>> LIVE from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE! Covering VMworld 2018. Brought to you by VMware and it's Ecosystem Partners. >> Welcome back to theCUBE's continuing coverage of VMworld 2018! I'm Lisa Martin, finally paired up with Stu Miniman. Hey, Stu! >> Lisa, three days, wall-to-wall coverage and how have you and I not been paired together yet? >> Did you do the scheduling, Stu? >> Um. >> That's okay. I'm glad to be paired up with you. The last interview, saving the best for last. Speaking of the last, we've got two guests, welcoming back some alumni to theCUBE, who also seem to be so busy at VMworld that you come to us as our last guests. I like this tradition. >> You had be the bookend, you know? Got to be the bookend. >> Best for last. >> Exactly. We've got Ajay Patel, SVP of VMware, and Russ Reeder, CEO of OVH US. Welcome, guys! >> Thank you, great to be here. - Thank you. >> Saving the best for last. >> Best for last, you bet. >> So, last year just, yeah, VMworld last year, vCloud Air acquisition by OVH had just happened. Give us an update on what's gone on in the last year and the momentum that that is giving the OVH business in the U.S. >> So, we're super excited to be here on second year as a Diamond Sponsor. We, as OVH Cloud, coming to the U.S. is a great opportunity. OVH is the largest hosting company in Europe. Everyone knows who we are in Europe, we come to the U.S. a year and a half ago, every one's like, who's OVH? We acquire vCloud Air, partnered with VMware, which is old news in Europe. For the past nine years, we've been virtualizing vSphere, seven of those nine we've been the award winning partner in Europe. So coming to America, the best way to really launch with the VMware partnership is to acquire vCloud Air. All of those customers, and brought over those employees, and the best news is that we just launched two months ago, starting to migrate those customers over to OVH Cloud. >> Fantastic. >> It's very exciting. >> Yes. >> Ajay, so, Multi-Cloud being the story of the show, we've seen really the maturation after, you know, we've been tracking this for a lot of years. It was like, okay, do we have the VMware Cloud story? Are we happy with it? Things like that. So first of all, congrats to you and your team. >> Thank you. >> We've had some good proof points, a lot of partners I hear. >> Absolutely. >> I'm joking to you, it's like, yeah, OVH- >> OVH clearly one of the important ones. (laughs loudly) >> So, you know, put this in perspective for us as to, from the vCloud Air world to, you know, we're talking AWS, IBM, OVH and many others. >> Stu, you and I talked about it a couple of times now, this is year number four, so thank you for inviting me, first of all. Our strategy's been consistent. How do we get VMware running on as many destinations as possible? And Hybrid, for us, has been a strategy that's been consistent. Glad the market caught up, even having Andy Jassy talk about moving RDS and making it available to vSphere on-prem is really a sign of maturity that the world is going to be hybrid for a long time. So from a strengths perspective, Hybrid is here to stay and we're really focused on what we've been calling this Cloud Verified Partner. So, OVH is a handful of partners that have reached that highest level achievement of delivering a full-stack VMware CDC and it can have a consistent infrastructure experience that cost customers 10 dollars. So we're at a point where the strategy's being realized. Strategic partners like OVH are delivering a full-stack VMware and customers are seeing the value of delivering Cloud, whether public Cloud or on-prem on vSphere. >> Russ, as I said, multi-cloud, it's matured a bit. You know, one of the big questions we had coming into was that AWS partnership, how much of it is a one-way? Well, things like RDS, really interesting. I've spent a bunch of time digging into it and understanding it. The other thing is, it's as Ajay said, the strategy was VMware everywhere. And partners like yourself, okay, where do we play? You know, public cloud's not the enemy, it's what do we do, what do we partner with? How they're help fitting the landscape as to, you know, how OVH and, you know, how do you play in that larger ecosystem and differentiate and, you know? >> Yeah, I think the third generation of the cloud here coming to multi-cloud is kind of going the first generation of hey, someone needs to do it for me. AWS, I'm going to do it myself. Now, hey, I want to do it myself, but I need multi-cloud. I'm not going to put all my eggs in one basket, I need a true infrastructure partner where I have predictability on billing. I don't have ingress or egress charges. I have a true infrastructure partner with the automation that can scale globally. And so, 20 years ago when we started OVH in Europe, the opportunity there was wide open. Coming here to the U.S. now it's a perfect opportunity in multi-cloud where all customers are saying I need to get out of my closet. I have seven-year-old machines in my Colo facility. I'm all-in-one whether it's AWS, or IBM, or another partner out there, they need to put different workloads where they would work best or DR. So coming in as a true infrastructure player with all of our automation, it's actually perfect timing for OVH to come to the U.S. and laugh OVH Cloud. >> So I'm curious, obviously with the European you have their legacy as we've transitioned and it's a spectrum but from kind of the traditional hosted environment to you're almost fully satisfied when you go this. >> Sure. >> The US, do you still have the spectrum or are you more built the modern with the vCloud Air being the foundation? You know, what spectrum of services are you offering customers? >> We offer the full spectrum. We had the opportunity to take OVH, all of our experience and systems, take the next generation of OVH in Europe, launch it in the U.S. and then bringing that back to Europe. So what we're launching in the U.S. is a full spectrum. The initial launch with VMware, fully hosted suite of the VMware products. So we have the VMware, the vSphere, vSAN, NSX offering that we've just announced. And having nine years of experience with vSphere as a service is a great opportunity to launch that. We also have a public cloud and that's the open source OpenStack public cloud, which is a different unique opportunity for a lot of companies that don't want to go the traditional public cloud. We also, being one of the largest dedicated server providers. It's all built on dedicated server, even server-less compute. And so you have to find a infrastructure partner that doesn't want to provide solutions first, and how do we rack and stack second. We understand the infrastructure and the network globally to help our partner's succeed. >> Ajay, I wonder if you could speak a little bit to the portfolio that your partners get to get access to from VMware. I was just interviewing Milin Desai, who you know oh so well. And the SAS piece is so, you know, it gets lost. You know, infrastructure as a service is one piece, but, you know, it's applications and services and, you know, yeah. >> Yeah, so far our cloud provider partners, what we've done is we introduced something we call Cloud Provider Platform. It gives them all the tools they need to sign up for Cloud, as Russ talked about, in a dedicated cloud. We give you a multi-tenant cloud. We're also, now with our cloud hub announcement, taking the VMware IP Cloud Services and making them available to our partners. And when you think about a partner on MSP, he's no longer just the asset heavy like OVH, but he's also the asset like a DXE. So we're now opening up the aperture for anyone who wants to either build clouds, or use clouds to offer managed services on top. I love the fact that OVH has economics, efficiency, and the customer support with the full VMware value proposition. They've always been the leader in kind of vSphere hosting, now they're offering a full private cloud built on VMware and the managed services go with it. So it's really about that choice, which really uniquely makes a provider program so compelling to our end customers. >> We've heard choice a lot. We hear it, Stu, at every show. Customers need choice, companies like VMware, OVH needs to build for what the customers want, not what you guys all think is great. Another thing that we've heard a lot at this show is that the seamlessness of the message, starting with Pat Gelsinger's keynote on Monday morning with people saying, you know, the structure is in place. I also thought it was one that was very cohesive in terms of the messaging and how the technologies are working together. I'm curious to get your feedback on what are some of the things that you've heard around this show from your customers who need a choice or in multi-cloud environments for many reasons, right? Applications that kind of dictate which direction that needs to go in, or through acquisition and, you know, have multiple cloud solutions. How are they taking this message? Especially with what you're doing with OVH in the U.S. And be able to digest this so they can really figure out, alright, here's what I can do with my infrastructure so that my business succeeds, whether I'm a bank or I'm a hospital. Tell us about that. >> I can go first and then Russ can add. So I think one of the things we've done a really good job this time is clarifying the message. I'm hoping, to the market, we're now becoming a very relevant and strategic platform that spans beyond the traditional VMware data center and hybrid cloud. So the first message is, you know, VMware is providing you the solutions while you're building on VMware or you're building on native clouds. And that CloudHealth acquisition is a good indication of VMware's commitment to kind of pure native public cloud. The second I would say is hybrid and this kind of consistent environment for runtime, if you will, and this hybrid control plane that give people a sense that I will lift and shift my workload first to an OVH and then transform leveraging the power of the public cloud. So it's become very pleasing to say, look, I don't need to change for changes sake, I can move and get economics off a public cloud, a dedicator, or even a pure multi-tenant. But then I can now refactor using public cloud services. So the power of VMware is giving them the flexibility to start a leverage cloud without having to make an upfront investment just for change sake, but more for the business transformation they're trying to drive, right? >> Yeah and so, what we've seen from the OVH side is really coming here and looking at all the partners. So we have Veam for backup, we can no offer Zerto for disaster recovery. Obviously, the VMware partnership we just launched earlier in the week which David Wigglesworth, our chief revenues officer was on talking about our partnership strategy and we have an amazing opportunity to bring partners in. FusionStorm is one of those partners, IT services. So OVH Cloud, we don't compete with our partners, true infrastructure partner with they can leverage our 28 data centers and our 15 terabytes of network and no charges for ingress. So what we're seeing here, our customers are coming and saying, hey, I just used you for DR but I'd like to actually take my on-prem full production system and bring it to the cloud now. So the customer's were migrating. There's more comfort going to the cloud, there's more understanding of the partnership ecosystem, and now instead of just saying, oh, we're going to just put DR or backup, we're going to come and we're going to migrate our entire production system because we've tried it out, our foot's been in the water, and now we're going all-in. So that's exciting and talking to all the customers this week, I love it. It's so exciting to talk to our customers that have migrated to OVH Cloud in the U.S. and now they want to bring over those production workloads. That's where it's really kind of that multi-cloud and I think VMware's been a huge asset to the cloud market in their strategy and a great partner. >> Getting that validation from your customers, the momentum that OVH is carrying is working. You've done a lot of education, especially in the last year. They're getting it and you're seeing your technologies and your partnership validating what it is that they're business needs. >> It's disheartening almost that the technology is in place now. We had to migrate from the vCloud Air into the OVH data center. Those tools, those best practices, those skills now are available to the end customer. So the compelling value here is, you want to take the entire data center and move it to OVH, we know how to do it. We have the tools, the people, the skills. And so just that kind of reference, the ability to say I'm not the first one to do it. It's been done before. That confidence is building in their business now. >> We had the opportunity, I mean, I don't want to say that there was a bleeding edge, but we were on a bleeding edge of HCX and it's working seamlessly now. >> Hybrid Cloud Exchange. >> The extension to bring, without any downtime, from on-prem to over to the cloud with OVH Cloud, or from the vCloud Air cloud over to ours. So it's working and the customer's are super excited, they get that trust. They go back to their management team and say, hey, now it's time to go more. I can go to the cloud and the cost efficiency, the savings, the redundancy of the network and the power, and not all this capex. That's why they're all moving to the cloud now. >> Final thing, you've talked about some good high level things. Any specific customer examples? I know you might not be able to mention names, but, you know, Vertical, or things like that as to how businesses are helping to transform themselves after they've done these sort of solutions. >> Yeah, sure, I mean first of all, it's all about the customer. So we, I can't mention any specific names, we will have some, we filmed some customer testimonials in the booth that we'll be announcing and maybe the next time we can bring customers up here to talk about it. Whether it's really education or high-tech, especially on a high-tech, the tech guys love OVH, right? They really love it. But from an infrastructure provider, people that are looking to lift and shift their existing applications without having to rewrite their applications for a public cloud, that's where OVH really comes into play. I've got all of these systems. I've got VMware on-prem, I need to move it but I don't want to rebuild it. So that's where we see the excitement of, of course I'm going to build some new stuff in the cloud, but how do I take all of my thousands of applications that we have, that we're never going to refactor and just move it over to the cloud to have that security. That's where I think customers are saying, wow, I can't actually do more in the cloud than I thought I could. >> For me, I think, I just walked out of a customer meeting, so I won't name them but just kind of give you a sense of what they're doing. They have four clouds, they believe they have monolithic applications, they don't want to be locked in to a particular cloud, so you're hearing the consistent view is, we're trying to figure out how do we change our development practices. You know, how do we leverage container, whether it's PKS, whether it's payloads. What's my development methodology? How do I make sure that deployment gives me a choice of running across clouds? How should I setup my IT operations to operate in the cloud? So consistency, portability, how do I manage the complexity of running on multiple clouds? What's my cost profile and how do I do it effective? So those are the kinds of questions we're getting. They're starting to look to VMware as a trusted advisor, that safe choice, as we talked about, to say, you know, one thing I can bet on is if I bet on VMware technology, it runs on more clouds than I can, you know, when I need them. It is portable, I can take a workload that traditionally I'd run on different hardware, now we run it on different clouds. So we're seeing a tremendous momentum around this notion of VMware's kind of the pathway or the hybrid control plane that we can bet on. And then partners like OVH, etc. But I have this destination that's safe, that's secure, that's consistent with what they're running today. So pretty exciting in terms of how customers kind of take in the message and start to put it into their strategy as they go forward. >> One more thing I'd like to understand, you talked about the tremendous capabilities that OVH and VMware have together with vCloud Air. You can enable customers to do a lot. To transform IT, to facilitate digital transformation. They're comfortable with this. But one of the things that that absolutely requires is cultural transformation. I'd love to get your final thoughts on how is OVH and VMware together helping your customers to understand and really impact the cultural changes that are need to take advantage, full advantage of the technology? >> That's a great question. Go ahead. >> On our side, what we try to do is, we as a company are going through the same transformation. We're a perpetual company becoming a services company. So the lessons learned, I spent some time where I-CIO actually talks about how we're operating our internal cloud. We're talking about the best practices of how we're moving to a service first mentality. How we're creating a CICD development mentality and practices. How are we leveraging public clouds and how are we managing cost? So those internal lessons learned, we're starting to make available to our customers and our partners. We're also packaging some of the products that we make available to VCP, our provider program. So the products that we're building up much more suited to run a services organization, which when we started five years ago at vCloud Air, we took enterprise products and tried to force fit them, now we're much more delivering our own service, eating our own dog food, if you will, have to incorporate that capability into our platform. So it's a combination of product improvement, best practices and lessons learned that we're making available to the market. >> I can talk from specific example. Acquiring vCloud Air, a great customer base, and all of the personnel from VMware in vCloud Air to come over. So not only was it cultural from a customers perspective, but also from an employee perspective. You build culture on trust. So what's interesting is that our employees and our customers that were over in Europe, in our U.K data centers and our German data centers, they're growing much quicker than the ones over in the U.S. The U.S. after a year of working with us and seeing that, hey, we say we're going to do this and now we're actually doing it, and I've migrated and that was really easy, and I can point and click and actually expand my compute and my storage and add more hosts in a matter of minutes. That builds trust, that has a great culture, and that spreads. So, from an education perspective, we have a lot of higher education customers, and now they're like, I'm going to go talk to this school and this school, and that word of mouth is golden. >> That validation of, we've been in your shoes, VMware has been in our shoes, they've done it successfully. Guys, I wish we had more time, but thanks so much for helping Stu and I wrap up the day on this set. It's great to talk to you both. I think it might be fair to say that we'll probably see you at the next VMworld on day three around the same time. >> Yeah, perfect! - Hopefully earlier. >> Maybe. Ajay, Russ, thank you so much for your time. >> Thank you. - Thank you so much, Lisa. >> For my co-host, Stu Miniman, I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching theCUBE's continuing coverage of VMworld 2018. Stick around, we'll be back to wrap up the show. (electronic music)

(tech music) >> Announcer: Live from Madrid, Spain, it's the CUBE, covering HPE Discover Madrid 2017 brought to you by Hewlett Packard Enterprise. >> Welcome back to Madrid everybody this is the CUBE. The leader in live tech coverage. This is day one of our coverage of HPE Discover 2017. I'm Dave Vollante with my co-host Peter Burris. Jim Jackson is here, he's the senior vice president of the Enterprise Group at Hewlett Packard Enterprise. >> Happy to be here. Good to see you again and Jason Newton, vice president of global marketing at Hewlett Packard Enterprise. Guys, it wouldn't be a Discover without some big news, transitioning to Antonio. We're about to hear the key note but Jim, set up the week for us. The big news that we can expect. Show us a little leg. >> Yeah well first of all, thanks for having us here guys. We're really excited for this week. It's gonna be probably one of our biggest weeks of innovation. We've got a pretty amazing Discover lined up. So you're gonna see us talk about AI in the data center, so bringing predictive analytics from our Nimble acquisition it's called info site. We're extending that to three par so that really helps our customers predict and anticipate problems and solve them in advance. So that's really software-based leading with that. Another area is we're bringing consumption-based capabilities. A whole new suite of consumption offerings. We're branding it HPE Green Lake and it's really, think of purpose-built solutions for things like backup, SAP, data like environments but it's really outcomes as a service. So we're not able to give our customers the ability to have infrastructure as a service, and now outcomes as a service. And the other part of making hybrid IT simple that you're gonna hear about is how we're really helping our customers unify and manage that multi cloud environment. So applications are sitting in public clouds, private clouds, what we're hearing from our customers is, hey we need to be able to manage this a lot easier and have holistic ability to see all of that. So you're gonna see us talk about that on main stage as well. So new brands, a lot of innovation. We've also got some partnerships that we'll be rolling out later today. So a lot happening. >> Jason, you've spent a lot of time, sweat, toil, blood on branding. Obviously you're a big part of the branding exercise. Up leveling the messaging, we had you on two or three years ago, and you said, look, we're gonna change things. We're gonna shift the focus from product and widgets and really talk about what customers care about. How has that gone? Where are you at with that? It resonates extremely well with customers. In fact we just got out of a panel where we had four of our top customers, ABV, Dreamworks, IKEA and Nokia. And we just spent an hour just talking about their digital transformation journey and what they're all about. The room was packed. I think we had over 400 people who were in there. That's showing that we can be an innovation partner to those customers enabling them to share their stories at a venue like this is really powerful. >> We're becoming much more software and services led and it's really all about experiences. Providing that experience that our customers are looking for. >> Just follow up to that, so a lot of people think oh well HP, spun merge it's software business but you're leading with services and software. So help us clear that. >> We're doing a ton in software today. So if you just think of our software portfolio. We have HP 1V to manage our customers complete infrastructure estate, service storage and networking. We extended that last year with composability so HP and Synergy, we have over a thousand new customers since we announced that last year actually at this event. So we're seeing a lot of progress. Synergy enables our customers to really have one environment that can flex to the needs of multiple different applications so reduces over provisioning. AI, I talked about AI in the data center. So what we're doing with info site, that's software based, we're extending that to 3PAR and you'll see us extend that to other parts of the portfolio going forward. Nyara, and on the Aruba side of the house, software based. Aruba is very software centric and then of course, we'll be announcing this afternoon our code name project new stack, really about helping to manage that multi cloud environment. A lot happening in the software space and an area that we're very focused on. >> One of the things... By the way, we think that those three things that you mentioned, automation in the data center, on-premise capabilities and a cross multi cloud approach to management and managing your assets, absolutely spot-on. And we think ultimately and here's a question, we think that what's going to drive the determination is what does the data need? So talk to us a little bit about how you are articulating the idea of data as the new value source, the new value and hardware infrastructure and software and these capabilities, making it possible for the work to exist where the data requires. >> Yeah and I'll start maybe you can pile on a little bit. Our conversation starts with apps and data so we're starting the dialogue there and you know what we're seeing is you know really moving from large data centers, or only large data centers to centers of data that are really everywhere, right? So we're starting to see that edge really starting to proliferate and drive a lot more change, and what our customers are saying is wherever might, regardless of where my data sits, I need to manage it, I need to secure it, I need to process it, I need to be able to translate it into insight and that's really what our strategy is all about. We've been talking for the last couple of years about making hybrid IT simple. and we're really doing a lot in that space. So for example, we announced the acquisition of cloud technology partners and really what we're trying to do there it's the foremost authority really in helping customers understand how to migrate applications to to AWS or even to Google or Azure, and when you combine that with our on-prem capabilities, it really now starts to talk about data, we want to say your data is what matters and we want to help you manage that holistically. The software investments that we're doing enable you to have that complete view. And then from a consumption perspective, some of the things I talked about earlier, rolling that out right, making it easier to consume this as a service and only pay for what I use. So, we are in alignment. It all starts with data and wherever that data sits, it's how do I manage it? >> And that's why Aruba is such a great asset for us, because a lot of people think about Aruba as you know, you just replace copper wire and WiFi ... And hey, don't get me wrong, it's a money-making great business, but if you'd asked Kierty, he'd probably say we're a data business, right? >> Peter: We did ask him, and that is what he said. >> Is that what he said? Well, good, we're on message then. We're on message today, alright, yeah. I mean, because that's where the action is happening, that's where the data is being created, and so everything that they're doing around the the security 360 platform, the mobile first platform, everything is centered around, how do I draw a value in context from that data? >> Well I want to ask you about Aruba, because when you acquired Aruba, we said wow, this is a great business, it's gonna be a growth business, but is it a strategic weapon for HPE? Is it a strategic infrastructure component? From a messaging standpoint, It's all about the intelligent edge, that you've up-leveled that. Where'd that come from? Maybe take us through sort of the anatomy of-- >> Well I mean, the message is just exactly what we were saying. That if if value is gonna be created at the edge, if the data's gonna be coming from the edge, we have to drive a whole lot more intelligence into that edge in order to collect, process, analyze, secure the data that's coming in and make use of it, right? So I mean, that's where the genesis of the intelligent edge came from. >> Yeah, I mean I would say the other thing about Aruba that we're really seeing is all about experiences. So when we talk to our customers about Aruba, they're looking to deliver a different experience. Whether it's in retail, whether it's in stadiums, whether it's in the campus space. It's all about delivering a better experience. And that's really the value prop behind Aruba. Very software centric, open software, mobile solution. The other thing is, it's enabling us to engage more and more with parts of the company, customers that we might not have had as much engagement before. You know, the c-suite, you know, talking more with the line of business. because what they're focused on is how do I deliver that better experience? And Aruba's really playing a key role in doing that. We also have the view that ultimately, and you started the conversation about data, and we totally agree. But it has to be thought of from the edge, to the core, to the cloud. So whether we engage with Aruba, whether we engage with our core data center, capabilities, and our strengths there, or with services ... That's enabling us to holistically have a much more strategic conversation with our customers. So we're excited about that. >> I'd like to dig a little bit on this notion of AI for the data center, or AI for managing IT (mumbles). We'd like to talk about the difference between a breadth-first, which is I'm gonna do this, like in this big broad way, and we'll figure out how we're gonna get the components to participate, versus a depth-first. Which is, let's lean on suppliers, who know that hardware, know the software best, and ask them to create simulacrums, you know, digital representations that then will allow me to apply AI machine learning, et cetera. We like the depth-first approach, but customers ultimately want to see this bloom into a breadth approach. Talk to us a little bit about how individual elements are being represented, but in a coherent consistent way, so that you can get to a broader, overall set of automation across entire infrastructure. >> Well, I mean, I think that you're seeing the paradigm shift now. I mean for decades we've been chasing this idea that we can make the one tool to rule them all, this sort of magic management environment, one single pane of glass, everyone says that right? >> I've written a lot of research papers that suggested that, right? >> Right? And look, I think that's, we're done, alright? And the only thing we can do now is, how do we embed intelligence to make the infrastructure so smart it can take care of itself? And that's ultimately the experience that our customers are telling us that they want, right? Is, I don't want to be an expert on IT anymore. I don't wanna touch this stuff, I don't want to deal with it. >> Peter: Not just want, need. >> Right? I can't handle it, right? I mean, the scale and speed of everything is beyond the capacity ... I can't hire enough people to take care of it. So you know, I think starting there and saying, okay we're gonna start embedding that type of intelligence. Right now it's mostly predictive analytics type of stuff, but increasingly you're gonna see more true AI come in not just in the data center, with what we're doing with Nimble, right? But also with Nyara. Now we call it introspect, right at the edge. How do we start weaving that across to do a variety of things? Whether it's maintenance or performance optimization, or security. I think thinking of it like a continuous platform across the infrastructure is gonna give you that depth and kind of breadth of control that you're looking for. >> So that leads to kind of an ecosystem question, and I liked your comments on that. Because the question of breadth or depth, the answer is yes, you got to have both. The ecosystem posture has totally changed in the last year or so, subsequent. Because we had PWC on today. We've had Veam on earlier. These are-- >> Jason: They love us. Partners that you're putting forth, yeah. >> Jason: We're making them money. >> For sure, right. But they are partners that previously, you know, you wouldn't have profiled. Whether on stage, on the Cube, wherever. >> Jason: Yeah. >> How has the ecosystem evolved? >> I mean it's opening up a whole new set of opportunities for us. You know, if you think of when we had ES, a lot of people just felt like, hey we were gonna compete with them, right? Now that ES has spun out, we actually created another great partner in ES, but we've got a whole host of other SIs that want to engage with us. They want to take our capabilities in IT systems. Our consumption capabilities, and then align it with a value prop that they'll bring. So you talked about Veam for example, right? Data availability is really, really important for customers. So taking HPE and Veam together, we're able to deliver a great solution from data protection to recovery. Really powerful stuff, and we're seeing some great opportunities out there in the marketplace, and a very strong ROI. I mean, we have some data that says, hey over five years, is a 200% ROI. Another area, when you think of just partnering, right? Is what we're doing with our channel partners. So we're giving them more solutions that are channel centric, that we're driving through our channel organization, yeah. And then, we just announced a relationship a couple weeks ago with Rackspace. It's a managed private cloud, open source solution. We're using our consumption capabilities, combined with with Rackspace, their environment. And this is giving our customers the flexibility to now spin up very quickly, a private cloud environment that they're looking for with a lot of the public cloud capabilities. Very strong economics behind it. And then the edge, that's the other area we're seeing lots of new partnering opportunities as the edge continues to expand. So we believe that innovation is a team sport, and we're leaning in really hard, and I know you know the Gartner's and the IDCs don't track who are the best partners, but I think if they did, we would be at the top of the list. >> Well, probably a lot of this activity was going on previously, so it's not like you're starting from ground zero. >> Jim: Correct. >> But you just, from a marketing standpoint, you really didn't talk about it, because you had colleagues, whether it was from EDS or the software division that's saying, hey, don't talk about that, help us out here. So, how has that changed the way in which you market? One of the big values is your go-to-market. I mean, people are drooling to now partner with HPE. >> Yeah, and one of the big reasons is honestly, is point next. Because they see the value in what Accenture or PwC, or Wipro can bring from understanding a business, or whatever, versus the deep technical knowledge of a point next to come in, and what they really love is the consumption model stuff that we've been able to wrap around it. They see that customers want, that in order to move fast with less risk, right? You've gotta have some sort of financial lever that says, okay, I can start small and I can grow over time. I'm not putting all my money out in one place and we've been building that with flex capacity over the last several years. You're gonna see, well, I guess we announced yesterday, a new Green Lake ... Making that even simpler to consume. Every one of our partner says, I wanna take your IT expertise in that consumption based model and wrap it around a total solution. And that's what's like white-hot right now, and there's unlimited opportunity right now from ... As Jim said, edge to core to cloud. >> And we have another one we're gonna announce on stage in a couple of hours, so we're pretty excited about that as well. >> Well, you see that in the numbers too, yeah. >> Jason: I think we might have a clue what that is. >> We're excited about that. >> Yeah, I know, it is. Well, look, and you kind of you kind of gave something of a preview when you talked about the three things that you want to be able to do. Because there's one brand that hasn't been mentioned yet. But ultimately the business is recognizing that the technology questions that we're raising here are crucial to their future success, but they don't want them to be a continuous source of antagonism. >> Group: Right. >> So they recognize that they need the capability, but they want to dramatically simplify the degree to which it's evasive. I once had a CIO tell me that the value of my infrastructure is adversely proportional to the degree to which anybody in my business knows anything about it. So how do you then take steps to ensure that your customers don't know anything about the infrastructure, even though they have the infrastructure where the data demands, which is gonna be at the edge, and on premise? >> I think that's some of the things we're focused on now. So software to make infrastructure much more frictionless. And you're not really worrying about managing that infrastructure, it's just there to power the business, to deliver the business. Consumption-based offerings with Green Lake, this is truly purpose-built stacks for specific things, because our customers are telling us, I don't want to have to set all that up and manage it, but I want that outcome, and I only want to pay for what I use. So those are just a couple of examples of how we're trying to simplify it. Because ultimately it's all about the experience and the outcome and being able to translate all that data into insight. >> Well, when you're simplifying your face to the world, we heard in the last earnings call, new reporting structure going forward. Hybrid IT ... intelligent edge, and financial services, which is exploding, the consumption base modeling 22% growth last quarter. So organizationally, presumably, you've started to take that shape, and that's how you're presenting your face to the world. Is that right? >> Yeah, and that's helping us to really break down some of the silos, that has existed in this company for a while. And you're seeing that really, really becoming much more unified in terms of how we go to market, and how we think about engaging with our partners how we engage with our customers. >> Are your customers breaking down those silos at a consistent rate? Are you a little bit ahead, a little bit behind? How would you evaluate that? I think it's a transition, it depends on which customer, which sector. We still see some of some of them that are maybe a little behind. Some that are a little bit ahead, but really everybody wants to start the conversation much more about, how do I move faster? How do I accelerate my business? It's all focused on outcomes starting at that data level, and then how can you help me? And this is where I think some of the acquisitions that we've made, like CTP are very empowerful, and then all the software capabilities that we're bringing as well. So we're leading the dialogue much more around that. >> And the only way they're gonna get there is to break down those silos. >> Jim: Absolutely, absolutely. And we have to help them do that, right? We have to help them do that and give them the solutions to do this. >> So Jim, I want to go back to a point that you made about those other two research firms, Gartner and IDC I think it was. But you said that if they were measuring the value, or if there was a magic quadrant for who is the best partner, you guys would be up in the upper right hand quadrant? But partners in this world, especially here in Europe, are more than just the big guys. >> Jim: Yes. >> How are you taking steps to ensure that that large mass of crucially important companies out there, that still where a lot of that innovation, a lot of that excitement really is, are coming with you, are able to move with you? Because your ability to certainly provide them with financial support is important, but your ability to show them the future, and have them see their business in the future, is going to be crucial to whether or not they stay with you. >> And I think we're doing a couple of things. We created our Pathfinder program, I'm sure you guys are aware of that, right? So these are some of the newer partners coming up, we're actually investing in them, helping to scale them, because we think it's going to be unique innovation. Another area is this program that we have called Cloud 28 Plus, where we have a whole network of providers, service providers, ISVs, SPs, that's part of a network that we're able to grow and kind of scale that ecosystem, so I don't know if you want to comment anything more on that, but-- >> Jason: Up to 700 now (mumbles). >> Yeah, so Saviea is very passionate about this obviously, but he's done some some really good things-- >> Peter: And he should be passionate about it. >> But that gives us an ecosystem now of partners who are part of that HPE ecosystem, but different use cases, different compliance needs, they sit in different regions, so we're able to give our customers a lot of that flexibility. >> Alright, gotta give us something on the key note. Just a tidbit. What can you share? A little nugget? >> I mean, you know-- >> Dave: Teaser. >> Some themes we've talked about. You'll hear the word friction free a lot, how do we make things invisible? And really demonstrating how with services and software, and consumption-based service models, can we do that for customers? You'll hear a lot of those themes. We'll highlight some of the things we've announced over the last 24 hours, a few weeks. So we'll emphasize what we've done around Nimble and info site, and the importance of AI in the data center. We'll obviously spotlight point next, and Anna and her energy, she's gonna be out there and really firing people up. And a few surprises in the software space that will come today, that it'll probably cause the market to do a bit of a double take and say who is that that's doing this again? Yeah, it's us, it's HPE doing that. >> And you'll see us also talk about a little bit of a vision in terms of how we see the market starting more at the edge, bringing in AI, composing for different kinds of environments, and then how HPE has really been able to invest, so we're gonna start to show that over the last couple years, we have had a very clear agenda where we want it to go, and now that's all coming to fruition, so we'll start to show all that holistically in terms of our technology vision. So that's another thing that we're gonna be highlighting. >> Great. Perfect timing, we can hear the announcement. Keynotes are coming up, we'll be broadcasting those on our twitch channel. Siliconangle.com/twitch You can go to HPE.com and see the keynotes as well. Gents, great energy, awesome to see you. >> It's great to see you guys, thank you. >> We'll be watching the college football ranks. You guys have a fun little rivalry of Ohio State here. >> The Ohio State. >> Dave: ... Yale, but nobody cares. >> Baker for Heisman. >> Dave: Gents, thanks very much for coming. >> Thanks guys, appreciate it. >> Keep right there everybody, we'll be back with our next guest right after this short break. (soft tech music)