 Live from Denver, Colorado, it's theCUBE. Covering Commvault Go 2019, brought to you by Commvault. Welcome back to theCUBE's coverage of Commvault Go 19. I'm Lisa Martin with Stu Miniman, and Stu and I are pleased to welcome to theCUBE. For the first time, we have Chris Powers, VP and General Manager at HPE. Chris, welcome. Thank you very much. Thank you. I was telling Stu earlier, you know, longtime watcher, first-time participant. All right, well, awesome. We love that. So here we are in your native area of Colorado. We were just talking about the weather, which is probably a topic. If you live or visit Colorado, that is always an interesting conversation because it changes so rapidly. Exactly. Because I said snow last week with beautiful weather, well, at least so far this week, but I only got in last night. Well, stick around to this weekend because we'll have some more snow. All right, I brought some boots. So Chris, talk to us. You've been a longtime HPE guy. Let's have just kind of a status of the HPE-Convault relationship, the partnership. What's going on there? Absolutely. So, Convault is a key important partner to HPE. We actually have an arrangement via a capability we call HPE Complete, by which we actually skew up Convault products. We go through the background working with Convault, making sure that we have application integration so that customers have a lot of confidence in that. And then a customer or a partner can buy a complete solution on a single PO from both companies. So it really provides that ease of transaction, ease of evaluation, and then confidence in the delivered solution that they purchase from HPE. So confidence and simplification are great from doing a transaction. Talk to us about how Convault and HPE are working together to really help customers in this multi-cloud world that a lot of them are living in, have confidence that they're able to access secure data in a way that is as simple as it can be. Well, there's a couple things. We have integration with Convault products with a number of our, across a number of our platforms. Convault is the backbone for our HPE GreenLake backup as a service product, right? And what that gives is the confidence and the capabilities of having a cloud-like experience for your backup environment, but it's managed and controlled on-premises. So it brings the benefits of both. With a Convault IntelliSnap technology, we've got that integrated in with our HPE Primera, three-par and nimble platforms. And that makes snapshot management much more seamless and much more of a core portion of their data protection strategies. So there's a number of connection points that we have, and we will continue over time to just continue to broaden that exploit where the opportunities exist. Yeah, I just had a conversation with Craig Rutledge last week about GreenLake. Bring us inside your customers and how some of their buying patterns are changed. GreenLake's actually been around for about nine years. I hadn't been aware that it had been around that long, but cloud and as-a-service Convault's talking about there's a new SaaS offering that they have. Storage used to be just something you thought about with a box now. Software is one of the key delivery mechanisms for how I manage and deal with my data. That's correct. A lot of consumption models changed quite a bit over time, and there are more and more, we're seeing more and more of our customers really being more interested in not purchasing the box. Really, I mean, the box delivers something. And really that's a shifting towards, more towards, purchasing what is being delivered, right? And so that's why these as-a-service models are really that significant. They're a market changer in a couple of aspects. First of all, it changes economics from a consumption standpoint about what are you purchasing? Second thing it does is it pushes back onto the vendor, more of the responsibility of the day-to-day maintenance and the activities, right? It offloads. And so you can be using these IT compute storage services really focusing on them to bring your business outcome as opposed to spending a lot of your time and energy managing the infrastructure itself. Chris, of course we've heard a lot about data this week. One area I'm surprised I haven't heard about it much. Maybe I just haven't been in the right conversations is AI. And I know, I've talked to your peer, Patrick Osborne, quite a few times about how AI is impacting your portfolio. Maybe help us understand how it fits into this whole discussion. Certainly, it's really in two forms. One is AI to support your infrastructure management itself. So a key component of our strategy is something we call the global intelligence engine. And that brings with it a combination of really monitoring what's happening within the environment, creating from that a set of, think of it, fingerprints associated with workloads. Such that we can begin to trace and understand based upon those fingerprints if there's something changing in the environment applying rules-based AI to understand what an immediate type of response is. So that's how we're using it to simplify infrastructure management because it is amazingly complex to what it used to be years ago. The second way, though, is actually bringing to market capabilities that support AI-type workloads. And that's a stuff that Patrick's really focused on with our MapR, with our BlueData integrations. And it's really, so it's bringing both of those sets to marketplace. One, to help customers better manage their environment. And then one, effectively being able to utilize those tools to then manage their businesses. And this is part of your, the Intelligent Data Platform strategy that HPE is talking about. Can you kind of walk us through that IDP pitch? Absolutely. So first and foremost, it starts with workloads, right? And it's workload optimized systems. That being either from your primary, from your file-based, from your object and secondary, all the way to managing your cloud capabilities. And it's providing that workload mobility, data mobility across those platforms, right? We layer on top of that, this notion of the global intelligence engine, right? That I've already spoken to. And then what we have is effectively been able to make sure that we have SaaS-type plugins for infrastructure management, right? Plugins and Kubernetes, Chef, Puppet, and so forth. And then also optimizing from an application standpoint, what is necessary from a workload standpoint, from a data protection standpoint. And all of this then focused at consumers, right? Be it the data administrators, be it the line of business owners, being the IT infrastructure ops people. So it's really this layered set of capabilities, but it starts and ends with workloads, right? We don't talk about platforms, it's really, how do you optimize the capability set for a specific set of workloads? Recognizing that the data associated with those workloads needs to transition over time. Chris, wondering if you have any customer examples that might be able to illustrate the power of HPE plus Commvault. Certainly, just reflecting back to the backups as a service. Via HPE Greenlight, we have a number of large customers that utilize Greenlight for their core of their operational activities, right? Just recently we took down a number of large deals in Europe utilizing HPE with Commvault to provide that in a backup environment managed by HPE Greenlight. Yeah, and from the value of doing that is that obviously their simplicity, does that have an organizational change to how they think about their data protection once they leverage Greenlight? Well, definitely upon when they're leveraging Greenlight because no longer do you have this army of backup administrators sitting within your own company, you are procuring a service, right? You're no longer having to take care of it and manage that infrastructure be responsible for it. And we take upon ourselves then to also make sure that that infrastructure is being continuously updated, refreshed, basically taking that headache of IT management away and focusing on the business outcome. Yeah, I'm wondering, you could probably give a good, kind of long-term view of this. How do you see that as different from, say the previous trend of outsourcing that we had gone through? So I think that trend of outsourcing, a lot of times that turned into, once you played it out over a couple of years, turned into more of a game of asset sweating, right? And so this notion of continually keeping up from a serviceability standpoint, optimizing the capabilities, I think it was more focused from an asset utilization play as opposed to delivering a service. I think the real change now is delivering a service and what does that involve as opposed to, like I said, arbitrating and taking advantage of an asset play. So when we're talking, you mentioned the term business outcomes a second ago and my ears perked up. So whether you're talking about, whether it's a large retailer or it's a bank, for example, talk to us about some of the business outcomes that you guys together are helping customers achieve. You talked about kind of the consumer focus, but in terms of kind of like distilling that down to how an organization is maybe delivering new products and services because not only is the data protected and it's available, it's recoverable, they've got the AI to be able to glean insights from it. Favorite story, maybe that shows like business transformation by leveraging HPE and Combat together? So I think the best stories there are really in regards to, given that we've freed up resources from that day-to-day operational activities and coupled together with, as you mentioned, that AI type understanding the insights, what it's really doing is allowing companies to really accelerate from a flexibility standpoint. It's that notion of flexibility and speed to be able to react quickly. And we're seeing that occur across a large number of customers and that's really what's differentiating customers. In this new, what we call the intelligence era, it's that speed and agility to adopt those new quick, adopt new business models, new opportunities, quickly change on a dime to recognize when things are changing and then chase after and take the opportunity. So as we're here at day one of CommBallGo 19, this is their fourth event, but a lot has changed for them since Sanjay Marchandani came on board just about nine months or so ago. Just curious, you've been a partner a long time. Your perspectives on maybe this new convolt or this convolt 2.0 that you're seeing that HPE is partnering with? So I think it's refreshing, right? It builds into it a new energy, right? A new sense of focus and it's really, I think, as all of us within the IT industry are recognizing, it's this whole notion about service and customer, it's really it's a customer experience and the service enablement that we provide from infrastructure capabilities. I mean, we are providing the tools to allow these companies to accelerate. And so I think it's really great. It's really great, you know? Companies need to go through a transformation, new leaders come in, breathe some different viewpoints and so forth and I think it's very healthy. Cultural change is always challenging to do, but in some cases, like you said, it's refreshing. They've also done a lot, even with the launch of Metallic yesterday, just in terms of how quickly we're seeing them go from ideas to conceiving technologies and delivering them quite quickly to not just their kind of sweet spot of the enterprise, the large global enterprises, but down into the mid-market. So in terms of that speed and agility, I think they're articulating that and showing that pretty well as to your point, customers have to have the ability, whatever size they are, whatever type of industry they're in to be able to react quickly, to take advantage of the next wave or be on the front of that next wave and having an infrastructure that is smart, that is optimized, cost efficient, is as table stakes to do that. Absolutely, absolutely, right? And I think what they've been able to demonstrate this week, you know, as part of their announcement said, is that flexibility, that awareness, that there's continuous opportunities to be chased. Excellent, well Chris, we thank you for joining Stu and me on theCUBE today, telling us what's new with HPE and Commvault. We appreciate your time. Appreciate it, thank you very much. For Stu Miniman, I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching theCUBE from Commvault Go 19.