 Live, from the Mandalay Bay Convention Center in Las Vegas. It's theCUBE, covering VMworld 2016. Brought to you by VMware and its ecosystem sponsors. Now here's your host, John Furrier. Hey, welcome back, everyone. We're live here in Las Vegas, the Mandalay Bay at the hang space at VMworld 2016 here in Las Vegas. I'm John Furrier, John Troy, Tech Reckoning. You're watching theCUBE. The next guest is Patrick Osborne with HPE Enterprise. HPE Enterprise, welcome back to theCUBE. Great to see you. Thank you so much. Yeah, always great to be back here on theCUBE. Got to love the energy day two. Rockin' tonight's going to be the big night, but you know, day three, wall to wall coverage. Big, last night's just an opening night, you know how it is, everyone sees each other. Great show here at VMworld. I'll see the open ecosystem. Number one message we heard out of Michael Dell's mouth. Pat Kelsinger's banging hard, CrossCloud, which has been an HPE strategy, quite frankly, for multiple years. Yep. You guys are familiar with all the storage. Talk about your view on that ecosystem. What's going on? Yeah, I mean, it's a huge, very important ecosystem for us at HPE. We've been a partner of VMware for, I think we're going on 16, 17 years at this point, right? So we are definitely one of the largest infrastructure partners for VMware. And it's part of, from a storage perspective, it's a huge part of our ecosystem. So everything from software defined, hyper-converged, three-part all-flash, all the data protection offerings, a lot of that sits within the VMware ecosystem. So, huge partner for us, and I don't see that changing. Okay, so give us the update on the storage world. Obviously, with the keynotes today you saw, VSAN is exploding with the VMworld. You're in product management, so you have to kind of set the roadmap. Any changes, has there been a lot of movement on the roadmap relative to the key features that customers want? Obviously, flash is key, we see that. But what's going on on the product management side, because it's kind of like a moving train, but it seems to be gravitating around software for virtualized storage, or storage as a service. What's the main points on that you're seeing? The shifts and where is it settling? Yeah, so from my perspective, from a product management view, we're more of a software development organization in storage than we ever have been. So the days of bending sheet metal and qualifying parts and making custom hardware is that's not the focus, right? The focus is in the software. So when they talk about hyper-converged, the values in the software, even when we talk about great operating systems and platforms like 3par, all the value of that is in the software. So from us, we got to keep pace with some of the innovations there, and it's clear that customers want the option of storage co-located with their compute. And we do that through partnerships with VMware. We have our own intellectual property, our own offerings around store virtual and some of the hyper-converged offerings we have. So for me, from a product management standpoint, that is definitely shifting into software very quickly. Talk a little more about store virtual. I'm very fascinated by the hyper-converged market, how it's developing, the kind of customers that you're seeing out there. What are you seeing as the target market and the roadmap here that we're seeing in front of us hyper-converged and store virtual in particular? Sure, store virtual is a key component of that roadmap going forward for us. We use it as an enabling technology for a number of form factors, which is really important for us. It's not just a virtual storage appliance that you bring the software and then you bring your own x86 servers with different kind of media. We use it for, for example, like two weeks ago, we just launched an ARM-based, scalable iSCSI and fiber channel array that's based on store virtual. We can take that same intellectual property, you can build your own software-defined hyper-converged platform with that same IP. We actually take that and embed it in appliances. So we have our own hyper-converged offerings like the HC380. So for us, it's like this core piece of our software-defined strategy that has a bunch of different formats that meet different use cases for customers. In terms of the appliance kind of that market, how are you seeing, what is the market for that? What kind of customers are you seeing for that kind of approach? So store virtual has been around for some time. We've got a number of deployments. In different incantations, we probably have over 250,000 deployments of that technology in the field. And what we see is that some customers who have gone and, let's say, built their own hyper-converged, right? So they're aggregating storage across multiple servers for virtualized storage. That takes a degree of work to do that on your own, right? So some people like to do that, some people don't. And then they move to an appliance experience, which for the HC380, for example, you can have that thing up and running and provisioning VMs in 15 minutes. So having the ability to deliver from the factory at rack scale a number of hyper-converged appliances for folks that are doing it at that scales is pretty important, right? So we see customers who want that ease of use at simplicity. You don't get as many knobs, right? And customization, right? But at the end of the day, do you really need that? Right, so the 15-minute no-nerd knob thing. How important is that to you in terms of product management? Is that the future of the direction? For some customers, yes, right? So it depends on which kind of customer you're talking about in which segment, right? If I'm, let's say, a smaller customer, or I'd say like, or even a remote office, you know, that doesn't have a lot of trained IT staff and they really know, for example, VMware, right? You want to make it as simple as possible. You don't want to break context out of the UI that you use the most. You want to be able to do all those tasks there. So from a simplicity standpoint, that's what you need. When you need scale, right? And you need to be able to tune things for specific workloads, then you want knobs, right? And to be able to provide both those form factors is kind of unique for store virtual. How do you guys approach now the VMware ecosystem as it's evolving with the cloud? You saw IBM cloud on stage, Salesforce on there today. I'll see, very open. Open ecosystem is what they're really, really working on. What areas are you guys tweaking with VMware going forward? What's the key intersection point? So for us, we want to provide customers choice on the platforms. So you are very well aware of our compute line, right? We sell a DL380 every time a baby's born. And so we want to make sure that for our customers who are choosing VMware, our infrastructure is the first of choice, right? Servers, networking, storage. And we want to put as much context into the VMware management plane, to make that very simple for them to use and stand up. In terms of strategy around some of the areas of plug, it's around the management. So being able to plug in to our one view, infrastructure management plane, being able to support all those functions within VMware, it's pretty important to us. In terms of the VMware ecosystem and training, enablement, buying center, are you as a product manager having to direct more of your attention again to the virtualization admin versus maybe 10 years ago it was the storage admin? Absolutely, so the days of dedicated storage admin, especially a dedicated backup, data protection admin, even some of the folks on the networking side now, you have to be able to provide context within a virtualized world. So a lot of that stuff is moving to other areas where you have eye and screen capture in different places than you would break context and go into a storage widget or a networking widget or even go to your favorite backup software. So what we're seeing at HP is that customers are coming to us buying more vertically integrated systems. So the whole kit in Kabooda, say I want a vertically integrated system from HP, I want to buy another one from another portfolio vendor and for us, from a product management standpoint, making all of those pieces work together seamlessly is the challenge, right? You want to drive as much complexity out of that as possible where I don't have to rack servers, I don't have to worry about fiber channel or iSCSI networking or VLAN tagging or all the things that go along with deploying a complex three tiered architecture. So from a product manager standpoint, it's my goal to reduce those clicks, you know, keep the eyeballs focused on one simple Chris UI, that's the holy grail. So what about the customer environment right now? What are the top conversations you're having with customers? You can boil them down and what's the pattern that you're seeing, is it changing, is the narrative changing? Obviously you guys have a great story with composable infrastructure. Love that messaging came out of HP Discover this year. What are some of the substantive conversations? Can you rank them, stack rank them, or have you followed the pattern? People, right? So I need to do more with less from an FTE perspective. So I need to manage an order of magnitude more infrastructure per FTE than I was doing three years ago. That's a big one. The second one is time to value. So the days of entering a service ticket to get a full application stack to test, your app, your middleware, your database, your storage, that can't take 47 days anymore. You want to be able to submit that ticket and have an environment for your developers up and running within hours, if not instantaneously, because that's what they expect from the cloud. So that's a challenge for us. We're getting some tweets here, some direct messages. One is, I think this guy plays the jazz saxophone. So the question is, did playing jazz help your career in storage? Actually, so yes, very much so. On two fronts, I play a lot of music, so I'm up on stage a lot, so you'd better be able to bring it. When you got to bring the heat, you got to bring the heat. And then for jazz, it's definitely, you learn the changes, right? You learn the melody, but you have to improvise, right? So at the end of the day, up in front of customers, and obviously with two heavy weights like yourself, you got to be able to do some tap dancing. That's awesome. Well, hey, you know what? The cube is like a jazz band. You're doing great, stepping up on the big stage. Yeah, it's always good to sit in, you know? Just kind of riff and see where the conversation goes. That's our style. Absolutely. Going with the changes, no real agenda. Just kind of get down. Yeah, it's a good opportunity. Good to see you. Congratulations on all your success. Love seeing you in person, Patrick. Thanks for sharing the insights and storage. Final word, what's your takeaway from VMworld? Just share with the folks what you're going to walk away with this year from the show. Every year I come here, I think, what else could you possibly do? Right? You've seen it all, but every year I come here and it's, you know, whether it's a take on some older architectures, like server side caching with, you know, a company like Datrium, you know, for example, or you see, you know, high end storage sort of reincarnated. You always see some new stuff and people are doing new things where you didn't think there would be any space for any more innovation in this. So that's, for me, as a kind of a nerd and a product manager and a tech geek, I love that, just seeing the new stuff every year. Yeah, it's definitely a geek culture here at VMworld. Sure, that's why I love it. And we are here breaking it down inside theCUBE in the hang space on day two of VMworld 2016. I'm John Troy. We'll be back with more, you're watching theCUBE.