>> Announcer: theCube presents HPE Discover 2022,
brought to you by HPE.
>> Hey, everyone. Welcome back to Las Vegas.
This is Lisa Martin with Dave Vellante live
at HPE Discover '22.
Dave, it's great to be here.
This is the first Discover in three years
and we're here with about 7,000 of our closest friends.
>> Yeah. You know, I tweeted out this,
I think I've been to 14 Discovers
between the U.S. and Europe,
and I've never seen a Discover with so much energy.
People are not only psyched to get back together,
that's for sure, but I think HPE's got
a little spring in its step and it's feeling more confident
than maybe some of the past Discovers that I've been to.
>> I think so, too. I think there's definitely
a spring in the step and we're going to be unpacking
some of that spring next with one of our alumni
who joins us, Keith White's here,
the executive vice president and general manager
of GreenLake Cloud Services. Welcome back.
>> Great. You all thanks for having me.
It's fantastic that you're here and you're right,
the energy is crazy at this show.
It's been a lot of pent up demand,
but I think what you heard from Antonio today
is our strategy's changing dramatically
and it's really embracing our customers and our partners.
So it's great.
>> Embracing the customers and the partners,
the ecosystem expansion is so critical,
especially the last couple of years
with the acceleration of digital transformation.
So much challenge in every industry,
but lots of momentum on the GreenLake side,
I was looking at the Q2 numbers,
triple digit growth in orders,
65,000 customers over 70 services,
eight new services announced just this morning.
Talk to us about the momentum of GreenLake.
>> The momentum's been fantastic.
I mean, I'll tell you, the fact that customers
are really now reaccelerating their digital transformation,
you probably heard a lot, but there was a delay
as we went through the pandemic.
So now it's reaccelerating,
but everyone's going to a hybrid, multi-cloud environment.
Data is the new currency.
And obviously, everyone's trying to push out to the Edge
and GreenLake is that edge to cloud platform.
So we're just seeing tons of momentum,
not just from the customers, but partners,
we've enabled the platform so partners can plug into it
and offer their solutions to our customers as well.
So it's exciting and it's been fun to see the momentum
from an order standpoint, but one of the big numbers
that you may not be aware of
is we have over a 96% retention rate.
So once a customer's on GreenLake,
they stay on it because they're seeing the value,
which has been fantastic.
>> The value is absolutely critically important.
We saw three great big name customers.
The Home Depot was on stage this morning,
Oak Ridge National Laboratory was as well, Evil Geniuses.
So the momentum in the enterprise is clearly present.
>> Yeah. It is. And we're hearing it from a lot of customers.
And I think you guys talk a lot about,
hey, there's the cloud, data and Edge,
these big mega trends that are happening out there.
And you look at a company like Barclays,
they're actually reinventing
their entire private cloud infrastructure,
running over a hundred thousand workloads on HPE GreenLake.
Or you look at a company like Zenseact,
who's basically they do autonomous driving software.
So they're doing massive parallel computing capabilities.
They're pulling in hundreds of petabytes of data
to then make driving safer
and so you're seeing it on the data front.
And then on the Edge, you look at anyone
like a Patrick Terminal, for example.
They run a whole terminal shipyard.
They're getting data in from exporters, importers,
regulators, the works and they have to real-time,
analyze that data and say, where should this thing go?
Especially with today's supply chain challenges,
they have to be so efficient, that it's just fantastic.
>> It was interesting to hear Fidelma,
Keith, this morning on stage.
It was the first time I'd really seen real clarity
on the platform itself and that it's obviously her job is,
okay, here's the platform,
now, you guys got to go build on top of it.
Both inside of HPE, but also externally,
so your ecosystem partners.
So, you mentioned the financial services companies
like Barclays.
We see those companies moving into the digital world
by offering some of their services
in building their own clouds.
>> Keith: That's right.
>> What's your vision for GreenLake
in terms of being that platform,
to assist them in doing that and the data component there?
>> I think that was one of the most exciting things
about not just showcasing the platform,
but also the announcement
of our private cloud enterprise, Cloud Service.
Because in essence, what you're doing
is you're creating that framework
for what most companies are doing,
which is they're becoming cloud service providers
for their internal business units.
And they're having to do showback type scenarios,
chargeback type scenarios, deliver cloud services
and solutions inside the organization
so that open platform, you're spot on.
For our ecosystem, it's fantastic,
but for our customers, they get to leverage it as well
for their own internal IT work that's happening.
>> So you talk about hybrid cloud,
you talk about private cloud, what's your vision?
You know, we use this term Supercloud.
This in a layer that goes across clouds.
What's your thought about that?
Because you have an advantage at the Edge with Aruba.
Everybody talks about the Edge,
but they talk about it more in the context of near Edge.
>> That's right.
>> We talked to Verizon and they're going far Edge,
you guys are participating in that,
as well as some of your partners in Red Hat and others.
What's your vision for that?
What I call Supercloud, is that part of the strategy?
Is that more longer term
or you think that's pipe dream by Dave?
>> No, I think it's really thoughtful, Dave,
'cause it has to be part of the strategy.
What I hear, so for example, Ford's a great example.
They run Azure, AWS, and then they made a big deal
with Google cloud for their internal cars
and they run HPE GreenLake.
So they're saying, hey, we got four clouds.
How do we sort of disaggregate the usage of that?
And Chris Lund, who is the VP of information technology
at Liberty Mutual Insurance, he talked about it today,
where he said, hey, I can deliver these services
to my business unit.
And they don't know, am I running on the public cloud?
Am I running on our HPE GreenLake cloud?
Like it doesn't matter to the end user,
we've simplified that so much.
So I think your Supercloud idea is super thoughtful,
not to use the super term too much,
that I'm super excited about
because it's really clear of what our customers
are trying to accomplish, which it's not about the cloud,
it's about the solution
and the business outcome that gets to work.
>> Well, and I think it is different.
I mean, it's not like the last 10 years where it was like,
hey, I got my stuff to work on the different clouds
and I'm replicating as much as I can,
the cloud experience on-prem.
I think you guys are there now and then to us,
the next layer is that ecosystem enablement.
So how do you see the ecosystem evolving
and what role does Green Lake play there?
>> Yeah. This has been really exciting.
We had Tarkan Maner who runs Nutanix
and Karl Strohmeyer from Equinix on stage with us as well.
And what's happening with the ecosystem is, I used to say,
one plus one has to equal three for our customers.
So when you bring these together,
it has to be that scenario,
but we are joking that one plus one plus one equals five now
because everything has a partner component to it.
It's not about the platform,
it's not about the specific cloud service,
it's actually about the solution that gets delivered.
And that's done with an ISV, it's done with a Colo,
it's done even with the Hyperscalers.
We have Azure Stack HCI as a fully integrated solution.
It happens with managed service providers,
delivering managed services out to their folks as well.
So that platform being fully partner enabled
and that ecosystem being able to take advantage of that,
and so we have to jointly go to market to our customers
for their business needs, their business outcomes.
>> Some of the expansion of the ecosystem.
we just had Red Hat on in the last hour
talking about- >> We're so excited
to partner with them.
>> Right, what's going on there with OpenShift and Ansible
and Rel, but talk about the customer influence
in terms of the expansion of the ecosystem.
We know we've got to meet customers where they are,
they're driving it, but we know that HPE
has a big presence in the enterprise
and some pretty big customer names.
How are they from a demand perspective?
>> Well, this is where I think the uniqueness
of GreenLake has really changed HPE's approach
with our customers.
Like in all fairness, we used to be a vendor
that provided hardware components for,
and we talked a lot about hardware costs
and blah, blah, blah.
Now, we're actually a partner with those customers.
What's the business outcome you're requiring?
What's the SLA that we offer you
for what you're trying to accomplish?
And to do that, we have to have it done with partners.
And so even on the storage front, Qumulo or Cohesity.
On the backup and recovery disaster recovery,
yes, we have our own products,
but we also partner with great companies like Veeam
because it's customer choice, it's an open platform.
And the Red Hat announcement is just fantastic.
Because, hey, from a container platform standpoint,
OpenShift provides 5,000 plus customers,
90% of the fortune 500 that they engage with,
with that opportunity to take GreenLake with OpenShift
and implement that container capabilities on-prem.
So it's fantastic.
>> We were talking after the keynote,
Keith Townsend came on, myself and Lisa.
And he was like, okay, what about startups?
'Cause that's kind of a hallmark of cloud.
And we felt like, okay, startups are not the ideal
customer profile necessarily for HPE.
Although we saw Evil Geniuses up on stage, but I threw out
and I'd love to get your thoughts on this
that within companies, incumbents, you have entrepreneurs,
they're trying to build their own clouds or Superclouds
as I use the term, is that really the target
for the developer audience?
We've talked a lot about OpenShift
with their other platforms, who says as a partner-
>> We just announced another extension with Rancher and-
>> Yeah. I saw that.
And you have to have optionality for developers.
Is that the way we should think about the target audience
from a developer standpoint?
>> I think it will be as we go forward.
And so what phenomena presented on stage
was the new developer platform,
because we have come to realize,
we have to engage with the developers.
They're the ones building the apps.
They're the ones that are delivering the solutions
for the most part.
So yeah, I think at the enterprise space,
we have a really strong capability.
I think when you get into the sort
of mid-market SMB standpoint,
what we're doing is we're going directly
to the managed service and cloud service providers
and directly to our Disty and VARS
to have them build solutions on top of GreenLake,
powered by GreenLake, to then deliver to their customers
because that's what the customer wants.
I think on the developer side of the house,
we have to speak their language,
we have to provide their capabilities
because they're going to start articulating apps
that are going to use both the public cloud
and our on-prem capabilities with GreenLake.
And so that's got to work very well.
And so you've heard us talk about API based
and all of that sort of scenario.
So it's an exciting time for us, again,
moving HPE strategy into something very different
than where we were before.
>> Well, Keith, that speaks to ecosystem.
So I don't know if you were at Microsoft,
when the sweaty Steve Ballmer was working
with the developers, developers.
That's about ecosystem, ecosystem, ecosystem.
I don't expect we're going to see Antonio replicating that.
But that really is the sort of what you just described
is the ecosystem developing on top of GreenLake.
That's critical.
>> Yeah. And this is one of the things I learned.
So, being at Microsoft for as long as I was
and leading the Azure business from a commercial standpoint,
it was all about the partner and I mean,
in all fairness, almost every solution that gets delivered
has some sort of partner component to it.
Might be an ISV app, might be a managed service,
might be in a Colo, might be with our hybrid cloud,
with our Hyperscalers,
but everything has a partner component to it.
And so one of the things I learned with Azure is,
you have to sell through and with your ecosystem
and go to that customer with a joint solution.
And that's where it becomes so impactful and so powerful
for what our customers are trying to accomplish.
>> When we think about the data gravity and the value of data
that put massive potential that it has,
even Antonio talked about it this morning,
being data rich but insights poor for a long time.
>> Yeah. >> Every company
in today's day and age has to be a data company
to be competitive, there's no more option for that.
How does GreenLake empower companies?
GreenLake and its ecosystem empower companies
to really live being data companies
so that they can meet their customers where they are.
>> I think it's a really great point because like we said,
data's the new currency.
Data's the new gold that's out there
and people have to get their arms around their data estate.
So then they can make these business decisions,
these business insights and garner that.
And Dave, you mentioned earlier,
the Edge is bringing a ton of new data in,
and my Zenseact example is a good one.
But with GreenLake, you now have a platform
that can do data and data management
and really sort of establish and secure the data for you.
There's no data latency, there's no data egress charges.
And which is what we typically run into
with the public cloud.
But we also support a wide range of databases, open source,
as well as the commercial ones,
the sequels and those types of scenarios.
But what really comes to life
is when you have to do analytics on that
and you're doing AI and machine learning.
And this is one of the benefits I think
that people don't realize with HPE is,
the investments we've made with Cray, for example,
we have and you saw on stage today,
the largest supercomputer in the world.
That depth that we have as a company,
that then comes down into AI and analytics
for what we can do with high performance compute,
data simulations, data modeling, analytics,
like that is something that we, as a company,
have really deep, deep capabilities on.
So it's exciting to see what we can bring
to customers all for that spectrum of data.
>> I was excited to see Frontier, they actually achieve,
we hosted an event, co-produced event
with HPE during the pandemic, Exascale day.
>> Yeah.
>> But we weren't quite at Exascale,
we were like right on the cusp.
So to see it actually break through was awesome.
So HPC is clearly a differentiator
for Hewlett Packard Enterprise.
And you talk about the egress.
What are some of the other differentiators?
Why should people choose GreenLake?
>> Well, I think the biggest thing is,
that it's truly is a edge to cloud platform.
And so you talk about Aruba and our capabilities
with a network attached
and network as a service capabilities,
like that's fairly unique.
You don't see that with the other companies.
You mentioned earlier to me that compute capabilities
that we've had as a company and the storage capabilities.
But what's interesting now
is that we're sort of taking all of that expertise
and we're actually starting to deliver these cloud services
that you saw on stage, private cloud,
AI and machine learning, high performance computing,
VDI, SAP.
And now we're actually getting
into these industry solutions.
So we talked last year about electronic medical records,
this year, we've talked about 5g.
Now, we're talking about customer loyalty applications.
So we're really trying to move
from these sort of baseline capabilities
and yes, containers and VMs and bare metal,
all that stuff is important,
but what's really important is the services
that you run on top of that, 'cause that's the outcomes
that our customers are looking at.
>> Should we expect you to be accelerating?
I mean, look at what you did with Azure.
You look at what AWS does
in terms of the feature acceleration.
Should we expect HPE to replicate?
Maybe not to that scale, but in a similar cadence,
we're starting to see that.
Should we expect that actually to go faster?
>> I think you couched it really well
because it's not as much about the quantity,
but the quality and the uses.
And so what we've been trying to do is say,
hey, what is our swim lane? What is our sweet spot?
Where do we have a superpower?
And where are the areas that we have that superpower
and how can we bring those solutions to our customers?
'Cause I think, sometimes, you get over your skis a bit,
trying to do too much,
or people get caught up in the big numbers, versus the,
hey, what's the real meat behind it.
What's the tangible outcome
that we can deliver to customers?
And we see just a massive TAM.
I want to say my last analysis was around $42 billion
in the next three years,
TAM and the Azure service on-prem space.
And so we think that there's nothing but upside
with the core set of workloads, the core set of solutions
and the cloud services that we bring.
So yeah, we'll continue to innovate, absolutely, amen,
but we're not in a, hey we got to get to 250 this
and 300 that, we want to keep it as focused as we can.
>> Well, the vast majority of the revenue in the public cloud
is still compute.
I mean, not withstanding,
Microsoft obviously does a lot in SaaS,
but I'm talking about the infrastructure and service.
Still, well, I would say over 50%.
And so there's a lot of the services
that don't make any revenue and there's that long tail,
if I hear your strategy,
you're not necessarily going after that.
You're focusing on the quality of those high value services
and let the ecosystem sort of bring in the rest.
>> This is where I think the, I mean,
I love that you guys are asking me about the ecosystem
because this is where their sweet spot is.
They're the experts on hyper-converged or databases,
a service or VDI, or even with SAP,
like they're the experts on that piece of it.
So we're enabling that together to our customers.
And so I don't want to give you the impression
that we're not going to innovate. Amen.
We absolutely are, but we want to keep it within that,
that again, our swim lane,
where we can really add true value
based on our expertise and our capabilities
so that we can confidently go to customers and say,
hey, this is a solution that's going to deliver
this business value or this capability for you.
>> The partners might be more comfortable with that than,
we only have one eye sleep with one eye open
in the public cloud, like, okay, what are they going to,
which value of mine are they grab next?
>> You're spot on. And again, this is where I think,
the power of what an Edge to cloud platform
like HPE GreenLake can do for our customers,
because it is that sort of, I mentioned it,
one plus one equals three kind of scenario
for our customers so.
>> So we can leave your customers, last question, Keith.
I know we're only on day one of the main summit,
the partner growth summit was yesterday.
What's the feedback been from the customers
and the ecosystem in terms of validating the direction
that HPE is going?
>> Well, I think the fantastic thing has been
to hear from our customers.
So I mentioned in my keynote recently,
we had Liberty Mutual and we had Texas Children's Hospital,
and they're implementing HPE GreenLake
in a variety of different ways,
from a private cloud standpoint
to a data center consolidation.
They're seeing sustainability goals happen on top of that.
They're seeing us take on management for them
so they can take their limited resources
and go focus them on innovation and value added scenarios.
So the flexibility and cost that we're providing,
and it's just fantastic to hear this come to life
in a real customer scenario
because what Texas Children is trying to do
is improve patient care for women and children
like who can argue with that.
>> Nobody. >> So, yeah. It's great.
>> Awesome. Keith, thank you so much for joining Dave and me
on the program, talking about all of the momentum
with HPE Greenlake. >> Always.
>> You can't walk in here without feeling the momentum.
We appreciate your insights and your time.
>> Always. Thank you you for the time. Yeah.
Great to see you as well.
>> Likewise. >> Thanks.
>> For Keith White and Dave Vellante, I'm Lisa Martin.
You're watching theCube live, day one coverage
from the show floor at HPE Discover '22.
We'll be right back with our next guest.
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