth generation you're watching the cube the leader in high tech Enterprise coverage [Music]

(upbeat music) >> Hey everyone. Lisa Martin here of theCUBE. I have three guests now here with me. Please welcome Dave Fafel, chief technology officer at WEI. And welcome back to the program, Terry Richardson, North American channel chief at AMD, and Dr. John Fry, chief technologist, sustainable transformation at HPE. Gentlemen, it's great to have you on the program. Thanks so much for hopping on. >> Thanks for having us. >> Thank you. >> (indistinct) >> So, Dave, let's start with you, a lot of acronyms here. Talk to us about WEI and its approach to sustainability. >> Yeah, absolutely, sure. So, WEI is a innovative, full service, customer-centric, IT solutions provider. We're experts in business technology improvement, in driving efficiency, helping our customers to optimize their IT environments. That's what we do. And of course, sustainability is really now part of the core function in architecting IT solutions these days. It has to be. I look at sustainability and I hear the word sustainability and I think efficiency. And that's the way that our organization designs solutions for our customers today. >> Talk about the impetus. You mentioned being customer centric you talked about efficiency, all incredibly important to all of us on this Zoom, but Dave, talk about the impetus for WEI to develop and implement this sustainability initiative. Well, I mean, so look, for WEI, it's part of our business model, it's part of our culture. So it's natural that that comes out in the solutions that we design for our customers, but we're trying to solve business problems for our customers, We're not just geeks building something really cool with the latest technology, we're trying to solve real world problems and sustainability addresses real world issues. And so, our customers are looking for us to help them either implement their sustainability programs, or to mature their sustainability programs. And IT has a big responsibility in that. And so, when we're working with them to solve these problems we're really solving that business problem, solving that sustainability, IT initiative that they have. >> And we're going to dig and unpack that in a little bit. John, I want to bring you into the conversation. HPE and AMD have been long partnering on advancing sustainability goals for quite a long time now. Can you talk about how HPE and WEI are partnering? What are some of the key aspects of the relationship that help support not only the goals that Dave talked about but HPE's sustainability goals? >> Yeah, absolutely. One of the things in sustainability is partnership is really leadership. No one company can do this by themselves, and customers really need that input and perspective from all of their partners as part of this process. So, for us as HPE, 65% of our carbon footprint, for example, is when our customers use our technology products. So, for us to lower our carbon footprint, it also requires us helping the customer do that. And that's where the power of the AMD and HPE relationship comes together, but we can't give our expertise widely to every customer in the world. And so, we use our channel partners like WEI to not only extend our reach, but they bring that deep knowledge of the customer and all of their operations across technology, even places where HPE does not offer that technology, in the client space, for example, or in the printer space. And so, what it allows us to do is develop better solutions for the customer. WEI has a deep relationship with the customer. They have a deep expertise in local nuances if there's regulations or local constraints. In fact, in many cities in the world, you can't, for example, build new data centers because of power infrastructure constraints. So, that's where we leverage partners like WEI to improve the customer experience and make sure that we give the best solutions to the customer. >> All about improving those customer experiences as demand for technology does nothing but increase. Terry, let's bring you into the conversation now. Speaking of customer centricity, we find that sustainability is very complicated, that a lot of large companies might have the resources to figure it out, but some of the smaller and mid-size companies might not quite have the boots on the street. What should some of the smaller organizations do, Terry, in your perspective to get started where sustainability is concerned? >> Well, I first off, appreciate the opportunity to be here and it's really terrific to have such a strong partnership with both HPE and WEI in order to deliver innovative solutions to customers. I think what AMD brings to the table is a real choice for customers that they haven't had. All of our personnel are really expert in articulating a differentiated value proposition that hits on a little bit what John talked about which is higher performance but with very, very efficient systems. And we've been offering those to the market since 2017 and we continued to get better. And now, there's an absolute opportunity to do more with same amount of servers, or do a workload with far fewer servers, that require far less energy. So, bringing in the AMD resources to assist the efforts of HPE and WEI, I would say, would be a good step for customers. >> Are there any Terry, sticking with you, any recommendations or tools particularly that you've seen really help customers get kicked off well, and strategically? >> Yeah, there actually are a couple that are readily available and I would encourage through WEI, customers take a close look. Two that really come to mind. We have a virtualization TCO tool that helps optimize configurations for virtual environments. And one of our newest tools is one that's focused on bare metal and greenhouse gas emissions TCO. So, really quantifying the impact to customers and expressed in terms that are familiar and help them achieve their sustainability initiatives. >> Excellent, that's great that those resources are available for customers, especially those smaller ones that might need a bit more guidance and handholding. Dave, let's come back to you. Let's now unpack the sustainability initiatives at WEI that you're really leveraging and implementing to meet the demands of customers and their future technology demands. >> Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, that's a great question, what we're getting to. So, look, we're going to combine, the advancements in technology from an AMD and from an HPE into an architecture that's really usable for a customer. So, 10 years ago, we were all looking at consolidation ratios for virtualization as one driver to a more efficient IT environment. And so, look, we've done this over the last decade, where we've added as many virtual machines to a server as we can get and as many containers to a physical machine as we can get, and now we've got to find other ways to drive efficiency. And so, when we see technology from AMD that's maybe having the socket count from a CPU perspective with a 30 plus percent reduction in power consumption and heat output, that's huge. So, we're architecting these solutions, using that best of breed technology but also implementing technology that was previously consumed more by larger enterprise customers for that small and medium customer base that you mentioned earlier. And that is implementing infrastructure as a service as a way to more efficiently utilize IT resources. So, we'll design the right systems, we'll put them into a consumption model that allows us to dial up and down when we need to, as opposed to having to build oversized environments that consume too much power, that produce too much heat and that aren't really driving toward those sustainability initiatives. So, we want to change not only the technology but also the models of which we consume IT. That's how we're driving that forward with customers today. >> And Dave, another question for you. How are you seeing from a cultural perspective this be adopted and accepted across the customer base? 'Cause change management is challenging but we all know sustainability is a focus of pretty much every business on the planet. >> It is, but fortunately we've got good partners like AMD and HPE, so they make it easy for the channel to implement these things. If you take a look at HPE's GreenLake solutions, for instance. These are tool sets that allow us to go and easily implement that for customers and reduce that change or cost of change for them. In fact, it actually allows them to take the models that they're currently used to and yet still leverage that new consumption model that I just referred to. >> Got it, awesome, thank you. John, let's go back to you. There's a tremendous opportunity here for customers from a sustainability standpoint, across every industry. And I was looking at some data that HPE shared that said for example, 25% of compute in data centers is comatose. First of all, I think the description is brilliant. What are some of the outcomes that customers can expect in working with HPE and AMD and WEI in terms of better leveraging their technology investments today and in the future? >> Yeah, it's a great question. And we do see a tremendous amount of equipment in the average data center that's not doing any useful work. And so, comatose is a great name for that. We also see a tremendous amount of equipment that's being dramatically underutilized as well. So, when the three companies come together and share that expertise with the customer and the customer follows through on that you can expect a whole lot of things. So, you reduce over-provisioning, you have the IT assets in your infrastructure doing useful work for you. The second thing you you tend to see is utilization levels going up. So, where the average utilization level across compute today even in a virtualized or containerized environment is about 30%. You see that almost doubling, for example, in good scenarios where the customer has that equipment doing a tremendous amount of additional work, keeping them from needing to add additional assets to the infrastructure. So, all of that drives cost savings, both CapEx and OPEX, cost savings opportunities. It drives efficiency savings. If you have less equipment being more well utilized and better managed, you tend not to have over temperature situations or equipment that goes down for no explainable reason that then drives staff work to go find out and fix workloads that go down. In fact, many of our customers are measured on service level agreements. They want to keep that infrastructure running all the time to keep their customers happy as well. And finally, one that sometimes is missed is employee satisfaction. Technology companies are having a tough enough time finding and attracting and retaining employees to start with but those employees want to see how what they're doing contributes to purpose. So, as our customers can use these employees to do more productive work, show them how it connects to the purpose of their company and show them how it makes the world a better place at the same time, they can do a better job of holding on to those employees that they so value. >> That's such a great point, John, that you bring up that employee retention but also talent attraction and retention for your customers. Dave, back to you. Are you seeing more and more customers come to WEI, saying, "We have sustainability initiatives. "We can only partner with companies that are also really focused on this because we need to make sure that our employees are satisfied and that we can attract and retain customers." Is that something that you're seeing an increase of? >> Yeah, absolutely. So very often, we're asked to explain how we're implementing sustainability in our business, that the partners that we work with are also doing the same and I'll give you an example of that. So, we've been talking about IT efficiency and good utilization of IT equipment but let's not forget that life cycles of IT equipment result in that equipment leaving a customer site eventually. So, we've got to be responsible in the way that we handle that. And so, this is the area where WEI has put together programs to connect the sustainability aspect of IT recycling, if you will, with the social aspect of corporate social responsibility. And that is, what do we do with this stuff? So, we offer programs to customers where we say, "Hey, look, let's take back some of that IT equipment, there's value in this." It may be that we need to go and recycle this in a responsible way. And we can extract valuable components out of this that result in funds to do something with. Well, what can we do with those funds? Can we put those towards social programs? So, this is where we, again, tie together sustainability and social responsibility. We've been talking about data centers but this also extends to other IT devices. So, if we're pulling back laptops, as an example, from a customer environment, well, those may still have a useful life someplace. Can we bring those to disadvantaged communities and utilize those for educational purposes and other things? Again, this is how WEI connects our customers with these opportunities to enhance their CSR programs. >> Tremendous opportunities there for customers across every industry. Dave, sticking with you for a second. From a differentiation perspective, talk about what the partnership with HPE and AMD delivers WEI from a unique value prop perspective. >> Yeah, so we touched on it a little bit already, and that is, you've got the incredible technology from AMD and from HPE that work seamlessly together but is also focused on driving down the cost of computing. I mean, just the overall efficiency built into design of these solutions makes it easy for an IT consultant like us to build an efficient architecture. But it's not just the technology. It's also the models, or the IT provisioning and consumption models that are important. And again, that's where the relationship between HPE and WEI comes together, because we get to leverage some of these other programs. I mentioned before GreenLake, as an example. This gives us the opportunity to build that infrastructure as service model for our customers who would otherwise maybe go out to a hyperscaler for a similar solution. But as we know, most of our customers even small and medium businesses, can't move everything out to the cloud. They have to use their own data centers. They have to keep data on site and on-prem. So, building that model for them drives efficiency and quite honestly, that's the thing that they're looking for, it's driving cost savings, it's driving efficiency, it's aiding their CSR initiatives. >> Got it. Let's chat now about the strategic versus the tactical. Terry, I would like to get your feedback and then John, yours as well. We talked a little bit about this already but how do you help advise organizations that might be in that tactical mode, approaching sustainability from a tactical mode and really up level that to a strategy that's around sustainable IT? Terry, what are some of the things that you're seeing in the marketplace? Well, at AMD we're fortunate to be passionate about partnerships and sustainability. We're fortunate to work with companies of all shapes and sizes and in different geographies around the world. Some are a little bit more advanced in the way they think about this, but it really is becoming a strategic imperative for companies. And I think certain companies don't know exactly how to proceed. So, the opportunity to educate and open their eyes to the way that you can do both, you can meet your IT goals and objectives, but also do it in a very socially responsible and sustainable way, to me is a win-win. And we welcome the opportunity to just have those conversations. I think some customers are not necessarily understanding how much IT can really contribute to their ability to meet their current and future sustainability goals. And we look forward to having as many conversations as possible 'cause it goes in the category of just the right thing to do. If you can power your IT and do things that are good for the planet and good for all. >> That's a great point. It really is the right thing to do. John, just question, last question for you, is similar to what I asked Terry, but I would like to know where are your customer conversations when it comes to really looking at IT as a big driver of sustainability? Who in the organization really needs to be the spearheads around that initiative? >> Yeah, great question. Often we see customers have one organization that sometimes is a sustainability organization. Sometimes the facility's a real estate organization or sometimes IT is spearheading this and often doing that in isolation. To your point, we really need to think about this as a sustainable IT strategy and get all the right organizations involved together. So, for example, for us, after seeing many customers that didn't know how to develop this strategy, we wrote a workbook called "Six Steps For Implementing A Sustainable IT Strategy." And the steps are things like figure out what your company goals already are that you've made public to your customers then grab the right stakeholders and bring them together. For example, you know you're going to have cost savings, so have the finance team in the room, You know this is going to save utilities, have the real estate team in the room. You know it's going to generate a sustainability benefit, have the sustainability team involved so that they can quantify the benefit in a meaningful manner. Have the communication and marketing teams because when companies implement a sustainable IT strategy they have a great story that they can then tell their customers about how they're doing a better job from an efficiency perspective and from an environmental perspective as well. So, when you bring all of those stakeholders together you can have a much broader and deeper strategy. It becomes a strategic imperative. And when your institutional investors, if you're publicly traded, or your customers come asking about your programs, you're ready to answer those questions in a credible manner. >> Sounds like it really needs to truly be a collaborative effort across the organization. You mentioned John's story and that goes back to employee retention, talent attraction and retention for your companies and your customers as well. We could go off on that but we're almost out of time. So, I want to go back to Dave to take us home here. You walked us through what WEI is doing from a sustainability initiative perspective, the impetus to develop that. What are some of the things that we can expect to see on the horizon from WEI where sustainability is concerned? What are you excited about? >> Well, that's a good question. So, we're excited about how we can continue to deploy those infrastructure as a service models. That's the next step in the direction. How do we automate these things, and then how do we quantify them? So, you've got to build the environment but then you've got to be able to measure it. And that's another area where WEI really adds value to this whole solution set is how are we measuring these things in the long term and developing a program that extends beyond just the implementation of this, but through its entire life cycle and the value of it? Because if you can quantify the value and if you can show what the savings really is and how it's helping customers meet their sustainability goals, well, guess what? They're going to want to implement more of this So, it's good business, and that's what we're excited about, is that next mile of implementation after we developed the initial architecture. >> That measurement is key. It sounds like then it really becomes a flywheel of sustainability. Gentlemen, thank you so much for joining me today talking about from your three perspectives and how you're partnering together to really enable businesses across any industry to develop a sustainable IT strategy that they can implement and then create a flywheel of optimization. We appreciate your insights and your time. >> Thank you. >> Thanks, Lisa. >> Thank you. >> All right, my pleasure for my guests, I'm Lisa Martin. In a moment, John and Terry and I are going to be joined by Charles Mulrooney, global presales engineering manager at SHI and John Sahs, global presales technical consultant at SHI. You're watching theCUBE, the leader in global tech coverage. (upbeat music)

>> Announcer: Live from Chicago, Illinois, it's theCUBE, covering VEEAMON 2018. Brought to you by Veeam. >> Welcome back to VEEAMON 2018 in Chicago, everybody. You're watching theCUBE, the leader in live tech coverage. My name is Dave Vellante. I'm here with my cohost, Stu Miniman. Karl Rautenstrauch is here, Karl Rautenstrauch, Senior Program Manager for Azure Storage at Microsoft. Karl, thanks for coming on. >> It's a pleasure, guys. Thank you for having me. >> You've got a beautiful picture of your family. You got three boys at home, is that right? >> Karl: Three boys. >> Alright. >> They keep me out of trouble. They get into it, they keep me out of it. >> I'm one of three boys. My mom, you know, kept us going. You must have a strong woman at home. >> She is a saint. >> At any rate, thanks for coming on. We love talking Microsoft Azure, Cloud and storage. Let's start with your role. >> Karl: Sure. What do you have? >> What do you do at Microsoft? >> Absolutely. So for the last year I've been program manager with the storage team, and I've kind of a unique role. Usually you see program managers who focus on features, right? You are championing a new feature in your service, your platform. For me, I get to work with our partner ecosystem. So I spend a lot of time with our great partners, like Veeam, and our channel partners, like SHI, CDW, Softchoice, Insight. I'll tell you, I've got the best job in the business. I can't complain. I get to work with great, smart people everyday. >> So is your role transferring knowledge to those partners, assisting those partners, acting as a catalyst, gathering information from them and feeding it back to the product teams? >> Yeah, really all of the above. Helping to make sure that we've got a combined solution, an end-to-end solution, that's the best thing for our customers. So everything from upfront assessment through implementation through health check afterwards, our goal is to have the happiest customers in the public Cloud, and we can't do that without our partners. >> How should we think about the Azure Storage portfolio? Can you paint a picture for us? >> Oh boy, it has grown drastically just in the last couple of months. So not only do we have our first party offerings in the disk, traditional VM disk as we all know it, you're going to attach to a server, we have hosted file infrastructures where we provide file shares that don't require a server to manage, our partnership with NetApp where we are going to be operating NetApp systems in our data centers and offering their native services. And we just continue to expand with big data solutions, with Avere, our new acquisition, that is really aimed at high performance compute environments like we see in genomics and media and entertainment. It's just a portfolio that continues to grow. We all joke that storage is boring, right? Nobody cares about storage, but honestly, it's one of the most interesting and fastest growing and evolving platforms in Azure. >> We joke, sometimes we call it snore-age, but Stu and I are kind of boring people, so we love talking about it. >> I like that. >> So you got file, you got object, you got block, you got big data solutions, you got high performance file solutions. Okay, like you say, this expanding portfolio. >> Karl, I look back at my career and Microsoft's had a long partnership, not only on the compute side, but really on the storage side, maybe isn't as well known as shipping on every PC and server out there. Lot has changed, when you talk about Azure and Azure Stack coming out. Maybe explain a little bit, I believe you called it the first party versus the second party. How that Microsoft does it versus Microsoft partners, how those mesh together. >> Yeah, absolutely. Well I'll tell you. So I joined the company about five years ago, and I've been on the storage team for the last year. I was a field specialist, a subject matter expert, before that working very, very closely with customers. And what I love that I've seen over this period through the Satya Nadella era, is just this open Microsoft that says, we don't have to do everything. We don't have to try to provide everything to the customer. We really believe in, and I think we just diffuse that best of breed attitude going forward. Our partners feel that. Whether we're working with Veeam in Azure Public Cloud as a target, or them offering protection of VMs in public cloud, which is necessary by the way. I think that's a huge fallacy in the industry, that you place your app, you place your machine in a public cloud, and it's magically protected by pixies. It's not. >> Backup and security aren't a concern, wherever you put it, right? >> Absolutely, wherever they are. So we rely on our partners like Veeam to provide that. And really where Azure Stack comes in, is providing that consistent experience, not just to our customers, but also to out partners. So Veeam is able to protect Azure Public assets, in the same manner they're able to protect Azure Private, for Azure Stack resources. So really it's just offering customers choice to use best of breed solutions, and allowing our partners to have an easy means to support both on-premises and public Cloud. >> So it's like a service catalog that you guys offer, and then you advise customers or they pick and choose what they want? How's that all work? >> Yeah, so really what we do, and that's a great way to put it. We have what we call the Azure Marketplace that's present in the Azure Public Cloud, and we extend that to Azure Stack. So if I'm a customer who wants to deploy Veeam, per se, in either infrastructure, I go to this catalog of apps. I mean it literally is a catalog of apps. Search for Veeam, there it is, and I can single click deploy in either Azure Stack or Azure Public. >> Microsoft is unique in the sense of its hybrid strategy, in terms of what you have in the cloud you have on-prem. You're trying to, wherever possible, make it identical. >> Karl: Absolutely. >> Microsoft and Oracle are really the only two companies that have a stated strategy to do that. Let's talk about Microsoft in terms of where you're at, in terms of getting that substantially similar capability in on-prem and in the public Cloud. >> Yeah, absolutely. That's a great, great topic to discuss. Azure Stack, I always like to tell folks, full disclosure, and we don't try to hide this at all, that's not who we are, but it will always lag a little bit behind Azure Public. When you think about the controls in customers' data centers for rolling out code updates and new versions of software, new capabilities, there's always an adoption curve. You have folks who are a little more hesitant to release quickly and adopt quickly. So Azure Stack offers them the capability to defer some of those updates for a period of time. So there will be a lag. We have to qualify for multiple vendor platforms, we've chosen to go to market in a hyperconverged model with our partners, like Dell EMC, HP, Lenovo and Cisco. Whereas Azure Public, that's a completely controlled infrastructure, and we're able to deploy very quickly. And we do; we're constantly iterating and releasing new features. So I think that's the biggest difference between the two. >> So Karl, you give a session here at the show called Migrating to Azure. That whole move is pretty challenging. >> Karl: Oh yes. Am I lift and shifting? Am I transforming? Am I building new? What are you hearing from customers? And give our audience a taste of some of the key takeaways that you were talking about. >> Yeah, absolutely. So that's one of the biggest concerns that we've had over the last couple of years. I said earlier, we want the happiest customers in Public Cloud, and no Cloud regret or remorse. So what we talked about in our session was a tool that we released recently called Azure Migrate, that is all about assessing and setting expectations for customers around what can and cannot migrate, how much it will cost to run that infrastructure in Public Cloud, either as is or optimized, and then suggestions for optimizing their infrastructure to get the best bang for their buck. So there are great opportunities to save cost when platforms are adopted, like Azure sql, platform as a service offerings. When I've got that time-sharing concept, when I take away maintenance activities around operating systems and software releases, there are significant cost savings versus a lift and shift, which can quite honestly be more expensive than what that customer is doing on-premises today. So Azure Migrate is meant to help customers avoid that, no regrets. >> I wonder what you're hearing from customers cuz there's some concern. Maybe I should just do infrastructure as a service. Cuz if I get into those platform as a service, am I locked in? Microsoft is used for lots of business scribble applications. I see Microsoft strongly in the Kubernetes ecosystem, getting into the functions as a service, which those things are trying to give me a little bit more portability and flexibility. Maybe discuss some of that. >> Yeah, that's great, and I'm glad you brought that back around. So there is always that concern about the Cloud Hotel California, right? And that said, I like to half jokingly refer to it as you get in, you can never leave. And there is that jeopardy with any provider. That if you're using some proprietary platform that you can be locked-in, and really we try to promote the use of containers extensively with those customers who have that concern. And even with our hosted analytics and hosted database infrastructures, we make sure to provide those portable cross-Cloud platforms, like Postgres, MySQL. Our analytics is all Ubuntu based. Really we don't want that lock-in to be there, we don't want that to be a concern. So continuing support for open platforms and ecosystems is really something we're committed to. >> The lock-in, openness choice, it's a spectrum. I've been in this business for a long time, and Unix used to be the open system. And then today, you can't get more locked-in then a Unix platform. So I feel as though, and I wonder if you guys can comment, the Cloud has transparent pricing and transparent billing. And so lock-in is if I have a customer and they're trying to move and they're up for a contract renewal or something or a maintenance, I'm going to jack their maintenance. But you can't just do that across the board, if you have transparent billing. So there's the pricing aspect. There's certainly a lock-in with the processes and procedures that you choose, but no matter what you choose, whether it's open source, a Cloud provider like Amazon, an on-prem provider like the many that we know out there, you're going to be locked-in to your processes and procedures. So it's a matter of degree. I personally see it, because of the Cloud, as a lot less onerous than it used to be. Do you guys agree with that? >> I mean Dave, it's that application is the long pole in the tent for ones I see. What I've been using and if I go to something new, if I go build this new architecture, Cloud Nader or whatever, that's a pretty big bet. So depending on how deep and tied that is to a specific platform, even if I'm choosing a database, migrating databases aren't easy. >> But that's the issue. It's the bet that you're making. It's more so than the lock-in because lock-in, you're going to be locked in to whatever bet you make, so you've got to make the right bet. To me, it's a way for consultants to act like an advocate for the customer. What's more important in my view, is negotiation strategies, how you place that bet, how you architect your Cloud strategy. >> And I mean Dave, just quickly, I remember four years ago you and I interviewed Brad Anderson with Microsoft, and we were poking him on licensing. I don't hear that discussion about Microsoft as much, of course we always want it cheaper, and everything like that, but Microsoft's done a great job. In the Cloud communities, they're known as participating in those communities, and giving customers- >> Well that's our take, what's your take? >> No, I love it. And I think what I'm seeing is customers are hedging their bets. So you do, and it is a bet. You do have to not go all in with somebody, with any Cloud provider, but you got to put your chips with some proprietary platforms. And what I'm seeing is that multi-Cloud that we're all talking about is really becoming the reality. I can think of very few customers that I've worked with who have had Azure as their single public Cloud. And really that's how they avoid that z-series down the road, right? Where you're locked-in, you got one provider that platform. They're saying, look, I'm going to deploy on the best service in the best public Cloud for that application instance, as Stu mentioned. That's happening. >> Horses for courses, as they say in England. >> Karl: There you go. >> So we're here at VEEAMON. Your relationship with Veeam, they've obviously partnered up with you guys in a big way. Your thoughts on the partnership? >> Yeah, love working with these guys. I'm very fortunate in that I get to work with some of the best that we have, and everything from the relationship that we have on a marketing level, an engineering level, a field level, they're really ingrained in our ecosystem at all levels. Just a very, very easy partner to work with, very responsive to their customer needs. And that's what we look for. We want to work with the partners that customers love. So I'm just thrilled to be part of this relationship. >> Karl, thanks so much for coming on theCUBE. I think you embody the new open Microsoft, and you guys are making great progress. Congratulations and thanks so much for coming on. >> Thank you Dave, it was a pleasure. Stu, thank you very much. >> Alright, keep it right there everybody. We'll be back with our next guest. VEEAMON live from Chicago, you're watching theCUBE. (upbeat music)