>> Male Voice: From around the globe, it's theCUBE
covering HPE Discover Virtual Experience
brought to you by HPE.
>> Hi, and welcome back.
I'm Stu Miniman.
And this is the CUBE coverage of HPE Discover 2020.
The Virtual Experience,
going to be digging into GreenLake
and help me with that happy to welcome to the program
first time guest Arwa Kaddoura.
She is the Vice President of worldwide sales
for GreenLake with Hewlett Packard Enterprise.
Arwa thanks so much for joining us.
>> Thanks for having me.
>> All right, so as I teed up,
you're relatively new in the role.
So if you could just give us a little bit
about your background, what brought you to HPE
and what your focus is there?
>> Absolutely, thanks for having me.
Week seven so definitely new in the role
came from sort of a public cloud,
cloud native set of experiences through Microsoft
and previous to that it was Xamarin
where we focused on a lot of mobile application development.
Ultimately, what brought me to HPE to be honest,
is the fact that while cloud has brought a ton of innovation
to many companies, many industries, many applications,
I think I also see the opportunity
that it's not just about public cloud,
but it's about bringing cloud experience everywhere.
And so looking at the agility, the innovation, the speed,
in some of the cost savings that the cloud has brought
companies, I believe that from a GreenLake perspective,
we now have an opportunity to modernize IT infrastructure
and bring it to our customers
in a way that they've never seen before.
And so ultimately, that was what brought me to HPE.
>> All right, Arwa, what excited me about having
the discussion with you is you talked about
some of the application modernization, cloud native pieces
that you've got history on my background's infrastructure,
but as an infrastructure person
we know the role of infrastructure really is to support
those application. >> Absolutely
The term I've used for a number of years now
is you want to modernize the platform.
And then you can modernize the application on platform.
What are you hearing from customers,
when I talked to developers,
often it is, hybrid model of how they're building things.
It is no longer monolithic.
Things are changing and moving everywhere.
Data, of course, has huge importance field.
Help us understand that role of the application and data
when it comes to GreenLake.
>> Yeah, and I think one of the great points that,
whether it's research or our customers,
what we ultimately know is 70% of apps and data
remain on-premises today, right?
Whether that's in data center,
it's in colocation and/or at the edge, right?
And that's for a good business reason
that they have to remain in those data centers, right?
We have things like latency that we have to deal with.
We have governance and security.
We have data gravity.
We have application dependencies, right?
And so being able to think about,
well, how do you solve
that problem for the remaining 70% of applications?
So if they can't move into the cloud,
well, how do we bring the cloud to them?
And that's exactly where GreenLake fit then,
which is let's create that cloud like experience
from everything for the obvious things, the pay as you go,
the sort of the Self Service, they managed for you,
bringing that in to the customers,
data center, again, colo, the edge,
I think becomes a really powerful value prop.
And again, from my experience,
not every application
is going to be a cloud native application
that is being built newly for cloud only capabilities.
And there are still a lot of great applications
that can still be built on-prem
with cloud-like experiences
that are brought to you by GreenLake.
>> All right, so Arwa you have the sales title.
And when I think about HPE,
HPE has had a number of offering
that help customers along that journey
towards that cloud model that you're talking about.
A lot of them,
I think back, go back, seven years ago was very much,
here is our stack.
And we have hybrid models,
and we're working with service providers.
GreenLake is very much managed service.
So help us understand a little bit
from the go to market standpoint,
the sales standpoint, that mind shift of going from,
here's gear or here's the stack we're doing
to really it is a managed services offering.
So I would think it's a different, it's if you will--
>> It is. >> It is different,
mindset it's different,
necessarily who you might be selling it to.
>> Absolutely, and I think if I had to think about
what we're announcing at Discover
and how we're evolving GreenLake,
it really starts to focus on launching new cloud services
like containers, virtual machines, storage, compute,
sort of the core cloud offerings,
but then also adding things like machine learning Ops,
data protection for cloud and on-prem,
and networking services, right?
And from a GreenLake perspective,
I think if I had to think about the go to market,
it's yes, managed services.
But what does that mean?
That means new Self Service cloud experiences
via GreenLake Central, which has very detailed
sort of consumption and billing data
to allow you to have that transparency.
It also gives you Self Service capabilities, right?
So that you can spin up virtual machines,
or configure the services that you need
or that you've purchased from us.
And then also having the ability now
to have new workload optimized
sort of T-shirt size building blocks, right?
So being able to very quickly find out from our customers,
what is it that they need
having sort of small, medium, large capabilities,
again, thinking about those workloads
that they're trying to support,
and then in under 14 days,
being able to deliver the capability to their doors,
and have that spun up and ready to go.
>> Yeah, one of the advantages, of course, is
rather than thinking about, okay,
I've got all of these products.
It's now more like a service catalog,
I have a lot of different ways.
>> Exactly.
>> And you've got things that like,
"Oh, wait, can that run in there?"
You talk about the ML analytics, of course,
HPE's done a few acquisitions in this space,
to help enhance that light, like map
or I know we've been talking a bit about
blue data, and the like,
I'm curious from the touchpoints
that you're having in customer
is it shifting from,
it's not necessarily that I think the person
that buys the server,
cloud often was the line of business
driving from the application down.
So how does that alignment between the field
and the customer shifting and how do you expect GreenLake
to kind of move that along even more?
>> Yeah, that's right.
It becomes a business sort of driven conversation, right?
So what are the outcomes that our customers
are driving for from a business transformation perspective?
So if you think about what they're trying to do is,
they don't want to have to worry about delivering
their own IT, which often is slow
maybe contains supply chain risks.
And then of course, there's sort of the over provisioning
risks that come with that as well.
The way I see our role from a go to market perspective
is we do have to engage
and we are engaging new audiences that we probably
haven't been intimately sort of familiar with in the past
and that includes the line business,
that includes also,
the architects internally within companies
that are designing sort of best of breed architectures
to deliver the technology infrastructures that will power
their next generation of internal applications
or even their own solutions to the market.
It includes, if you're talking about MLOps,
it includes talking to data scientists,
and understanding, what is that specific machine learning
scenario that they are trying to train a model around?
And how do we help deliver the best solution for them,
because we also know that putting that in cloud,
most of the time is too far away from your data or the edge
from which you are collecting data from which again,
becomes super expensive,
you have latency issues,
and it's not a really great way to solve MLOps.
We feel like we have a much better solution.
And in talking to some of those audiences that are trying
to solve those business challenges within our customer base.
We are finding ourselves also talking
to a lot of new audiences.
And one audience that I'm intimately familiar
with is obviously the developer audience, right?
Developers don't want to worry about IT infrastructure,
they don't want to have to walk over and tell someone that,
"Hey, I need you to configure XYZ in order for me to start
"testing my code or my sort of MPQ."
They want to know that it's all managed
that it's quick time to value
and that when they're ready to go,
the infrastructure is there and ready
to be deployed against the project
that they're trying to execute.
So those are really important audiences
that I feel like we are starting to nurture
and we will have a lot more content and relevance
for going forward with GreenLake.
>> Yeah, really important point there
want to also, how do you kind of there's a big ecosystem
around GreenLake.
So give me a little bit about the differentiation of HPE
compared to some of the other hybrid solutions
out there-- >> Sure.
>> And then 'cause I look,
there's, obviously, hardware and software solutions
that HPE has internally, but then you've also got,
VMware, Nutanix, Red Hat and others that are partners,
for sure now >> Absolutely.
>> How do you help customers sort through those?
>> Yeah, absolutely.
And I think it begins with delivering choice
to our customers, right?
At the end of the day, we need to make sure
that we're optimizing for what our customers
are looking to do.
So there has to be an element of openness with HPE GreenLake
that we're pretty proud to deliver.
So we have multiple ISV partnerships.
You mentioned some of them, VMware and Nutanix
with respect to delivering some of our solutions,
I think from a competitive advantage,
I go back to the fact that the 70% of apps and data
that are still sitting on-prem or in colo and edges,
our competitive advantage comes from being able to bring
a true cloud experience to those apps and data
where I would argue no one else can do this
in a way that has speed from a time to value perspective
scalability, being able to sort of go up and down,
a managed for you a true pay per use model and billing
at that level of granularity and the Self Service,
allowing you to self provision and do some of those things,
once we've delivered the core capabilities for you.
So from a competitive advantage,
I feel like we cover off more of the cloud like experiences
than anyone else does in the market.
And then we also have the partnerships and the ability
to bring in some of those third party ISV solutions
that work incredibly well on GreenLake.
>> One of the challenges we've seen in the field is,
customers, they do have, I guess we know,
IT always is added.
So you mentioned their shifts,
but customers absolutely they have their data centers.
They're using often multiple
public clouds out there. >> They are.
And then they had, we've talked a lot HPE about the edge.
So help us understand where GreenLake fits,
and how the portfolio helps customers
as they need to be able to manage and optimize
what they're doing across all those disparate environments?
>> Yeah, I think you're absolutely right.
Customers, first of all, are going to have a multi-cloud
and sort of multi-modal strategy, right?
Some things they're going to put
into different public clouds
and some things they're going to maintain on-prem
or in a colo and then some things,
of course, work better in an edge scenario.
The great part about GreenLake is we solve the on-prem
state problem in a really effective and cost effective
and time to value perspective really, really well.
But with GreenLake Central,
we also give you the transparency to manage
your public cloud footprint just as well.
So we allow you to unify across the different footprints
that you want to have.
And we're also, not proprietary,
when it comes to GreenLake Central, right?
You can plug in other pieces versus,
maybe some of the hyper scalars that are trying to create
more of a walled garden or a locked in scenario
where, yes you get transparency
but only as long as you're within their solution.
>> All right, so I understand there's
about a thousand customers, we've passed
a thousand customers-- >> We have.
>> Using GreenLake according to another interview that I did,
so you've got sales, give us a little bit,
what we expect for kind of customer adoption?
And what else do you expect us to be looking at
from the GreenLake offerings?
>> Yeah, absolutely.
And I think from a customer momentum perspective,
it has just been fantastic to be part of this journey,
at least for me for the past seven weeks,
and to see our customers really embrace
this new way of how we deliver IT infrastructure to them.
I think in a way that meets them where they are, right?
As they're transforming,
we're bringing that on-prem, cloud like experience
to their doorstep without them having to feel the pressure
of migrating everything, whether it makes sense or not,
into the cloud.
Again, in terms of what's coming new,
I would reiterate the fact that
it is looking at all of the basic services
like containers, VMs storage, compute.
It's also starting to optimize around specific workloads,
again, to the point earlier about MLOps.
But from what's new and exciting,
I get really excited about,
hey, I don't want our customers spending time
thinking about how to architect and how to design
the right IT or infrastructure offering.
I want to be able to do that for them
in order to deliver that experience that they need.
And again, what that helps our customers with is cost,
time to value and the ability to get a pre-configured
solution that is already optimized, right?
We don't want our customers spending all of their time
having to configure and architect IT infrastructure.
We want them to worry about the business outcomes,
and then tell us what they need.
And then we create those pre-configured solutions
on their behalf, given their input.
So again, it's a very cloud like way
to deliver our value to our customers.
And I think it also frees up our customers
to focus their resources on the real innovation
that they need to drive at their business level
versus focusing on things that
we're experts in and we can bring to them in a much quicker
and more value effective way.
>> Absolutely, thank you so much,
what we've had cloud into (mumbles) customers,
they need to be able to shift away from things
that they don't have differentiation
and don't add value to the business
and focus on this business effort.
Arwa congratulations on the new position--
>> Thank you.
>> And definitely look forward to watching
the continued progress good buzz around GreenLake.
>> Fantastic, thank you, Stu.
Thanks for having me.
>> All right, stay tuned for lots more coverage from HPE
Discover the Virtual Experience.
I'm Stu Miniman.
And thank you for watching theCUBE.
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