>> From the cube studios in Palo Alto in Boston,
connecting with our leaders all around the world.
This is a cube conversation.
>> Hi, I'm Stu Miniman and welcome to theCUBE conversation.
I'm coming to you from our Boston area studio.
We've been digging into Pesando
and the technology that there've been doing.
Happy to welcome to the program.
Steve Hershkowitz, he's the vice president
of worldwide sales with Hewlett Packard enterprise,
part of the HPC, HPE Pensando, relationship.
Steve, thanks so much for joining us.
>> Thanks for having me, Stu.
I'm really happy to be here.
>> So, obviously, Pensando made a bit of a splash
when they came out at the end of 2019.
We were really excited to have the Cube Apple launch,
had some big name guests there,
including your CEO, Antonio Neri.
HPE has an investment and as an OEM of Pensando,
So, bring us in us to why this partnership,
why this investment from HPE standpoint?
>> Well, thanks Stu.
So obviously there were a lot of reasons
why HP would be interested in a partnership
with an innovative company like Pensando standing
the fact that you have the MPLS team that had developed,
industry changing technologies,
for their previous company at Cisco,
and leveraging their expertise and their market leadership
to bring new innovation to the market,
which was very interesting to us.
As well as, the partnership that was launched between,
Pensando's chairman John Chambers
and our CEO, Antonio Neri.
And when you hear them speak, they talk about,
being partners for life.
And so I think what's unique and what's interesting
to us is you'll hear our CEO,
Antonio talk a lot about HP's evolution as a company
and how we are absolutely the edge to Cloud Platform
as a service company.
And when you have a strategy that involves
servicing and consumption, you have to follow
the innovation engine and the market transitions up
to be able to satisfy your customers
and get out in front of some of the market trends.
And so the technology and the innovation that
Pensando brings to the market is unlike anything else
that's available today that anybody else can do.
And we saw this as a great opportunity for us
to really serve our customers
as they move more of their data to the edge
and want to apply and distribute a lot of the services
to the edge where the data is created and of course,
where most of the data is consumed.
So it's an exciting partnership for us.
We also have a board seat in the company
and we're very, very excited about the opportunity
and our customers are really, really excited
as well about the partnership.
>> Yeah, it's interesting.
Those of us that have watched the industry long enough,
I remember back, John Chambers for many years at HP
was one of Cisco's biggest partners, for a long time.
It really interesting what you're talking about,
some of the new opportunities,
what's going on with edge.
Bring us inside the partnership a little bit.
How has it been going?
You've got about six months
since it's unveiled to the world.
What can you tell us so far,
now that it's seen the light of day?
>> Well, so the partnership is very, very strong
and I think if you ask some of the senior executives
on the Pensando side,
including some of the board members,
they would tell you that the partnership with HPE
is different than any other relationship
that they have with any other company.
And it is that way because we created
a very unique bond through our global business unit
that's responsible for bringing these products
to market and defining the roadmap
to a very, very unique go to market strategy
that we've developed where we actually
have myself leading a go to market engine of people
that are helping with the enablement,
with the training, with the customer interactions,
qualifying opportunities,
and really helping to make a market for this technology
as we do have first mover advantage.
So we work very closely with all aspects
of the Pensando team.
Our business units are aligned,
our development teams are aligned,
our sales teams are very, very closely aligned.
Their chief revenue officer, Frank Paloma and I
are tied at the hip as we bring this technology
to market together with both of our sales teams.
And then as we look at further innovating together,
we are completely locked and aligned
on the combined roadmap.
So it's a unique partnership.
It creates unprecedented opportunity for HPE
through this partnership to gain architectural control
and help our customers gain architectural control
over these next generation data center networks
and really make a leapfrog over any of the technologies
that are available today.
Really two focuses, right?
One is in helping the cloud service providers
that want to better compete with the 800 pound gorillas,
with a much better technology,
a faster technology and a technology
that leapfrogs anything that they've built.
And the other side of that is our ability
to help enterprises as we sell more
as a service offerings and more edge solutions,
help our enterprises make their environments
much less complex, much more secure,
and really help him improve business application performance
so that they can sustain competitive advantage
and make their data center networks
look a lot more like what the hyperscalers have built,
but only a lot better and a lot faster
and a lot more secure.
>> Yeah. I tell you, Steve, one of the things
that I've always been really admired about HP
over the years is baking these solutions together.
It's not just a bunch of pieces,
get them at the customer site and figure it out.
But, I worked on standards,
I've worked on a lot of solutions over the years
and HP and now HPE always makes sure
when it gets to the customer,
it's together, it works.
The time from getting it to being able to use it,
really is minimized and that focus on simplicity
is something that I've seen time and again from HPE.
When it comes to the Pensando solution,
how does this fit in with the HPE products?
Where is it fit in?
What are those solutions look like today?
>> It's a really, really good question, Stu.
So, initially we're going to market
on our ProLiant Rack Server platform
and we will launch in June, general availability.
These solutions, we've been offering them to customers,
very select number of customers
through a private skew that we've created,
but it fits initially within
our Rack Server portfolio.
But over time you'll see us start
to begin to integrate this across
the entire compute portfolio,
where it makes sense and where there's a market
and where customers are asking for it
in addition to some integration points
with different business units, right?
So we have this relationship
is so exciting that almost
every business unit within HPE
is interested in figuring out
what the leverage points are to help
solve customer problems
and create opportunities for customers.
So everything from our blade servers through synergy,
through our Aruba relationship,
through our software, stack,
we're going to be doing a lot more integration.
So I think you look out for initially
an opportunity to install this digital services platform
where you have a lot of Rack Servers
and you want to reduce the complexity
and really distribute a lot of those network services
that are provided today in a centralized fashion.
Through a number of different black boxes
with a number of different operating systems,
a number of different service contracts,
move those to the compute edge at the exhaust
of an HPE server on a platform that's factory integrated.
And that we stand behind them, we support and sell.
And you made another comment about support
and how HPE does a really good job at making sure
that when we sell a solution,
it's a tightly integrated solution that scales,
that works together and their customers can count on
and versus something that's loosely coupled than disjointed
as you see a lot of partnerships,
which we try and avoid.
So one of the parts of this relationship
that's unique is that HPE is actually
going to be supporting and providing the L1,
and the L2 support
for this product on a global basis.
So when our customers have an issue or they need help,
they come to us and it really rounds out the relationship.
So it's not just taking a portfolio or a solution
and putting it into an HP server.
It's a factory integrated,
factory tested solution with a lot of different integrations
that we stand behind, that we sell and it scales.
It'll work just as well with a hundred DSPs
and servers as it will with a hundred thousand.
>> I'd love to drill in a little bit on,
really the customer use cases there.
When you talk about edge computing, first of all,
there's a lot of misnomers out in the industry.
Edge can be anything from the telco edge.
I've seen lots of things
like network function virtualization.
I've talked to HPE about those network offerings
in the past through down to kind of IOT devices
and everything in between.
You said you've got some customers
that have been getting early access.
Are there any patterns or anything
you can tell us about what are those edge use cases
that this solution is a good fit for?
>> Sure Stu. I think, when we started this journey
six months ago, we initially thought that
the most common use case that customers would be interested,
especially the large New York financial customers
were the large financial customers
in general would be security, right?
And so we had a lot of conversations
about things like East West firewall,
70, 80% of the traffic as we talk to customers nowadays,
is East West, right?
It's application to application traffic,
where it used to be North, South and that East West traffic,
especially in a virtualized world
with virtualized networks and virtualized servers,
has created a lot of complexity for customers.
So we thought originally, security,
micro-segmentation, East, West firewall encryption
would be the use cases.
But interestingly enough,
as we started to talk to customers,
what we found out pretty quickly was that many
of these customers have lost track
because of the sprawl in the growth of the data,
in their data centers.
It really lost track of which applications
are talking to which applications,
which people are talking to which people.
And in fact, we had some customers tell us
that if we were to put your system
in and turn on firewall services from day one,
we could potentially...
it would bring our network to its knees
because we've lost track of where everything is going.
So, what that's led itself to is a lot of customers
very interested in the first use case,
which is around visibility, observability
and telemetry, giving our customers the ability
to really graph out and see their application patterns.
Because what you can't see,
you really can't secure.
And then, and then what we believe will happen
over time and we're starting to see this play out,
is that those customers, once they have a handle
on what their traffic flows are
and they have some good telemetry.
They have some good services on being
able to get that visibility.
Then they'll start to define
security policy based upon those traffic patterns
and use the centralized Pensando policy services manager
to distribute that policy,
whether it be micro-segmentation for managing
and securing, virtualized traffic or East West firewall.
And then later on encryption and in a future release.
So that's what we're seeing.
>> Excellent. I'm like, Oh, great customer data already.
What you've been saying really resonates
customers today know that pace of change
and keeping track of things is really challenging.
It's gone from something that people
might be able to get a handle to with,
to knowing I have to have the automation,
the systems the intelligence baked into the system
to be able to handle it.
All right. So June, this month,
you've GA the product,
congratulations on getting that.
So tell us what you expect to see,
the Pensando HP relationship.
Are there expansions in the product line?
We should be looking forward through the rest of 2020
or any other pieces as look forward?
>> Sure.
So, we are excited about the June, launch.
We're also excited about the fact that
we have our large customer show coming up this year,
HP discover and we're going to be profiling
the new conceptual partnership at discover,
giving customers, the ability to see the power
of this technology and how it can really help them
solve their most pressing business and technical priorities.
But we have a full roadmap that we've built out jointly
with our partners at Pensando that involves taking
this platform across different parts of our portfolio.
One of the things that we'll be doing
as we launch almost immediately
is we're going to be putting
this on our flagship GreenLake offer, right?
Which is our, as a service offering.
And so customers will have the ability
to purchase Pensando's solutions under GreenLake
and then over time we'll enhance
that to provide the detailed metering
that our customers have come to know through that platform.
So I think you'll see a big splash there.
And then there's a lot of work being done
to leverage the SDKs that Pensando was providing
to provide better integration into some of our workflows
and some of our tools.
And again, as I mentioned to you earlier,
Stu, almost every business unit in our company
has got meetings going on with Pensando
trying to figure out how they can leverage
the power of this technology to help HPE,
gain and sustain longterm competitive advantage
as customers move from these old legacy,
three tier networks that are very complicated
to run and they have to stitch the lands together.
They have to go through different
service chaining to get simple things done.
I think there's going to be a lot of work going on
across all of our business units
to keep Pensando front and center and help us
deliver this platform jointly
so that we're differentiated.
One other thing I think is important too
is that we're also building a whole host
of differentiated services around this platform.
So things like professional services,
training services, security assessment services, right.
We're gaining a lot of experience
through the trial and proof of concept process
that we're going through right now
and we're building runbooks right?
To be able to sort of document exactly
what we've learned as we do
these big implementations and these trials
and be able to bring those to our customers
in the form of services that they can use
as they look to migrate and modernize
these legacy networks.
>> Excellent. Well Steve, sounds like just
the GA is step one.
You and your team have your hands
full with a lot of pieces.
As you go to market with this
and expand that offering, really impressive.
We're taking this.
Want to give you the final word
Pensando HPE and what customers
should be looking for?
>> Stu, I think our customers should look forward
to the GA launch coming out towards the end of June.
And this technology is very exciting
because if I had to sum it up in basically,
three statements it would be
this solution combined with what HP
has the ability to deliver and support
will absolutely help our customers simplify
their environments, reduce a lot of
operational complexity there by reducing significant
cost as they look to rearchitect
and build their next generation data center networks.
Secondarily, this solution,
our combined solution together will help every customer,
especially those in the financial industry
or highly regulated industries really substantially
improve their security posture
and reduce the amount of risk
that they have in their environments.
And then lastly, and I think almost as equally as important,
is the fact that this solution,
because it's built on a highly programmable, customization,
that's traditionally used in networking technology,
not necessarily seen at the exhaust of a server,
is going to give our customers
the ability to exponentially improve
their application performance
so that when business applications run faster,
it gives them opportunities
to get to market faster with their own products
and drive additional revenue
to sustained longterm competitive advantage.
So we're excited about the opportunities to...
it's going to be a lot of fun.
>> Excellent.
Well, Steve Hershkowitz,
thank you so much for the update.
Congratulations on the launch and absolutely
we'll be keeping track of the progress.
>> Thank you for your time. Happy to be here.
>> All right. I'm Stu Miniman
and thank you for watching theCUBE.
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