 Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE, covering HPE Discover 2017, brought to you by Hewlett Packard Enterprise. Welcome back everyone, live here in Las Vegas, this is theCUBE's exclusive coverage for three days at Hewlett Packard Enterprise Discover 2017. I'm John Furrier with my co-host Dave Vellante. Day two winding down, a lot of action happening, a lot of news, a lot of technology announcements, a lot of groundbreaking stuff. And our next guest is Navin Metall, director, products and solutions marketing at the data center infrastructure group. Welcome to theCUBE, good to see you again. Good to see you, John. Thanks for coming on, I mean, a lot of stuff going on under the hood. We heard from Susan about the servers, with the security chip and the silicon. You guys got flex fabric, you got all this capacity. It's like really kind of like the new sports cars coming out with Gen 10, under the hood, a lot of action happening. What's going on with the relationships? We're hearing a partner centric message here at Discover this year, give us the update. Yeah, so first of all, absolutely spot on on the whole Gen 10 servers. We are there to crush it, we will get the market right. But let's talk about networking, right? Because that's something that actually combines everything when you talk about server storage and networking and our customers as you very well know can't just give it servers alone. So if you may or may not remember, six months back, we announced this strategic relationship with the Risto networks, where we basically said that they're our preferred network provider Yeah, we had them on in London. Okay, great, yeah. So it's been going great so far. The joint go-to-market has not been just go-to-market but it's also been reference architecture designs. It's been creation of reference architectures with our server teams, especially mission critical servers, SAP, HANA, I think talk about it, so. Give us the update, what's soon with the partnership? What's the progress in six months? Yeah, so six months our sales teams are completely trained and stoked to go out and sell there. Our customers are very excited with the partnership. They are asking for not only HPE servers and storage solutions, but of course the Risto products also. Because now they have a choice of products. If they are existing fixed fabric customers, they already work very well with HPE. But now with the bringing in of the Risto switches, you can actually get the software defined layer end to end. And you get the high end covered, a lot of service provider opportunities. What's the big takeaway in the marketplace from your standpoint? As you look at what's going on here at Discover 2017 and looking at what you do with the Risto, at the networking layer, a lot of interesting things are going on in the network layer. A lot of open source projects. Sure. A lot of new software. What's your take on what's going on at the network layer and in the cloud and whatnot? Yeah, so at the open source has always been an integral part of HPE's DNA, as you very well know, right? We have been a great contributor whether you talk about Helion or you talk about open switch, which was happening last year. Customers are looking for business outcomes, right? They don't really care whether it's open source or closed source at one point. We are all about outcomes and business solutions. So we bring in the best of breed networking along with best of breed servers and storage, combine them to give a solution that we can offer to our customers. Whether they are in the cloud-centric journey, they've already made the transition to cloud or they are, you know, trying to tackle with legacy. So what are some examples of some of the solutions? Yeah, so the SAP HANA solution reference architecture that we did recently. Not many people know about this, but the HANA cloud actually runs on the Arista switches already. Now think about the power that our customers can get if we can bring that flexibility and agility that SAP uses internally in their cloud into the enterprise data centers today. So that's the reference architecture which we already have. Okay, and in that example, it's the core switches, Arista, and what do you guys bring to the table? Everything else around it? Everything servers and storage, yes. And don't forget the point next to consulting, right? Services which ties everything together so that customers can actually utilize not only our products and solutions, but the entire journey. And in that solution, for example, the HANA, when you mentioned point next consulting, what specifically is the services organization doing? Is it tuned for SAP HANA? Is there some magic sauce that's sprinkled in? How does that all work? Yeah, so a great point. And so the point next consulting, of course, makes a point to understand where you are currently in your journey, right? Depending on where you are, the SAP HANA cloud solution may not be a perfect fit. In this example that I mentioned about SAP HANA itself, we just wanted to highlight the fact that if you are ready to move to the cloud like agility into your private data center, we have the solution ready with you and you can deploy it in your private data center. So your journey might begin with point next, it might begin with coming directly to HPE. All right, so here's the hard million dollar, billion dollar question, I say, billion dollar, trillion dollar question. Well, true private cloud TAM is 260 billion, so that's not including hybrid. But Meg's up there. Well, I heard it's 250 billion based on one of the reports that Wikibon put in. The true private cloud groundbreaking, again, another great Wikibon research that no one else is doing. Again, that number is legit. That's basically saying that on-prem isn't going away anytime soon. I think this plays beautifully to what you guys are doing. But the question is this, how are you going to simplify it as customers are transforming their operating model to cloud-like? Yes. How are you going to simplify it with these relationships? Yeah, so for that, to talk about simplicity, I need to take a step up, right? Because you saw Meg talk about the hybrid IT strategy and then we also talked about the Gen10 server announcement where we talk about control and agility and security. That's where the Aristoportfolio fits in squarely across the hybrid IT and the point next consulting because now you're talking about the security solutions being end-to-end from server storage and networking while giving you the agility that you're already accustomed to in some cases from VMware and some of the network virtualization solutions and having the flexible capacity control from our financial services offering. So from a customer standpoint, no real change. It's kind of like, it's enabling them to subtract it away. I'm just trying to get to on the network side, what's your policy? A lot of policies going, a lot of automation opportunities. Yes. What's going on there? Yeah, so I don't know if you know about the product called Distributed Cloud Networking that we offer where it is really allowing the policies that are defined at the application level and translating that into the underlying infrastructure level. So think about this, in a typical data center you tend to have silos where you have a server silo, networking silo and a storage silo and from the time the application developer defines the policies and the requirements from an application standpoint to reach the end customer, you would have to go through these silos in order to provision those. With bringing in Distributed Cloud Networking and its integration with the Rista networks, those policies get automatically deployed and guess what, it's a heterogeneous environment. So you can actually mix and match existing workloads along with existing infrastructure as well. And what happens to the IT pros that used to be associated with those different silos? I mean, what are they all doing today? Yeah, they get to do much better things, right? Because IT is now transitioning from a cost center to a revenue generator, right? And it's not about firing people, right? Let me make sure I clarify this. It's about re-utilizing your resources so that they can now become more productive at the time that they have. I don't know about you, if I'm done at 5 p.m. you could either go back to your home and I'm sure you have families or you could spend time figuring out the next network problem that you're having in the data center. That's where the true agility comes out. That's where the true economic savings come out. That's where software programmable infrastructure works. People can get their weekends back. That's really kind of like, a lot of time spent on mundane tasks, either chasing down some sort of automated provisioning or manual provisioning or configuring stuff. What's the big game changer? Is it machine learning that you were seeing there? How do you guys see that technology? What's the enabler? Yeah, so I think at the end of the day, customers are looking for a stack, end-to-end stack that one company can bring to them with the flexibility of choosing every layer within the stack. So we at HP, of course, are very focused on openness, right? So the new HP IT stack actually has all the way from applications to computes to servers to storage to networking, whether you're talking about Nimble or the SimpliVity acquisition or the Proline servers that we have to the underlying networking layer. And in this case, we are contending that Arista switching is the fabric which brings in best of breed. But you're free to choose the other layers of the stack as well. And how do you differentiate in the marketplace and the competition where the customer says, oh, I should have bought you guys HP and Arista instead of whatever, vendor X, Y, or Z. What do you tell them? Yeah, so the famous thing that I tell is you are either in the legacy mode and stuck with a typical vendor, we all know what the name begins with, I won't mention it here, where they try to keep selling you newer and newer gear with newer operating systems or you go with a vendor that is open as a DNA of being open. We'll hold your hand till you actually get deployed in the data center and give you the choice that you need in the data center to be successful. Certainly making things easier has been the key. Nimble and SimpliVity really kind of put the design at the center and then brought software in. That changes the game. That's more cloud-like. That's certainly very DevOps friendly. Absolutely, and it doesn't even stop there, right? If you take the conversation up higher up to the virtualization or the container layer discussion when you start talking about the agility that containers bring into the world, then it's the completely game changes. How do you ensure that the network traffic, that an application sitting on a container somewhere in one of the VMs or on a badminton server can be translated and traced all the way back to the switchboard and ensuring that nothing goes down? And that's the whole ethos of infrastructure as code is to actually make it programmable. So the app guys don't have to get under the hood. Yes, that programmable is taking care of the agility side of the house. What I'm talking about is visibility and security so that if something does go wrong, we all are humans, something can go wrong. Even in programming, you know, you need to pinpoint and detect and create an automate and fix issues as fast as possible. And there are some fundamental underlying tenants of the Aristoperating system which allows us to do that. And of course, the secret source that we add on top of that is the combination with the server and storage. Naveen, thank you for coming in to theCUBE and sharing the insights. Final question for you. What's your takeaway from this year at Discover? What's the vibe? What's your personal, you know, obviously we hear the messaging, simplifying IT, hybrid IT and intelligent edge. Outside of the core themes, what's your big takeaway? Yeah, I think I'm super excited after meeting our customers and partners here. We are back in the game. We are here to take the market by storm and we will be doing it. All right. Here, breaking it down and networking and risk to relationship and all the great stuff in the networking level. Naveen, thanks so much. theCUBE live coverage from Las Vegas in HPE 2017. We'll be back with more live coverage after this short break.