 Welcome back to HPE Discover 2021. My name is Dave Vellante and you're watching theCUBE's virtual coverage of Discover 21 and we're excited to welcome back Arwa Kadura, she's the vice president and worldwide go-to-market leader for HPE's Smoke and Hot Green Lake Cloud Services. Arwa, welcome back to theCUBE, good to see you again. Thank you for having me, good to be with you. So, talk about how your products and services are supporting customer transformations. I'm interested in the experience that everybody's been dreaming about. Describe how you're giving your customer that competitive advantage and if you got any examples, that would be awesome. Yeah, you got it. I think as we heard Antonio say, the cloud is an experience, not a destination, right? And what we're doing with Green Lake is bringing those cloud capabilities and the cloud experience to our customers. We like to say co-locations, data center and edge, of course. So, this is the cloud on-prem. And so rather than forcing customers to only have to go up to cloud to get modern cloud capabilities or the benefits of things like pay as you go for consumption, et cetera. Cloud-native capabilities like containers, leveraging Kubernetes. We now bring all of that to Green Lake and to our customers' edge locations and co-locations and data centers. We've been able to dramatically transform many of our customers' businesses, right? And you'll probably see it discover some of those examples come to life. For example, Care Stream, who is in the electronic medical imaging world, right? They have all of the X-ray equipment that capture X-rays and different sort of diagnostics for patients. And we work with them to not only craft a ML solution to better read and diagnose these images, but also all of the underlying infrastructure with the HPE Green Lake ML Ops platform that allows them to instantly leverage the capabilities of machine learning and the infrastructure to go with it. And so tell me, so how is it resonating with customers? You're out there talking to customers all the time. What do they tell you? You know, I think what our customers appreciate about HPE Green Lake is it's not sort of, look, it's either all on-prem in my data center and I have to fully manage it, build it, implement it, take care of it. Or it's fully public cloud, I have little control and basically I get whatever the public cloud gives me, right? HPE Green Lake gives our customers the flexibility and control that they require, right? And so you can think of many use cases where customers have a need to have the, you know, compute storage sort of processing need to happen closer to where their data and apps live. And so for that exact reason, our customers love the flexibility, right? Cloud 1.0 was public cloud, Cloud 2.0 I think is the cloud that comes to our customers at their convenience. And to me, you know, what I tell CIOs and CTOs and sort of other lines of business leaders when I meet with them is you shouldn't be forced to have to take your data and apps elsewhere to get the transformation that you need. We want to be able to bring that directly to our customers. Of course, a lot of the transformation is around data. We love talking about data on the cube. And it's funny. I mean, we talked about big data last decade. We don't use that term much anymore. And it was kind of overhyped. But as oftentimes as the case maybe in the early days it's overhyped, but then it's underhyped when it actually starts to kick in. And I feel like we're entering a new age of data and insights with the ascendancy of machine learning and AI. What does this mean from HPE's perspective and what are customers telling you that it means for them? Yeah, no, data I think we often hear data is the new currency, right? It's the new gold. We've heard Antonio even say things like, look, data could even become something that maybe over time companies start to put some kind of value on their balance sheet behind, right? The same way that maybe brands represented this value on a balance sheet. Effectively what's happened with data is a lot of people have a lot of data but there's not been a lot of ability to extract insights from data, right? And I think this is the new revolution that we're all undergoing is we finally have the modern analytics tools to actually turn the data into insights. And what we bring to the table from an HPE perspective is the fact that we have the best infrastructure. We obviously now have the cloud capabilities mixed in with our data fabric, our container platform, our machine learning operations platform to then be able to process that data. Again, integrated with many of the great ISV partners that we have on the data side, allow our customers to turn that into real insights for their business. And effectively data is becoming a huge competitive advantage, right? I think many of us are, you know, leveraging some, you know, pretty interesting tools or gadgets these days, right? Like I wear one of those, you know, sleep rings. You can imagine a company like that in the future that's able to collect so much data from the folks that purchase their products, then being able to give us insights about, you know, where's the best zip code that, you know, people get the most amount of sleep in or, you know, which zip codes are the healthiest in, you know, the United States or countries, et cetera. But data really is becoming, you know, a competitive advantage. And one of the things that we care most about at HPE is also using it as a force for good and making sure that there is a sort of ethical AI capability. That's a great message and very important one. And it's interesting what you're saying about data and the value, how we, it's clearly, it's clearly being valued in terms of companies' market caps. I mean, it's, you know, maybe it's not in the balance sheet yet, but it's on the income statement in terms of data products and data services, that's happening. So we'll see if Antonia is right in the next, you know, several years. But so let's talk more about the specific data challenges that you're solving for your customers. They talk about silos. They talk about they haven't got as much value out of their data initiatives as they wanted to. What are they telling you? Are there challenges and how are you approaching it? Yeah, I think, you know, data's everywhere, right? The ability for customers to store the right amount of data is a huge challenge because obviously there's, you know, a huge cost associated with collecting, keeping, cleansing, processing, you know, all the way to sort of analyzing your data. There tends to be a ton of data silos, right? So customers are looking for a common data fabric that they can then process their data sources across and then be able to sort of tap into that data from an analytics perspective. So much of the technology, again, that we're focused on is be able to store the data, right? Our data fabric layer with Esmeral, right? Being able to process that data, capture that data, and then allow the analytics tools to then harness the power of that data and turn that into real business insights for our customers. Every customer that I've spoken to, you know, whether they're financial services, you know, you can imagine the big financial services, I mean, they've got, you know, just the zillions of pockets of data everywhere. And, you know, the real sort of challenge for them is how do I build a common data platform that allows me to tap into that data in effective ways for my business users? You talk a little bit about how you're changing the way you're providing solutions, maybe you could contrast it with the way HPE has done it in the past, because I think that's important when you think about, when you talk a lot about GreenLake and as a service, but if the products are still, you know, kind of boxes and lawns and gigahertz and ports, then, you know, that's a discontinuity. So what's changed from the past and how are you feeding into the way customers are transforming their business and supporting their outcomes? That's exactly right. You know, at some point in time, right, if you think maybe 10 or 20 years back, it used to be very much about the infrastructure for HPE. What's exciting about what we're doing differently for our customers is, look, we have the best infrastructure in the business, right? HPE has been doing this, you know, longer than anyone has, probably almost 60 years now. But being able to vertically integrate, right, move up in that value chain so that our customers can get more complete solutions is the more interesting part for our customers. Our customers love our technology, yes, the gigahertz and the speeds and feeds, all of that do matter because they, you know, make for some very powerful infrastructure. However, what makes it easier is the fact that we are building platform stacks on top of that hardware that help abstract away the complexity of that infrastructure and the ability to use it far more seamlessly. And then, if you think about it, we of course have also one of the most advanced services organizations. So being able to leverage our services capabilities, our platform capabilities on top of that hardware, again, deliver it back to our customers in a consumption model, which they've come to expect from a cloud model, and then surrounded by a very rich ecosystem of partners. And we're talking about system integrators that now have capabilities on helping our customers run their GreenLake environments. We're talking about ISVs, right, so software stacks and platforms that fully integrate with the GreenLake platform for completely seamless solutions, as well as channel partners and global distributors. So I think that's where we can truly deliver the ultimate end-to-end solution. It's not just the hardware, right, but it's being complemented with the right services, being complemented with the right platform capabilities, the software integrations to deliver that workload that the customer expects. As partners, they got to place bets. They got to put resources, time, money, and align their resources with their partners and their suppliers, like HPE. So when they ask you, hey, okay, HPE, tell me, Arwa, what's your overall strategy? Why is it compelling, and why do you give me competitive advantage relative to some of your peers in the industry? Yeah, I think what partners are gonna be most excited about is the openness of the platform, right? Being able to allow our partners to leverage GreenLake Central with OpenAPI so that they can integrate some of their own technologies into our platform, the ability to allow them to also layer in their own managed services on top of the platform is key. And of course, being able to build sort of these win-win solutions with the system integrators, right? The system integrators have some fantastic capabilities all the way from an application development, all the way down to the infrastructure management and data center delivery centers that they have. And so leveraging HPE GreenLake really helps them have access to core technologies that they need to deliver these solutions. I wonder if I could take a little sort of side road here and ask you because there's so many changes going on. HPE itself is transforming, your customers are transforming, the pandemic has accelerated all these transformations. Can you talk a little bit about how you've transformed go-to-market specifically in the context of as a service? I mean, that had to be quite a change for you guys. Yeah, no, go-to-market transformations in support of sort of moving from traditional go-to-markets to cloud go-to-markets are significant. They required us to really think through what does delivering as a service solutions mean for our direct sales force? What does it mean for our partners and their transformations in being able to support as a service solutions? For HPE specifically, it also means thinking about our customer outcomes, not just our ability to ship them, the requisite hardware and say, look, once it's left our job is done, right? It really takes our obligation all the way to the customer using the technology on a day-by-day basis, as well as supporting them in making sure that everything from implementation to set up to the ongoing monitoring operations of the technology is working for them in the way that they'd expect in an as-a-service way, right? We don't expect them to operate it. We don't expect them to do anything more than pick up the phone and call us if something doesn't go as planned. And how about your sellers and your partners? How do they respond? I mean, you just wake up one day, say, okay, guys, here we go, new compensation scheme, new way to sell, new way to market. That took some thought and some time and where are you in that journey? That's right. I always say, if you expect people to wake up one day and be transformed, right? You're kidding yourself. So everything from sort of the way that we think about our customers' use cases, right? And empowering our sellers to understand the outcomes that our customers expect and demand from us to things like compensation, to the partner rebate program that we leverage through the channel partners in order to give them the right incentives to also allow them to make the right investments to support GreenLake. HPE has a fairly significant field, sales, and solution team. And so not thinking about this only as a single person that represents GreenLake, but looking at our capabilities across the board, right? We have fantastic advisory consultants on the ground with PhDs and data science. We have folks that understand high performance computing. So making sure that we're embedding the expertise in all of the right personas that support our customers, not just from a comp perspective, but also from an understanding of the end-to-end solutions that we're bringing to those markets. So what gets you stoked in the morning? You get out of bed and you're like, okay, I'm going to go attack the world. What are you most excited about for HPE and its future? You know, there's so much happening right now in this sort of cloud world, right? To me, the most exciting portion is the fact that given that we've now introduced on-prem cloud to the world, our ability to ship new services and new capabilities, but also do that via a very rich partner ecosystem honestly is what probably has me most excited. This is no longer the age of go at it alone, right? So not only are our engineering and product teams hard at work in the engine room producing capabilities at sort of lightning fast speeds, but it's also our ability to partner, whether it's with platform providers, software providers or system integrators and services providers. That ecosystem is starting to come together to deliver highly meaningful solutions to our customers and all in a very open way. The number one thing that I personally care about is that our customers never feel like they are being locked in or that they are sort of being forced to have to give up certain levels of capabilities. We want to give them the best of what's out there and allow them to then have that flexibility in their solution. And one of the challenges of course with virtual events is you don't have the hallway track. You know, somebody can say, hey, have you seen that IoT zone? It's amazing. They got all these robots going around. So what would you say that people should be focused on at Discover, maybe things that you want to call out, specific highlights or segments that you think are relevant? Yeah, there's going to be a ton of fantastic stuff. I think, you know, really looking for that edge to cloud strategy that we're going to be spending a lot of time talking about looking at some of our vertical workload solutions. Right, we're going to be talking about quite a few from electronic healthcare records to payment solutions and many more. I think depending on what folks are interested in, there's going to be something for everyone. You know, Project Aurora, which now starts to announce our new security capabilities, you know, the zero trust capabilities that we're delivering is probably interesting to a lot of our customers. So lots of exciting things coming and I'm excited for our customers to check those out. No doubt that's a hot topic, especially given what's been happening in the news these past several months. Arwa, thanks so much for coming back to theCUBE. It was great to see you. Hopefully face to face next time. I sure hope so. Thanks so much for having me. It's our pleasure. And thank you for watching and thank you for being with us in our ongoing coverage of HPE Discover 2021. This is Dave Vellante. You're watching theCUBE, the leader digital tech coverage.