 From the SiliconANGLE Media office in Boston, Massachusetts, it's theCUBE. Now, here's your host, Dave Vellante. Hi everybody, welcome to this special CUBE Conversation sponsored by Hewlett Packard Enterprise. This is part of our partner series. You know, the partner business has changed quite dramatically over the years. I mean, it kind of used to be, you can make a lot of money pushing hardware and get some pretty good margins there, but increasingly, partners are becoming system integrators, they're becoming much more specialized in helping organizations transform, supporting their digital transformations, their infrastructure modernization, moving to the cloud, hybrid cloud security, it really runs the gamut. And here to talk to me about that is Tim Ferriss, who's a solutions architect at GreenPages. Tim, good to see you, thanks for coming on. Great to be here, thank you. So tell me a little bit about GreenPage, it's kind of a cool name, where did that come from and what are you guys all about? Oh God, I'm going to be killed for not knowing the history here, but I think back in the old days, we used to hand out a neon green catalog. So we couldn't, back when we were doing cold calls, you know, you'd probably get a lot of, okay, we shipped you a catalog, did you get that? Oh, I'm not quite sure, it may be buried under there. Neon green catalog, you could not lose. So I think we do our invoices on neon green paper now. That's good, green, tell her money. So tell us about your role as a solutions architect. What does that entail and what's your background? Sure, so I'm a solutions architect. We have a number of different solutions architects at GreenPage's who have a number of different specialties. My specialty is storage, disaster recovery and data management and protection, and DR automation and that sort of compute, hyper-converged infrastructure and hybrid cloud. So specialization a little bit wide, but we have other architects who are very deep in networking and hybrid cloud networking and that sort of thing as well. So let's get into some of that. I mean, looking at your website, I mean, you guys are into everything. You got software defined, you got cloud, you got security, you got DevOps and really runs the gamut. And well, sometimes in this industry, we suffer from, you know, acronym soup. The reality is, is that things are changing quite dramatically. I mean, it used to be, you'd build an infrastructure to support a single application. You'd harden that infrastructure and that was it, it became a silo. And people don't want that anymore. They want their data to be shared. They want it out of the silos, but at the same time it has to be protected. So what are some of the big trends that you're seeing in the marketplace and let's get into it? Sure, so yeah, many years ago that one server, one application thing went the way of the dodo. You just got back from VMworld and I paid my dues during the wave one virtualization boom when people were transforming racks and racks of servers into virtual machines. So that, and it used to be so easy to impress a customer. You show them of the emotion and it was like magic. You know, you move a server from this server to that server without missing a beat. Now people are looking at hybrid cloud. So not just cloud, but hybrid cloud. Everybody we're talking to, you know, we hear some people say that this is the last major hardware purchase that I wanna make. Now I don't know the reality of, you know, that that's debatable, right? But I think people have a, people wanna have a roadmap to move their infrastructure to cloud or cloud services. Not just infrastructure as a service, you know, lift and shift, but you know, software as a service and take advantage of that. So helping our customers manage that hybrid cloud journey is a big part of what GreenPage is. Yeah, and of course what the customer's really telling you is we don't wanna spend a lot of time, you know, provisioning loans anymore because it doesn't have value to our business. We wanna focus on building new apps or our digital transformation, et cetera. And I think you're right. I mean, it's sort of aspirational that, okay, we're not gonna buy anymore hardware anymore. To me, the key is can the industry, through R&D, simplify what's on-prem, and you know, let's face it, those mission critical apps, you don't just wanna throw them into the cloud. I mean, they're working. You don't wanna have to refactor them and migrate. That's sort of an evil word, but so to the extent that the industry can deliver that cloud-like experience on-prem, you can start to see this hybrid cloud vision evolve. What are your thoughts on that? Sure, so I think in H, it's fortuitous that we're here with HPE. I think they're doing a couple of things with some of their products and services that help push that. So it used to be that storage was relatively complicated. There were a lot of knobs and dials on storage that you could push and rotate in order to increase performance. You could have a number of different RAID levels, the three-part chunklets and this sort of thing, and there was a lot of customization you could do as you could use as a customer in order to properly set up your array for your workloads. People appreciate that level of detail that you can put into that, but they want it easier. So I'm seeing a trend toward less customization and more ready, just set it and forget it, arrays. Nimble, the three-part array was highly available. Very good array, very fast, but a little bit higher end to operate. Nimble, with HPE's acquisition of Nimble, they've taken that operational complexity down significantly, not only with operating the array, provisioning the lines, but managing it, maintaining it, and performing predictive analytics through InfoSight and that sort of thing. So at the storage level, I think, Nimble in that paradigm is transforming storage and HPE's GreenLake technologies, that is very much an answer to the private cloud, having that hyperscale feel, that ability to expand elastically and get out of the hardware maintenance business by using the GreenCloud, I'm sorry, not GreenLake service. Yeah, so actually a little bit of history here. So three-part was actually, the company was formed in the early 2000s before the term cloud computing really came out. They used, I think, utility computing in their S1 registration. But what three-part did is it really simplified that high end and then they, three-part reached escape velocity by going after the high end EMC base and did very well. And of course, famously got acquired by Hewlett Packard at the time, HPE, then became HPE. Nimble now is bringing sort of a new level, where you're talking about intelligent automation and AI managing infrastructure, predictive analytics, and that drives more automation, which I think, Tim, has got to be really a theme of hybrid cloud. I mean, cloud is all about automation, so hybrid cloud on-prem and public, some kind of interconnection, has to be highly automated, doesn't it? It absolutely does. And people don't have time to turn the dials into optimize their storage. They need systems that will do that for them. And there's the level one, the level two support that you get through those predictive analytics of InfoSight are critical to customers. They don't, a lot of customers don't have time for full-time storage admins anymore. And these technologies are what's freeing up those resources, those people resources, to do other strategic things for the business. Especially in small and mid-sized businesses, where they're generalists really, not really specialists at one thing. I want to come back to the hybrid cloud. Thinking about data governance, and management, and security, are we at the point where you can start to see sort of a consistent framework across clouds? Yeah, smiling. So what's the journey there? How are we going to get there? What inning are we in? Yeah, I would say we're certainly early days there. I think customers need to be much more cognizant of the tools that they use and buy. They can't be necessarily proprietary on-prem tools. The best use of your money is to buy tools that can be used to manage hybrid and secure hybrid infrastructures. So that should be a main qualifier for what people are looking for, for security technologies and that sort of thing. It's not quite the Wild West, though we still see, you know, there's that shared governance model, that shared responsibility in the cloud. And I think there are still some who haven't woken up to that basic concept, that just because I move and workload to the cloud doesn't mean it's no longer my responsibility to secure that data, though we're still talking with people today who may be under that misimpression. You're right, Tim. I mean, that is not well understood. I mean, people think, oh, I move in the cloud, I'm good, but there is a shared responsibility model, whether it's for security or governance, et cetera. And when you talk to chief information security officers, they'll tell you, yeah, you know, the cloud vendor might secure the storage device, but it's really our responsibility to do everything else. And the list of everything else is still quite long. Absolutely, you know, rights, roles and responsibilities, those sorts of things, firewall rules, they provide the firewall, they make sure the firewall is up to date on its firmware, but you're setting the rules, you're setting the ingress, egress. So, yes, it's very much still a shared responsibility. And yeah, it's eye-opening still to some. Let's talk about your partnership with HPE. We talked about some of the products, but what do you look for in a partner? Obviously, I said before, you know, it used to be when you're just selling boxes, you want margin, and I'm sure you still want margin, but it's got to be more, right? Well, yeah, I mean, we've known for quite a while, I mean, we've seen the writing on the wall that, I remember the glory, I don't know, glory days, the old days, back when people could make a fortune selling memory back before the turn of the century, turn of the century, I'm updating myself. But it's true, you could make a quite a bit of money selling memory back then. But today, and certainly over the past 20 years, people, our clients are choosing partners that they can't just, not just the cheapest price, but people who can talk with them about a solution, not just a product, hear their business problems and turn that into technology solutions that help them address those problems. So that's what I would look for as a partner if I were, you know, we look to HPE for the same thing, not just pushing product to sell product, but to solve business problems. And I think, you know, HPE is listening, they're hearing their clients, they were listening to them with the acquisition of HPE Nimble, they were listening to them, how they're expanding InfoSight from just the Nimble platform to 3PAR and ProLiant and other things and expanding some of those things. Yeah, the pendulum is swung, I mean, after the dot-com boom, it became cut, cut, cut. Everybody was concerned about budgets, you know, IT doesn't matter anymore, we heard all that. And that's totally changed, right? IT's driving revenue, it's driving top line. Of course, budgets are still critical and we talked a lot about simplification, which is a lot about attacking the IT labor problem. But right now, the sentiment with this, you know, the booming economy, we're in this 10th, 9th year of a run on a bull market, obviously in the late cycles, but the sentiment is much more toward how do I enable the business with technology? Yes. Yeah, yeah, so how does IT add value back to the business? They can do that through AI, through analytics and through digital transformation in general. I think we've seen a, you know, there's always been this upward curve to storage growth, but it's dramatically increased. I think it's predicted to be upward of 40 zettabytes or something like that by the year 2022. And that's because more and more businesses are using this data more creatively. They're saving it more. And not only is that growing the usable data, but they need to retain it for longer. You've got to retain it, you've got to protect it, and we still got data protection problems, not just storing it and providing the right performance level for it. But it's really difficult, and then you've got to secure all that extra data as well. Well, I think you're right too. The curve is getting non-linear. I mean, it used to be, I've said this often on theCUBE, that we for decades, we've marched to the cadence of Moore's Law, but now the innovation sandwich, if you will, it's about applying machine intelligence to data and then automating whether it's public cloud or on-prem cloud-like is being able to scale. And it's those three pieces of the sandwich that are now driving innovation, no longer the doubling of transistors every 18 months. Yeah, so do people want to scale on-prem? Do they want to scale to the cloud? And the cloud market itself is this very elastic, very easy to grow and shrink and contrast. Or can you do some of those types of things on-prem with GreenLake and with some other programs that let you have your on-prem security blanket and your on-prem performance with the hands-off operational paradigm and the elastic growth that you have in cloud? I think that's the best of both worlds for some. Let's end with a call to action. So what advice would you give to practitioners, clients that are looking to modernize their infrastructure, trying to support their digital transformation? They want to get from point A to point B, they don't want to spend a billion dollars doing it. They got to go on a journey. How do they get there? What's your advice? My advice is to, certainly I'm jaded here, but I would say engage professionals who have done this many, many times. Don't learn on the job here. You can make some expensive mistakes, moving workloads to the cloud. And we've seen anecdotal evidence and in-person evidence of people moving to the cloud, doing it the wrong way and then having to migrate back. That's a costly mistake. So make sure you do your planning. Migrate in phases, move your data there in phases, bite off some smaller chunks first to make sure that if you have growth pains, teething pains, that that happens with a non-critical application. Build your knowledge base and then make some better decisions. Engage people like GreenPages to help you roadmap your journey, your hybrid cloud journey. And don't go in with a preconceived notion of where you need to end, right? The applications, the performance requirements, and that assessment work up front should dictate where the best place is for those workloads. Great advice to Tim Ferriss from GreenPages. Thanks so much for coming on theCUBE. It was great to have you. Thank you. And thank you for watching, everybody. We'll see you next time. This is Dave Vellante. We're out.