>> Announcer: Live from Las Vegas it's theCUBE covering VMWorld 2017. Brought to you by VMware and its ecosystem partners. >> Okay, welcome back everyone. Live CUBE coverage here at VMWorld 2017. Three days, we're on our third day of VMWorld, always a great tradition, our eighth year. I'm John Furrier with theCUBE co-hosted by Dave Vellante of Wikibon and our next guest is Keegan Riley, vice president and general manager of North American storage at HP Enterprise. Welcome to theCUBE. >> Thank you, thanks for having me. >> Thanks for coming on, love the pin, as always wearin' that with flair. Love the logo, always comment on that when I, first I was skeptical on it, but now I love it, but, HP doing great in storage with acquisitions of SimpliVity and Nimble where you had a good run there. >> Keegan: Absolutely. >> We just had a former HPE entrepreneur now on doing a storage startup, so we're familiar with he HPE storage. Good story. What's the update now, you got Discover in the books, now you got the Madrid coming up event. Software to find storage that pony's going to run for a while. What's the update? >> Yeah, so appreciate the time, appreciate you having me on. You know, the way that we're thinking about HPE's storage it's interesting, it's the company is so different, and mentioned to you guys when we were talking before that I actually left HP to come to Nimble, so in some ways I'm approaching the gold pin for a 10 year anniversary at HP. But the-- >> And they retro that so you get that grand floated in. >> Oh, absolutely, absolutely, vacation time carries over it's beautiful. But the HPE storage that I'm now leading is in some ways very different from the HP storage that I left sic years ago and the vision behind HPE's storage is well aligned with the overall vision of Hewlett-Packard Enterprise, which is we make hybrid IT simple, we power the intelligent edge, and we deliver the services to empower organizations to do this. And the things that we were thinking about at Nimble and the things that we're thinking about as kind of a part of HPE are well aligned with this. So, our belief is everyone at this conference cares about whether it's software defined, whether it's hybrid converge, whether it's all flash so on and so forth, but in the real world what clients tend to care about is kind of their experience and we've seen this really fundamental shift in how consumers think about interacting with IT in general. The example I always give is you know I've been in sales my whole career, I've traveled a lot and historically 15 years ago when I would go to a new city, you know, I would land and I would jump on a airport shuttle to go rent a car and then I would pull out a Thomas Guide and I would go to cell C3 and map out my route to the client and things like that. And so I just expected that if I had a meeting at 2:00 p.m., I needed to land at 10:00 a.m., to make my way to, that was just my experience. Cut to today, you know, I land and I immediately pull out my iPhone and hail an Uber and you know reserve an Airbnb when I get there and I, for a 2:00 p.m. meeting I can land at 1:15 and I know Waze is going to route me around traffic to get there. So, my experience as a consumer has fundamentally changed and that's true of IT organizations and consumers within those organizations. So, IT departments have to adapt to that, right? And so a kind of powering this hybrid IT experience and servicing clients that expect immediacy is what we're all about. >> Okay, so I love that analogy. In fact when we were at HP Discover we kind of had this conversation, so as you hailed that Uber, IT wants self driving storage. >> Keegan: Absolutely. >> So, bring that, tie that back, things that we talk a lot about in kind of a colorful joking way, but that is the automation goal of storage is to be available. We talk about edge, unstructured data, moving compute to the edge, it's nuanced now, storage and compute all this where they go through software. Self driving storage means something, and it's kind of a joke on one hand, but what does it actually mean for an IT guy? >> No, that's a great question and this is exactly the way that we think about it. An the self driving car analogy is a really powerful one, right? And so the way we think about this, we're delivering a predictive cloud platform overall and notice that's not a predictive cloud storage conversation and it's a big part of why it made a ton of sense for Nimble storage to become a part of HPE. We brought to bear a product called InfoSight that you might be familiar with. The idea behind InfoSight is in a cloud connected world the client should never know about what's going on in their infrastructure than we do. So, we view every system as being at the edge of our network and for about seven years now we've been collecting a massive amount of information about infrastructure, about 70 million telemetry points per day per system that's coming back to us. So, we have a massive anonymized dataset about infrastructure. So, we've been collecting all of the sensor data in the same way that say Uber or Tesla has been collecting sensor data from cars, right, and the next step kind of the next wave of innovation, if you will, is, okay it's great that you've collected this sensor data, now what do you do with it? Right? And so we're starting to think about how do you put actuators in place so that you can have an actual self managing data center. How can you apply a machine learning and global kind of corelation in a way that actually applies artificial intelligence to the data center and makes it truly touchless and self managing and self healing and so on and so forth. >> So, that vision alone is when, well, I'm sure when you pitched that to Meg, she was like,"Okay, that sounds good, "let's buy the company." But as well, there was another factor, which was the success that Nimble was having. A major shift in the storage market and you can see it walking around here is that over the last five, seven years there's been a shift from the storage specialist expert at managing LUNs and deploying and tuning, to the sort of generalist because people realize, look, there's no competitive advantage. So, talk about that and how the person to whom you've sold and your career has changed. >> Yeah, no, absolutely, it's a great point. And I think it's in a lot of ways it goes to, you're right, obviously Meg and Antonio saw a lot of value in Nimble Storage. The value that we saw as Nimble Storage is as a standalone storage company with kind of one product to sell. You know there's a saying in sales that if you're a hammer everything looks like a nail, right. And so, it's really cool that we could go get on a whiteboard and explain why the Castle file system is revolutionary and delivers superior IOPs and so on and so forth, but the conversation is shifting to more of a solutions conversation. It moves to how do I deliver actual value and how do I help organizations drive revenue and help them distinguish themselves from their competitors leveraging digital transformation. So, being a part of a company that has a wide portfolio and applying a solutions sales approach it's game changing, right. Our ability to go in and say, "I don't want to tell you about the Nimble OS, "I want to hear from you what your challenges are "and then I'm going to come back to you with a proposal "to help you solve those challenges." It's exciting for our sales teams, frankly, because it changes our conversations that makes us more consultative. >> Alright, talk about the some of the-- >> Value conversations. >> Talk about the sales engagement dynamic with the buyer of storage, especially you mentioned in the old days, now new days. A new dynamic's emerging we've identified on theCUBE past couple days and I'll just kind of lay it out for you and I want you to get a reaction. I'm the storage buyer of old, now I'm the modern guy, I got to know all the ins and outs of speeds and feeds against all the competitors, but now there's a new overlay on top of which is a broader picture across the organization that has compute, that has edge, so I feel more, not deluded from storage, but more holistic around other things, so I have to balance both worlds. I got to balance the, I got to know and nail the storage equation. >> Yeah. >> Okay, at well as know the connection points with how it all works, kind of almost as an OS. How do you engage in that conversation? 'Cause it's hard, right? 'Cause storage you go right into the weeds, speeds and feeds under the hood, see our numbers, we're great, we do all this stuff. But now you got to say wait a minute, but in a VM environment it's this, in a cloud it's like this and there's a little bit of bigger picture, HCI or whatever that is. How do you deal with that? >> No, absolutely, and I think that's well said. I mean, I think the storage market historically has always been sort of, alright, do you want Granny Smith apples or red delicious apples? It always sort of looked the same and it was just about I can deliver x number of IOPs and it became a speeds and feeds conversation. Today, it's not just not apples to apples, it's like you prefer apples, pineapples, or vacuum cleaners. Like, there's so many different ways to solve these challenges and so you have to take the conversation to a higher level, right. It has to be a conversation about how do you deliver value to businesses? And I think, I hear-- >> It gets confusing to the buyers, too, because they're being bombarded with a lot of fudd and they still got to check the boxes on all the under the hood stuff, the engine's got to work. >> And they come to VMWorld and every year there's 92 new companies that haven't heard of before that are pitching them on, hey, I solve your problems. I think what I'm hearing from clients a lot is they don't necessarily want to think about the storage, they don't want to think about do I provision RAID 10 or RAID five and do I manage this aggregate in this way or that way, they don't want to think about, right. So, I think this is why you're seeing the success of these next generation platforms that are radically simple to implement, right, and in some ways at Nimble, wen we were talking to some of these clients to have sort of a legacy approach to storage where you got like a primary LUN administrator, there's nothing wrong with that job, it's a great job and I have friends who do that job, but a lot of companies are now shifting to more of a generalist, I manage applications and I manage you know-- >> John: You manage a dashboard console. >> Exactly, yeah, so you have to make it simple and you have to make it you don't have to think about those things anymore. >> So, in thinking about your relationship over the years with VMware, as HP, you are part of the cartel I call it, the inner circle, you got all the APIs early, all the, you know, the CDKs or SDKs early. You know, you were one of the few. You, of course EMC, NetApp, all the big storage players, couple of IBM, couple others. Okay, and then you go to Nimble, you're a little guy, and it's like c'mon hey let's partner! Okay and so much has changed now that you're back at HPE, how has that, how is it VMware evolved from a ecosystem partner standpoint and then specifically where you are today with HPE? >> That's a great question and I remember the early days at Nimble when you know we were knocking on the door and they were like, "Who are you again? "Nimble who?" And we're really proud of sort of the reputation that we've earned inside of VMware, they're a great partner and they've built such a massive ecosystem, and I mean this show is incredible, right. They're such a core part of our business. At Nimble I feel like we earned sort of a seat at that table in some ways through technology differentiation and just grit and hustle, right. We kind of edged our way into those conversations. >> Dave: Performance. >> And performance. And we started to get interesting to them from a strategic perspective as just Nimble Storage. Now, as a part of HPE, HPE was, and in some ways as a part of HPE you're like, "Oh, that was cute." We thought we were strategic to VMware, now we actually are very strategic to VMware and the things that we're doing with them. From an innovation perspective it's like just throwing fuel on the fire, right. So, we're doubling down on some of the things we're doing around like VM Vision and InfoSight, our partnership with Visa and on ProLiant servers, things like that, it's a great partnership. And I think the things that VMware's announced this week are really exciting. >> Thank you, great to see you, and great to have you on theCUBE. >> Thank you so much. >> I'll give you the last word. What's coming up for you guys and HP storage as the vice president general manager, you're out there pounding the pavement, what should customers look for from you guys? >> No, I appreciate that. There's a couple things. So, first and foremost are R&D budget just got a lot bigger specifically around InfoSight. So, you'll see InfoSight come to other HPE products, 3PAR, ProLiant servers so on and so forth and InfoSight will become a much more interesting cloud based management tool for proactive wellness in the infrastructure. Second, you'll see us double down on our channel, right. So, the channel Nimble's always 100% channel, SimpliVity was 100% channel, HPE Storage is going to get very serious about embracing the channel. And third, we're going to ensure that the client experience remains top notch. The NPS score of 85 that Nimble delivered we're really proud of that and we're going to make sure we don't mess that up for our clients. >> You know it's so funny, just an observation, but I worked at HP for nine years in the late '80s, early '90s and then I watched and been covering theCUBE for over seven years now, storage is always like the power engine of HPE and no matter what's happening it comes back down to storage, I mean, the earnings, the results, the client engagements, storage has moved from this corner kind of function to really strategic. And it continues that way. Congratulations. >> Thank you so much. Appreciate the time. >> Alright, it's theCUBE. Coming up Pat Gelsinger on theCUBE at one o'clock. Stay with us. Got all the great guests and alumni and also executives from VMware coming on theCUBE. I'm John Furrier, Dave Vellante. We'll be right back with more live coverage after this short break.

>> Announcer: Live, from Las Vegas, It's the cube, covering VMWorld 2017, brought to you by VMWare and its ecosystem partners. (techno music) >> Welcome back, I'm Stu Miniman, joined by Keith Townsend, welcome back to the program, a multi-time cube-along. Patrick Osborne, who's the senior director of product management with Hewlett-Packard Enterprise. Patrick, great to see you. >> Great to be back, thanks for having me. >> Yeah, uh, what number VMWorld is this for you? >> Oh gosh, uh, it's, it's, I can't count it at this point, too many. >> Yeah, it's like I've been working with VMWare for 15 years, it's the eighth one of these for me. Keith, I know you've been few, so what's your take so far, the show? Big ecosystem, a lot of news going on. What do you think so far? >> Yeah so I mean, from my perspective, VMWare has been such a huge ecosystem partner for HP for forever, y'know? It covers everything from, y'know, from our perspective on the compute networking, storage side, certainly services. So um, y'know for me it's always good to catch up with, y'know, old colleagues and kind of understand what's going on in the industry. A lot of talk today around private cloud, multi-cloud, y'know, what people are doing around automation. Y'know certainly a lot of things around software defined, software defined networks, software defined storage, so uh, a lot of good topics, um, it's always good to see the customers here too, as well. >> Yeah uh, the joke a few years ago was VMWorld became storage world, so uh, y'know, in your space of availability, and data protection, y'know, and I walk through the show floor, HP's got a big boot but I see a lot of companies that are attacking different angles of that. You brought up the cloud being a, y'know increasing piece. >> What's top of mind, of a customers that are coming to you, and what sort of things are you working on these days? >> Yeah so, um, from our perspective on the storage and data management landscape, I think that you see a lot of vendors in the space right now. Some of them are certainly part of our ecosystem, you see folks like Veem and, y'know, other folks that we partner with out on the floor. There is an increased look from the customer perspective on availability. It's, the segment's changing, the requirements are changing. I don't think people are tackling availability in the same way as sort of traditional data protection architectures. So we see customers, especially when they're looking for certain inflection points in their infrastructure, like, I'm going to go to all flash, or y'know, deploy some new storage. They're definitely rethinking the way they're doing availability from an application standpoint. So we're uh, we're trying to y'know, meet those market demands through our own technologies, as well as having a pretty robust ecosystem here that we barter with. >> So a lot of talk, not just at this show, but at previous HP shows about hybrid IT. It's obvious the data center isn't going anywhere for the majority of customers, but we have the complexity of cloud. How does cloud impact, practically, data protection, data availability. >> Yeah so uh, from our perspective it's certainly an opportunity, right, to help customers out. We have a, we've, y'know, from a strategy standpoint, we've put a couple solutions and things into market that we hope address some of these cases. So y'know, when you talk about Nimble cloud volumes, right, being able to have your data in a co-located facility very close to, y'know, public clouds so you can do some compute arbitrage, and ultimately be able to, y'know, control your data. And then we do other things for example, Store one's cloud bay, being able to back up to the cloud, which is a pretty established use case. I think from our perspective, helping customers make that move in terms of, um, y'know, you can set up the data path, and make the bits move, but when we talk to mid-size, especially large enterprise customers, the governance around that, I think is really important, And the user experience, to make sure that what you're sending out to the cloud is certainly protected, it's audited. We've even had customers coming to us, we just had a big customer that you've had on here before, 21st Century Fox, right, a big customer of HPE talk last week about, I want to back up workloads that are in the cloud to the cloud, right? There's not a lot of great tools for that today, and I want that audited, and I want y'know, a paper trail around that for their own internal uh, capabilities. So I think there's a lot of opportunities in the space. It's very nascent. >> Yeah, Patrick I think you're bringing up a great point. We were talking a lot at this show, kind of the multi-cloud world. I've got my maturation of what's happening in my data center, deploying a bunch of sass on one or multiple public clouds. And there's certain things like security or y'know, data protection availability. I need to get my arms around all of it. HPE's looking to fill some of those y'know, gaps, and help customers, y'know. What's the overriding story in y'know how you're not one of the big three public cloud providers, but why does HP have a position in this discussion, and maybe you can help us kind of round out that story a little. >> Yeah so, we have a position in that discussion because of, y'know, we are very large infrastructure provider to a lot of customers, right? In terms of providing on-prem, hybrid IT experiences. From a public cloud perspective, we're very sort of, public in our strategy of not having a public cloud within HPE, but we certainly partner with folks and we've got a very long standing partnership with Microsoft. We come to market with things like Azure Stack, and we have a number of integrations we do with things like Nimble, and um, in that area we resell y'know, Azure, from an HPE standpoint. So we're really looking to provide y'know, a full experience for customers in that space. And y'know, the other day, like you said before, people are still going to buy and deploy in their data center, right? But, they want to buy and deploy in their data center with the thought that um, y'know multi-cloud is going to be a possibility, and they want to have the infrastructure that's going to allow them to do that. So what we're doing is incrementally, in our product portfolio, I care about storage, right, is to be able to provide those experiences. I buy a 3PAR all flash, I want to be able to tier that or back that up to the cloud. I have Nimble, right, I want to be able to replicate that to a co-located provider that provides Nimble cloud volumes, and then assign compute to and from the cloud, right. So a bunch of things that we want to get customers ready for, and make it easier for them. >> So can we talk a little bit more about that Nimble story? Y'know, the 3PAR, we understand it. It is, covers a great depth of use cases in enterprise, where does Nimble fit in the strategy? Yeah, um so we're super excited to have Nimble in the portfolio for three reasons. They have a great team, number one, they bring a really good go to market engine, and the sales team, y'know, with that, and they have great products. So from the product angle, which we're very interested in, is a couple different areas. Infosite, predictive analytics, right, is something that we want to apply to our entire product line, hands down. So the things that they do around VM Vision, right, with um, with VMWare, we want to apply that to 3PAR, right, and essentially give the people the simplicity that it takes to manage a very large virtualized environment. They have a lot of things that they've done that are very unique. I mentioned Nimble cloud volumes before, that's a use case for primary storage, but could easily be extended to backup, data protection, object storage, right, as not only just a technology provider, but as a way to price it, consume that type of storage. And then they also bring a number of things around, in the availability space, which we find is very interesting. Secondary flash, right. So you think, all flash as high performance maybe a higher cost, right? But certainly is going to help you with that application acceleration. They just, we just released the Nimble secondary flash array for workloads that are tech-dev cloned workloads, y'know, things you can automate, and that you need some performance on it. But it's more performance than your backup storage, not as much cost and not as much storage as your primary. So think about secondary flash as flash for secondary workloads. Very cost optimized. More performance, maybe a little bit more expensive than your backup tier. So there's a lot of things that they bring to the table from a technology standpoint that we want to take advantage of. >> Patrick, HPE's got a broad portfolio, but still to meet all the needs of the customers, especially in like, the divergals niche ecosystem, acquires a lot of partnerships. Where are the, kind of the deep integrations that your team's been doing, where are the places where customers have been asking you to kind of pull things in, and any solutions that you want to highlight specifically? Yeah so, um, I think more and more what you start to see is portfolio vendors, like HPE, they bring great technology that we build organically, or that we go and acquire. I think one of the big things that customers rely on us as well, that doesn't get a lot of air play is that we bring in a vetted ecosystem to a customer. Y'know, so the whole kit and caboodle, from compute networking storage, services to bring that all together, and an ecosystem that's supported, and we basically HPE stamp of quality and support behind that so, y'know when it comes to VMWare, obviously this has a huge ecosystem. So we do a lot with, y'know, innovating with VMWare. I mentioned Nimble, VM Vision, things we're doing there to make hypervisor environments quite a bit more easy to implement for customers from a storage angle. You talked to Jessie from the SimpliVity standpoint. We do a lot around data protection, with certain things, with 3PAR, Nimble. So there's a lot on integrations that we do in, for VMWare specifically, and then in other areas of the portfolio, especially automation, right. So we've got fully supported solutions, I think we've got one of the best docker implementations for storage with Nimble. Huge partnerships with Puppet and Kubernetes, and Sheb, all these great things around the automation side. So when we go out and partner with somebody, we're going to go provide a whole solution, a complete solution to a customer that's vetted, RA's, supported, so from my perspective, partnering is actually one of the most important things we do at HPE. >> So, from a customer's perspective, HPE hugely important, key industry player for most CIO's, you guys are still very very trusted in that area, you have a huge ecosystem, huge portfolio, what should CIO's, CTO's, high level architects be focused on at this point? What's like, the consistent theme that you're telling your customers you really need to pay atttention to this part of the industry? >> So, from a corporate perspective, we've got a couple of things that we're working on, right. So we talk about hybrid IT, right. And that sort of transformation from, I would call it established methodologies of application and development to y'know, sort of new style. And we're definitely helping customers along that journey, and a lot of it is around bringing this vetted portfolio and ecosystem along with the services. So the services I think is one thing that, um, y'know HP is very unique in the fact that we've got a very very broad set of services, in terms of, y'know, we can go and help CIO's and CFO's and CTO's understand y'know, where are you along that journey, right. All the way to implementation, I think one of the things that we're going to be very very focused on over the next couple of years, is providing everything in our portfolio as consumption based pricing, right. So all the things that you like about the cloud, right, the things that are implied there are elasticity, right, agility, consumption based. You're moving from a cap-ex to an op-ex model, making that more predictable. So we want to be able to model that, and provide those experiences. Definitely one of the things that we're really focused on in HPE is IOT in the edge, right, so, that's a very fundamental part of our business that we're going to be looking at to make a lot of investments in big data. Certainly, some of the assets are on Edgeline and Aruba, and all the implications around security for that. So those are some of the key areas that we are, y'know, we talk to CIO's every day about. >> Patrick, from an availability and data protection standpoint, what does something like IOT mean? I have to think, we're not going to store all the data, lots of it's just going to be processed at the edge, we're talking a lot about edge so, I'm curious, what are the things that you're looking at, maybe start there, I think about like, containers, or a lot of times going to be something that is going to fit at that kind, maybe even serverless at the edge, so y'know, I seem to think back, y'know, when we talk about like oh, we're going to go to object store and therefore the way I do everything changes. So y'know, are we going to, couple years from now, is this going to be a very different discussion? >> Well I think, yeah, it's an interesting topic, right. When you talk about that volume of data, right, and the fact that it's very dispersed, right, being able to do, apply traditional availability techniques to something like that is um, it's difficult, it's next to impossible, right? So, um, y'know what we see is customers buying, in these type of ecosystems, you're not buying along horizontal lines, right. You're not buying a specific server vendor, or a networking vendor, or y'know, a storage vendor, and then going best of breed, trying to integrate that yourself. A lot of these things are vertically oriented now in terms of you're buying a stack, y'know, from a portfolio vendor or going to a service, y'know, an integrator. And I think with he volume of data that it takes to, to do some of these implementations, so we have very large customers, autonomous cars, y'know big, big implementations of Hadoop and analytics. I mean a lot of that stuff is built in. I think one thing you're starting to see is that, those types of deployments are outstripping or outpacing, y'know running away from the support of the traditional IT folks. So we have customers that are operationalizing, very large Hadoop customers for example, who don't have methodologies for backing that up and replicate it, so I think there's a lot of technology that needs to catch up with some of these implementations, we see it all the time. So, y'know, I think there's different techniques from a technology standpoint. Y'know, when we try to approach these from a customer perspective, we want to provide a full stack for edge, IOT, um, and but, from a data protection availability standpoint, that's a difficult problem to solve. >> Stu: Well Patrick Osborne, always a pleasure to catch up with you, thanks for all the updates here. Looking forward to tracking some of those, y'know, emerging areas that you were just-- >> Yeah, I look forward to talking to you guys in Discover in Madrid. >> Absolutely, so The Cube, so many events, check out siliconangle.tv, or actually thecube.net is where you're going to be able to see everything. Nice shorter url, you're going to keep the branding of The Cube, for Keith Townsend, I'm Stu Miniman, stay with us, watch more coverage here still to come. VM World 2017, you're watching The Cube. (techno music)