 Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE. Covering VMworld 2017, brought to you by VMware and its ecosystem partners. Hi, I'm Stu Miniman here with Keith Townsend and you're watching theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media's production of VMworld 2017 here in Las Vegas. For the last few years, hyper-converged infrastructure has been one of the hot topics and I'm happy to welcome back to the program Jesse St. Laurent, who is the chief technologist of hyper-converged software group, hyper-converged, sorry, software-defined, hyper-converged and cloud group at Hewlett Packard Enterprise. Slightly longer title than the last time I interviewed Jesse. Thanks so much for joining us. Yeah, thanks Stu, it's great to be here. All right, so hyper-converged has had a lot of hype. Hyper-converged has also had a lot of customers, a lot of dollars. First of all, I have to say, I think you're the first employee of SimpliVity that we've had on since the acquisition. We've had the pleasure of knowing, I've known you since before SimpliVity, but we've been watching SimpliVity since Stealth Mode, $650 million acquisition in CAS for HPE, so congratulations on that. And what have you been doing since the acquisition? I think one of the biggest changes really is going from being a product company where in reality startups, if you're going to be successful, you have to focus on one thing and you have to do it well. And for SimpliVity, well we spent a lot of time building technology that was much more broadly applicable from an industry perspective. Taking it to market, it had to be narrow, and that's why we focused specifically on hyper-convergence. But we always felt that, and you know, you and I have talked about this long ago, that some of the underpinnings of our technology really were about this concept of a data fabric. So fast forward to today, SimpliVity is no longer a single product company, we're part of a portfolio company that has technology that span the entire hybrid IT marketplace. Jesse, I want you to look back for a little bit for us. You've written this wave, I sometimes joke, I'm still yet to find a CIO that had a convergence problem. But you're solving real customer problems, obviously you've got a lot of customers. As you look back, what have you learned along the way? What are some of those key drivers that kind of got you to where you are? And what's changed in the conversations recently for your customers? I think it's always been about simplification. The strange thing is, SimpliVity always talked about simplifying IT. Whenever any of us talked about what the company did, the first slide was, our mission is to simplify IT. I didn't know it prior, but after the acquisition, HP's one of the core strategies of the company is to simplify hybrid IT, which aligns remarkably well. I think that's the common thread for SimpliVity is we've seen the product evolve and the use cases evolve early on, smaller customers, much larger enterprises over time, different use cases, ranging from data centers to extreme robo examples. I think that really the thread through that is hybrid IT's complicated. What I think is a common thread through all of, we see on the floor here for the most part, is IT is really hard. I always use the term the messy middle. In the end of the day, vendors like to make the world seem binary, right? It's either you either public cloud or your private cloud, or you're either X or Y, and the reality is no customer I've ever seen has come in in the morning and said, you know what, today we're going to flip this switch and everything is going to go from the mainframe to open systems, or open systems, bare metal to virtualization, or virtualization to containers. Customers live in a very messy world and that's where simplification is that scene. So Jesse, no matter the technology, technologists, we love to say scale, break stuff. SimpliVity is used to scale, but coming into HPE, much different size organization, organization that looks at the industry a little bit differently than SimpliVity does, how has things changed for your view now that you're inside of HPE? Yeah, I mean, one of the things that is a huge change is we're everywhere. But I mean, SimpliVity talked about being in, I don't know, tens of countries before, and we were excited about that. And for a startup, the number was huge. Right. It paled in comparison to the footprint of Hewlett-Packett Enterprise, right? I was in one of the first couple of weeks of the acquisition, I was presenting to some customers and Meg Whitman was part of the discussion as well, and I said, one of the biggest changes will be, we will be in 90% of the opportunities where somebody's talking about hyperconvergence. And Meg stopped me and said, no, no, no, we will be in 100% of the opportunities where someone's talking about hyperconvergence. And just to a scale perspective, that's a scale that no startup has ever experienced, right? You can't be everywhere and that's a huge transition just in terms of enabling a global sales force to be able to be everywhere. Jesse, I'd like to get your take. People talk about software is eating the world. We live in a software defined world right now. Cloud's a lot of software, but hardware still has an impact. I mean, we all know virtualization, boy, some of those underlying things, the devils and the details on networking and storage specifically. Hewlett-Packett Enterprise, obviously your solution is predominantly software, but now you have a lot more hardware that kind of goes with it. I know you've done a lot of the integration on that. What, has anything changed as to how you think of the software and hardware? And I'd love to hear a little insight as to kind of that integration work. Anything surprise you or excite you coming into the HPE family? Yeah, I think, let me talk about a little bit of sort of the SimpliVity hardware view and how that's evolved, because I think it's an interesting transition, which is we've always based our technology on one, our accelerator that just made everything faster and more predictable. It was a core part of our technology, but we've always talked about having a software optimized version of the stack as well. And doing that across a whole suite of hardware platforms was never a simple thing to do because there was one SimpliVity and there were a lot of hardware platforms out there. What we've seen now is we're going into an environment where there's one suite of hardware technology and it's a company that has a massive amount of expertise in Hewlett-Packett Enterprise, developing hardware technologies. So where SimpliVity had an accelerator, one of the things that I didn't think about in advance of the acquisition is a whole bunch of people coming to us saying, we've got some really interesting ideas on how to take what you've built around this accelerator and make it really fast. You know, you imagine when you own the chassis, when you own the motherboard, when you own everything about the platform, the idea of putting a card in, well, that's easy, but what else can you do? When you have an army of people that can build hardware, you can do all sorts of really cool stuff. So I think what you'll see is actually us doing two separate things in the market. You'll continue to see a hardware optimized version of everything SimpliVity's done for years now. Seems just a little strange to say years, but years now. That's not going to go away. In fact, it's going to get even better. But at the same time, their form factors and their places where you want to run in software, whether it's to be extra small, whether it's to bounce down the road in a Humvee, whether it's to be in an airplane. There's a whole bunch of reasons you want to do that. So you'll actually see us having a portfolio that embraces both sides of that. So one last question around that hardware and software abstraction. HPE, while a lot of expertise, you have to be a little bit overwhelmed. DL380, which you guys are supporting now. DL580, synergy. Where are we going to see SimpliVity next in HPE's massive hardware profile? Yeah, my hope is you see it everywhere, but it takes time to get there. I think one of the things that's most exciting about this transformation that SimpliVity will go through is really becoming a data fabric company. So hyperconvergence isn't going away. But in hyperconvergence, we'll come to other platforms. Whether it's a one-U platform or a four-U platform, more sockets, higher density, you'll see all those things over time. You'll also see what does it mean to be part of a software defined stack, living in a composable world. I think those things fit together really well, and you'll see a lot of cool stuff coming around that. We're seeing the biggest boost in terms of exposure in the market has caused huge SimpliVity product growth in the market. Now what we want to do is broaden that portfolio to be in a lot of other places in the market. All right, well, Jesse, really appreciate you catching the update. We're sure going to be watching as to how composable infrastructure and the portfolio of the HPE offerings fit in with SimpliVity. So thanks so much for joining us. For Keith Townsend, I'm Stu Miniman. We'll be back with lots more coverage here from VMworld 27 Las Vegas. You're watching theCUBE.