>>Welcome back to HPD discovered 2021. My name is Dave Volonte and you're watching the cubes virtual coverage of discover we're going to dig into the most pressing topic not only for I. T. But entire organizations and that's cyber security with me. Miss O'Neil James, senior Director of security engineering at Hewlett Packard Enterprise. So Neil welcome to the cube. Come on in. >>Dave, thank you for having me. I appreciate it. >>Hey, you talked about Project Aurora today. Tell us about project Aurora. What is that? >>So I'm glad you asked. Project Aurora is a new framework that we're working on that attempts to provide the underpinnings for Zero Trust architectures inside of everything that we build at. Hp. Zero Trust is a way of providing a mechanism for enterprises to allow for everything in their enterprise. Whether it's a server, a human or anything in between to be verified and attested to before they're allowed to access or transact in certain ways. That's what we announced today. >>Well, so in response to a spate of damaging cyber attacks last month, President biden issued an executive order designed to improve the United States security posture and in that order essentially issued a zero trust mandate. You know, it's interesting. Zero Trust has gone from a buzzword to a critical part of a security strategy. So in thinking about a zero trust architecture, how do you think about that and how does project Aurora fit in? >>Yeah, Zero Trust architecture as a concept has has been around for quite some time now and over the last few years you've seen many a company attempting to provide technologies that they purport to be. Zero trust. Zero Trust is a framework. It's not one technology, it's not one tool, it's not one product. It is an entire framework of thinking and applying cyber security principles uh to everything that we just talked about beforehand. Project Aurora, as I said before hand, is designed to provide a way for our ourselves and our customers to be able to measure a test and verify every single piece of technology that we sell to them, whether it's a server or everything else in between. Now, we've got a long way to go before we're able to cover everything that HP sells. But for us these capabilities are the root of Zero Trust architectures, you need to be able to at any given moments notice, verify measure and a test and this is what we're doing with Project Aurora. >>So you founded a company called citadel and sold out to HPD last year. And my understanding is you were really the driving force behind the secure production identity framework, but you said zero Trust is really a framework, uh that's an open source project. Maybe you can explain what that is. I mean people talk about the nist framework for cybersecurity. How does that relate? What why is this important and how does Aurora fit into it? >>Yeah, so it's a good question. The next framework is a broader framework for cybersecurity that couples and covers many aspects of thinking about the security posture of an enterprise, whether it's network security, host based intrusion detection capabilities in response things of that sort Spiffy. What you're referring to secure production identity framework for everyone is an open source framework and technology base that we did work on when I was the ceo of Seattle. That was designed to provide a platform agnostic way to assign identity to anything that runs in a network. And so think about yourself or myself, we are uh, we have identities in our back pocket driver's license, passports, things of that sort. They provide a unique assertion of who we are and what we're allowed to do that does not exist in the world of software. And what spiffy does is it provides that mechanism so that you can actually use frameworks like project Aurora that can verify the underpinning infrastructure on top of which software workloads run to be able to verify the spiffy identities even better than before >>is the intensive product ties this capability within this framework. How do you approach this from HP standpoint >>suspicion inspire will and always will be. As far as I'm concerned, remain an open source project held by the cloud Native Computing Foundation. It's for the world. And we want that to be the case because we think that more of our enterprise customers are not living in the world of one vendor or two vendors. They have multiple vendors. And so we need to give them the tools and the flexibility to be able to allow for open source capabilities like Spiffy inspire to provide a way for them to assign these identities and assign policies and control regardless of the infrastructure choices they make today or tomorrow. H P E recognizes that this is a key differentiating capability for our customers. And our goal is to be able to look at our offerings that power the next generation of workloads, kubernetes instances, containers, serverless and anything that comes after that. And our responsibility to say, how can we actually take what we have and be able to provide those kinds of assertions, those underpinnings for zero trust that are going to be necessary to distribute those identities to others workloads and to do so in a scalable, effective and automated manner, which is one of the most important things that project Wara does. >>So a lot of companies senior will set up a security division, uh and and so, but is the IS HPV strategy to essentially uh embed security across its entire portfolio? How do you, how should we think about HP strategy in cyber? >>Yeah, so it's a it's a great question. Hp has a long history, uh security and other domains, networking and servers and storage and beyond. Uh the way we think about what we're building with project or this is plumbing, this is plumbing that must be and everything we built, customers don't buy one product from us and they think it's one custom, one company and something else from us and they think it's another company, they're buying HPV products. And our goal with Project Aurora is to ensure that this plumbing is widely and uniformly distributed and made available. So whether you're buying in Aruba device, a primary storage device or per alliance server. Project Aurora's capabilities are going to provide a consistent way to do the things that I've mentioned beforehand To allow for those zero trust architectures to become real. >>So it's I alluded to President biden's executive order previously, I mean you're a security practitioner or an expert in this area. It just seems as though, and I'd love to get your comments on this. I mean the adversaries are well funded. You know, they're either organized crime, their nation states, uh they're they're extracting a lot of very valuable information, they're monetizing that you've seen things like ransomware as a service now, so any any knucklehead can, can be in the ransomware business. Um it's just this endless escalation game. Um how do you see the industry approaching this? What needs to happen? So obviously I like what you're saying about the plumbing, you're not trying to attack this with a bunch of point tools, which is part of the problem. How do you see the industry coming together to solve this problem? >>Yeah, it's uh if you operate in the world of security, you have to operate from the standpoint of humility. And the reason why you have to operate from a standpoint of humility is because the attack landscape is constantly changing the things and tools and investments and techniques that you thought were going to thwart an attacker. Today, there quickly outdated within a week, a month, a quarter or whatever it might be. And so you have to be able to consistently and continuously evolve and adapt towards what customers are facing on any given moments notice I think to be able to as an industry tackle these issues more and more. So you need to be able to have all of us start to abide, not abide, but start to adopt these open source patterns. We recognize that every company hB included is here to serve customers and to make money for its shareholders as well. But in order for us to do that, we have to also recognize that they've got other technologies in their infrastructure as well. And so it's our belief, it's my belief that allowing for us to support open standards with spiffy inspire and perhaps with some of the aspects of what we're doing with project Aurora, I think allows for other people to be able to kind of deliver the same underpinning capabilities, the plumbing if you will, regardless of whether it's an HP product or somebody else along those lines as well. We need more of that generally across our industry and I think we're far from it. >>I mean this sounds like a war. I mean, it's it's more than a battle. It's a war that actually is never gonna end. Uh, and I don't think there is an end in sight. And you hear, see, so let's talk about the shortage of talent. Uh, they're getting inundated with point products and tools and then that just creates more technical debt. It's been interesting to watch interesting. Maybe it's not the right word, but the pivot 20 trust, endpoint security, cloud security and the exposure that we've now seen as a result of the pandemic was sort of rushed. And then of course, we've seen, you know, the the adversaries really take advantage of that. So, I mean, what you're describing is this ongoing, never ending battle, >>isn't it? Yeah, yeah, no, it's it's it's going to be ongoing. And by the way, Zero Trust is not the end state, right. I mean, there was things that we called the final nail in the coffin Five years ago, 10 years ago and yet the Attackers persevered. And that's because there's a lot of innovation out there. There's a lot of uh, infrastructure moving to dynamic architecture is like cloud and others that are going to be poorly configured and are going to not have necessarily the best and brightest providing security around that. So we have to remain vigilant. We have to work as hard as we can to help customers deploy Zero Trust architecture, but we have to be thinking about what's next. We have to be watching, studying and evolving to be able to prepare ourselves to be able to go after whatever the next capabilities are. >>What I like about what you're saying is, you're right. You have to have humility. I don't want to say. I mean it's it's hard because I do feel like a lot of times the vendor community says, okay, we have the answer to your point. You know, okay. We have a zero trust solution or we have a security solution and there is no silver bullet in this game. And I think what I'm hearing from you is look, we're providing infrastructure, Plumbing is the substrate, but it's an open system. It's got to evolve. We've anything you didn't say, but I love your thoughts on this is we got to collaborate with who some of you might think is your competitor because they're still, they're the good guys. >>Yeah. I mean our our customers are customers don't care that we're competitors with anybody. They care that we're helping them solve their problems for their business. So our responsibility is to figure out what we need to do to work together to provide the basic capabilities that allow for our customers to to remain in business. Right. If cybersecurity issues plague any of our customers, that doesn't affect just HP. That affects all of the companies that are serving that customer itself. So I think we have a shared responsibility to be able to protect our customers >>and you've been in cyber for much, if not most of your career. Right, correct. Let's go. So I got to ask you, did you have a superhero when you were a kid? Did you have sort of uh, you know, save the world thing going? >>Did I have to say, you know, I I didn't have to save the world thing going. But I had um I had, I had two parents that cared for for the world in many, many ways. They were both in the world of health care and so every day I saw them taking care of other people. And I think that probably rubbed off in some of the decisions that I made too >>Well. It's awesome. You can do a great work, really appreciate you coming on the cube and and thank you so much for your insights. >>I appreciate that. Thanks >>All right. Thank you for being with us for our ongoing coverage. HPD discovered 21. This is Dave Volonte. You're watching the cube. The leader in digital tech coverage will be right back. Mhm.

>>Welcome >>back to HP discover 2021. My name is Dave Volonte and you're watching the cubes virtual coverage of discover 21 we're excited to welcome back our wa Kadoura, She's the vice president and worldwide go to market leader for HP. Es smoking hot. Green Lake Cloud services are welcome back to the cube. Good to see you again. >>Thank you for having me to be with you. >>So talk about how your products and services are supporting customer transformations. I'm interested in the experience that everybody has been dreaming about describe how you're giving your customer that competitive advantage. If you've got any examples, that would be awesome. >>Yeah, you got it. Um, I think as we heard Antonio say the cloud is an experience, not a destination, right? And what we're doing with Green Lake is bringing those cloud capabilities and the cloud experience to our customers. You know, we like to say co locations, data center and edge of course. So this is the cloud on prem. And so rather than forcing customers to only have to go up to cloud to get modern cloud capabilities or the benefits of things like, you know, pay as you go for consumption, et cetera. You know, cloud native capabilities like containers, leveraging, kubernetes. We now bring all of that to Green Lake and to our customers. Edge locations and co locations and data centers. We've been able to dramatically transform many of our customers businesses. Right? And you'll probably see it discover some of those examples come to life. For example, Care Stream, who is, you know, in the electronic medical imaging world, Right? They have all of the X ray equipment that capture x rays and different sort of diagnostics for patients. Um and we worked with them to not only craft a ml solution to better read and diagnose these images, um but also all of the underlying infrastructure with the HP Green Lake Ml ops platform that allows them to instantly leverage the capabilities of machine learning and the infrastructure to go with it. >>And so tell me, so, how is it resonating with customers? What you're out there, talking to customers all the time? What are they >>telling you? You know, I think what our customers appreciate about HP Green Lake is it's not sort of look, it's either all on prem in my data center and I have to fully manage it, build it, implement it, take care of it or it's fully public cloud. I have little control and basically I get whatever the public cloud gives me right. Hp Green leg gives our customers the flexibility and control that they require. Right. And so you can think of many use cases where customers have a need to have the compute storage sort of processing need to happen closer to where their data and apps live. Um and so for that exact reason our customers love the flexibility, right? Cloud one, Dato was public cloud. Cloud to Dato I think is the cloud that comes to our customers at their convenience. And to me, you know what I tell C I O S and C T O S and sort of other lines of business leaders when I meet with them is you shouldn't be forced to have to take your data and apps elsewhere to get the transformation that you need. We want to be able to bring that directly to our customers. >>Of course, a lot of the transformation is around data. We love talking about data on the cube and it's funny, I mean we talked about big data last decade. We don't use that term much anymore. Uh It was kind of overhyped but as as often times as the case may be in the early days it's overhyped but then it's under hyped when it actually starts to kick in. And I feel like we're entering a new age of data. And insights with the ascendancy of machine learning and ai what does this mean from H. P. S. Perspective and what our customers telling you that it means for them. >>Yeah no data. I think we often hear data is the new currency writes the new gold. Um You know we've heard uh Antonio even say things like look data could even become something that maybe over time companies start to put some kind of value on their balance sheet. Behind right the same way that maybe brands represented this value on a balance sheet. Um effectively what's happened with data is a lot of people have a lot of data but there's not been a lot of ability to extract insights from data. Right? And I think this is the new revolution that we're all undergoing is we finally have the modern analytics tools to actually turn the data into insights and what we bring to the table from an HPD perspective is the fact that we have the best infrastructure. We obviously now have the cloud capabilities mixed in with our data fabric or container platform, our machine learning operations platform to then be able to process that data again, integrated with many of the great I SV partners that we have on the data side allow our customers to turn that into real insights for their business. And effectively data is becoming a huge competitive advantage. Right? I think many of us are you know, leveraging some, you know, pretty interesting tools or gadgets these days, right? Like I wear one of those, you know, sleep brings, you can imagine a company like that in the future that's able to collect so much data from the folks that purchase their products. Then being able to give us insights about, you know, where is the best zip code that, you know, people get the most amount of sleep in or you know, which zip codes are the healthiest and you know, the United States or countries, et cetera. Um but data really is becoming um you know, a competitive advantage. And one of the things that we care most about at HP is also using it as a force for good and making sure that there is a sort of ethical ai capability. >>That's a great message and very important one. And and it's interesting you're saying about data and the value how well it's clearly it's clearly being valued in terms of companies market caps. I mean it's it's it's you know, maybe it's not the balance yet, but it's on the income statement in terms of data products and data services that that's happening. So we'll see if Antonio's right in the next, you know, several years. But so let's talk more about the specific data challenges that you're solving for your customers. They talk about silos, they talk about they haven't got as much value out of their data initiatives as they wanted to. What are they telling you? Are there challenges and how are you approaching it? >>Yeah, I think, you know, um data's everywhere right. The ability for customers to store the right amount of data is a huge challenge because obviously there's, you know, a huge cost associated with collecting, keeping cleansing processing, you know, all the way to sort of analyzing your data. There tends to be a ton of data silos, right? So customers are looking for a common data fabric that they can then process their data sources across and then be able to sort of tap into that data from an analytics perspective. So much of the technology again that we're focused on is be able to store the data right, Our data fabric layer with his moral right being able to process that data capture that data and then allow the analytics tools to then harness the power of that data and turn that into real business insights for our customers. Um Every customer that I have spoken to, you know whether their financial services, you know, you can imagine the big financial services. I mean they've got you know, just bazillions of pockets of data everywhere and you know, the real sort of a challenge for them is how do I build a common data platform that allows me to tap into that data in effective ways for my business users? >>You talk a little bit about how you're changing the way you're providing solutions? Maybe maybe you could contrast it with the way HP has done in the past, because I think that's important when you, when you think about, you talk a lot about green lake and as a service, but if the products are still, you know, kind of boxes and Luns and, and gigahertz and ports, then, you know, that's that's a dis continuity. So what's changed from the past and how are you feeding into the way customers are transforming their business and supporting their outcomes? >>That's exactly right. You know, at some point in time, right. If you think maybe 10 or 20 years back, it used to be very much about the infrastructure for hp. What's exciting about what we're doing differently for our customers is look, we have the best infrastructure in the business, right. Hp has been doing this you no longer than anyone has probably almost 60 years now. Um but being able to vertically integrate right, move up in that value change so that our customers can get more complete solutions is the more interesting part for our customers. Our customers love our technology, Yes, the gigahertz and the speeds and feeds all of that do matter because they, you know, make for some very powerful infrastructure. However, what makes it easier is the fact that we are building platform stacks on top of that hardware, um that help abstract away the complexity of that infrastructure and the ability to use it far more seamlessly. Um and then if you think about it, we of course have also one of the most advanced services organizations. So being able to leverage our services capabilities, our platform capabilities on top of that hardware, again, deliver it back to our customers In a consumption model, which they've become two X, which they've come to expect from a cloud model. Um and then surrounded by a very rich ecosystem of partners. And we're talking about system Integrators that now have capabilities on helping our customers run their Green Lake environments. We're talking about I. S. V. S. Right? So software stacks and platforms that fully integrate with the Green Lake platform for completely seamless solutions. Um as well as channel Partners and global distributors. So I think that's where we can truly deliver the ultimate end to end solution. It's not just the hardware, right? But it's being complemented with the right services being complemented with the right platform capabilities, the software integrations to deliver that workload that the customer expects. >>And partners, they gotta they gotta place bets, they gonna put resources time money in a line, their resources with with their their partners and their suppliers like HP. So when they ask you, hey, okay. Hp. Tell me or well, what's your overall strategy? Why is it compelling and why do you give me competitive advantage relative to some of your peers in the industry? >>Yeah, I think what, you know, partners are going to be most excited about is the openness of the platform, right? Being able to allow our partners to leverage Green Lake Central with open API so that they can integrate some of their own technologies into our platform. Uh the ability to allow them to also layer in their own um managed services on top of the platform is key. Um And of course being able to build sort of these win win solutions with the system Integrators, right. The system Integrators have some fantastic capabilities all the way from an application development, all the way down to the infrastructure management and data center delivery centers that they have. And so leveraging HP Green Lake um really helps them have access to core technologies that they need to deliver these solutions. >>I wonder if I could take a little sort of side road here and ask you because so many changes going on HP itself is transforming your customers are transforming the pandemic has accelerated all these transformations. Can you talk a little bit about how you've transformed go to market specifically in the context of of as a service? I mean that had to be quite a change for you guys. >>Yeah, no, go to market transformations in support of sort of moving from traditional go to markets right to call, go to markets or significant. Um They required us to really think through what does delivering as a service solutions mean for our direct sales force? What does it mean for our partners and their transformations and being able to support as a service solutions? Um for HP specifically, it also means um thinking about our customer outcomes, not just our ability to ship them, you know, the requisite hardware and say, look, once it's left our dog, our job is done right. It really takes our obligation all the way to the customer using the technology on a day by day basis, as well as supporting them in making sure that everything from implementation to set up to the ongoing monitoring operations of the technology is working for them in the way that they expect in an as a service way, right? We don't expect them to operate it. We don't expect them to, you know, do anything more than pick up the phone and call us if something doesn't go as planned. >>And how about your sellers and your partners? How did they respond? I mean you just wake up one day is okay guys, here we go, new compensation scheme, new way to sell new way to market that that took some thought in some time. And where are you in that journey? >>That's right. And I always say, you know, if you expect people to wake up one day and be transformed, right? You're kidding yourself. Um So everything from sort of the way that we think about our customers use cases, right? And empowering our sellers to understand the outcomes that our customers expect and demand from us to things like compensation too. You know, the partner rebate program that we leverage through the channel partners in order to give them the right incentives to also allow them to make the right investments to support Green Lake. Um, you know, we've all, you know, HP has a fairly significant field sales and solution team and so not thinking about this only as a single person that represents Green Lake, but looking at our capabilities across the board, right. We have fantastic advisory consultants on the ground with phds and data science. We have folks that understand, you know, high performance computing, so making sure that we're embedding the expertise in all of the right personas that support our customers, not just from a calm perspective, but also from an understanding of the end to end solutions that we're bringing to those markets. >>So what gets you stoked in the morning, you get out of bed and you're like, okay, I'm gonna go attack the world. What are you most excited about for H P E and his future? >>You know, it's, there's so much happening right now in this sort of cloud world. Right? Um to me the most exciting portion is the fact that given that we've now introduced on prem cloud to the world, our ability to ship new services and new capabilities, um, but also do that via a very rich partner ecosystem honestly is what probably has me most excited. This is no longer the age of go at it alone, Right. So not only are engineering and product teams hard at work in the engine room producing, you know, capabilities at sort of lightening fast speeds, but it's also our ability to partner, uh you know, whether it's with platform providers, you know, software providers or, you know, system Integrators and services providers, that ecosystem is starting to come together to deliver highly meaningful solutions to our customers and all in a very open way. Um, the number one thing that I personally care about is that our customers never feel like they are being locked in or that they are sort of being forced to have to give up certain levels of capabilities. We want to give them the best of what's out there and allow them to then have that flexibility in their solution. >>And one of the challenges, of course with virtual events is you don't have the hallway track. You know, somebody can't say, hey, have you seen that IOT zone? It's amazing. They got all these robots going around. But so what, what would you say that people should be focused on the discovery maybe things that you want to call out specific highlights or segments that you think are relevant? >>Yeah, there's gonna be a ton of fantastic stuff I think, um you know, really looking for that edge to cloud strategy, um that we're gonna be spending a lot of time talking about um looking at some of our vertical workload solutions, right. We're gonna be talking about quite a few from electronic health care records to payment solutions. Um and many more I think depending on what folks are interested in, there's gonna be something for everyone. Um Project Aurora, which now starts to announce our new security capabilities. Um, you know, the zero trust capabilities that we're delivering um is probably interesting to a lot of our customers, so lots of exciting things coming and I'm excited for our customers to check this out. >>No doubt that's a hot topic. Especially given what's been happening the news these past several months. All right, well, thanks so much for coming back in. The cube is great to see you hopefully face to face next time. >>I sure hope so. Thanks so much for having me. >>It's our pleasure. And thank you for watching and thank you for being with us and our ongoing coverage of HPD discovered 2021. This is Dave Volonte. You're watching the cube, The leader and digital tech coverage. >>Yeah.

>>Welcome >>back to HP discover 2021. My name is Dave Volonte and you're watching the cubes virtual coverage of discover 21 we're excited to welcome back our wa Kadoura, She's the vice president and worldwide go to market leader for HP. Es smoking hot. Green Lake Cloud services are welcome back to the cube. Good to see you again. >>Thank you for having me to be with you. >>So talk about how your products and services are supporting customer transformations. I'm interested in the experience that everybody has been dreaming about describe how you're giving your customer that competitive advantage. If you've got any examples, that would be awesome. >>Yeah, you got it. Um, I think as we heard Antonio say the cloud is an experience, not a destination, right? And what we're doing with Green Lake is bringing those cloud capabilities and the cloud experience to our customers. You know, we like to say co locations, data center and edge of course. So this is the cloud on prem. And so rather than forcing customers to only have to go up to cloud to get modern cloud capabilities or the benefits of things like, you know, pay as you go for consumption, et cetera. You know, cloud native capabilities like containers, leveraging, kubernetes. We now bring all of that to Green Lake and to our customers. Edge locations and co locations and data centers. We've been able to dramatically transform many of our customers businesses. Right? And you'll probably see it discover some of those examples come to life. For example, Care Stream, who is, you know, in the electronic medical imaging world, Right? They have all of the X ray equipment that capture x rays and different sort of diagnostics for patients. Um and we worked with them to not only craft a ml solution to better read and diagnose these images, um but also all of the underlying infrastructure with the HP Green Lake Ml ops platform that allows them to instantly leverage the capabilities of machine learning and the infrastructure to go with it. >>And so tell me, so, how is it resonating with customers? What you're out there, talking to customers all the time? What are they >>telling you? You know, I think what our customers appreciate about HP Green Lake is it's not sort of look, it's either all on prem in my data center and I have to fully manage it, build it, implement it, take care of it or it's fully public cloud. I have little control and basically I get whatever the public cloud gives me right. Hp Green leg gives our customers the flexibility and control that they require. Right. And so you can think of many use cases where customers have a need to have the compute storage sort of processing need to happen closer to where their data and apps live. Um and so for that exact reason our customers love the flexibility, right? Cloud one, Dato was public cloud. Cloud to Dato I think is the cloud that comes to our customers at their convenience. And to me, you know what I tell C I O S and C T O S and sort of other lines of business leaders when I meet with them is you shouldn't be forced to have to take your data and apps elsewhere to get the transformation that you need. We want to be able to bring that directly to our customers. >>Of course, a lot of the transformation is around data. We love talking about data on the cube and it's funny, I mean we talked about big data last decade. We don't use that term much anymore. Uh It was kind of overhyped but as as often times as the case may be in the early days it's overhyped but then it's under hyped when it actually starts to kick in. And I feel like we're entering a new age of data. And insights with the ascendancy of machine learning and ai what does this mean from H. P. S. Perspective and what our customers telling you that it means for them. >>Yeah no data. I think we often hear data is the new currency writes the new gold. Um You know we've heard uh Antonio even say things like look data could even become something that maybe over time companies start to put some kind of value on their balance sheet. Behind right the same way that maybe brands represented this value on a balance sheet. Um effectively what's happened with data is a lot of people have a lot of data but there's not been a lot of ability to extract insights from data. Right? And I think this is the new revolution that we're all undergoing is we finally have the modern analytics tools to actually turn the data into insights and what we bring to the table from an HPD perspective is the fact that we have the best infrastructure. We obviously now have the cloud capabilities mixed in with our data fabric or container platform, our machine learning operations platform to then be able to process that data again, integrated with many of the great I SV partners that we have on the data side allow our customers to turn that into real insights for their business. And effectively data is becoming a huge competitive advantage. Right? I think many of us are you know, leveraging some, you know, pretty interesting tools or gadgets these days, right? Like I wear one of those, you know, sleep brings, you can imagine a company like that in the future that's able to collect so much data from the folks that purchase their products. Then being able to give us insights about, you know, where is the best zip code that, you know, people get the most amount of sleep in or you know, which zip codes are the healthiest and you know, the United States or countries, et cetera. Um but data really is becoming um you know, a competitive advantage. And one of the things that we care most about at HP is also using it as a force for good and making sure that there is a sort of ethical ai capability. >>That's a great message and very important one. And and it's interesting you're saying about data and the value how well it's clearly it's clearly being valued in terms of companies market caps. I mean it's it's it's you know, maybe it's not the balance yet, but it's on the income statement in terms of data products and data services that that's happening. So we'll see if Antonio's right in the next, you know, several years. But so let's talk more about the specific data challenges that you're solving for your customers. They talk about silos, they talk about they haven't got as much value out of their data initiatives as they wanted to. What are they telling you? Are there challenges and how are you approaching it? >>Yeah, I think, you know, um data's everywhere right. The ability for customers to store the right amount of data is a huge challenge because obviously there's, you know, a huge cost associated with collecting, keeping cleansing processing, you know, all the way to sort of analyzing your data. There tends to be a ton of data silos, right? So customers are looking for a common data fabric that they can then process their data sources across and then be able to sort of tap into that data from an analytics perspective. So much of the technology again that we're focused on is be able to store the data right, Our data fabric layer with his moral right being able to process that data capture that data and then allow the analytics tools to then harness the power of that data and turn that into real business insights for our customers. Um Every customer that I have spoken to, you know whether their financial services, you know, you can imagine the big financial services. I mean they've got you know, just bazillions of pockets of data everywhere and you know, the real sort of a challenge for them is how do I build a common data platform that allows me to tap into that data in effective ways for my business users? >>You talk a little bit about how you're changing the way you're providing solutions? Maybe maybe you could contrast it with the way HP has done in the past, because I think that's important when you, when you think about, you talk a lot about green lake and as a service, but if the products are still, you know, kind of boxes and Luns and, and gigahertz and ports, then, you know, that's that's a dis continuity. So what's changed from the past and how are you feeding into the way customers are transforming their business and supporting their outcomes? >>That's exactly right. You know, at some point in time, right. If you think maybe 10 or 20 years back, it used to be very much about the infrastructure for hp. What's exciting about what we're doing differently for our customers is look, we have the best infrastructure in the business, right. Hp has been doing this you no longer than anyone has probably almost 60 years now. Um but being able to vertically integrate right, move up in that value change so that our customers can get more complete solutions is the more interesting part for our customers. Our customers love our technology, Yes, the gigahertz and the speeds and feeds all of that do matter because they, you know, make for some very powerful infrastructure. However, what makes it easier is the fact that we are building platform stacks on top of that hardware, um that help abstract away the complexity of that infrastructure and the ability to use it far more seamlessly. Um and then if you think about it, we of course have also one of the most advanced services organizations. So being able to leverage our services capabilities, our platform capabilities on top of that hardware, again, deliver it back to our customers In a consumption model, which they've become two X, which they've come to expect from a cloud model. Um and then surrounded by a very rich ecosystem of partners. And we're talking about system Integrators that now have capabilities on helping our customers run their Green Lake environments. We're talking about I. S. V. S. Right? So software stacks and platforms that fully integrate with the Green Lake platform for completely seamless solutions. Um as well as channel Partners and global distributors. So I think that's where we can truly deliver the ultimate end to end solution. It's not just the hardware, right? But it's being complemented with the right services being complemented with the right platform capabilities, the software integrations to deliver that workload that the customer expects. >>And partners, they gotta they gotta place bets, they gonna put resources time money in a line, their resources with with their their partners and their suppliers like HP. So when they ask you, hey, okay. Hp. Tell me or well, what's your overall strategy? Why is it compelling and why do you give me competitive advantage relative to some of your peers in the industry? >>Yeah, I think what, you know, partners are going to be most excited about is the openness of the platform, right? Being able to allow our partners to leverage Green Lake Central with open API so that they can integrate some of their own technologies into our platform. Uh the ability to allow them to also layer in their own um managed services on top of the platform is key. Um And of course being able to build sort of these win win solutions with the system Integrators, right. The system Integrators have some fantastic capabilities all the way from an application development, all the way down to the infrastructure management and data center delivery centers that they have. And so leveraging HP Green Lake um really helps them have access to core technologies that they need to deliver these solutions. >>I wonder if I could take a little sort of side road here and ask you because so many changes going on HP itself is transforming your customers are transforming the pandemic has accelerated all these transformations. Can you talk a little bit about how you've transformed go to market specifically in the context of of as a service? I mean that had to be quite a change for you guys. >>Yeah, no, go to market transformations in support of sort of moving from traditional go to markets right to call, go to markets or significant. Um They required us to really think through what does delivering as a service solutions mean for our direct sales force? What does it mean for our partners and their transformations and being able to support as a service solutions? Um for HP specifically, it also means um thinking about our customer outcomes, not just our ability to ship them, you know, the requisite hardware and say, look, once it's left our dog, our job is done right. It really takes our obligation all the way to the customer using the technology on a day by day basis, as well as supporting them in making sure that everything from implementation to set up to the ongoing monitoring operations of the technology is working for them in the way that they expect in an as a service way, right? We don't expect them to operate it. We don't expect them to, you know, do anything more than pick up the phone and call us if something doesn't go as planned. >>And how about your sellers and your partners? How did they respond? I mean you just wake up one day is okay guys, here we go, new compensation scheme, new way to sell new way to market that that took some thought in some time. And where are you in that journey? >>That's right. And I always say, you know, if you expect people to wake up one day and be transformed, right? You're kidding yourself. Um So everything from sort of the way that we think about our customers use cases, right? And empowering our sellers to understand the outcomes that our customers expect and demand from us to things like compensation too. You know, the partner rebate program that we leverage through the channel partners in order to give them the right incentives to also allow them to make the right investments to support Green Lake. Um, you know, we've all, you know, HP has a fairly significant field sales and solution team and so not thinking about this only as a single person that represents Green Lake, but looking at our capabilities across the board, right. We have fantastic advisory consultants on the ground with phds and data science. We have folks that understand, you know, high performance computing, so making sure that we're embedding the expertise in all of the right personas that support our customers, not just from a calm perspective, but also from an understanding of the end to end solutions that we're bringing to those markets. >>So what gets you stoked in the morning, you get out of bed and you're like, okay, I'm gonna go attack the world. What are you most excited about for H P E and his future? >>You know, it's, there's so much happening right now in this sort of cloud world. Right? Um to me the most exciting portion is the fact that given that we've now introduced on prem cloud to the world, our ability to ship new services and new capabilities, um, but also do that via a very rich partner ecosystem honestly is what probably has me most excited. This is no longer the age of go at it alone, Right. So not only are engineering and product teams hard at work in the engine room producing, you know, capabilities at sort of lightening fast speeds, but it's also our ability to partner, uh you know, whether it's with platform providers, you know, software providers or, you know, system Integrators and services providers, that ecosystem is starting to come together to deliver highly meaningful solutions to our customers and all in a very open way. Um, the number one thing that I personally care about is that our customers never feel like they are being locked in or that they are sort of being forced to have to give up certain levels of capabilities. We want to give them the best of what's out there and allow them to then have that flexibility in their solution. >>And one of the challenges, of course with virtual events is you don't have the hallway track. You know, somebody can't say, hey, have you seen that IOT zone? It's amazing. They got all these robots going around. But so what, what would you say that people should be focused on the discovery maybe things that you want to call out specific highlights or segments that you think are relevant? >>Yeah, there's gonna be a ton of fantastic stuff I think, um you know, really looking for that edge to cloud strategy, um that we're gonna be spending a lot of time talking about um looking at some of our vertical workload solutions, right. We're gonna be talking about quite a few from electronic health care records to payment solutions. Um and many more I think depending on what folks are interested in, there's gonna be something for everyone. Um Project Aurora, which now starts to announce our new security capabilities. Um, you know, the zero trust capabilities that we're delivering um is probably interesting to a lot of our customers, so lots of exciting things coming and I'm excited for our customers to check this out. >>No doubt that's a hot topic. Especially given what's been happening the news these past several months. All right, well, thanks so much for coming back in. The cube is great to see you hopefully face to face next time. >>I sure hope so. Thanks so much for having me. >>It's our pleasure. And thank you for watching and thank you for being with us and our ongoing coverage of HPD discovered 2021. This is Dave Volonte. You're watching the cube, The leader and digital tech coverage. >>Yeah.

(bright music) >> Welcome back to HPE Discover 2021. My name is Dave Vellante and you're watching theCUBE's virtual coverage of Discover. We're going to dig into the most pressing topic, not only for IT, but entire organizations. And that's cyber security. With me is Sunil James, senior director of security engineering at Hewlett Packard Enterprise. Sunil, welcome to theCUBE. Come on in. >> Dave, thank you for having me. I appreciate it. >> Hey, you talked about project Aurora today. Tell us about project Aurora, what is that? >> So I'm glad you asked. Project Aurora is a new framework that we're working on that attempts to provide the underpinnings for Zero Trust architectures inside of everything that we build at HPE. Zero Trust is a way of providing a mechanism for enterprises to allow for everything in their enterprise, whether it's a server, a human, or anything in between, to be verified and attested to before they're allowed to access or transact in certain ways. That's what we announced today. >> Well, so in response to a spate of damaging cyber attacks last month, President Biden issued an executive order designed to improve the United States' security posture. And in that order, he essentially issued a Zero Trust mandate. You know, it's interesting, Sunil. Zero Trust has gone from a buzzword to a critical part of a security strategy. So in thinking about a Zero Trust architecture, how do you think about that, and how does project Aurora fit in? >> Yeah, so Zero Trust architecture, as a concept, has been around for quite some time now. And over the last few years, we've seen many a company attempting to provide technologies that they purport to be Zero Trust. Zero Trust is a framework. It's not one technology, it's not one tool, it's not one product. It is an entire framework of thinking and applying cybersecurity principles to everything that we just talked about beforehand. Project Aurora, as I said beforehand, is designed to provide a way for ourselves and our customers to be able to measure, attest, and verify every single piece of technology that we sell to them. Whether it's a server or everything else in between. Now, we've got a long way to go before we're able to cover everything that HPE sells. But for us, these capabilities are the root of Zero Trust architectures. You need to be able to, at any given moment's notice, verify, measure, and attest, and this is what we're doing with project Aurora. >> So you founded a company called Scytale and sold that to HPE last year. And my understanding is you were really the driving force behind the secure production identity framework, but you said Zero Trust is really a framework. That's an open source project. Maybe you can explain what that is. I mean, people talk about the NIST Framework for cybersecurity. How does that relate? Why is this important and how does Aurora fit into it? >> Yeah, so that's a good question. The NIST Framework is a broader framework for cybersecurity that couples and covers many aspects of thinking about the security posture of an enterprise, whether it's network security, host based intrusion detection capabilities, incident response, things of that sort. SPIFFE, which you're referring to, Secure Production Identity Framework For Everyone, is an open source framework and technology base that we did work on when I was the CEO of Scytale, that was designed to provide a platform agnostic way to assign identity to anything that runs in a network. And so think about yourself or myself. We have identities in our back pocket, driver's license, passports, things of that sort. They provide a unique assertion of who we are, and what we're allowed to do. That does not exist in the world of software. And what SPIFFE does is it provides that mechanism so that you can actually use frameworks like project Aurora that can verify the underpinning infrastructure on top of which software workloads run to be able to verify those SPIFFE identities even better than before. >> Is the intent to productize this capability, you know, within this framework? How do you approach this from HPE's standpoint? >> So SPIFFE and SPIRE will and always will be, as far as I'm concerned, remain an open source project held by the Cloud Native Computing Foundation. It's for the world, all right. And we want that to be the case because we think that more of our Enterprise customers are not living in the world of one vendor or two vendors. They have multiple vendors. And so we need to give them the tools and the flexibility to be able to allow for open source capabilities like SPIFFE and SPIRE to provide a way for them to assign these identities and assign policies and control, regardless of the infrastructure choices they make today or tomorrow. HPE recognizes that this is a key differentiating capability for our customers. And our goal is to be able to look at our offerings that power the next generation of workloads. Kubernetes instances, containers, serverless, and anything that comes after that. And our responsibility is to say, "How can we actually take what we have and be able to provide those kinds of assertions, those underpinnings for Zero Trust that are going to be necessary to distribute those identities to those workloads, and to do so in a scalable, effective, and automated manner?" Which is one of the most important things that project Aurora does. >> So a lot of companies, Sunil, will set up a security division. But is the HPE strategy to essentially embed security across its entire portfolio? How should we think about HPE strategy in cyber? >> Yeah, so it's a great question. HPE has a long history in security and other domains, networking, and servers, and storage, and beyond. The way we think about what we're building with project Aurora, this is plumbing. This is plumbing that must be in everything we build. Customers don't buy one product from us and they think it's one company, and something else from us, and they think it's another company. They're buying HPE products. And our goal with project Aurora is to ensure that this plumbing is widely and uniformly distributed and made available. So whether you're buying an Aruba device, a Primera storage device, or a ProLiant server, project Aurora's capabilities are going to provide a consistent way to do the things that I've mentioned beforehand to allow for those Zero Trust architectures to become real. >> So, as I alluded to President Biden's executive order previously. I mean, you're a security practitioner, you're an expert in this area. It just seems as though, and I'd love to get your comments on this. I mean, the adversaries are well-funded, you know, they're either organized crime, they're nation states. They're extracting a lot of very valuable information, they're monetizing that. You've seen things like ransomware as a service now. So any knucklehead can be in the ransomware business. So it's just this endless escalation game. How do you see the industry approaching this? What needs to happen? So obviously I like what you're saying about the plumbing. You're not trying to attack this with a bunch of point tools, which is part of the problem. How do you see the industry coming together to solve this problem? >> Yeah. If you operate in the world of security, you have to operate from the standpoint of humility. And the reason why you have to operate from a standpoint of humility is because the attack landscape is constantly changing. The things, and tools, and investments, and techniques that you thought were going to thwart an attacker today, they're quickly outdated within a week, a month, a quarter, whatever it might be. And so you have to be able to consistently and continuously evolve and adapt towards what customers are facing on any given moment's notice. I think to be able to, as an industry, tackle these issues more and moreso, you need to be able to have all of us start to abide, not abide, but start to adopt these open-source patterns. We recognize that every company, HPE included, is here to serve customers and to make money for its shareholders as well. But in order for us to do that, we have to also recognize that they've got other technologies in their infrastructure as well. And so it's our belief, it's my belief, that allowing for us to support open standards with SPIFFE and SPIRE, and perhaps with some of the aspects of what we're doing with project Aurora, I think allows for other people to be able to kind of deliver the same underpinning capabilities, the plumbing, if you will, regardless of whether it's an HPE product or something else along those lines as well. We need more of that generally across our industry, and I think we're far from it. >> I mean, this sounds like a war. I mean, it's more than a battle, it's a war that actually is never going to end. And I don't think there is an end in sight. And you hear CESOs talk about the shortage of talent, they're getting inundated with point products and tools, and then that just creates more technical debt. It's been interesting to watch. Interesting maybe is not the right word. But the pivot to Zero Trust, endpoint security, cloud security, and the exposure that we've now seen as a result of the pandemic was sort of rushed. And then of course, we've seen, you know, the adversaries really take advantage of that. So, I mean what you're describing is this ongoing never-ending battle, isn't it? >> Yeah, yeah, no, it's going to be ongoing. And by the way, Zero Trust is not the end state, right? I mean, there was things that we called the final nail in the coffin five years ago, 10 years ago, and yet the attackers persevered. And that's because there's a lot of innovation out there. There's a lot of infrastructure moving to dynamic architectures like cloud and others that are going to be poorly configured, and are going to not have necessarily the best and brightest providing security around them. So we have to remain vigilant. We have to work as hard as we can to help customers deploy Zero Trust architectures. But we have to be thinking about what's next. We have to be watching, studying, and evolving to be able to prepare ourselves, to be able to go after whatever the next capabilities are. >> What I like about what you're saying is, you're right. You have to have humility. I don't want to say, I mean, it's hard because I do feel like a lot of times the vendor community says, "Okay, we have the answer," to your point. "Okay, we have a Zero Trust solution." Or, "We have a solution." And there is no silver bullet in this game. And I think what I'm hearing from you is, look we're providing infrastructure, plumbing, the substrate, but it's an open system. It's got to evolve. And the thing you didn't say, but I'd love your thoughts on this is we've got to collaborate with somebody you might think is your competitor. 'Cause they're the good guys. >> Yeah. Our customers don't care that we're competitors with anybody. They care that we're helping them solve their problems for their business. So our responsibility is to figure out what we need to do to work together to provide the basic capabilities that allow for our customers to remain in business, right? If cybersecurity issues plague any of our customers that doesn't affect just HPE, that affects all of the companies that are serving that customer. And so, I think we have a shared responsibility to be able to protect our customers. >> And you've been in cyber for much, if not most of your career, right? >> Correct. >> So I got to ask you, did you have a superhero when you were a kid? Did you have a sort of a, you know, save the world thing going? >> Did I have a, you know, I didn't have a save the world thing going, but I had, I had two parents that cared for the world in many, many ways. They were both in the world of healthcare. And so everyday I saw them taking care of other people. And I think that probably rubbed off in some of the decisions that I make too. >> Well it's awesome. You're doing great work, really appreciate you coming on theCUBE, and thank you so much for your insights. >> I appreciate that, thanks. >> And thank you for being with us for our ongoing coverage of HPE Discover 21. This is Dave Vellante. You're watching theCUBE. The leader in digital tech coverage. We'll be right back. (bright music)

(lively music) >> Welcome back to HPE Discover 2021. My name is Dave Vellante and you're watching theCUBE's virtual coverage of Discover '21, and we're excited to welcome back Arwa Kaddoura, she's a vice president and world-wide go-to market leader for HPE's smoking hot GreenLake Cloud Services. Arwa, welcome back to theCUBE, good to see you again. >> Thank you for having me, it's good to be with you. >> So, talk about how your products and services are supporting customer transformations. I'm interested in the experience that everybody's been dreaming about. Describe how you're giving your customer that competitive advantage. And if you've got an examples, that would be awesome. >> Yeah, you got it. I think as we heard Antonio say, that cloud is an experience, not a destination, right? And what we're doing with GreenLake is bringing those cloud capabilities and the cloud experience to our customers. You know, we like to say, colocations, data center and edge of course. So this is the cloud on prem. And so rather than forcing customers to only have to go up to cloud, to get modern cloud capabilities or the benefits of things like, pay as you go for consumption, etc, cloud native capabilities, like containers, leveraging Kubernetes, we now bring all of that to GreenLake and to our customers, edge locations, and Colocation and data centers. We've been able to dramatically transform many of our customers businesses, right, and you'll probably see it discover some of those examples come to life, for example, Carestream, who is in the electronic medical imaging world, right, they have all of the X-Ray equipment that capture X-rays and different sort of diagnostics for patients. And we worked with them to not only craft a ML solution to better read and diagnose these images, but also all of the underlying infrastructure with the HPE GreenLake ML Ops platform that allows them to instantly leverage the capabilities of machine learning and the infrastructure to go with it. >> And so tell me, so how is it resonating with customers? They're talking to customers all the time? What do they tell you? >> Sure, you know I think what our customers appreciate about HP GreenLake is, it's not sort of look, it's either all on prem in my data center, and I have to fully manage it, build it, implement it, take care of it, or it's fully public cloud, I have little control and basically, I get whatever the public cloud gives me, right? HPE GreenLake gives our customers the flexibility and control that they require, right? And so you can think of many use cases where customers have a need to have the compute storage sort of processing need to happen closer to where their data and apps live. And so for that exact reason, our customers love the flexibility, right. Cloud One Dotto was public cloud, Cloud Two Dotto I think is the cloud that comes to our customers at their convenience. And to me, what I tell CIOs and CTOs and sort of other lines of business leaders when I meet with them, is you shouldn't be forced to have to take your data and apps elsewhere to get the transformation that you need. We want to be able to bring that directly to our customers. >> 'Cause a lot of the transformation is around data, we love talking about data on theCUBE. It's funny, I mean, we talked about big data last decade, we don't use that term much anymore. It was kind of overhyped, but as oftentimes is the case may be in the early days it's overhyped, but then it's underhyped. When it actually starts to kick in, and I feel like we're entering a new age of data and insights with the ascendancy of machine learning and AI. What does this mean from HPEs perspective and what are customers telling you that it means for them? >> Yeah, now, data I think, we often hear data is the new currency, right? It's the new gold. we've heard Antonio even say things like, data can even become something that maybe over time companies start to put some kind of value on their balance sheet behind, right, the same way that maybe brands represented this value on a balance sheet. Effectively, what's happened with data is, a lot of people have a lot of data. But there's not been a lot of ability to extract insights from data, right. And I think this is the new revolution that we're all undergoing is we finally have the modern analytics tools to actually turn the data into insights. And what we bring to the table from an HPE perspective is the fact that we have the best infrastructure, we obviously now have the cloud capabilities mixed in with our data fabric or container platform, or machine learning operations platform, to then be able to process that data, again, integrated with many of the great ISV partners that we have on the data side allow our customers to turn that into real insights for their business. And effectively data is becoming a huge competitive advantage, right? I think many of us are leveraging some pretty interesting tools or gadgets these days, right? Like, I wear one of those sleep rings. You can imagine a company like that in the future that's able to collect so much data from the folks that purchase their products, then being able to give us insights about, where's the best ZIP Code that people get the most amount of sleep and which ZIP Codes are the healthiest in the United States or countries, et cetera? But data really is becoming a competitive advantage. And one of the things that we care most about at HPE is also using it as a force for good and making sure that there is a sort of ethical AI capability. >> That's a great message and very important one. It's interesting what you're saying about data and the value, how we value, it's clearly being valued in terms of companies' market caps, but maybe it's not in the balance sheet yet, but it's on the income statement in terms of data products and data services that that's happening. So, maybe we'll see if Antonia is right in the next several years. But so, let's talk more about the specific data challenges that you're solving for your customers, they talk about silos, they talk about, they haven't gotten as much value out of their data initiatives as they wanted to. What are they telling you are their challenges and how are you approaching it? >> Yeah, I think data is everywhere, right? The ability for customers to store the right amount of data is a huge challenge. Because obviously, there's a huge cost associated with collecting, keeping, cleansing, processing, all the way to sort of analyzing your data. There tends to be a ton of data silos, right. So customers are looking for a common data fabric that they can then process their data sources across, and then be able to sort of tap into that data from an analytics perspective. So much of the technology, again, that we're focused on is be able to store the data, right, our Data Fabric layer with Ezmeral, right, being able to process that data, capture that data, and then allow the analytics tools to then harness the power of that data and turn that into real business insights for our customers. Every customer that I spoken to whether their financial services, you can imagine the big financial services, I mean, they've got just bazillions of pockets of data everywhere. And the real sort of challenge for them is how do I build a common data platform that allows me to tap into that data in effective ways for my business users? >> Can you talk a little bit about how you're changing the way you're providing solutions, maybe you could contrast it with the way HPE has done in the past? Because I think that's important when you think about, you talk a lot about GreenLake and as a service. But if the products are still kind of boxes and lands and gigahertz and ports, then that's a discontinuity. So, what's changed from the past and how are you feeding into the way customers are transforming their business and supporting their outcomes? >> That's exactly right. At some point in time, right, if you think maybe 10 or 20 years back, it used to be very much about the infrastructure for HPE. What's exciting about what we're doing differently for our customers, is, look, we have the best infrastructure in the business, right? HPE has been doing this longer than anyone has probably almost 60 years now. But being able to vertically integrate right, move up in that value chain so that our customers can get more complete solutions, is the more interesting part for our customers. Our customers love our technology yes, the gigahertz and the speeds and feeds, all of that do matter because they make for some very powerful infrastructure. However, what makes it easier is the fact that we are building platform stacks on top of that hardware, that help abstract away the complexity of that infrastructure and the ability to use it far more seamlessly. And then, if you think about it we of course have also one of the most advanced services organizations. So being able to leverage our services capabilities, our platform capabilities, on top of that hardware, again, deliver it back to our customers in a consumption model, which they've come to expect from a cloud model. And then surrounded by a very rich ecosystem of partners, and we're talking about system integrators that now have capabilities on helping our customers run their GreenLake environments. We're talking about ISVs, right, so software stacks and platforms that fully integrate with the GreenLake platform for completely seamless solutions, as well as channel partners and global distributors. So I think that's where we can truly deliver the ultimate end-to-end solution. It's not just the hardware, right? But it's being complemented with the right services, being complemented with the right platform capabilities, the software integrations to deliver that workload that the customer expects. >> So customers and partners, they got to place bets, they've got to put resources, time, money, and align their resources with their partners and their suppliers like HPE. So when they ask you, hey, okay, "HPE, tell me what's your overall strategy? "Why is it compelling? "And why do you give me competitive advantage relative to some of your peers in the industry?" >> Yeah, I think what partners are going to be most excited about is the openness of the platform, right? Being able to allow our partners to leverage GreenLake Central with open API, so that they can integrate some of their own technologies into our platform, the ability to allow them to also layer in their own managed services on top of the platform is key. And, of course, being able to build sort of these win-win solutions with the system integrators, right? The system integrators have some fantastic capabilities all the way from an application development, all the way down to the infrastructure management, and data center delivery centers that they have. And so leveraging HPE GreenLake really helps them have access to the core technologies that they need to deliver these solutions. >> I wonder if I could take a little sort of side road here and ask you because so many changes going on, HPE itself is transforming, your customers are transforming, the pandemic has accelerated all these transformations. Can you talk a little bit about how you've transformed go-to-market specifically in the context of as a service? I mean, that had to be quite a change for you guys. >> Yeah, now go-to-market transformations in support of sort of moving from traditional go-to-markets, right, to cloud go-to-markets are significant. They required us to really think through what does delivering as a service solutions mean for our direct Salesforce? What does it mean for our partners and their transformations and being able to support as a service solutions? For HPE specifically, it also means thinking about our customer outcomes, not just our ability to ship the requisite hardware and say, look, once it's left our dock, our job is done, right. It really takes our obligation all the way to the customer using the technology on a day by day basis, as well as supporting them in making sure that everything from implementation to set up to the ongoing monitoring operations of the technology is working for them in the way that they'd expect in an as a service way, right? We don't expect them to operate it, we don't expect them to do anything more than pick up the phone and call us if something doesn't go as planned. >> Then how about your sellers and your partners? How did they respond? I mean, you wake up one day is Okay guys, here we go. New compensation scheme, new way to sell, new way to market. That took some thought and some time and where are you in that journey? >> That's right. And I always say, if you expect people to wake up one day and be transformed, right, you're kidding yourself. So everything from sort of the way that we think about our customers use cases, right, and empowering our sellers to understand the outcomes that our customers expect and demand from us to things like compensation to the partner rebate program that we leverage through the channel partners in order to give them the right incentives to also allow them to make the right investments to support GreenLake. HPE has a fairly significant field, sales and solution team. And so not thinking about this only as a single person that represents GreenLake, but looking at our capabilities across the board, right, we have fantastic advisory consultants on the ground with PhDs and data science, we have folks that understand high performance computing. So making sure that we're embedding the expertise in all of the right personas that support our customers, not just from a comp perspective, but also from an understanding of the end-to-end solutions that we're bringing to those markets. >> So what gets you stoked in the morning, you get out of bed, you're like, "Okay, I'm going to go attack the world." What are you most excited about for HPE and its future? >> There's so much happening right now in this sort of cloud world, right? To me, the most exciting portion is the fact that given that we've now introduced on prem cloud to the world, our ability to ship new services and new capabilities, but also do that via a very rich partner ecosystem, honestly is what probably has me most excited. This is no longer the age of go-at-it-alone, right. So not only are our engineering and product teams hard at work in the engine room producing capabilities at sort of lightning fast speeds, but it's also our ability to partner, whether it's with platform providers, software providers, or system integrators and services providers. That ecosystem is starting to come together to deliver highly meaningful solutions to our customers and all in a very open way. The number one thing that I personally care about is that our customers never feel like they are being locked in, or that they are sort of being forced, have to give up certain levels of capabilities, we want to give them the best of what's out there and allow them to then have that flexibility in their solution. >> And one of the challenges, of course, with virtual events is you don't have the hallway track, somebody can say, "Hey, have you seen that IoT zone? It's amazing, they got all these robots going around." So what would you say that people should be focused on at discover maybe things that you want to call out specific highlights or segments that you think are relevant? >> Yeah, there's going to be a ton of fantastic stuff. I think, really looking for that edge to cloud strategy, that we're going to be spending a lot of time talking about looking at some of our vertical workload solutions, right? We're going to be talking about quite a few from electronic healthcare records, to payment solutions and many more. I think, depending on what folks are interested in there's going to be something for everyone. Project Aurora, which now starts to announce our new security capabilities, the zero trust capabilities that we're delivering is probably interesting to a lot of our customers. So lots of exciting things coming and I'm excited for our customers to check those out. >> No doubt, that's a hot topic, especially given what's been happening in the news these past several months. Arwa, thanks so much for coming back in theCUBE. It's great to see you hopefully face-to-face next time. >> Thank you, I sure hope so. Thanks so much for having me. >> It was our pleasure. And thank you for watching and thank you for being with us in our ongoing coverage of HPE Discover 2021. This is Dave Vellante. You're watching theCUBE, the leader in digital tech coverage. >> Thank you. (soft music)