 Live from London, England, it's theCUBE. Covering Discover 2016 London. Brought to you by Hewlett Packard Enterprise. Now here's your host, Dave Vellante. We're back. This is theCUBE and we're witnessing the transformation not only of HPE, but the digital transformation of its customers. Xavier Pozonas here is the Vice President of Worldwide Indirect Digital Services at Hewlett Packard Enterprise. He's joined by Alexi Partenen, who's the Senior Vice President of Digital Services at Alzo. Good to see you, and Amin Ayub, who's the Head of Cloud Services at Injezat. Gentlemen, welcome to theCUBE. We all convene in London. It's good to see you. Thank you very much. So Xavier, let me start with you. What is this initiative all about? You guys talk about Cloud 28. It's a cloud of clouds, if you will. Help us understand what the purpose is. Yeah, thank you. And if you remember last year, exactly the same place I discovered, we announced the opening of Cloud 28 Plus as a community, a community of partners who would strengthen the ability of the customers to move to cloud computing, build or consume by publishing their cloud services into one single platform that would be shared between service providers, software vendors, resellers, and also service providers, including also some government entities like universities, all that for the benefit of the customer, user becoming consumers, that would be able to find the right services for their journey to cloud computing. So we opened last year, and we made this service catalog, I would say it live. And on top of that, so this year we have developed a digital marketing engine to support our partners to go to the market with Cloud 28 Plus. And we are more and more focused on getting the right content, the right applications for our customers that they can find inside the platform. Okay, so Alexi Alzo is obviously a partner in this whole ecosystem. Tell us a little bit about Alzo and how you fit into this community. So Alzo is a European B2B marketplace. We serve more than 100,000 customers in 15 countries. How Cloud 28 Plus is fitting to our strategy is give or take pretty perfectly. What we are trying to do is we're trying to find different types of cloud services and bring them together with our 100,000 customers so that they can pick and choose, select bundle, and create value-added services that they then deliver to their customers. So we are in an indirect business, so our customers are channel partners who then again deliver solutions to their end customers. So for us, Cloud 28 Plus is basically representing a great, let's say, selection of excellent services and excellent service providers, especially here in Europe for us, that is helping us to grow our ecosystem further. And I mean, InJazat does similar activities, is that right? Yeah, InJazat created actually to serve the public sector at the beginning. Now after 11 years of successful managed services as a provider in UAE, the business growth and the IT services become more bigger than we need to come up with the latest technology and offer our customers more reliable solutions and cost-adjective solution. Cloud 28 helped us to choose the right technology and partner with the right partners to deliver these new solutions based on state-of-the-art technologies to the customers and help the IT to move to our next level of services, IT services. And you sell directly or indirect as well? Both, actually. Okay, so you guys take this collection of services and package solutions for your partners and your customers. And you've been doing this for how long? Well, we've been in the market with our Cloud Marketplace, which is here the relevant part of our business, for already a bit more than two years. So in that sense, the collaboration with HP Enterprise, Hewlett-Parker Enterprise and with Cloud 28 Plus is a very good addition to expand our ecosystem further from where we have gone ourselves. So Xavier, what are some of the outcomes that you've seen as a result of this initiative? Well, you know, to be clear, after one year, one year of 330 members into Cloud 28 Plus, after one year, we have managed to publish all together built and consumed for the end-user customers more than 1,300 Cloud services. We deliver for the end-user customers capabilities from nearly 150 data centers, including 134 in Europe. It means that when we discuss with the customer that once we have their journey to Cloud Computing and then say to them, okay, where do you want to start with? If you want to make advisory, we have the right partners to do that. They can help you. Let's say that you are in Belgium. Who is serving you as a partner? Is this partner into Cloud 28 Plus? Yes, he's knowledgeable. He has access to all the resources of everybody. So he can really advise you to be the right thing. So let us be very clear. Hewlett-Parker Enterprise, according to the synergy analyst, is leading the pack in the market share on infrastructure in Europe, in the least on Africa, on its end-on-build and on-consume. It is because we have decided not to play alone, but to play with our partner ecosystem, like these great companies that are there, and with ISVs, and with also universities to develop intellectual property, that we're able to guide and to propose the right solution to our customers. Now, there is another thing that is very good for ourselves and for the customers out of Cloud 28 Plus. It is, I believe, and it will be more and more a great help for our customers in their move to digital transformation. I was in a meeting with a very large group in the US two weeks ago, and this large company has transformed their business model, and instead of doing physical things, they have packaged intellectual property, and now this was for their own business, and they want now to propose it to all the world, to all the vertical industries as a service, and they got to know that Cloud 28 Plus was existing, so they said, okay, I want to meet with you because I want you to potentially publish my intellectual property as a software as a service in your service catalog. All your partners will take advantage of that, and you will help me to find the right, trusted service providers that will be able to host my solutions everywhere on the planet. So, for you at Packard Enterprise, it's a great, great win because we are in our DNA. Our DNA is partners. It is working with partners, and I believe it is a fantastic equation that we found to take all the ecosystem, ISVs, distributors, resellers, service providers at one place and say, okay, guys, let us work together to make something which is valuable for our end user customers. And out of that, of course, our business is growing. Of course, and the business of our partners is growing because nobody plays a role on one plus one makes five. So I wanted to ask you as partners why HPE is because as Xavier was saying, is there a leader in infrastructure? Are you a consumer of Hewlett-Packard Enterprise infrastructure? Why HPE? Well, Hewlett-Packard Enterprise for us is a very strong partner. As I mentioned, we are serving, using the same synergy here, we are serving a base of more than 100,000 channel partners. Many of these channel partners are also partners of Hewlett-Packard Enterprise. So basically what we are adding to the offering is that not only offering, let's say the traditional offering from Hewlett-Packard Enterprise, but now also looking at the Cloud 28 plus ecosystem of different kind of service providers, as you're giving great example, like these are individual service providers around the world, who then we can onboard into our catalog and basically make accessible for our huge base of channel partners. So basically what we're doing is, we're adding value to the Cloud 28 plus by bringing like a commercial opportunity of reaching to one of the largest channel partner bases in Europe. And similar, I mean, do you consume HPE infrastructure? Of course, we are partners with HPE before even we become a Cloud 28 members. We used to use the hardware and software for HPE and we are actually in Middle East considered a model office for HPE for some of the technologies. It's like a showcase. So adding to value, it's an added value to our customers to extend to the Cloud services, having the same wide range of technologies coming from HPE and bundle it on a Cloud offering and offer the platform as service and software service based on HPE technology, it actually enrich our catalog and our portfolio to our end user and its customers. So the reason why this is an interesting discussions over here is because with the spin merges and moving the DS piece out and now the software piece out, everybody says, okay, HPE, they're now a hardware company. But we're not really talking about hardware. However, power is all. So we're talking about value add on top of. Value add, value add, value add, value add. So my principles are very easy. We need to answer the customer needs. And in fact, with the most near to our customers, most of the time it is our partners because everybody has been thinking, okay, public cloud, everybody will go there and connect full stop. It does not work. If you have not a value added reseller discussing with the customer, what is his problem on security, on data management for this legacy, the move to cloud native development, microservices and so on. This is the person that will do it. So for this value added reseller or system integrator, they need to have an easy portfolio of capabilities in order they can make that job the right way. In the past, it was a server, a storage, a network. Today, on top of that, it is storage, server, network. Oh, can I propose some consume cloud services? Oh, by the way, Alzo is there. Good. Can I propose some regulated security, secured cloud services in Middle East because we have something specific? Oh, in jazz, that is there. This is how we want to play. And we are really supported also. And I should mention it on top of these great partners working with us technology partners because Intel is part of the game. And you know that their trusted platform to secure the cloud is really promoted inside that 28 plus. We have also Docker with a great, great active member of the community to help everybody to make things happen. Or Muko another one coming from Canada supporting us also. So at the end, it's not a question of hardware. It is a question, hardware is in the center for unit backup enterprise. It is not necessarily in the center of a value added reseller with just in front at the end of the customer who will answer to the customer as what is your business needs that I need to solve? And out of the equation to solve the business needs, there will be hardware, there will be software, there will be public cloud services. There would be hosted private cloud services. On all of that, out of cloud enterprise, they can get it. So we ease the process for everybody to engage on the solution selling and how to solve the, to help the customer to move to their digital transformation. Well, I'm sure, this is a US centric position, but I wonder if it's similar in Europe and in the Middle East and Asia. The box sellers in the channel still comprise probably 70% of the revenue in the channel, but it's not growing. And all channel participants that I speak to are trying to transform to become value added in some way, shape, or form. Is it similar in the? That's similar, yes. So everybody is looking into those opportunities and everybody can read the studies, everybody can read what's happening in the market, right? What is important to understand here is that what Hewlett Pocket Enterprise is doing greatly through the Cloud 28 Plus platform is actually helping us others to enable our partners. So basically in our interest is to make sure that as many services as possible from the Cloud 28 Plus network are presented in our marketplace. So that we can present as many of them as possible to our 100,000 plus channel partners in Europe. It's a true win-win scenario because in the end we have that channel partner who is transforming, who is helping their end customer to transform their business, right? So we need to make sure as a chain that we enable these channel partners to help their customers to transform. What I think I'm hearing though is you're also redefining the notion of solutions. Because it used to be solutions where SAP, Oracle, Microsoft, VMware was a solution, right? That's almost table stakes now. That's sort of, it's almost like boxes, right? Is that right? And how are you looking at solutions? So now currently the IT solution is not limited to an infrastructure you deliver to the customer. The customer always for your added value to enable him to transform actually the IT from a cost center to a business, to business added value to the organization. So with the Cloud 28 we are able to offer the customer or the end user more than the traditional way of having a service where he can consume and we enable him to go to the market faster than the traditional infrastructure delivery and we give him the ability to become a reseller to have an internal of his organization. So that system is flexible enough to enable the IT services or IT organization to become a reseller for internal entities or internal organization. There's music to the channel's ears. So, Xavier, is this, it's nice that you do this for Amia, what about the rest of the world? Well, you know, this is a big topic that has been, that is going to be there here at Discover. So we have taken the decision because you have seen in one year what we have done and we have also request from some other players outside Europe to join, of course. So we have already partners from Canada who are there like Ormuko, for instance as technology partners, but this afternoon Cloud 28 Plus is open for business for every single partner across the world. So we decided really to make it available for every single service provider, software vendors, value-added reseller, SI system integrator on universities to join the pack. They will find here, and I'm used to say that to all the newcomers, they will find it what they want to give because joining Cloud 28 Plus is not to take, it is to give on take. It is at the heart of the philosophy I want for this platform. We have been successful up till now because we were a community and we are a community where everybody is respecting everybody. I don't know if you are aware, but we have even an advisory board. We do not as HPs try Cloud 28 Plus, we are a sponsor and we enable, but we have an advisory council of 15 people representing all the categories of partners. So we have built that in EMEA and we are going to expand it in the other regions respecting the community place that may be the one of America, North America, may be different from Europe, may be different from Asia, or may be different from Latin America. But we'll have one single catalog because I believe that if we are able to propel all the services around the globe that have been developed by there and there, everybody will make more money at the edge for all the participants and the customer will be the winner because they will have all the benefits of everything that we are doing. So already, Amzio is a service provider in the Netherlands has been propelling their offer in New York as a member of Cloud 28 Plus. They have opened a data center in New York City and they are proposing a SAS Institute data mining as a service from New York, it's done. And you have a service provider, DSM, who has been joining Cloud 28 Plus recently. They have data centers in Florida and Texas, in Georgia, and they are joining the club. So more to come and it's open for business. Yeah, 330 members and 1300 services are going to explode now. We hope so, we hope so, and all our partners are working on that. And that's great news for the whole partnership, right? That's exactly what basically has been the, let's say, storyline from the very beginning and it has been super exciting to work together with Xavier on building that and together with other partners and then we're very excited to see what there is to come because as we all understand, the more we have services available through the Cloud 28 Plus, we can offer to our channel partners the more solutions they can then again bring to their end customers. Yeah, for actually one of the good benefit of Cloud 28 that you don't have an end of your thinking. So it allows you to grow as long as every time you have new partners, it's through new ideas, you explore new opportunities and actually it's expanding. So this is the good of Cloud 28. You always keep updated with our technologies and with the different market place and market segments so you can penetrate more market segments. Great. All right, we have to leave it there gentlemen. Congratulations on the success ecosystem. We can't underscore the importance enough, fantastic story. Thanks again for coming on theCUBE. Thank you very much. Thank you. Thank you so much. You're welcome, keep it right there. Everybody will be back with our next guest. This is theCUBE, we're live from Excel London. Right back.