 Okay, now we're going to go into the GreenLake power panel, talk about the cloud landscape, hybrid cloud, and how the partner ecosystem and customers are thinking about cloud, hybrid cloud as a service, and of course, GreenLake, and with me are C.R. Howdy Shell, president of Advisex, Ron Nemechek, who's the business alliance manager at CBTS, Harry Zarek is president of CompuGen, and Benjamin Clay is VP of sales and alliances at Arrow Electronics. Great to see you guys, thanks so much for coming on theCUBE. Thanks for having us. To be here. Okay, here's the deal, so I'm going to ask you guys, each to introduce yourselves and your companies, add a little color to my brief intro and then answer the following question. How do you and your customers think about hybrid cloud? And think about it in the context of where we are today and where we're going, not just the snapshot, but where we are today and where we're going. C.R., why don't you start, please? Sure, thanks a lot, Dave, appreciate it. And again, C.R. Howdy Shell, president of Advisex. I've been with the company for 18 years, the last four years as president. So I had the great, great opportunity here to lead a 45-year-old company with a very strong brand and great culture. As it relates to Advisex and where we're headed to with hybrid cloud, it's a journey, so we're excited to be leading that journey for the company, and as well as HPE, we're very excited about where HPE is going with GreenLake. We believe it's a very strong solution when it comes to hybrid cloud. I've been an HPE partner since, well, since 1980. So for 40 years, it's our longest standing OEM relationship, and we're really excited about where HPE is going with GreenLake. From a hybrid cloud perspective, we feel like we've been doing the hybrid cloud solutions the past few years with everything that we've focused on from a VMware perspective. But now with where HPE is going, we think really changing the game, and it really comes down to giving customers that cloud experience with the on-prem solution with GreenLake, and we've had great response from our customers, and we think we're going to continue to see how that kind of increased activity and reception. Great, thank you, CR, and yeah, I totally agree. It is a journey, and we've seen it really come a long way in the last decade. Ron, I wonder if you could kick off your little first intro there, please. Sure, Dave, thanks for having me today, and it's a pleasure being here with all of you. My name is Ron Nemechek. I'm a business alliance manager at CBTS. In my role, I'm responsible for our HPE GreenLake relationship globally. I've enjoyed a 33-year career in the IT industry. I'm thankful for the opportunity to serve in multiple functional and senior leadership roles that have helped me gather a great deal of education and experience that could be used to aid our customers with their evolving needs for business outcomes to best position them for sustainable and long-term success. I'm honored to be part of the CBTS and Onyx Canada organization. CBTS stands for Consult, Build, Transform, and Support. We have a 35-year relationship with HPE. We're a platinum and inner-circle partner. We're headquartered in Cincinnati, Ohio. We serve as 3,000 customers, generating over a billion dollars in revenue, and we have over 2,000 associates across the globe. Our focus is partnering with our customers to deliver innovative solutions and business results through thought leadership. We drive this innovation via our team of the best and brightest technology professionals in the industry that have secured over 2,800 technical certifications, 260 specifically with HPE. And in our hybrid cloud business, we have clearly found that technology, new market demands for instant responses and experiences, evolving economic considerations with detailed financial evaluation, and of course, the global pandemic have challenged each of our customers across all industries to develop an optimal cloud strategy. We now play an enhanced strategic role for our customers as their technology advisor and their guide to the right mix of cloud experiences that will maximize their organizational success with predictable outcomes. Our conversations have really moved from product roadmaps and speeds and feeds to return on investment, return on capital, and financial statements, ratios and metrics. We collaborate regularly with our customers at all levels in all departments to find an effective comprehensive cloud strategy for their workloads and applications, ensuring proper alignment and cost with financial return. Great, thank you, Ron. Yeah, today it's all about the business value. Harry, please. Hi, Dave. Thanks for the opportunity and greetings from the Great White North. We're a Canadian-based company headquartered in Toronto with offices across the country. We've been in the tech industry for a very long time we're what we would call a solution provider. So hard for my mother to understand what that means, but our goal is to help our customers realize the business value of their technology investments. Just to give you an example of what it is we try and do, we just finished a build out of a new networking endpoint and data center technology for a brand new hospital. It's now being mobilized for COVID high-risk patients. So talk about our all being in an essential industry providing essential services across the whole spectrum of technology. Now, in terms of what's happening in the marketplace, our customers are confused, no question about it. They hear about cloud and cloud first and everyone goes to the cloud, but the reality is there's lots of technology, lots of applications that actually still have to run on-premises for a whole bunch of reasons. And what customers want is solid senior serious advice as to how they leverage what they already have in terms of their existing infrastructure but modernize it, update it. So it looks and feels a lot like a cloud, but they have the security, they have the protection that they need to have for reasons that are dependent on their industry and business to allow them to run on-prem. And so the Green Lake philosophy is perfect. It allows customers to actually have one foot in the cloud, one foot in their traditional data center, but modernize it so it actually looks like one enterprise entity. And it's that kind of flexibility that gives us an opportunity collectively, ourselves, our partners, HPE, to really demonstrate that we understand how to optimize the use of technology across all of the business applications they need to run. You know, Harry, it's interesting about what you said is cloud is, it is kind of chaotic, my word, not yours, but there is a lot of confusion out there. I mean, it's what's cloud, right? Is it public cloud? Is it private cloud, the hybrid cloud? Now it's the edge, and of course the answer is all of the above. Ben, what's your perspective on all this? From a cloud perspective, you know, I think as an industry, you know, I think we've all accepted that public cloud is not necessarily going to win the day and we're in fact in a hybrid world. There's certainly been some commentary impressed, you know, that would sort of validate that, not that it necessarily needs any validation, but you know, I think as the linkages between on-prem and cloud-based services have increased, it's paved the way for customers to more effectively deploy hybrid solutions in the model that they want or that they desire. You know, Harry was commenting on that a moment ago. You know, as the trend continues, it becomes much easier for solution providers and service providers to drive their services initiatives, you know, in particular managed services. So, you know, from an aero perspective, as we think about how we can help scale in particular from a green light perspective, we've got the ability to stand up some cloud capabilities through our aerospace platform that can really help customers adopt green light and benefit from some alliances opportunities as well. And I'll talk more about that as we go through. And Ben, I didn't mean to squeeze you on the arrow. I mean, arrows been around longer than computers. I mean, if you Google the history of arrow, it'll blow your mind, but would give us a little quick commercial. Yeah, absolutely. So I've been with Aero for about 20 years. I've got responsibility for alliance organization, North America, we're a global value added distribution, business consulting and channel enablement company. You know, we bring scope scale and expertise as it relates to the IT industry. You know, I love the fast paced, the fast paced that comes with the market that we're all in. And I love helping customers and suppliers both, you know, be positioned for long-term success. And you know, the subject matter here today is just a great example of that. So I'm happy to be here and forward to the discussion. All right, we got some good brain power in the room. Let's cut right to the chase. Ron, where's the pain? What are the main problems that CBTS, I love what it stands for, consult, build, transform and support. What's the main pain point that customers are asking you to solve when it comes to their cloud strategies? Sure, Dave. Our customers, concerns and associated risks come from the market demands to deliver their product services and experiences instantaneously. And then the challenges is how do they meet those demands because they have aging infrastructure, processes and fiscal constraints. Our customers really need us now more than ever to be excellent listeners so we can collaborate on an effective map for the strategic placement of workloads and applications in that spectrum of cloud experiences while managing their costs and of course mitigating risks to their business. This collaboration with our customer, customers often identify significant costs that have to be evaluated, justified or eliminated. We find significant development, migration and egress charges in their current public cloud experience coupled with significant over provisioning, maintenance, operational and stranded asset costs in their on-premise infrastructure environment. When we look at all these costs holistically through our customized workshops and assessments, we can identify the optimal cloud experience for the respective workloads and applications. Through our partnership with HPE and the availability of the HPE GreenLake Solutions, our customers now have a choice to deliver SLAs, economics and business outcomes for their workloads and applications that best reside on-premise in a private cloud and have that experience. This is a rock solid solution that eliminates the development costs that they experience in the egress charges that are associated with the public cloud while utilizing HPE GreenLake to eliminate over provisioning costs and the maintenance costs on aging infrastructure hardware. Lastly, our customers only have to pay for actual infrastructure usage with no upfront capital expense. And now that achieves true utilization to cost economics with HPE GreenLake solution from CBTS. I love the focus on the business case because it's measurable and that's where, follow the money. That's where the opportunity is. Okay, Sierra, I got a question for you. Thinking about advisex customers, how are they, are they leaning into GreenLake? What are they telling you is the business impact when they experience GreenLake? Well, I think it goes back to what Rahm was talking about. We had to solve the business challenges first. And so far, the reception's been possible. When I say that is customers are open. The C-suite wants to hear about cloud and hybrid cloud fits. But what we're hearing and what we're seeing from our customers is we're seeing more adoption from customers that it may be their first foot in, if you will, but as importantly, we're able to share other customers with our potentially new clients that say, what's the first thing that happens with regard to GreenLake? Well, number one, it works. It works as advertised and as a service, that's a big step. There are a lot of people out there dabbling today, but when you can say we have a proven solution, it's working in our environment today, that's key. I think the second thing is, is flexibility. You know, when customers are looking for this hybrid solution, you got to be flexible for, again, I think Ron said it well, is you don't have a big capital outlay, but also what customers want to be able to do is we want to build for grow, but we don't want to pay for it today. So we'll pay as we grow, not as we have to use, as we used to do, it was upfront, the capital expenditure, now we'll just pay as we grow and that really facilitates. And another great example is you'll hear from a customer this afternoon, but you'll hear where one of the biggest benefits, they just acquired a $570 million company and their integration is going to be very seamless because of their investment in GreenLake. They're looking at the flexibility to add to GreenLake as a big opportunity to integrate for acquisitions. And finally is really, we see it really brings the cloud experience and as a service to our customers. And with HPE GreenLake, it brings the best of breed. So it's not just what HP has to offer when you look at hyperconverge, they have Nutanix, they have Cohesity. So I really believe it brings best of breed. So to net it out and close it out with our customers, thus far the customer experience has been exceptional. With GreenLake Central as the interface, customers have had a lot of success. We just had our first customer from about a year and a half ago, just re-up. And it was a highly competitive situation, but they just said, look, it's proven it works and it gives us that cloud experience. So had a lot of great success thus far and looking forward to more. Thank you. So Harry, I want to pick up on something CR said and get your perspectives. So when I talk to the C-suite, they do all want to hear about a cloud, they have a cloud agenda. And what they tell me is it's not just about their IT transformation, they want that, but they also want to transform their business. So I wonder if you could talk, Harry, about CompuGen's perspective on the potential business impact of GreenLake. And also, I'm interested in how you guys are thinking about workloads, how to manage work, how to cost optimize in IT, but also the business value that comes out of that capability. Yeah, so Dave, if you were to talk to CFO and I have the good fortune to talk to lots of CFOs, they want to pay the cost when they generate the revenue. They don't want to have all the cost up front and then wait for the revenue to come through. A good example of where that's happening right now is related to the pandemic. Employees that used to work at the office have now moved to working from home. And now they have to connect remotely to run the same applications. So use this thing called VDI, virtual interfacing, to allow them to connect to the applications that they need to run in the office. Don't want to get into too much detail, but to be able to support that from an at-home environment, they needed to buy a lot more computing capacity to handle this. Now, there's an expectation that hopefully six months from now, maybe sooner than that, people will start returning to the office. They may not need that capacity so they can turn down on the cost. And so the idea of having the capacity available when you need it, but then turning it off when you don't need it is really a benefit of a variable cost model. Another example that I would use is one in new development. If a customer is going to implement a new, let's say, line of business application, SAP is very, very popular. You know, it actually, unfortunately, takes six months to two years to actually get that application set up, install, validate, attest it, and then move through production. You know what used to happen before? They would buy all that capacity at front and it would basically sit there for two years. And then when they finally went to full production, then they were really getting value out of that investment, but they actually lost a couple of years of technology literally sitting almost idle. And so from a CFO perspective, his ability to support the development of those applications as he scales it, perfect. Green Lake is the ideal solution that allows him to do that. You know, technology has saved businesses in this pandemic. There's no question about it. And what Harry was just talking about with regard to VDI, I think about that. There's the dialing up and dialing down piece, which is awesome from an IT perspective. And then the business impact there is the productivity of the end users. And most C-suite executives I've talked to have said productivity actually went up during COVID with work from home, which is kind of astounding if you think about it. Ben, you know, Ben, we said Harry's been around for a long, long time. Certainly before all of us were born and it's gone through many, many industry transitions during our lifetimes. How does Arrow and how do your partners think about building cloud experiences and where does Green Lake fit in from your perspective? Yeah, great question. So from an Arrow perspective, when you think about cloud experience, and of course us taking a view as a distribution partner, we want to be able to provide scale and efficiency to our network of partners. So we do that through our arrows through a platform. Just a bit of, you know, a bit of a commercial. I mean, you get single quote, single bill auto provision, compared multi supplier, if you will, subscription management, utilization reporting from the platform itself. So if we pivot that directly to HPE, you're going to get a bit of a scoop here, Dave. So we're excited today to have Green Lake Live in our platform available for our partner community to consume, in particular, the Swift solutions that HPE has announced. So we're very excited to share that today. Maybe a little bit more on Green Lake. Now, I think at this point in time, it's differentiated in a sense that, if you think about some of the other offerings in the market today, and further with having the solutions themselves available in Aerosphere. So, you know, I would say, we identify the uniqueness and quickly partner with HPE to work with our Aerosphere platform. One other sort of unique thing is, you know, when you think about platform itself, you've got to give a consistent experience in the different geographies around the world. So, you know, we're available in North of 20 countries, there's thousands of resellers and transacting on the platform on a regular basis. And frankly, hundreds of thousands of end customers are leveraging today. So that creates an opportunity for both Aerop, HPE and our partner community. So, we're excited. You know, I just want to open it up. We don't have much time left, but thoughts on differentiation. You know, when people ask me, okay, what's really different about HPE and Green Lake as others, you know, are doing things with as a service? To me, it's a, I always say cultural. It starts from the top with Antonio. And it's like, the company's all in. But I wonder from your perspectives, because you guys are hands-on, are there other differentiable factors that you would point to? Let me just open that up to the group. Yeah, if I could make a comment, you know, Green Lake is really just the latest invocation of the as a service model. What does that mean? What that actually means is you have a continuous ongoing relationship with the customer. It's not a sell and forget. Not that we ever forget about customers, but there are highlights. Customer buys, it gets installed. And then for two or three years, you may have an occasional engagement with them, but it's not continuous. When you move to a Green Lake model, you're actually helping them manage that. You are in the core, in the heart of their business. No better place to be if you want to be sticky and you want to be relevant and you want to be always there for them. You know, I wonder if somebody else could add too, and in your remarks, from your perspective as a partner, because you know, hey, a lot of people made a lot of money selling boxes, but those days are pretty much gone. I mean, you have to transform into a service's mindset, but other thoughts? I think dad did that, Dave. I think Harry's right on, right? The way he positioned it's exactly where you get to own the customer. I think even another step back for us is we're able to have the business conversation without leading with what you just said. You don't have to lead with a storage solution. You don't have to lead with a compute. You know, you can really step back and have a business conversation. And we've done that where you don't even bring up HPE GreenLake until you get to the point where the customer says, so you can give me an on-prem cloud solution that gives me scalability, flexibility, all the things you're talking about. How does that work? Then when you bring up, it's all through this HPE GreenLake tool. It really gives you the ability to have a business conversation and you're solving the business problems versus trying to have a technology conversation. And to me, that's clear differentiation for HPE GreenLake. All right, guys. CR, Ron, Harry, Ben, great discussion. Thank you so much for coming on the program. Really appreciate it. Thanks for having us, Dave. Appreciate it, man. All right, keep it right there for more great content at GreenLake Day. Right back.