>> Announcer: theCUBE presents HPE DISCOVER 2022.
Brought to you by HPE.
>> Hey everyone.
Welcome to Las Vegas.
It's theCUBE live on the show floor at HPE DISCOVER 2022.
The first in-person DISCOVER in three years!
There are about 8,000 people here.
The keynote was standing room only.
Lisa Martin here.
I got a powerhouse group joining me
for this keynote analysis.
Dave Vellante joins us, Keith Townsend, John Furrier.
Guys, lot of news.
It's all about HPE GreenLake.
What were some of the things, Dave, that stuck out to you?
>> Well, I'll tell you right now, I got to just quote
Antonio Neri, said four years ago
"I declared that the enterprise of the future would
be edge-centric, cloud enabled, and data driven.
As a result, we launched HPE GreenLake."
It kind of declared victory.
Now, I would say that what they're talking about,
what they announced, I would consider table stakes.
You know, I wish it started in 2014.
I wish Antonio took over in 2015 instead of 2018
but I have to give credit.
He's brought a focus and he's amped it up, John.
I mean, if he's really prioritizing the as a service
they're going on in all in,
they're burning the boats, and it's good.
They got a lot of work to do.
>> They got a lot of work to do.
Three years ago, John, Antonio stood
on this very stage saying, and by 2022
we're going to be delivering our entire portfolio as a service.
Here we are with GreenLake.
I want to get your thoughts on Keith's as well.
>> Yeah.
Well, first of all,
I think that the crowded house was a sign
of people want to come back together.
So, to me, that was the first good news I saw
which was the HP community, their customer base,
they're all here.
They're glad to be back and forth.
So it shows that their customer base, it's resonating,
their value proposition of annual recurring revenue
as a service.
Plus, the contract values with GreenLake are up.
So this resonance with the customers, Dave,
on the new operating model,
that's a great check the box there.
I would say that I don't think HP's as far along
as Antonio had hoped he'd be.
The pandemic was a setback
but GreenLake is a real shining star.
It's producing some green, if you will, money,
for them in terms of contracts,
but they still got a lot more work to do
because they're in a really interesting zone, Dave,
because Edge-to-cloud, although relevant and accurate,
where the shift is going,
are they really there with the goods?
And to me, I'm looking forward to seeing this DISCOVER
if they have it or not.
Certainly the messaging's good,
but we're going to unpeel that onion back and look at it.
>> But Keith, they're on the curve, right?
At least they're on the cloud curve.
>> They're absolutely on the curve.
They have APIs, they have consistent developer experience.
They announced a developer portal.
They're developer centric.
You can now consume your 3PAR storage array services
via a Terraform provider.
They speak the language of cloud practitioners.
You might struggle a little bit.
If I'm a small startup, why would I look towards HPE?
They kind of answered that a little bit.
They had Evil Genius as a customer on stage,
not a huge organization.
A lot of the pushback they've been given is that
if I may startup, I can simply go to a AWS portal,
launch a free trial service and run it.
HPE kind of buried the lead.
They now have, at least they announced, pre-announced,
the capability to trial GreenLake.
So they're moving in the right direction.
But it's table stake.
>> Well here's the thing.
Here's the dynamic, Dave, that's going on
and is something that we've got-
We've been covering HPE HP for now 11 years
with theCUBE
and look at Amazon's success
and look at where Amazon's struggling
if you can say that.
They're haven't crossed over to the enterprise
'cause the enterprises are now just getting up to speed.
You're seeing the rise of lack of talent.
IT certainly changing,
Cybersecurity, you can't find talent.
Kubernetes, good luck with that.
Try to find someone.
So you're seeing the enterprise aren't really geared up
or staffed up
for doing what I call high-end cloud.
So the rise of managed services is what we're seeing
out there right now.
You want Kubernetes Clusters?
There's a great set of managed services.
You want other services?
So that's the tell sign
that the enterprises, HP's customers, are now walking
before they can run.
They're crawling, now they're walking.
So they have time to get in the Amazon lane in my opinion.
>> Well you think about the hallmarks of cloud.
Obviously there's as a service,
there's consumption based pricing.
There's a developer, friendliness.
There's ecosystem, which is really, really important.
I think today, a lot of the ecosystem is partners,
resellers and managed service providers.
And to your point, Keith,
table stakes are things like single sign-on,
being able to have a console,
being able to do it from a URL.
Your point about startups is really interesting
because that's one of the other hallmarks of cloud
is you attract startups.
And Lisa, we were at the Snowflake Summit
and I asked the same question,
can Snowflake attract startups with their own super cloud?
And what you saw was ecosystem partners developing
in the Snowflake cloud and monetizing.
And that's something that we're waiting to see here.
And I think...
>> Are you suggesting that HP's going to attract startups?
>> Well I think that's a sign if they can do that,
that's a sign and, and right now,
you heard the example that Keith gave,
but not many.
>> Yeah.
I don't think HPE is going to ever attract startups,
but I think the opportunity GreenLake affords the ecosystem
is build clouds or purpose driven clouds around GreenLake.
Whether it's the agreement with Equinix
or all the Colos and semi clouds,
I think GreenLake gets most small CSPs a leg up
or 80% of the way there,
where they can add that 20% of the IP
and build services around GreenLake.
And then that can attract the startup.
>> Or entrepreneurs.
So the big question is,
okay, where are these developers going to come from?
They could come from incumbents inside of companies.
The DevOps crowd from the Enterprise,
the really ops-dev crowd.
Right?
Don't you see that as a sort of form of innovation startup,
even though it's not a true startup.
>> Yeah.
Even though it's not, so...
>> Todd's making faces over there.
(all laugh)
>> Look, look it, they have...
>> Listen. If they don't, if they can't do that...
>> No, their focus is not startups.
I agree with Keith on this one.
They have to take care of business.
Home Depot.
They have big customers and they have a lot of SMBs as well.
They've got a great channel.
HPE has got amazing infrastructure
and client action going on.
They got to get the operating model right.
Job one, as a service, ARR, and then contract value
and nail that with GreenLake.
>> Who's their ideal customer profile?
>> Their ideal is their installed base.
Look at Microsoft did with 365.
They were going down.
The stock price was 26 at one point.
They went to the cloud, 365, moved everything to the cloud
and look at the success they're having.
HP has the same kind of installed base.
They got to bring them along.
They got to get the operating model, right.
And the developers that they're targeting are the ones
inside the company and/or manage services
that they're going to go to the ecosystem for.
That's where the cloud native comes in.
That's where everything kind of comes together.
So to me, I'm bullish on the operating model,
but I'm skeptical that HP can get that
cloud native developer.
I haven't seen it yet.
I'm looking for it.
We're going to look for it here.
>> A key to that is going to be consistency.
One of the things I'm looking for on the tech side,
I hate to compare what HP is doing
to what VMware did with vCloud Air years ago
but vCloud Air on the outside looked wonderful.
>> Yes, it did.
>> Once you tried to use it, it was just flaky underneath.
And that's the part I'm looking to see.
Customers pounding on it and saying,
You know what?
API call after API call
can I provision 10,000 pods a day?
>> Does it scale?
And is it consistent?
>> Is it fragile?
>> Fidelma Russo, she's a seasoned veteran.
She was at VMware Cloud.
She saw that movie.
She gets a mulligan, Dave.
So I think her leadership is impressive.
And I think she could bring a lot to the table
to your point about don't make that same mistake
and they got to get this architecture right.
If they get the operating model right with GreenLake
they can double down on that
and enable the developers
that are driving the digital transformation.
That to me is the key positions that they have to nail.
And they do that, the rest is just fringe work,
in my opinion.
>> The reason why Fidelma was brought in, sorry, Lisa,
you got to chime in here,
was to really build out that platform
so that internal people at HPE can actually build value
on top of it and the ecosystem.
That's her priority.
>> We're going to hear a lot from the ecosystem
in the next couple of days,
but I want to get your perspective on,
you've been following HPE a long time, all three of you.
What are some of the things that you're hearing right now
that are differentiators?
We were just at Dell Technologies.
We're all talking about APEX.
We saw the big announcement they had with Snowflake.
We were at Snowflake two weeks ago.
I want to get all three of your opinions
on what are you seeing?
Where is HP leading?
>> I mean HPE and Dell will both,
Dell with APEX,
they're both going to differentiate with their strengths.
And, for Dell that's their breadth and their portfolio.
And for HPE, that's their sort of open posture.
I mean, John, you know this well,
that's their ecosystem which I know has to evolve.
And to me, their focus.
Antonio laid out some of the key differentiators.
I think some of them were kind of pushing the envelope
a little bit,
but I think they're focus on as a service,
burning the boats, telling Wall Street,
this is our business.
I think that's their differentiator.
Is that they're all in.
>> Yeah.
I think they try to highlight it
by re-announcing their private cloud service.
I don't even know why they needed to announce
that they have a private cloud.
GreenLake is a cloud.
It is a private cloud-
>> With block storage-
>> With like everything you get.
But I think the key is, ia that
all of that is available today
and you can get it in all kinds of frame,
of formats and frames.
Specifically, if I'm a customer
and I want to get out of the data center
and, Dave, we go back and forth about this all the time,
and I want to repatriate some workloads to Kubernetes on Prim.
I don't need to spin up another data center.
I can go to Equinix, get GreenLake,
MinIO object storage on the backend,
HPE Lighthouse,
all those services that I need
for Kubernetes and repatriate my workloads
without buying a new data center.
And I get it as a service.
I can get that today from HPE GreenLake.
Dell APEX is on the way.
>> The other thing they're differentiating with?
Aruba.
That's something that Dell doesn't have.
And that is their edge play, I think is stronger
than others.
>> To me, the differentiator for HP is their history.
Their channel's amazing.
They got great sales force.
And they have serious customers.
And they have serious customers that have serious problems.
Cybersecurity infrastructure,
the security paradigm's changed.
The deployment has changed
how they deploy applications in their customer base.
So they got to step up to that challenge.
And I think their differentiator is going to be
their size, their field
and their ability to bring that operating model.
And the hybrid model is a steady-state.
That's clear.
Multi-cloud is just hybrids stitched together
but hybrid cloud, which is basically on premises,
and cloud-to-edge operating model is the number one thing
that they need to nail.
And if they nail that right, they will have a pole position
that they could accelerate on.
And again, I'm really going to be watching
how well they could enable cloud native developers, okay,
to build modern agile applications
while solving those serious problems
with those serious customers.
So again, I think hybrids spun in their direction.
I'm not going to say they got lucky
'cause they've always been on the hybrid bandwagon
since we've been covering them.
But I thought they'd be for a long day
but they're lucky to have hybrid.
That's good for them.
And I think, do what Microsoft did,
convert their customers over
and they do that, right?
>> The key to that is going to be ecosystem again.
The developers need to see,
especially the data piece,
they talk about the cloud operating model.
I think they're really moving that direction.
The data piece to me is the weakest.
Like they'll make claims that we can do anything
that the cloud can do.
You can't run Snowflake, can't run data bricks,
can't run Mongo Atlas.
So they got to figure out that data layer
and that's optionality of data stores.
And they don't have that today.
>> Yeah. They have an announcement coming
and I can't pre-announce it,
but they're-
I've deemed them against it.
They have the vision.
Ezmeral Data Services, their data fabric,
multi-protocol access is a great start.
They need the data network behind it.
They need the ability to build a super cloud
across multiple cloud providers
bringing some Google Anthos love
inside of right next to your data.
They have the hardware, they have the infrastructure
but they don't have the services.
>> That's a key thing.
I think one of you just brought up great point, Keith,
and that is, is that at the end of the day, Dave,
we're in a market now
where agility and speed can be accomplished
by startups or any company.
And HP's customers, okay, can move fast too.
Okay.
And so whoever can extend that value.
If HPE can enable value creation for their customers
that's going to be truly their task at hand.
They got the channel, they got some leverage,
but at the end of the day,
the customers have alternatives now.
And they can move faster to get the value that they need
to solve their serious problems,
like cyber, like scalable infrastructure,
like infrastructures code, like data ops, like AI ops
it's all here.
And it's all coming really fast.
Can GreenLake carry the day.
>> By the way, everything we just said
about GreenLake in terms of table stakes
and everything else, it applies for Dell.
>> Yeah, absolutely.
>> No question.
>> It does.
Guys, we have, jam packed three days.
We're going to be talking with the ecosystem.
We're going to be talking with HPE leaders, with customers,
you're going to hear all of this information unpacked
over the next three days.
We will be right back with our first guest
for Dave Vellante, Keith Townson and John Furrier.
I'm Lisa Martin.
Our first guest joins us momentarily.
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