 From London, England, it's theCUBE. Covering Discover 2016 London. Brought to you by Hewlett Packard Enterprise. Now, here's your host, Dave Vellante and Paul Gillin. Welcome back to the docks of London, everybody. This is theCUBE, the worldwide leader in live tech coverage. We're here at HPE Discover 2016. This is the first day we're wrapping up Paul Gillin and I. The cloud glasses here is the Vice President of Product Management at Hewlett Packard Enterprise. Focusing on software defined and hyper-converged. Welcome to theCUBE. See you again. Thanks a lot. Glad to be here. So what's the buzz on the floor? Are people excited? Yeah, yeah, we've got lots of stuff going on. Very excited. We had several key announcements today around our synergy, a one-view platform introducing Cloud System 10 on Synergy, which is the first private cloud on composable infrastructure. Made some announcements around our new hyper-converged operating environment, adding some key capabilities there. So very excited. We've been talking about composable sort of all day. Can you make this real for us with the new Cloud System 10? What can a customer now do that they couldn't do yesterday? Yeah, yeah. So it's basically capability to deliver private cloud on composable infrastructure. Composable obviously is a key technology that allows you to get more out of your infrastructure. It's basically is built of fluid resource pools, a programmable, software-defined intelligence, as well as a key capability around software APIs where we have an ecosystem of partners that we work with to really kind of help you build infrastructure that essentially allows you to deliver a cloud-like experience on our infrastructure within your data center. So I feel like, so HP was kind of early on in talking about converged infrastructure, and then things kind of slowed down. And then it just, you know, with Synergy and this whole push around composable, it really picked up. I mean, the early days of DevOps, infrastructure is code. I mean, it was clear those things were becoming real. And it's taken HP a while. Your strategies seem to be not just to sort of follow what the converged infrastructure guys are doing, but try to leapfrog where they're at. Is that a fair assessment? I would say we were a leader in converged infrastructure, and we're a leader now in the transformation both from hyper-converged as well as into composable infrastructure, which I think is a key piece of really helping our customers simplify delivering IT and hybrid IT. You know, I think Rick talked about today. You know, a lot of people know that public cloud has been a significant area of growth, but what you don't realize is private cloud is growing just about the same at the same rate. And so, you know, we really believe that one of our core parts of our strategy is hybrid IT is where things are at. And that's really where we're focused on really simplifying and delivering that for our customers. What makes Hewlett Packard Enterprise different, you know, specifically the products different? Yeah, I mean, I think one of the things is the fact that we believe that the infrastructure really still matters, right? And that's where, you know, delivering this software-defined capability across our infrastructure to be able to allow our customers to deliver more value to their, you know, lines of businesses and to their customers is really what it's all about. So, you know, being able to deliver that kind of efficiency and cloud-like experience for them where they can, you know, dynamically deploy and match up their infrastructure and the resources within their infrastructure to their workloads and be able to redeploy that infrastructure, you know, essentially with a line of code is really what sets us apart. Is this capability confined to HP infrastructure or can your partners play as well? Oh, absolutely. This is our partner-led. We work with our partners all the time. Our partners are a key part of our value that we deliver to our customers. And, you know, absolutely. And it's a HPE technology around composability. We're definitely a leader in composable infrastructure. Okay, I want to come back to this a little bit, but let me set it up. So, we were talking about sort of, you know, debating whether or not, where was HP and the whole converged infrastructure to play? I always like to joke that sort of, we go back to Teradata. That was kind of the first converged infrastructure. And then, I've said even today earlier, I said HP and Oracle came up with Exadata. And that was sort of the sort of next wave. And then, I think HP coined the term converged infrastructure. And then you sort of saw VCE come out. And then this hyperconverged thing hit. And it almost was like the traditional enterprise players were taking a page out of the hyperscalers and saying, hey, we can actually develop a similar capability for our customers on-prem and bring a cloud-like experience to them. So, first of all, that's kind of my setup. And I want to dig into what's really different about HPE. You said, because you believe infrastructure matters, but when you look at hyperconverged, I think VMware, maybe they don't care so much about hardware infrastructure, okay, fair enough. But certainly Dell EMC care about hardware infrastructure. I would say as well, a company like Nutanix seems to care, even though a lot of the innovation is on software. What do you mean by infrastructure matters and how does HP differentiate from some of those other companies that I mentioned? Yeah, just bringing intelligence into the infrastructure itself to deliver the experience that we deliver around composability, right? So, I mean, it's not the software necessarily sitting on top of it, which is all really important as well, but it allows you to deliver that physical infrastructure and deliver it to match the workloads that customers have in a dynamic way. An example, I think we were talking a little bit earlier before we were on air, specifically about how a customer can go take that infrastructure and deliver, say, a VDI implementation. The way they would do it in the past is you had your VDI set up, and then if you were going to do something else, you would have a different set up for that. Using composable infrastructure, you could have VDI during the day, and you don't have users that are going to log on at night. You can then take and dynamically reprovision that same infrastructure without having to stand up a new instance of infrastructure to go do something else that's very important for you, like process batch payments or something like that. And I couldn't do that, say, with a Nutanix type of system. You can't do that because it's not composed. That's the beauty of composable infrastructure. In that instance, I'm pinning that system to a workload is what you're saying, correct? Yes, yeah, absolutely. See, is composable an evolution of converged? Is it a super set of converged? Absolutely, yes. Composable is basically, you think about traditional, think about converged infrastructure, think about hyperconverged, and think about composable as being kind of the in-state in terms of the ideal way to deploy infrastructure in a private, hybrid cloud type of environment. So essentially, you're virtualizing everything? Yes, I mean, basically, I mean. So why is virtualization? But it's beyond virtualization, though, right? It's beyond that. It's bare metal, it's containers, it's virtualization. You can do the same management, the same implementation using our OneView technology as well as the Synergy platform to do that. And you said it before, infrastructure is code. It's containers, it's microservices, it's an API. It's mimicking, to a great extent, at least in my mind, the public cloud experience on prem. Maybe with the exception, maybe you debate this, but the exception of the pace of the sum of the services, but maybe not. I've always argued you don't necessarily need all the services on prem that you get in the public cloud, but maybe eventually you do. We work with a lot of partners that's part of the ecosystem and having the open API that allows us to work with a lot of our partners. I mean, if you saw the session today, you saw Microsoft talking about their operations management suite and the integration with the OneView API to deliver that cloud service, private cloud service on top of the OneView capabilities to deliver some of the infrastructure information to be able to help them better manage that private cloud environment. So there's lots of cool ways that we can take advantage of that, just to deliver value to our customers. So the vendor marketing frequently, and I use it myself, so I get the Kool-Aid injection that sticks in my brain, is mimicking public cloud on prem, and I use that term a lot, because essentially that seems to me like a good North star in a good mission. Having said that, there's trouble looming in the public cloud, particularly with regard to API, and I'm wondering if you can solve this problem. So I'm more familiar with AWS, because we use it extensively, but if you want to access different data services within AWS, there's probably 10 different APIs. There's one for Kinesis, there's one for DynamoDB, there's one for S3, there's one for ElastiCache, there's one for Search, they're all different proprietary APIs. And you're getting API creep in it, and it's bringing complexity, it's hard to understand pricing, it's hard to understand what my bill is going to look like at the end of the month. Can you solve that problem? Let me start there. And is it a real problem and can you solve it? What I'd say is what we're delivering on a composable infrastructure is a single API that's the same as I said before across bare metal, containers, virtualization. It's a single open API that allows you to manage all of your infrastructure as code. So there aren't different APIs that you have to go interface with. For hot data or cold data. It's the same API that you would be delivering that infrastructure. And I access different services through your ecosystem. Yes, the ecosystem is where those services come into play. We have a lot of great partners. And they have their own API, is that right? So sort of, you've got the Uber API. Yeah, you think about working with partners, we have a lot of partners that are in that ecosystem. Turbinomics, we have the Mesosphere, Docker, all those guys are all part of that ecosystem. Does composable eventually extend to the public cloud? Is that an option or is that a direction? It does nothing that prohibits a public cloud provider from using composable infrastructure. I mean, it's an efficient way to do that. And the thing about it is it's multi workload, right? Typically what you see in a large public cloud type of environment is it's a couple of different workloads and you're basically building out a large compute farm or storage farm, depending on what service you're delivering, you're putting in a specific type of infrastructure to go serve that workload. What composable infrastructure allows you to do is actually serve the whole spectrum of workloads because you control that infrastructure and how you deploy those resources specifically around that workload. But your single API approach is all about openness and choice. Yes. Is that right? Because what AWS would say to my criticism would be what we want to control the primitives because things change, but I think what you're saying, if I understand it quickly, that's fine. You could still get to the primitive API with each of those individual services. We have a control point that's a single point of entry into our system. Is that right? Yeah, it allows you to run your infrastructure as code, like I said before. And that's unique in the industry in your view as a product marketing person, a product management person, you know what the competition is like, you have to line up against it and build something better. And so you've done the analysis, I have it. Yeah, yeah, composable infrastructure is definitely unique in the industry. It's something that HPE, it's an innovation that we've brought to market. And we've extended some of those tenants around composable into our new hyperconverge solution. So we've got our new hyperconverge operating environment that delivers multi-tenancy workspaces, which is also another unique thing that we offer within that hyperconverge portfolio of products that allows a line of business, IT to deliver essentially a service provider type of offering to their lines of business that allows them to compose these workspaces and the VMs within those workspaces so that they can get up and running very quickly. And this comes all under the rubric of hybrid IT, which was a lot of talk about that today. Yeah, absolutely, that's our number one goal is to make hybrid IT simple for our customers. So, okay, let's test that. So, you know, the old line I used to use is you don't buy hybrid, I used to use hybrid cloud, so let's use hybrid IT. You build it. There's still a lot of building going on, right? But you're making it simple to build? Yep, we're making it simple to build, simple to operate, simple to interface with your lines of businesses, all of those things come into play. Mimicking the whole public cloud model, I mean, essentially, maybe with the exception of swiping the credit card. Yep. I mean, you can do the, we've heard a lot about the capacity on demand. Yep, so we offer flexible consumption models as well. We have flex capacity, which allows our customers to, essentially, we offer the capability to do metering of the infrastructure and you pay as you go, and as you use that infrastructure. So, we offer cloud-like experience even for the on-premise infrastructure that we deliver for private clouds. But it's, and I'm not hearing from HPE that you're trying to be the central point of management for a multi-cloud environment, although that may be part of your strategy. You certainly hear that from VMware, increasingly, I'm not hearing that messaging from you guys. Yeah, no, we're a multi-cloud, multi-vendor solution, right? So, we work with all of our partners. It's not just one hypervisor, it's not one public cloud provider, it's not one private cloud stack. We're working across all of them. But one view is the way I manage all that, if I so choose. If I choose not to, then. Yeah, you think about the one view API as being kind of that, the glue that helps kind of tie all that together working with all of these ecosystem partners. So, where does this help? I mean, let's say HP's competitive edge here. You've got this partner ecosystem, anybody can play. Where do you? Well, I mean, it's delivering the composable infrastructure and our great network, through our great network of partners to go reach our customers and deliver that value to our customers. Yeah, and your channel. Yeah, so, I was including the channel in that. So, it's not just the ISV partners, but it's also our channel partners that are a key component of delivering that value to our customers. And they do a great job of it. We enjoy working with them every day, so. All right, let's line up the sort of horses on the track. You got the traditional converged infrastructure guys. They used to be new and hot. Now they're sort of becoming a legacy. You got the reference architecture folks, right? You guys play in that field. You got the hyperconverge, which is sort of replicating public cloud on-prem. You guys play in all of those, right? Yeah, absolutely. And how those markets sort of shake out. The hyperconverge is obviously smaller and growing. Yeah, absolutely growing, right? Those other ones are flattening now or? Yeah, I mean, so, you know, the overall market, you know, obviously I said before, like the private cloud market is growing at double digits, much like the public cloud market is. So that's where a lot of the growth is happening, which leads you down a path of hybrid, you know, hybrid IT, you know, kind of managing traditional, and a lot of people think of hybrid as public or private cloud, but it's traditional. It's, you know, private cloud and public cloud, all of those things kind of together and really kind of integrating and delivering value across all of those. Yeah, and the traditional is going to be more expensive to manage. You know it's going to be more labor cost. It's just, it's more siloed, right? I mean, you have your infrastructure that's deployed for a specific thing, and when you go do another thing, then you've got, you know, you either retire some old infrastructure and deploy it to go do that, or you build a new island, essentially, within your infrastructure, and really that's what Composable eliminates that problem for our customers. I guess my point there is that if you think about public cloud and Composable or private cloud, what we call a Wikibon true private cloud. In other words, private cloud that truly does mimic public cloud from an operational standpoint, you're eliminating a lot of the undifferentiated heavy lifting, you're eliminating a lot of labor costs associated with that. We think the number is maybe 200 billion over the next 10 years of labor cost that will get out of infrastructure management, move somewhere else. The application, you know, digital transformation, whatever. Are your, first of all, do you buy that? And are your customers comfortable with that notion? Well, what they're able to do is take the money that they would be spending in certain areas and reinvest it in their business and focus on innovation for their business. And I think that's a key piece of it, right? That there's, you know, this whole idea economy is how fast can you turn an idea into a product and a business? It allows them to focus more on that and less on chasing their IT infrastructure. Well, the CXO is comfortable with that. I'm not sure the IT infrastructure guy is comfortable with that. I mean, for years it was a lot of discussion around, wow. I think even they would say that, I mean, they're comfortable with it as well because they've got a lot, you know, essentially IT is the business now. So there's a lot of, you know, they have a huge queue of business behind them that they've got to go take care of and just freeze them up and focus on that. They've seen the light. Yeah. All right. Well, we're shining a light on HPE Discover 2016. Thank you very much for coming on theCUBE. Yeah, thanks a lot. Thanks for what they did. Great stuff. All right, this is a wrap. This is day one here at HPE Discover. We're in the docklands of London and the UK. This is theCUBE. We are signing out here. Check out siliconangle.tv. John Furrier and Stu Miniman and Jeff Frick are going to be firing up AWS re-invent. Check out siliconangle.com. We're going to be summarizing all the interviews we had here today. Check out wikimond.com for all the research. That's a wrap for today. We'll see you tomorrow. This is theCUBE. We're out.