 Welcome to theCUBE's coverage of HPE Discover 2021. I'm Lisa Martin. Robert Christensen joins me, one of our alumni, the VP of strategy in the office of the CTO at HPE. Robert, it's great to see you. Welcome back to the program. It's nice being here, Lisa. Thank you so much for having me. So here we are still in this virtual world. Things are opening up a little bit, which is nice. But one of the things I'm excited to talk to you about today is edge to cloud from the customer's perspective. Obviously that's why HPE does what it does for its customers. So let's talk about some of the things that you see from your perspective with respect to data. Can't have a CUBE conversation without talking about data. There's more and more of it value, but getting access to it quickly, getting access to it in real time and often cases to make data-driven decisions is a challenging thing to do. Talk to me about what you see from the customer's lens. Well, the customer at a very highest level from the board level on down, they're saying, hey, what is our data strategy? How are we going to put the value of data in place? Are we going to have it manifest its value in an internal fashion where it makes us run better as an organization? Can we get cost improvements? Can we move quicker with that? And then can we monetize that data if it's like very specific to an industry like healthcare or a farmer or something like that? Can we expose that data to the rest of the world and give them access into what we call like data sets? And there's a lot of that going on right now too. So we're seeing these two different angles about how they're going to manage and control that data. And you were talking about, and you mentioned it, the edge-related focus around that, the edges where business is done is where people actually do the transaction, whether it's in a healthcare, like in a hospital or a manufacturing facility, et cetera. And then, but that data that they're using at that location is really important to make a decision at that location. They can't send it back to a cloud. They can't send it back to someplace, wait for a decision to happen, and then shoot it back again and say, hey, stop the production line because we found a defect, right? You need to act at that moment, which the clients are saying, hey, can you improve my reliability? Can you give me better SLAs? Can you improve the quality of my products? Can you improve healthcare in a hospital by immediate decisions? And that is a data problem, and that requires the movement of compute and networking and storage and fundamentally the core piece of the HPEs world, but in addition to that, the software necessary to take the action on that data when they detect that there's some action in these to be taken. And as I mentioned a minute ago, real time and we've learned in the last 15 months, plus one of the things we learned is for a lot of cases, access to real time data is no longer a nice to have. It's really going to be something, an element that separates those that succeed versus those that aren't as competitive. But I want to talk about data from a consumption perspective, consumers, producers, obviously needing to ensure that the data consumers have what they need. What is your thought when you talk with customers, the consumers versus the producers? Yeah, that's a great question Lisa. One of the key fundamental areas that HPE and the office of the CTO has really been focused on over the last six months is something that we call data spaces. And that is putting in place a platform, a set of services that connect data consumers with data producers. And when you think about that, there really is nothing new. I mean, if you go all the way back, if you've been around for a while, you remember the company called TRW and they used to have credit reporting and they used to sell that stuff, right? And then it moved into Experian and those things. But you've got Bloomberg and Lexus, Nexus and all these companies that sell data. And they've been doing it, but it's very siloed. And so the explosion of data, the value of boldness, the value of the data for the consumers of it has put the producers in a position where they can't readily be discovered. And whether it be a private source of data like an IoT device in an industrial control or a set of data that might say, hey, here's credit card fraud data on a certain geography. Those sets need to be discovered, curated and be made available to those who would want that. For example, the fact that wanna know how a IoT device is working inside an industrial control or a company who's trying to lower their fraud rates on credit card transactions like in stadiums or something like that. And so this discoverability in this space or what you just talked about is such a core piece of what we're working on right now. We have our strategy is not only to just work on what HPE has to bring that and manifest that to the marketplace, but more importantly, how are we working with our partners to really bridge that gap and bring that next generation of services to those clients that can make those connections? So connecting and facilitating collaboration, absolutely key as well as that seamless flow of data sharing without constraints. How are customers working with HPE and some of your partners to be able to create a data strategy, launch it and start gleaning value from data faster than they can't before? Yeah, this is the big question, right? Because it's a maturity curve. Organizations are in various states of what we call data maturity or data management maturity. They can be in very early stages, what we consider, they just more worried about just maintaining the lights on DR strategies and make sure the data doesn't go away versus all the way through a whole cycle where they're actually governing it and putting it into what I call those discoverable buckets that are made available. And there's a whole life cycle about that. And so we see a big opportunity here for our AAMPS and other professional services organizations to help people get up that maturity curve. But they also have to have the foundational tools necessary to make that happen. And this is really where the Esmerell product line of software applications really shines is being able to give that undercarriage that's necessary to help that data maturity and the growth of that client to meet those data needs. And we see the data fabric being a key element to that for that distributed model allowing people to get access and availability to have a highly redundant, highly durable data fabric. And then to build applications, specifically these data intensive applications on top of that with the Esmerell platform all the way into our GreenLake solutions. So it's quite a journey here, Lisa. I want to just point to the fact that HPE has done a really, really good job of positioning itself for the explosion of all of these data intensive AIML workloads that are making their way into every single conversation, every single enterprise to this day that wants to take advantage of the value of the data they have and to augment that data through other sources. One, when you think about data intensive applications the first one that pops into my mind is Uber and it's one of those applications that we just expect, we kind of think of it as a taxi service when really it's logistics and transportation but all of the data on the back end that it is organizing to find the ride for me at my location to take me where I'm going the explosion of data intensive applications is great but there's also so much more demand from consumers whether we're in business or we're consuming in our personal lives. It's so true and that's a very popular example and you think about the real time necessity of what's the traffic patterns at the time I order my thing is it going to route me the right way? Those are, that's a very real consumer facing one but if we click into our clients and where HPE very much is like the backbone of the global economy, we provide one third of the compute for the global economy and it's a staggering stat if you really think about it. Our clients, I was just talking with a client here earlier it's a very, very large financial services company and they have 1200 data sets that they have been selling to their clients globally and a lot of these clients want to augment that data with their existing real time data to come up with a solution, okay? And so they merge it and they can, they determine some value through a model and AI model. And so we're working hand in hand with them right now to give them that backbone so that they can deliver data sets into these other systems and then make sure they get controlled and secured so that the company we're working with our client has a deep sense of security that data set is not going to find itself out into the wild somewhere, right? And uncontrolled for a number of reasons, right? From security and governance point but the number of use cases Lisa are as infinite as the number of opportunities for people see value in business today. When you're talking about 1200 data sets that a company is selling and of course there are many, many data sets that many types of companies consume. How do you work with them to ensure that they don't just proliferate silos but that they get more of a unified data repository that they can act on? Yeah, that's a great question. So, you know, a key tenant of the strategy at HPE is open source, right? So we believe in a hybrid multi-cloud environment meaning that as long as we all agree that we are going to standardize on open source technologies and APIs we will be able to write and build applications that can natively run on any abstract platform. So for example, it's very important that we containerize for example and then we use storage and data tools that adhere to open standards. So if you think about that if you write a Spark application you want that Spark application potentially to run on any of the hyperscalers the Amazons or the Microsofts or the GCPs or you want it to run on-premises and specifically like on HPE equipment. But the idea here is I consider one of our clients right now let me think about that. One of our clients specifically asked that question that you just said. They said, hey, we are building out this platform this next generation platform and we don't want the lock-in. We want to create that environment where that data and the data framework so they use very specific open source data frameworks and they use very specific application frameworks the software from the open source community we were able to meet that through the Elzmeral platform giving them a very high availability five nines high availability redundant, redundant geographically two geographic data centers to give them that security that they're looking for. And because of that where it has opened so many other doors for us to walk in with a cloud strategy that is an alternative not just the one bet to public cloud but you have another opportunity to bring a cloud strategy on-premises that is compatible with cloud native activities that are going on the public cloud. And this is at the heart of HPE strategy. I think it's just it's been paying off it continues to pay off. We just keep investing and keep moving down that path. I think we're going to be doing really well. It sounds to me that the strategy that HPE is developing is highly collaborative and synergistic with your customers. Talk to me a little bit about that especially in the last year as we've seen a massive acceleration in digital transformation the rapid pivot to work from home the necessity to collaborate electronically. Talk to me a little bit about that yin and yang with HPE and its customers in terms of your strategy. Yeah, well, you know, I think when COVID hit one of the very first things that just took off was VDI, right? So, you know, the Rohit Dixit and I were talking on a podcast we had earlier around the work from home strategy that was implemented almost immediately. Well, we had it already in the can we already were doing it for many clients already but it went from like a three priority to a 12 you know, 10 being the max, right? You know, super, super charged up on how do we get work from home secured work from home applications and stuff in the hands of people doing, you know when data sensitivity is super important, VDI kicks in that's that's on that side. But then if you start looking at the digital the digital transformation that has to happen in the supply chain that's going on right now the opening up of our economies it's been various starts and stops if you look around the globe the supply chains have absolutely gone under a huge amount of pressure because in like in the United States everybody wants everything now because things are starting to open up, right? I was talking to a rest a meat packing company in a restaurant business a little while ago and they said everybody wants to order the barbecue now we can't get the meat for the barbecues, right? Cause everybody's going to the barbecues and so the supply I just a multi-billion dollar industry supplying meat to all of the rest of the countries and stuff like that and so they don't have optics into that supply chain today so they're immediately having to go through a digitization process the transformation in something as what you would call as low tech as delivering meat. So no industry is immune, none anywhere in this whole process and it will continue to evolve as we exit and change how we live our life going into these next couple of years I think it's going to be phenomenal just to watch. Yeah, it's one of the things I call a COVID catalyst some of the silver linings that have come out of this cause I wouldn't have thought of the meat packing industry as a technology field as well, but now thanks to you I will last question for you when customers in this very dynamic world in which we're still living talk about edge to cloud are they working with you to develop a cloud initiatives cloud mandates, cloud everywhere? And if so, how do you help them start? Yeah, that's great question. So that again, it's like back in the data model that everybody has a different degree or a starting point that they are that they will engage us with a strategy specifically with what you're talking about almost everybody already has a cloud strategy, right? So they may be in different maturity levels with that cloud strategy and there's almost always a cloud group. Now, historically HPE has not had much of a foot in the cloud group because they never historically looked at us as that HPE as a cloud company but what's happened over the last couple of years with the acceleration of the acceptance of cloud on premises in Green Lake specifically and the introduction of Esmerell and the cloud native infrastructure services and pass layer stuff that's coming up through the Esmerell product into our clients. It's immediately opened the door for conversations around cloud that is available for what is staying on premises which is in excess of 70% of the applications today. Now, if you were to take that now and extend that into the edge conversation, what if you were able to take a smaller form factor of a Green Lake cloud and push it more closer to an edge location while still giving the similar capabilities cloud native functions that you had before? When we're provocative with clients in that sense, they suddenly open up and see the art of the possible, right? And so this is where we are really, really breaking down a set of paradigms of what's possible by introducing, not just from the silicon all the way up but the set of services all the way to the top of stack, to the actual application that they'll give me running and we say, hey, we can offer it to you in as a pay as you go model, we can get you the consumption models that are necessary that let you buy it the same way as the cloud offers it but more importantly, we'll be able to run it for you and provide you an abstraction out of that model. So you don't have to send your people out into the field to do these things. We have the software, the tools and the systems necessary to manage it for you. But the last part, at least I want to be really, really focused on, when clients are writing that application for the edge that matters, okay? They are putting it into new cloud native architectures, containers, microservices, they're using solid pipelines, development pipelines. They've implemented what they call their dev ops or their data ops practices in field, in country, if you would say, that's where we shine. And so we have a really, really good conversation to start there. And so how we start that is we arrive with a set of blueprints to help them establish what that roadmap looks like and then our professional services staffs or ANPS groups around the globe are really, really set up well to help them take that trip. Wow, that's outstanding, Robert. I, we could have a whole conversation on HPE's transformation in and of itself. That was my first job in tech was at Hewlett Packard back in the day. But this has been really interesting, really getting it your vision of the customer's experience and the customer's perspective from the office of the CTO. Great to talk to you, Robert. Thank you for sharing all that you did. This could have been a part two conversation. Well, hopefully then we'll do a part three and four here as the months go by. So I look forward to seeing you again, Lisa. That's a deal. All right, for Robert Christensen, I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching theCUBE's coverage of HPE Discover 2021.