>>Thank you for joining us for accelerate next event. I hope you're enjoying it so far. I know you've heard about the industry challenges the I. T. Trends HP strategy from leaders in the industry and so today what we wanna do is focus on going deep on workload solutions. So in the most important workload solutions, the ones we always get asked about and so today we want to share with you some best practices, some examples of how we've helped other customers and how we can help you. All right with that. I'd like to start our panel now and introduce chris idler, who's the vice president and general manager of the element. Chris has extensive solution expertise, he's led HP solution engineering programs in the past. Welcome chris and Mark Nickerson, who is the Director of product management and his team is responsible for solution offerings, making sure we have the right solutions for our customers. Welcome guys, thanks for joining me. >>Thanks for having us christa. >>Yeah, so I'd like to start off with one of the big ones, the ones that we get asked about all the time, what we've been all been experienced in the last year, remote work, remote education and all the challenges that go along with that. So let's talk a little bit about the challenges that customers have had in transitioning to this remote work and remote education environments. >>Uh So I I really think that there's a couple of things that have stood out for me when we're talking with customers about V. D. I. Um first obviously there was a an unexpected and unprecedented level of interest in that area about a year ago and we all know the reasons why, but what it really uncovered was how little planning had gone into this space around a couple of key dynamics. One is scale. Um it's one thing to say, I'm going to enable V. D. I. For a part of my work force in a pre pandemic environment where the office was still the central hub of activity for work. It's a completely different scale. When you think about okay I'm going to have 50, 60, 80, maybe 100 of my workforce now distributed around the globe. Um Whether that's in an educational environment where now you're trying to accommodate staff and students in virtual learning, Whether that's in the area of things like Formula one racing, where we had the desire to still have events going on. But the need for a lot more social distancing. Not as many people able to be trackside but still needing to have that real time experience. This really manifested in a lot of ways and scale was something that I think a lot of customers hadn't put as much thought into. Initially the other area is around planning for experience a lot of times the V. D. I. Experience was planned out with very specific workloads are very specific applications in mind. And when you take it to a more broad based environment, if we're going to support multiple functions, multiple lines of business, there hasn't been as much planning or investigation that's gone into the application side. And so thinking about how graphically intense some applications are. Uh one customer that comes to mind would be Tyler I. S. D. Who did a fairly large rollout pre pandemic and as part of their big modernization effort, what they uncovered was even just changes in standard Windows applications Had become so much more graphically intense with Windows 10 with the latest updates with programs like Adobe that they were really needing to have an accelerated experience for a much larger percentage of their install base than they had counted on. So, um, in addition to planning for scale, you also need to have that visibility into what are the actual applications that are going to be used by these remote users? How graphically intense those might be. What's the logging experience going to be as well as the operating experience. And so really planning through that experience side as well as the scale and the number of users is kind of really two of the biggest, most important things that I've seen. >>You know, Mark, I'll just jump in real quick. I think you covered that pretty comprehensively there and it was well done. The a couple of observations I've made, one is just that um, V. D. I suddenly become like mission critical for sales. It's the front line, you know, for schools, it's the classroom, you know, that this isn't Uh cost cutting measure or uh optimization in IT. measure anymore. This is about running the business in a way it's a digital transformation. One aspect of about 1000 aspects of what does it mean to completely change how your business does. And I think what that translates to is that there's no margin for error, right? You know, you really need to to deploy this in a way that that performs, that understands what you're trying to use it for. That gives that end user the experience that they expect on their screen or on their handheld device or wherever they might be, whether it's a racetrack classroom or on the other end of a conference call or a boardroom. Right? So what we do in the engineering side of things when it comes to V. D. I. R. Really understand what's a tech worker, What's a knowledge worker? What's the power worker? What's a gP really going to look like? What time of day look like, You know, who's using it in the morning, Who is using it in the evening? When do you power up? When do you power down? Does the system behave? Does it just have the, it works function and what our clients can can get from H. P. E. Is um you know, a worldwide set of experiences that we can apply to, making sure that the solution delivers on its promises. So we're seeing the same thing you are christa, We see it all the time on beady eye and on the way businesses are changing the way they do business. >>Yeah. It's funny because when I talked to customers, you know, one of the things I heard that was a good tip is to roll it out to small groups first so you can really get a good sense of what the experiences before you roll it out to a lot of other people and then the expertise. Um It's not like every other workload that people have done before. So if you're new at it make sure you're getting the right advice expertise so that you're doing it the right way. Okay. One of the other things we've been talking a lot about today is digital transformation and moving to the edge. So now I'd like to shift gears and talk a little bit about how we've helped customers make that shift and this time I'll start with chris. >>All right Hey thanks. Okay so you know it's funny when it comes to edge because um the edge is different for every customer and every client and every single client that I've ever spoken to of. H. P. S. Has an edge somewhere. You know whether just like we were talking about the classroom might be the edge. But I think the industry when we're talking about edges talking about you know the internet of things if you remember that term from not too not too long ago you know and and the fact that everything is getting connected and how do we turn that into um into telemetry? And I think Mark is going to be able to talk through a a couple of examples of clients that we have in things like racing and automotive. But what we're learning about Edge is it's not just how do you make the Edge work? It's how do you integrate the edge into what you're already doing? And nobody's just the edge. Right. And so if it's if it's um ai ml dl there that's one way you want to use the edge. If it's a customer experience point of service, it's another, you know, there's yet another way to use the edge. So, it turns out that having a broad set of expertise like HP does, um, to be able to understand the different workloads that you're trying to tie together, including the ones that are running at the, at the edge. Often it involves really making sure you understand the data pipeline. What information is at the edge? How does it flow to the data center? How does it flow? And then which data center, which private cloud? Which public cloud are you using? Um, I think those are the areas where we, we really sort of shine is that we we understand the interconnectedness of these things. And so, for example, Red Bull, and I know you're going to talk about that in a minute mark, um the racing company, you know, for them the edges, the racetrack and, and you know, milliseconds or partial seconds winning and losing races, but then there's also an edge of um workers that are doing the design for the cars and how do they get quick access? So, um, we have a broad variety of infrastructure form factors and compute form factors to help with the edge. And this is another real advantage we have is that we we know how to put the right piece of equipment with the right software. And we also have great containerized software with our admiral container platform. So we're really becoming um, a perfect platform for hosting edge centric workloads and applications and data processing. Uh, it's uh um all the way down to things like a Superdome flex in the background. If you have some really, really, really big data that needs to be processed and of course our workhorse reliance that can be configured to support almost every combination of workload you have. So I know you started with edge christa but and and we're and we nail the edge with those different form factors, but let's make sure, you know, if you're listening to this, this show right now, um make sure you you don't isolate the edge and make sure they integrated with um with the rest of your operation, Mark, you know, what did I miss? >>Yeah, to that point chris I mean and this kind of actually ties the two things together that we've been talking about here at the Edge has become more critical as we have seen more work moving to the edge as where we do work, changes and evolves. And the edge has also become that much more closer because it has to be that much more connected. Um, to your point talking about where that edge exists, that edge can be a lot of different places. Um, but the one commonality really is that the edge is an area where work still needs to get accomplished. It can't just be a collection point and then everything gets shipped back to a data center back to some other area for the work. It's where the work actually needs to get done. Whether that's edge work in a used case like V. D. I. Or whether that's edge work. In the case of doing real time analytics, you mentioned red bull racing, I'll bring that up. I mean, you talk about uh, an area where time is of the essence, everything about that sport comes down to time. You're talking about wins and losses that are measured as you said in milliseconds. And that applies not just to how performance is happening on the track, but how you're able to adapt and modify the needs of the car, adapt to the evolving conditions on the track itself. And so when you talk about putting together a solution for an edge like that, you're right. It can't just be, here's a product that's going to allow us to collect data, ship it back someplace else and and wait for it to be processed in a couple of days, you have to have the ability to analyze that in real time. When we pull together a solution involving our compute products are storage products or networking products. When we're able to deliver that full package solution at the edge, what you see results like a 50 decrease in processing time to make real time analytic decisions about configurations for the car and adapting to real time test and track conditions. >>Yeah, really great point there. Um, and I really love the example of edge and racing because I mean that is where it all every millisecond counts. Um, and so important to process that at the edge. Now, switching gears just a little bit. Let's talk a little bit about um some examples of how we've helped customers when it comes to business agility and optimizing the workload for maximum outcome for business agility. Let's talk about some things that we've done to help customers with that >>mark, give it a >>shot. >>Uh, So when we, when we think about business agility, what you're really talking about is the ability to implement on the fly to be able to scale up and scale down the ability to adapt to real time changing situations. And I think the last year has been, has been an excellent example of exactly how so many businesses have been forced to do that. Um I think one of the areas that I think we've probably seen the most ability to help with customers in that agility area is around the space of private and hybrid clouds. Um if you take a look at the need that customers have to be able to migrate workloads and migrate data between public cloud environments, app development environments that may be hosted on site or maybe in the cloud, the ability to move out of development and into production and having the agility to then scale those application rollouts up, having the ability to have some of that. Um some of that private cloud flexibility in addition to a public cloud environment is something that is becoming increasingly crucial for a lot of our customers. >>All right, well, we could keep going on and on, but I'll stop it there. Uh, thank you so much Chris and Mark. This has been a great discussion. Thanks for sharing how we help other customers and some tips and advice for approaching these workloads. I thank you all for joining us and remind you to look at the on demand sessions. If you want to double click a little bit more into what we've been covering all day today, you can learn a lot more in those sessions. And I thank you for your time. Thanks for tuning in today.