>> Hi everybody. Welcome back to HPE Discover 2023.
You're watching theCUBE's continuous coverage.
Day three here.
Wow, last night John Fogerty was rocking the house,
everybody was having a blast.
But we made it here today as did a number of folks,
you can see behind us.
Jason Newton is here.
He is the Vice President of integrated marketing,
events, messaging, HPE.
He's got a lot of new responsibility
but a longtime friend of theCUBE.
Jason, good to see you again.
>> It's great to be back. I always enjoy this.
The last day, but hey, I'll take it.
>> Well, but you and your team make a lot of this happen
and so we really appreciate having been here so many years
and watching the transformation of HPE.
You've got an expanded role.
Can you explain that?
>> Yeah, so in addition to kind of driving the messaging
across the company, driving our customer advocacy,
all that kind of stuff, we added HP GreenLake marketing
to my team as well as software marketing,
services marketing and industry marketing.
Obviously, HP GreenLake is the future.
It's all how we're going to get to that journey to one
that Antonio was talking about.
And we feel like combining those assets together,
putting them more front and center
and big activations like these different events
but also then downstream with what we're doing
with the sales team could be really powerful.
So that's the idea.
And then I'll be partnering with my colleagues
across Jim's organization to bring that to life
but also pull through the rest of the core portfolio
and everything we do.
So it's cool as you know,
'cause I've known you for years.
I'm a product marketing guy, so I get a lot of energy
and someone bringing a new problem
like this thing that we launched Tuesday,
like we think we have something here.
Can you make it make sense, right?
And that's what we do and then we create the megaphone.
>> Well, so I want to come back
'cause I've watched the transformation,
I want to come back to even the logo.
So I remember when you guys did that
and you got some heat.
>> We call it the Element. >> The Element, yes.
>> Okay, the Element. Beautiful.
And you said to at the time, we are going to use this element
in a lot of different ways, just you watch,
and you really have.
And it's been a home run. >> Yeah.
>> Dave: I mean, you got to be really pleased.
>> Sure. >> But you had to be,
you have to stick to your- >> Shout out Marissa Freeman.
>> Yeah, yeah. Shout out to Marissa.
In fact, I was just doing some searching on our cube AI
and she popped up on some of the stuff we've done.
But seriously, you had to really believe
in the research that you did
and your convictions.
And there are some other fundamental assumptions
you made around hybrid, around the unification.
>> Yep >> The shift from sort of
product/box centric to that unified message.
And again, you've probably got a lot of internal heat
for that as well as external heat from the product guys.
But it's now, it's taken some time
which these things always do, but it's now coming together
in a way that's coinciding
with what I'll call the equilibrium in cloud,
in sort of extended cloud spend.
>> Yeah, I would say the market's definitely moving
to the strategy.
We firmly believe in the strategy.
And I think what you're seeing over the last five years
is that bet at the edge,
people kind of scratched their head and said, "Okay."
But then we invested and we delivered.
Then we started talking about cloud.
And there's a need for hybrid,
we identified that need.
And they said, "Nah, you're full of it.
It's all going to go to the public cloud."
Hybrid's won.
Despite what you put on Twitter the other day.
I think that it's clear that hybrid's won that battle.
>> Well, but I think that my tweet,
I think I would agree with you that I think Antonio
is on the right side of history in that little battle.
>> So both times edge, hybrid, hybrid cloud
need a platform, need common experience.
You have to have both.
You can't do hybrid without edge connectivity securely.
You would have an incomplete hybrid cloud
or a cloud by accident, he talked about.
Once you have those two elements
you can now start to unify the experience
but most importantly, unify the data
and start to bring the right resources to the data.
Another thing they laughed at us at
was when we bought SGI and then Cray.
And I remember Antonio saying, "Look,
I'm looking at the trend lines.
If the data keeps going like this,
it doesn't look like it's slowing down.
These workloads aren't getting smaller
they're getting bigger.
At some point, we're going to need that kind of capability
to deal with that complexity of data."
And here we are now with entering the AI cloud market.
>> I'll say this, I didn't laugh at the time.
I instead said, "Oh, okay. That's nice."
But I didn't predict the serious intersection
of the two spaces, the way it's come together.
>> And I'd say, in fact, I got to meet with Jim
and your team, the extended team
in the analyst sessions.
And I think one of the things that was brought up,
and I've love to get your view on this,
is the fact that you're going out
and you're talking to people like different personas now,
like data scientists for instance.
That's got to really change how you do your job
and how you bring a bigger tent in
with those different data science personas, data personas,
LLMs are not a IT thing.
How does that work for you guys?
>> Well, yeah.
I mean, you look at some of the new assets,
something that I've been really interested in
is what we're doing around observability
in some of these tools.
And we talk about AIOps.
And the more I learn about it,
I realize that it changes the conversation,
the nature of the conversation.
So if I could say, look, Mr. Customers,
the business customer, I'll come into you.
I'll give you a view of all your workloads,
what they're running on.
Maybe have some opportunities that we could create
to improve your outcomes of what you're doing there.
It becomes a whole different conversation with the customer,
so now I'm selling the opportunity
or I'm selling the problem we solve.
I'm not selling the thing anymore.
And it's a much more strategic conversation
that leads in a lot more directions
where if you come in with a product,
it's usually a yes or no, right?
Or a maybe, you know, best case.
When you come at it from that perspective
with backed by data, all automated,
you can put in front of the customer.
Oh, well, let me introduce you to this person.
Oh, let me introduce you to this person.
Oh, yeah, we need to have a conversation about that.
It just widens the aperture of the opportunities.
And yeah, we're building those new relationships.
And an event like this is where we get
those first handshakes
and start to build those new relationships.
>> Ezmeral being part of your scope is kind of cool.
We had those guys on yesterday.
And as sort of described as think of Ezmeral
as our software group.
And remember, HPE and HP split,
software piece was sort of sent over to microfocus,
and it was like, all right.
I said at the time, now HPE has an opportunity
to re-architect its software strategy.
It must do that, was my claim at the time.
And you've done that. Tuck in acquisitions.
Some other major acquisitions.
But it's part of a differentiated strategy.
It's not just about optionality for customers.
You got that too.
But it's also about HPE on HPE.
You don't talk about in those terms,
but that's something that I would think over time
is going to attract more customers
and create more stickiness to GreenLake.
>> Yeah, absolutely.
I think what we're doing in software
is way bigger than just Ezmeral.
I think Ezmeral is an awesome solution
in the unified analytics space.
You know, a lot of people are leveraging Databricks
and Snowflakes and doing some stuff
with their data in the public cloud.
The opportunity that that team is developing
is saying, "Well, why am I limited to that data?
Why can't I not unify all the data at scale
across all of my different silos on-prem edge,
multiple public clouds.
What could I then do with that?"
So that's Ezmeral. Super powerful.
Then you start adding the other acquisitions
that we've been, you said tucking in and adding to it,
most of them have all been software.
So then we did Pachyderm, we did Determined AI.
Now we have OpsRamp.
So we're able now with HP GreenLake to have a,
not only like edge conversations
and traditional private cloud conversations,
but now we're starting to talk about analytics workflows.
We're starting to take a look at,
you know, workloads across the entire and environment.
So these software acquisitions are really aimed
to fulfill his strategy around Antonio's strategy,
edge, hybrid cloud, AI
and here's the software services to go start the journey.
>> And one of the things that Antonio said
when we talked to him yesterday
which really came into focus,
he goes, "You know, when we do these acquisitions,
it's not just about getting the technology,
it's about getting the talent."
Because I was asking about M&A versus organic,
and he said, "Now, once you have these people in place,
they can now start to develop organic capabilities
that stitch them together in a way that's unique
for value add for customers."
>> Yeah. So, yeah.
>> Yeah, I think what's really interesting
about the strategy,
and I think this goes to the marketing of it,
that the fact that it is a software group,
and I know Mohan came on board just a little while ago,
and has been doing a lot to really bring
a lot of that together.
>> Totally overhauled.
I mean, it's almost unrecognizable from two years ago.
It's amazing.
Sorry. >> And, no.
And I think that the key is also,
the same group also having the cloud,
the private cloud enterprise.
And then you start, you have your announcements
with private cloud business edition.
>> Yep. >> Which unfortunately
gets called PCBE. >> Yeah.
>> Which the whole different story,
but from a acronym perspective,
I think where do you see that group going?
Because then it seems like you also have the OpsRamp
which is off in the CTO office.
Does that tie together?
>> A hundred percent.
No, and it's back to the journey
to one that Antonio sees, right?
So we're going to have one portfolio,
the HP GreenLake portfolio, we can do custom solutions.
We're starting to call that HP GreenLake Flex Solutions.
And that's the core of our business today.
But where it's going is hybrid and cloud solutions
delivered as SaaS software or infrastructure as a service.
But the key is the platform, right?
That's going to be what differentiates.
That's what you didn't hear from Dell last month
when they were talking about it.
They're kind of moving in an area of more customization,
more solutioning, more complexity.
We have the biggest portfolio, great.
We're going simple
and we're going to a platform-powered experience.
So all of those things that these you see
as different teams that have come up to talk to you,
they're all either going to manage through
or run on that platform.
And that's going to be really powerful,
especially when the data starts coming in.
The insights that's going to create for us
to then share with the customer
and continue to grow and expand
different ways that we can help solve their problems.
>> Well, I'm glad you brought up Dell.
You're not afraid to talk about, you know, others.
It's fine. I mean, customers do it all the time.
You very clearly have a more unified message
when it comes to as a service.
There's no question about it. You're ahead.
You got there earlier.
You got more LLMs as a service
is something that, you know, that they didn't announce.
But the piece that I wanted to talk about was
what we're doing tomorrow.
Rob and I are flying back in the red eye.
I do a weekly series called Breaking Analysis.
Andy Thurai is coming in.
We just did, last week was Uber.
We had Uber on.
It was amazing. It's gone viral.
It's still going crazy.
And we're going to focus on your LLM as a service announcement,
really unpack that and essentially ask the question,
is it a viable and differentiable strategy
and what's the impact for customers going forward?
And so we really want to, you know, dig into it, understand,
help people understand exactly what it is.
'Cause it's not like you're serving up
super computing infrastructure.
>> That's not the play, yeah.
>> Right, that's not the play.
And so, I'm interested, you got this whenever you got it,
a month ago whenever and said, "Here,
how do we communicate this at Discover?"
And you had this, it's like that scene in Apollo 13
with, okay, make this oxygen thing work.
>> The first thing I did is I went to the person
that built it.
So Nick Dubay.
And he's also the guy behind
and his team that delivered Frontier.
And I said, explain this to me and the strategy
and the whats and whys of why we're unique.
And what he really focused in on was that
there's general purpose clouds and cloud architectures
and that's how all clouds run.
And the goal is to maximize the use of capacity.
So lots and lots of nodes with running lots
and lots of different workloads, maximizing utilization.
And that's the economic model, right?
That's where the margins come from there.
AI, large language models, especially the next generation,
the big stuff, is a totally different workload
and a totally different architecture.
Whereas over here, you know,
three nines of availability is fine
in general purpose cloud.
What we're talking about here is I think Antonio called it
the an AI native architecture.
One workload across a whole lot of different nodes
that all have to be running at multiple nines
of availability simultaneously.
If any of those fail, that job ends in a failure
and have to restart it.
Now we're talking hundreds, thousands,
in some cases, tens of thousands of GPUs,
failing, restart, failing.
How many resources, how much money,
how much power are we wasting?
So the special sauce is because we have the expertise
of running those things in that type of environment,
we can make those models run very successfully.
So very high completion rates all the way through.
Very accurate, very efficient.
And the customer through the service
doesn't have to know how to do that.
'Cause I promise you there's not many people
in the world that know how to do that.
That's the value of this new offering
is that we've done this for the biggest environments
in the world.
And at the same time we've been working with HP GreenLake
as a new type of experience to simplify all the hard stuff.
You put those two together
and you get something like HP GreenLake for LLMs.
>> I'm super excited to talk about that tomorrow, Rob,
we're going to unpack that and really dig into it.
Jason, thanks so much for having us here.
Thanks for coming back in theCUBE.
>> Always a pleasure. >> Good luck in the new role.
>> Yeah, thank you.
>> Okay, keep it right there.
We're going to rerun the interview from Antonio Neri yesterday
where he basically told us I am not putting my craze
in the public cloud.
So that's the unique advantage that Jason just talked about.
And we got a little clip of Norm Follett
in the background messing up the sound last night
with John Fogerty. >> Norm Follett.
>> Yeah, Norm Follett.
You don't want to miss.
You don't want to miss that.
All right, keep it right there.
theCUBE from HPE Discover 2023, right back.