 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 Gillis. Come back to the docks of London, everybody. This is HPE Discover 2016, and this is theCUBE, the worldwide leader in live tech coverage. We go out to the events, we extract the signal from the noise. Jay Jamison is here as the vice president of the software defined and cloud group strategy for the Converge Cloud for HPE. Jay, welcome to theCUBE, good to see you. Hey, nice to see you, thank you. So some changes in the cloud group. We've been sort of documenting that, watching that. You know, HP went out, it learned, and it's now folded the cloud into the infrastructure group under Antonio Neary. Kind of makes sense, cloud is infrastructure, infrastructure is a service, if you will. So that's come together under Rick Lewis. You gave a keynote yesterday, thought it was quite cogent. Lot of focus on Converged and Composable and Synergy, but give us the update from a strategy standpoint. What's going on? Yeah, that's a great place to start. So, as Rick described in his discussion yesterday, and as we talk all the time in the software defined and cloud group, our mission is really to help enterprises get solutions where we make hybrid IT simpler. That is to say that our customers are enterprises that are generally trying to move to the cloud, drive that transformation of digitizing their business, get more business value, and be quicker and more agile. But they're dealing with that in the context of having thousands and thousands of applications ranging across a whole set of different architectures, whole set of different technologies that are either very modern or at times very, very old. And so, what we're really trying to do is with the moves we've made with cloud and by merging it into the Converged Systems Group to basically create the software defined and cloud group, is really provide customers a great platform and a great set of solutions that help them get more simplicity in that hybrid IT. And so, at sort of the highest level, what we're going to be delivering, when you look at infrastructure platforms like our Synergy platform, which is the first composable infrastructure in the market leader, it's going to define the space, first one to market where we really want to get that first mover and that strong innovator position with composable infrastructure, where you have greater flexibility that spans across traditional apps and more cloud-native apps. And you look at us announcing at this Discover offering Cloud System 10 from the Helion team on Synergy, which is a full starter kit for cloud, for an enterprise that enables you to get cloud-enabled benefits on traditional applications and enables you to do cloud-native application development and management. What we're really trying to do is provide those building blocks where customers can get simpler hybrid IT solutions. How do you fit in with, and we've heard a lot of talk about convergence and slipping my mind right now, the architecture of treating everything as a pool. How does the cloud strategy, how does Helion, how does the cloud strategy fit into that? How does it fit into sort of a hardware-oriented thing? I think what we would say is, I kind of think of it as, at the highest level, I often will say, look, what we're really trying to deliver for our enterprise customers is something in the mode of iPhones for data centers. What that means is really marrying a great software experience with hardware that is delightful and delivers what it is a customer wants to do. So if you think about mobile phone before you saw an iPhone, it was you'd have hardware that could make phone calls and there were some play-it applications that could do calendaring or messaging or whatnot, but it was Clujie at best. And then you saw the iPhone and you're like, oh wow, we're in a new world and everything from sort of how the hardware looked and felt and how the glass worked, the responsiveness, the lack of buttons and so on to the software that was on it was really quite delightful. Same thing's true here, where it's saying like, look, we understand that our customers want to really, from the world that I come from, I started my career at HP in the Helion group, so I come at it from a software point of view. Customers talk to me about wanting to think about how do I migrate my workloads? How do I get the benefits of the cloud? How do I make my developers more productive and so on and so forth? So we think about how do we build great hybrid cloud management capabilities? How do we deliver the kinds of infrastructure and platform services at the software layer and how does that pair up with hardware such that the on-premises capabilities the customers will want when they get something like a composable infrastructure on HPE Synergy, how does that deliver the flexible resource pools that they want to be able to use for those on-premise environments? So composable then being a subset of cloud? Absolutely, I mean, we acknowledge that in a hybrid world, and my personal view of sort of how we think about, how HPE needs to think about hybrid and how we acknowledge it is, customers when they think about cloud are thinking about a set of resources that span from on-premise to off-premise. And our strategy is to say, look, we will have great infrastructure that will land on-premise in many cases, such as our composable Synergy stack, and then the management layers that we're delivering will, of course, manage that, but we'll manage off-premises workloads that will be running in an Amazon or an Azure or a Google or in our cloud, the number of service providers around the world. So Jay and Paul, so one of the things that we've quantified at our research organization, Wikibon is this notion of trying to take the cloud-like attributes and mimic that on-prem, and we coined this term, true private cloud. A lot of people don't even like the term, but the implication is that really, we wanted to show people the stepping stone to hybrid cloud. So true private cloud being that, which actually replicates it to a great degree, public cloud, not just virtualization, but well beyond virtualization into orchestration, actually fundamentally changing the operating model. Essentially, that's what you're trying to do from a strategy standpoint, is really don't forget about cloud as a place where you put stuff, applications and data, but think about cloud as an operating model. Is that a fair assessment? I think that's right. I think that what I think about is in the end state, customers are going to have a world where they have a set of workloads running in a public cloud and they're going to want, and they're going to have a set of workloads that are traditional workloads that have been running for years and are mission critical to their business that have no reason to move anywhere, to a private cloud or any, they'll stay the same. And then there'll be a bunch of stuff that's in the middle, private, manage, what have you. And what customers tell us is they want help and advice on where do I put, which ones do I move where? Where do I use SaaS? Where do I use public cloud? Where do I use private cloud? Where do I just keep things as they are? And then help me get the management tools such that I have one view into all this stuff and I can do things like charge back and billing and application security and all these things. And I'm not using just different silos. So for me, I think that's where hybrid IT ultimately ends up. In the current world, I think you're right. I think a lot of customers, as they sort of start on this journey to transform their infrastructure into cloud and make that effort, there are sometimes there, I think of as, if you're early in that effort, they're easy on ramps, things like disaster recovery, which if you're not doing that and as a service style model, often very costly and not used very often. So customers will often say, geez, even if I've never even used a Paz or I've never even really used Amazon, that's a place I can save millions of dollars, potentially a year, I want to go do that. And I don't have to transform my organization or change how we do move from waterfall to scrum or any of that. As you get more down the maturity model and you talk to customers that are really doing very advanced things, they're thinking about, okay, which developers do I need to train to start doing scrum and how do I think about Agile and where should I be putting applications into a Paz and where should I just be doing containers as a service? And the point is, cloud isn't a one size fits all model for really any customer in the enterprise space and HPE is trying to put ourselves in a spot where we're able to provide a wide and comprehensive breadth of solutions that span the partners and the technologies that customers want in a way that they want to consume it. So, Paul, before you jump in, so now having said that, if the customer puts it on Amazon, Amazon makes money, if the customer puts it on Synergy, you guys make more money. So where it ends up in part anyway matters, but you can also provide services to manage across clouds. Is that part of the strategy? Absolutely, I think that we, HPE has a strong and trusted relationship with many of our customers, with our enterprise customers, we've been doing business with them for years. And what customers will tell us is, one, the first thing they'll tell us is, I expect my estate to have applications in many places. Some will be in Amazon, some will be in Azure, some will be on HPE on premise, et cetera. So help me understand, be my trusted advisor and be a neutral broker to tell me where's the best price performance, where's the best benefit for the different applications landing in different places? That's sort of one thing that they want. The other thing they want is, when this is something we're seeing a huge amount of upsurge in our flexible capacity services, the ability to, and our data center care support from our technical support organization, where HPE has a great opportunity to go to customers and say look, we'll be the front for all this stuff, such that if you've got a problem with an AWS application, you're not submitting a trouble ticket to a web forum. You're calling HPE in 30 languages around the world, professionals that are going to cost years that issue and run it down for you with whatever vendor is ultimately providing the service. That's a great place for HPE to go and play and be that trusted delivery, or that trusted front end of service across this whole heterogeneous estate. And then finally, I think that as cloud continues to mature in organizations, environments, what they really look to us to be doing is going out and working with those leading technologies and softwares that customers want, things like Docker, things like Mesosphere, things like scalability, which we have relationships with, and really be able to provide that in an enterprise-grade supported level that is ready for production deployment. Because what we find is, and I hear this time and time again from my enterprise customers I talk to, is they'll say look, my developer will watch some webinar on some new cool thing on a Sunday night, and Monday morning they want to come in and use it. And for large-scale enterprises where you have all kinds of compliance challenges and all kinds of security, they want someone that they can turn to that says, look, I can help get you that trusted version of that that you can put in your environment that people can work with. And so that breadth of ability to stand and be sort of that first and trusted partner in this very diverse and interesting and fast-evolving market is something that I think HPE has a great role to play. HPE took a run at the public cloud market, decided that wasn't the right thing to do. Pull back, is there any chance you'll do it again? Do you see an edge? Do you see a new angle to come at public cloud? No, I think that what our public cloud angle will be, is and will be, is partner-oriented. I think that when you look at sort of the big three in the U.S., I'd probably expand it to big four or five if I look globally, like a Google and Amazon and an Azure in the U.S. and then Alibaba and China I'd probably pick one or two in Japan. I think there are going to be interesting opportunities for us to partner with different public cloud vendors. We've obviously talked at length and done a great deal of work with Azure in the past and I think there's great opportunity there. I think there'll be really interesting opportunities with other large-scale public cloud vendors. In addition to that though, we also have built out and seen a great deal of traction and we announced taking our cloud 28 plus program and then one of our big announcements to discover is evolving that ecosystem program beyond Europe where it had been built and expanding around the globe and what we've seen in the one year that we've started that program in Europe is just an explosion of interest, not just from ecosystem partners of service providers that are not those big three but managed service providers in different countries offering different types of services focused on different verticals or different horizontals. We've seen those really take off because customers want to have, they have such diverse needs as they move to the cloud that I think they're finding that, geez, it's not just going to be all workloads going in the big three, there's going to be opportunities for managed service providers all over the world to provide specific services that either, whether it's specific compliance or latency or what have you and we aim to be strong partners at all levels in that way. So that's I think our approach. So okay, so that's clear from a strategy standpoint, go partner and let's sort of break it down. Let's take a big three in the U.S. I don't know as much about Alibaba and NTT in Japan. Those are sort of special cases. But in the case of Microsoft, obviously you're very close to Microsoft. What you're doing with Azure Stack and Azure Pack are very interesting and I want to come back to that. The partnership with Amazon as well, Amazon's there if our customers want to use Amazon will help and maybe it's deeper than that but essentially that's all you can do with Amazon. Unless your VMware, what do you make of the VMware partnership with Amazon? I think the VMware partnership is interesting in so far as saying, hey, if you've got workloads on premise, you can move them to the cloud. I would say HPE has a couple of specific things we can do if a customer says, hey, I want to go to Amazon, what do you got for me? I think the first thing that we do have and we have the ability to sell this is we bought a company two years ago called Eucalyptus. Eucalyptus is the only software product that is a private cloud API compliant software offering that is API compliant with AWS. In a backpack. Right, exactly. That's awesome. I love Eucalyptus. So we can sell a customer, look, if you want to have workloads where you're doing dev test on the Amazon cloud and you want to move it to private or you want to do private and you want to move it to Amazon, we can help you with that with a unique offering that we can sell through a relationship that we have with the enterprise services. The second thing we can do is we have through our, again, this is one of our big benefits from our technical services and support group is through our data center care support offering, what we can say is, look, if you buy data center care support, the value proposition of that product or that offering is to say, we are your one phone number to call with whatever application, whatever hardware, whatever OS, whatever it is. And so what that's very comforting to enterprise customers is they look at Amazon, if they become data center care support customers, they're saying, look, if something goes wrong with Amazon, I can call HPE and they'll be my level one, level two and concierge that problem. And the third thing that we have is with customers that are looking to manage, and this is where I think a huge amount of opportunity is and remains for HPE is customers will have, tell us time and time again, that Amazon is one part of their estate. They'll at minimum have a couple clouds that they're looking at in public. They're generally running Amazon in some Azure as well as on premise stuff. We have with our CSA product, we have a hybrid cloud management product today and we'll continue to innovate in that hybrid cloud management space because we think that that ability to provide a, you know, as much as possible, a common non siloed tool set that gives IT the ability to manage and control where applications are going, how costs are running, get applications deployed in the right place and then be able to provide the services the developers need across that whole infrastructure is going to remain a really big and robust market for us. Well, and the Azure pack piece is interesting. Some of our analysts have predicted that Amazon will do a similar approach to Azure pack. Many of our analysts disagree. It seems as though right now Amazon disagrees, but we'll see. Anyway, thanks very much for coming to theCUBE. Really appreciate it. Give you the last word, the vibe of the show. What are you seeing on the floor that's exciting you? Well, it's been a really, this has been a really active floor. I've been really excited to see as much traffic and I think that there's been a great deal of interest at the synergy booth in particular. I think a lot of people are really trying to figure out how is synergy work? How's it coming together? I did one of the technical walkthroughs myself, one of the technical labs and it was just great. It was a lot of fun to see that product really starting to come to life and we'll be excited to be shipping it early in the calendar year. Excellent. All right, Jay Jamison, thanks very much for coming on theCUBE. Appreciate it. You're welcome. All right, keep it right there, buddy. We'll be back with our next guest. This is theCUBE. You're watching live from HPE Discover 2016 in London. Right back.