(smooth music) >> Hi, everybody. This is Dave Vellante, and with me is Sandeep Singh. He's the vice president of storage marketing at Hewlett Packard Enterprise, and we're going to riff on some of the trends in the industry, what we're seeing, and we got a little treat for you, Sandeep. Great to see you, man. >> Dave, it's a pleasure to be here. >> You and I have known each other for a long time. We've had some great discussions, some debates, (chuckles) some intriguing mind benders. What are you seeing out there in storage? So much has changed. What are the key trends you're seeing? And let's get into it. >> Yeah. Across the board, as you said, so much has changed. When you reflect back at the underlying transformation that's taking place with data, cloud, and AI across the board, first of all, for our customers, they're seeing this massive data explosion that literally now spans edge to core to cloud. They're also seeing a diversity of the application workloads across the board. The emphasis that it's placing is on the complexity that underlies overall infrastructure and data management. Across the board, we're hearing a lot from customers about just the underlying infrastructure and complexity, and the infrastructure sprawl. And then the second element of that is really extending into the complexity of data management. >> So it's interesting to talk about data management. You remember you and I were in... Well, you were in Andover. I don't know. It was probably like five years ago. And all we were talking about was media, flash this and flash that, and at the time that was kind of the hot storage topic. Well, flash came in, addressed some of the clicks that we historically talked about. Now the problem statement is really kind of, quote unquote, metaphorically moving up the stack, if you will. You mentioned management. But let's dig into that a little bit. I mean, what is management? I mean, a lot of people... That means different things to different people. You talk to a database person or a backup person. How do you look at management? What does that mean to you? >> Yeah, Dave. You mentioned that flash came in, and it actually accelerated the overall speed and latency that storage was delivering to the application workloads. But fundamentally, when you look back at storage over a couple of decades, the underlying way of how you're managing storage hasn't fundamentally changed. There's still an incredible amount of complexity for ITs. It's still a manual admin-driven experience for customers. And what that's translating to is, more often than not, IT is in the world of firefighting, and it leaves them unable to help with the more strategic projects to innovate for the business. And basically IT has that pressure point of moving beyond that, and helping bring greater levels of agility that line of business owners are asking for, and to be able to deliver on more of the strategic projects. So that's one element of it. The second element that we're hearing from customers about is as more and more data just continues to explode from edge to core to cloud, and as basically the infrastructure has grown from just being on-prem, to being at the edge, to being in the cloud, now that complexity is expanding from just being on-prem to across multiple different clouds. So when you look across the data life cycle, how do you store it? How do you secure it? How do you basically protect it, and archive it, and analyze that data? That end to end life cycle management of data, today resides on just a fragmented set of overall infrastructure, and tools, and processes, and administrative boundaries. That's creating a massive challenge for customers. And the impact of that, ultimately, is essentially comes at a cost to agility, to innovation, and ultimately business risk. >> Yeah, so we've seen obviously the cloud has addressed a lot of these problems, but the problem is the cloud is in the cloud. And much of my stuff, most of my stuff, isn't in the cloud. (chuckles) So I have all these other workloads that are either on-prem, and now you've got this emerging edge. And so I wonder if we could just talk a little vision here for a minute. I mean, what I've been envisioning is this abstraction layer that cuts across all, whether... It doesn't really matter where it is. If it's on-prem, if it's across cloud, if it's in the cloud, on the edge. We could talk about what that all means. But if customers that I talk to, they're sort of done with the complexity of that underlying infrastructure. They want technology to take care of that. They want automation. They want AI brought into that equation. And it seems like we're on the cusp of the decade where that might happen. What's your take? >> Well, yeah. Certainly, I mentioned that data cloud and AI are really the disruptive forces that are propelling the digital transformation for customers. Cloud has set the standard for agility, and AI-driven insights and intelligence are really helping to make the underlying infrastructure invisible. And yet a lot of their application workloads and data is on-prem and is increasingly growing at the edge. So they want that same experience to be able to truly bring that agility to wherever their data and apps load. And that's one of the things that we're continuing to hear from customers. >> And this problem's just going to get worse. I mean, we... For decades we marched to the cadence of Moore's law, and everybody's kind of forgets about Moore's law. And they'll say, "Ah, it's dying," or whatever. But actually, when you look at the processing power that's coming out now, it's not... It's more than doubling every two years, quadrupling every two years. So now you've got this capability in your hands, and application designers, storage companies, networking companies, they're going to have all this power to now bring in AI and do things that we've never even imagined before. So it's not about the box, and the speeds and feeds of the box. It's really more about this abstraction layer that I was talking about, the management, if you will, that you were discussing, and what we can do in terms of being able to power new workloads, machine intelligence. It's this kind of ubiquitous... Call it the cloud, but it's expanding pretty much everywhere in every part of our lives, (chuckles) even to the edge. You think about autonomous vehicles, you think about factories. It's actually quite mind boggling where we're headed. >> It is, and you touched upon AI, and certainly when you look at infrastructure, for example, there's been a ton of complexity in infrastructure management. One of the studies that was done, actually by IDC, indicated that over 90% of the challenges that arise, for example, ultimately down at the storage infrastructure layer that's powering the apps, ultimately, arises from way above the stack all the way from the server layer on down, or even the virtual machine layer. And there, for example, AI ops for infrastructure has become a game changer for customers to be able to bring the power of AI, and machine learning, and multi-variate analysis to be able to predict and prevent issues. Dave, you also touched upon edge, and across the board, what we're seeing is the enterprise edge is becoming that frontier for customer experiences, and the opportunity to reimagine customer experiences, as well as just the frontier for commerce that's happening when you look at retail, and manufacturing, and/or financial services. So across the board, with the data growth that's happening, and this edge becoming the strategic frontier for delivering the customer experiences, how you power your application workloads there, how you deliver that data, and protect that data, and be able to seamlessly manage that overall infrastructure, as you mentioned, abstracted away at a higher level, becomes incredibly important for our customers. >> It's so interesting to hear how the conversation's changing, I'd like to say. I go back to whatever it was, five years ago, we're talking about flash, storage class memory, and NVMe, and those things are still there, but your emphasis now, you're talking about machine learning, AI, math around deep learning. It's really software is really what you're focusing on these days. >> Very much so. Certainly, this notion of software and services that are delivering and unlocking a whole new experience for customers, that's really the game changer going forward for customers, and that's what we're focused on. >> Well, I said we had a little surprise for you. So you guys are having an event on May 4th. It's called Unleash the Power of Data. What's that event all about, Sandeep? >> Yeah. We are very much excited about our May 4th event. As you mentioned, it's called Unleash the Power of Data. And as most organizations today are data driven, and data is at the heart of what they're doing, we're excited to invite everyone to join this event. And through this event, we're unveiling a new vision for data that accelerates the data-driven transformation from edge to cloud. This event promises to be a pivotal event, and one that IT admins, cloud architects, virtual machine admins, vice-presidents, directors of IT, and CIOs really won't want to miss. Across the board, this event is just bringing a new way of articulating the overall problem statement, and a market-in focused the articulation of the trends that we were just discussing. It's an event that's going to be hosted by business and technology journalist, Shibani Joshi. It will feature a market-in panel with a focus on the crucial role that data is playing in customers' digital transformation. It will also include and feature Antonio Neri, CEO of HPE, and Tom Black, senior vice president and general manager of HPE storage business, and industry experts, including Julia Palmer, research vice president at Gartner. We will unveil game-changing HPE innovations that will make it possible for organizations across edge to cloud to unleash the power of data. >> Sounds like a great event. I presume I can go to hpe.com. And what? Get information. Is it a registered event? How does that all work? >> Yeah, we invite everyone to visit hpe.com, and by visiting there, you can click and save the date of May 4th at 8:00 AM Pacific. We invite everyone to join us. We couldn't be more excited to get to this event, and be able to share the vision and game-changing HPE innovations. >> Awesome. So it's... So I don't have to register, right? I don't have to give up my three children's name, and my social security number to attend your event, is that right? (chuckles) >> No registration required. Come by, click on hpe.com. Save the date on your calendar. And we very much look forward to having everyone join us for this event. >> I love it. It's pure content event. I'm not going to get a phone call afterwards saying, "Hey, buy some stuff from me." That could come other channels, so that's good. (chuckles) Thank you for that. Thanks for providing that service to the industry. I'm excited to see what you guys are going to be announcing that day. And look, Sandeep, I mean, like I said, we've known each other a while. We've seen a lot of trends, but the next 10 years, it ain't going to look like the last 10, is it? >> It's going to be very different, and we couldn't be more excited. >> Well, Sandeep, thanks so much for coming to theCUBE, and riffing with me on the industry, and giving us a preview for your event. Good luck with that, and always great to see you. >> Thanks a lot, Dave. Always great to see you as well. >> All right, and thank you, everybody. This is Dave Vellante for theCUBE, and we'll see you next time. (smooth music)