 From Las Vegas, it's theCUBE. Covering VMworld 2018. Brought to you by VMware and its ecosystem partners. Welcome back to Las Vegas everybody. You're watching theCUBE, the leader in live tech coverage. My name is Dave Vellante, and I'm here with my co-host, David Flore. Good to see you again, David. VMworld day three, wall-to-wall coverage. We got two sets going on, 94 guests. Patrick Osborne is here. He's the vice president of Big Data and Secondary Storage at Hewlett-Packard.com. Enterprise, Patrick, great to see you again. Always a pleasure to be on theCUBE. Big quarter, Antonio Neary early into his tenure. Just feed earnings, raise guidance. Great to see that. Got to feel good. Give us the update, VMworld 2018. What's happening with you guys? Yeah, so Q3 was bang-up quarter for all segments of the business. It's great, obviously it's the type of earnings you want to have from a CEO in a sort of second quarter. It's here in the ship here, and I think everyone's jazzed up. He's brought a lot of new life to the company in terms of technology leadership. He's someone who's certainly grown up from the grounds up, starting off his career at HPE. So for us who've started off as a product manager or an individual contributor, making your way up to the CEO is definitely possible. So that's been great. And I think it's favorable macroeconomics and we're taking advantage of that. VMworld's been awesome. I think this whole story around multi-cloud and obviously we talk about hybrid IT at HPE so it fits very well. VMwear technology partner of the year. Again, four years running. So it's been a really good show for us. Well, as last year, data protection is like the single hottest topic. Data protection, obviously cloud, the edge, but the edge is kind of new and it's hot. Okay, it's sexy. But in terms of actual business that's getting done, companies that are getting funded, companies get a huge raises. Somebody's throwing big parties. Yep. You had, we saw you back-to-back nights at Omnia. I mean, it's a lot happening in data protection and HPE's got a whole new strategy around data protection. Maybe talk about that a little bit and how it's going. Yeah, so it's going really well. Like you said, that part of the market, it's pretty hot right now. I think there's a couple of things that are playing into that. Certainly, I think this new style of IT like applied to secondary storage. We saw that with primary storage the last few years. Multi-cloud, the move to all flash, low latency workloads, and then certainly a lot of the things in that area are disrupting secondary storage. People want to do it different ways. They want to be able to simplify this area. It's a growing area for data in general. They want to make that data work for them, right? So test, dev, workload placement, intelligent placement of data for secondary and even tertiary storage in the cloud. So a lot of good things happening there from an HBE perspective. So not just backup. No, not just backup. I won't be talking about backup anymore. I want more out of my insurance policy. Exactly, exactly. So something in the past that was moving from purely a TCO type of conversation, right? My example is always like, who likes to pay their life insurance premium, right? Because at the end of the day, I'm not going to derive any utility from that payment, right? So now it's moving into more ROI. So we have things like the hybrid of flash array from Nimble, right, for example, that allows you to put your workloads to work. We have a great cloud service called HPE Cloud Volumes that we use for our customers to be able to do intelligent DR as a service, right? And be able to apply cloud compute to your data. So there's a lot of things going on in this space that's just outside of just your traditional move data from point A to point B. Now you want to make it work for you. And what about the big data portfolio? You don't, I mean, you hear a lot about data. Yep. You don't hear a ton about sort of the big data dupe piece of the world and a dupe. Nobody seems to be talking about that anymore, but everybody's talking about AI, machine learning, deep learning, certainly the edge is all about data. What's the big data story? So at HPE, you know, we're definitely focused on the whole edge to core analytic story, right? So we have a great story and you can see in the numbers from Q3, the edge business, edge line servers, Aruba, you know, driving a lot of growth in the company where a lot of that data is being created. And then back into the core, so for big data, we see a number of customers who are, they're using these tools to affect digital transformation, right? They're doing it, we're doing it to ourselves, right? So they're moving from batch oriented to now fast data, so streaming analytics, and then incorporating concepts of AI and ML to provide a better service or a better experience for their customers. And we're doing that with, for example, InfoSight, right? So we have a great product, Nimble 3PAR, and then we provide a service on top of that, which is a SaaS based service. It has predictive analytics and machine learning, and we are able to do that by using big data analytics. And you're offering that as a service, as a SaaS service to your customers? Absolutely, and the way we're able to provide those predictive analytics and be able to provide those recommendations and that machine learning across an entire portfolio, and be able to scale that service, because it's a service, right? We've got tens of thousands of users using the service on a daily basis, is moving from an ERP system data warehouse to batch analytics to now we're doing elastic search and Kafka and all these really cool techniques. So it's really helped us unlock a lot of value for our customers. So the Nimble thing, the acquisition is interesting. It's bringing that sort of machine learning and AI to infrastructure. You've got a lot of automation in the portfolio, and you can't really talk about cloud without talking about automation. So talk a little bit about automation. What are you guys differentiating there? In particular, I mean, even at the show here this week, we're a premier technology partner with VMware, right? And I think more that you see in the VMware ecosystem is all around cloud and automation. I mean, it's really where they're going. And we've been day zero partners on a lot of different fronts, right? So VMware Cloud Foundation integration, we do things on the storage level with V-Balls and SRM and all these things that allow customers to essentially program that infrastructure and get out of the mundane tasks of having to do this manually. So for us, automation is key part of our story here, especially with VMware. Yeah, so going a little bit further with that, what sort of examples, what benefit is this to your customers? How are they justifying putting all of this stuff in? So I think we're, it's a hybrid world, right? So our customers are going to expect from us as a portfolio vendor the ability to provide an automated solution on premises as automated as what you'd get in the cloud, right? So for us, the ability to have a sourcing experience that we call GreenLake, right? So you can buy everything from us from a solution perspective in a pay-as-you-go, elastic model where you can flex up, flex down and then being able to essentially provide a different view depending on what persona you're coming from, right? So today, obviously we've been focused for a long time on the infrastructure persona, but now more often we're getting into the DevOps persona, the cloud engineer persona and providing all of our infrastructure, whether it's compute, networking or storage that provides, that plugs into all these, essentially frameworks, right? Whether it's Ansible, Chef and all these things we do around our automation ecosystem, it's pretty ubiquitous. Yeah, so I mean, you're touching on all the cloud bases, right? And you're seeing a lot of discussion around that. What are you hearing from customers, right? I mean, sometimes we have to squint through this. When you, a lot of the guys here, we always like to say move at the speed of the CIO which sometimes is slow. At the same time, they're all afraid they're going to get disrupted. HPE over the last two or three years has really brought in and partnered with some of the guys that you're talking about, whether it's containers and companies that do those types of offerings. How fast are the customers actually adopting? Where are they adopting them? How are they handling, you talk about a hybrid world, so how are they bridging the old and the new? Yeah, so that's a great question for a lot of our customers. It's always a brownfield conversation, right? So you do have these mission critical workloads that have to run, right? So there's no edge to core without your core ERP system, right? Your core Oracle system or for smaller customers that are running their businesses on SQL and other things. But what we're seeing is that by shoring up that core and we provide a set of services and products that we feel are best in the industry for that, and then being allowed them to provide essentially adjacent services on top of it, it's exactly like the same example that we had with InfoSight, right? Where those systems used to call home, right now we're taking that data, we're providing a whole ancillary set of services and functions around it, and our customers are doing that. We have enormous customers like British Telecom, folks like Wayfair for example, they're doing this on-premises and they're disrupting their competitors in the meantime. What do you make of some of the announcements that we've heard this week? Obviously VMware making a big deal with what's going on with AWS. We're seeing AWS capitulate, David Floyer, you made the call, they've got to have an on-prem strategy. Many said no, that'll never happen. AWS just wants to sweep the floor. So that's sort of a tip to the hybrid cap. What are your thoughts on what's going on there and how does HP sort of participate in those trends? Yeah, I'd say it's, instead of battle and capitulate, we've been very laser focused on the customers and helping them along their way on the journey. So you see a lot of acquisitions we've done around services, advisory service. CTP is a perfect example. And so CTP has a whole cadre of experts who understand Azure, who understand ECS and all the services and functions that go along with them. And we're able to help people, right size, right place, whatever you want to call it, within their infrastructure. Cause we know that we've been in business for 75 plus years and have a very loyal customer base. And we're going to help them along their maturity curve. And certainly not everyone's on the same path in the same race, right? But it's been pretty successful so far. You guys tend to connect the dots between your HPE Discover, U.S. and Las Vegas and HPE Discover in December. So June to December, you're on these sort of six month cycles and U.S. focus, Europe focus. I think December's in Madrid again, second year in Madrid. U.S. is always Vegas, like most of these conferences. What's the cadence that you're on? What was the vibe like at Discover? What should we expect for leading up to Q4 and, you know, calendar Q4 in Madrid? Yeah, so I'd say that Discover was a big success in Vegas. Always fun to spend time here. And in Madrid, you'll see a focus definitely around the value parts of our business, right? So we've been growing in automation. We talked about hybrid IT, certainly the core around storage. We're really focused and very heavily invested in not just storage, but intelligent data management. So we really feel that our offerings, especially doubling down and offering more services around InfoSight and some of those predictive and cloud ready user stories for our customers is something that definitely differentiated to ourselves in the market. So that's been very, we'll be very focused on the data plan, the data layer and helping customers transform in that area. Great, awesome. Okay, so let's talk some tenor sacks. Yeah. It's not New Orleans, right? We were down in New Orleans, we were at V-Mon. I think you had your sacks with you. Played with the Soul Rebels. Played with the Soul Rebels, awesome. Leonard, a big, big jazz man, love it. I'm a huge TOP fan. So what's new in that world? Are you still active, still playing? Yeah, the band's still playing. Shout out to my buddies in Jalopy. Sitting in with some friends and a dead cover band coming up in a couple of weeks. So it should be fun. We're going to reenact the Grateful Dead and Brantford Marsalis. That's wonderful. Yeah, it should be fun. We're going to get a big dose of hip hop this week. Yeah. The new thing is that in hip hop, it's getting back to its original roots. So a lot of folks in the jazz world collaborating with the folks in the hip hop world, right? So not very commercial, definitely underground, but pretty cool. I love it. Well, that's right, Leonard, you'd be pointing out. Miles Davis was one of the first to make that transformation, you know? Yeah. Good call. Yeah. What do you say? I'm going to get the numbers wrong, but it's about 5% technique and 95% attitude, right? Yeah. Well, that's right. If it goes jazz, it didn't like hip hop. And there's a lot of guys doing their own thing. Somehow it all comes together. Absolutely. Absolutely. Patrick, great to see you, man. Yeah, great to see you guys. Thank you, Dave. All right. Good to see you guys. It's coming to people. It's a pleasure. Go, socks. Oh, let's start. We got time for some talk stocks. Yeah, all right. All right. What do you think? It's getting a little nerve wracking. Buffy Dan is trending in my Twitter, right? That's my problem. So hopefully we can, like we said the other night, I definitely don't want to be limping into the playoffs, right? And I'm still not a fan of this one team wildcard playoff, but I think we'll be all right. I hope we go deep. We got, it's a great time to be a Boston fan. Celtics. Football starting. We jammed up for Celtics. Celtics are coming in November. So awesome. Great to see you, man. Yeah, awesome. Thanks for having me. All right. Keep it right there, everybody. We'll be back with our next guest. You're watching theCUBE live, day three at VMworld 2018. We'll be right back.