 TheCube presents HPE Discover 2022, brought to you by HPE. Hey everyone, welcome back to TheCube's continuing coverage of HPE Discover 22 Live from Las Vegas, the Venetian Expo Center, Lisa Martin and Dave Vellante. Have a very special guest next. One of our esteemed alumni here on TheCube, Antonio Neary, the president and CEO of HPE. Antonio, thank you so much for joining us this morning. Well, thanks for being with us today. Great to be back here after three years away. You stood on stage yesterday in front of a massive sea of people. The energy here is electric. Must have felt great yesterday. Well, you stood on stage three years ago and said, by 2022, and here it is, we're going to deliver our entire portfolio as a service. What was it like to be on stage and say, we've done that? Here's where we are, we're a new company. Well, first of all, as always, I love TheCube to cover HPE Discover. As you said, it has been many, many years and I hope you saw a different company yesterday. I'm really proud of what happened yesterday because it was a pivotal moment in our journey. If I reflect back in my four years as a CEO, we said the enterprise of the future will be edge-centric, cloud-enabling, data-driven in 2018. And I pledge to invest $4 billion over four years. And you see the momentum we have at the edge with our business. And then in 19, to your point, Lisa, we said, by the end of 2022, we will offer everything as a service. When you look at the floor behind us, everything is as a service experience, from the moment you log into IHP Greenlight platform to all the cloud services we offer. So for me, it's a proud moment because our team worked really hard to deliver on that promise on the face of a lot of challenges. Tremendous challenges the last couple of years that nobody could have predicted or even forecast. How can we tolerate this? Talk to me about your customer conversations and how they have changed and evolved as every company today has to be a data company. Well, even this morning up to this interview, I already met four customers in less than an hour and a half. And I will say, all of them, first of all, really appreciate it bringing HB Discover back. And what they really appreciate was the fact that they had the opportunity to meet and greet and talk to people. The energy that comes from that engagement is second to none. And I think says something about the moment we are at this time where the return to work and everything else, I think this is a wake up call in many ways. But customers are telling us is that they want to engage with a partner that has a vision that can take them to their journey, whatever that journey is. And we know digital transformation is core to everything. But ultimately they are now more focused on delivering outcomes for the organization they're running in IT. And that's why HP GreenLake is incredible well positioned to do so. You know, just picking up on that, I counted it, Tony. I think I've been to 14 HPE and HPE Discovers when you include Europe. I mean, Frankfurt, London, Barcelona, Madrid, of course, the U.S. And I've never seen, I've tweeted this out, I've never seen this type of energy, right? People are excited to get back, that's part of it. The other big part of it is, of course, the focus. So that focus on as a service was a burn the boat moment for HP. I think it was a burn the boat moment. It was a moment that we have to decide how we think about the future and how we become even more relevant for customers. And we are very important to all the customers they buy from us, right? But I think about the next three, five, 10 years, how we position the company into the future to be relevant to whatever they need to do. Well, what I mean by that is you're not turning back. No. The bridge is gone, you're going forward. And so my question is, did the pandemic accelerate that move or did it hinder it and how so? Actually, it was a moment for us to think about how we go further and faster to what we call this journey to one, one platform, one experience. And we felt as a team, as an organization, this was a unique moment in time to go further faster. So to us, it was a catalyst to accelerate that transformation. Now, I want to ask you a question in your keynote. I love this, because you say, I'm often asked by customers, what workload should we move to the public cloud and what should stay on-prem? I'm like, yeah, I get that question all the time. And I was waiting for the answer. You said, that's the wrong question. And I was like, wait, but that's the question everybody's asking. So it was really interesting that you said that. I wonder if you could comment. And I think you said basically the world's hybrid. Is your challenge with the customers in this initiative to actually get people to stop asking that question, right? And not think about that. No, I think the challenge we all collectively have is that how we think about data and how we drive what I call a data-first modernization strategy for our customers in an age-to-cloud architecture, which basically says you are living a hybrid world. It's not a question which workloads are put in the public cloud, which workloads are put on-prem, all the issues around data gravity and whatnot. It's a question of how we bring the cloud experience to all your workloads later, wherever they live. And that's where the opportunity really exists. And as customers understand more and more about the new environments, how they work, how they enable these new experiences, is all driven by that data. And that data has enormous value. So it's not about which cloud to use, it's about how you bring the cloud experience to your data and workloads. When you're talking to CIOs, especially transformational CIOs, what's the value to those CIOs that want to transform and need to transform with the power of HPE? More and more of them are becoming conscious about the fact that they need to go faster in everything they do. We have done some interesting analysis with the brands that have done a better job or have become way more proficient on extracting insight from the data. They're actually the brands that are winning the marketplace. Not just with customers driving the preference, but also in the market capitalization because they become way more sophisticated in driving better efficiency, which is a necessity today. Second is the fact that also they need to improve their security aspect of it, but they are creating new experience and new revenue streams. And those are transformational CIOs are transforming their business in the way they run IT into a more an innovation engine. And so that's why we love working with them because they are advanced and the push has to think differently in the way we think about the innovation. How do you help customers go from data rich insight forward to data rich insight rich actions, new revenue streams, new services? Well, first of all, you have to deploy the right architecture which starts with a network, obviously because digital transformation requires an on ramp and the connectivity is the first step. Second is to make sure you have a true end to end visibility of that data. And that's why we announced yesterday with the data fabric, right? A revolutionary way to think about that age to cloud architecture from a data driven perspective. And then the third piece of this is the aspect of how we bring that intelligence to that data. And that's where we are enabling all these amazing services with AI machine learning with HP GreenLake, which is ultimately the way we are going to enable them. What's your favorite announcement from this week? I think HP GreenLake. I think I mentioned 36 times HP GreenLake. And to me, as I think about what comes next, right, is about how we innovate now on the platform at the pace that customers are demanding. And so for me, there is a lot of things there, but obviously the private cloud enterprise edition was a big moment for us because that's the way we bring that cloud operating experience on-prem and at the edge, but also all the hybrid capabilities that Brian showed during the demo is something that I think customers now say, wow, I didn't know we can do that. And thinking about your business, you know, despite some macro headwinds and the like, you reaffirmed your guidance on the last earnings call, does GreenLake give you better visibility or is it harder to predict? No, I think the more we get engaged with customers in running their workloads and data, the more visibility we get. You know, I said, you know, customers voted with their workloads and data. And in that context, you know, we already have 65,000 customers, more than 120,000 users. And the one interesting stat which I hope it didn't go lost during that transition was the fact that we now have under the GreenLake management over an exabyte of data. And so to me, right, that's a unique opportunity for us to learn and improve the whole cycle. So obviously a big pillar of your strategy is the data. And I wonder if you could talk more about that because I would observe, you know, we, the Cube started in sort of as big data, you know, started to take off and you saw that ecosystem and that ecosystem is dispersed now. So I've gone into the cloud, it's got the snowflakes pulling in some in, Mongo, now you have the opportunity with this ecosystem to have a data ecosystem. How do you look at the ecosystem and the value that your partners can build on top of GreenLake and specifically monetize? Well, if you walk through the floor, one of the things we changed this time is that the partners are actually in the flow of all our solutions, not sitting on a corner of the show floor, right? And that's because what we have done in the last three years has been together with our partners. But we conceive HP GreenLake with the partners in mind at the core of everything we do in the platform. And that's why on Monday, we announced the new partner one ready vantage program that actually opens the platform through our APIs for allowing them to add their own value on the platform, whether they're their own services to the marketplace or the other way around they have to use our capabilities in their own solutions. Because some of these cloud operating capabilities are hard to develop, whether it is metering and billing and all the other services, sometimes you don't have to build yourself. So that's why what we love about our strategy is the partners can decide where to participate in this broader ecosystem and then grow with us and we can grow through them as well. So GreenLake as a service, the focus is very clear. Hybrid is very clear. What's less clear to me is, and I'll ask you to comment is this, we're going to term called super cloud. And super cloud is different than multi-cloud. Multi-cloud is, oh, I run in AWS or I run in Azure, I run in GCP. Super cloud builds a layer above that, hides the underlying complexity of the primitives and the APIs and then builds new value on top of that out to the edge as well. You guys talk about the edge all the time. You have a Ruba as an asset. You got space, space-born. You're doing some pretty edge like stuff. What we have here, we are connected to the ISS. So if you go to that show floor, you can actually see what's being processed. I mean, you don't get more edge than that. So my question is, is that part of the vision to actually build that what I call super cloud layer or is it more to be focused on hybrid and connecting on-prem to the cloud? No, I don't like to call it super cloud because that means unless you are a superpower, you can't do what you need to do. I think I call it a substrate, right? That we are enabling through our edge to cloud architecture. So the customers can build their own experiences and consume the services that they need to compete and win in today's market. So our edge to cloud approach is to create that substrate with connectivity, obviously the cloud and the data capability that you need to operate in today's environment. Okay, so they're fair enough. I would say that your customers are going to build then the super cloud on top of that substrate. Well, actually we want to give it to them. They don't have to build anything. They just need to run the business. Well, they don't have the time to really build stuff. They just need to innovate. That's our value proposition. So they don't have to waste cycles in doing so. If it comes ready to go, why you want to build it? Well, when I say build it, I'm talking about building their business on top of it. Things that you're not going to do. I agree with that. Bringing their tools, financial services companies with their data, their tools, their ecosystem, connecting on-prem to the clouds above that substrate. That's their, as a digital... Yeah, and that's what I said yesterday. With our approach, we're actually enabling customers to power the next generation business models that they need. We enable that substrate that can innovate on the platform, these next-gen business models. Tap your engineering mind. I'd like to talk about how architectures are changing. You, along with many, many other CEOs, signed a letter to the US government, urging them to pass the CHIPS Act. As I posted on LinkedIn, there were a few notables missing, Apple wasn't on there, Meta wasn't on there, Tesla wasn't on there. I'd like to see them step up and sign up. And so, why did you sign that? Why did you post that? And why is that important? Well, first of all, it's important to customers because obviously they need to get access to technologies in a more ubiquitous way. And second, it's important for the United States. We live in a global economy that today is going to a refactoring of sorts where supply chain disruption has caused a lot of consternation and disruption across many industries. And I think, as we think about the next generation supply chains, which are built for resiliency and obviously inclusion, we need to make sure that the United States address this problem because once you fall behind, it takes a long time to catch up. Even if we sign the CHIPS Act, it's going to take many years for us, but we need to start now. Otherwise, we never get what we need to get. I agree we're late. I think Pat Gelsinger's done a very good job laying out the mission to bring, I mean, to me it's modest, bring 20% of the manufacturing back to the U.S. by the end of the decade. I mean, that's not going to be easy, but even so, that's... Well, we need to start somewhere. And we are great partners with Intel. I really support the vision that Pat has laid out and it's not just about Intel, again, it's about our customers in the United States. HP and HPE now, because HP Labs is part of HPE, I believe that's correct state. Well, we refocus HP Labs as a part of our high performance and AI business, yes. But HP and now HPE possess custom silicon expertise. You may... We always had. Yeah, exactly. And with the Fabulous World, do you see, I mean, you're probably doing some custom silicon today that I don't really have visibility on, but do you see getting more into that? Is there a need for that? Well, we already designed more than 60 different silicones that are included in our solution. More and more of that silicon is actually in support of our other service experience that's truly programmable for this new way to deploy a cloud or a data fabric or a networking fabric of sorts. When you look at our Edge portfolio as a part of GreenLake through our Aruba set of offerings, we actually have a lot of the silicon building our switching portfolio. That's programmable to give us the ability to drive intelligent routing in the network at the application layer. But also, as you know, many years ago, we introduced our own ILO, the Lights Out technology, the BMC type of support that allows us to provide security to the root of our systems, but now more implement a cloud operating security environment, if you will. But there is many more in the analog space for AI at scale and even the latest introduction with Frontier. When you look at Frontier, that wonderful high performance exascale system, the magic of that is in the silicon we developed, which is the interconnect fabric plus the smart nicks at massive, massive scale for parallel computing. And then ultimately is the software environment that we put on top of it so we can process billion, billion square transactions per second. And when you think about a lot of the AI today is modeling that's done in the cloud, when you think about the edge, actual real time inferencing, you're not going to send all that back to the cloud when you have to make a left turn or a right turn. Well, I think, you know, people need to realize that 70% of the data today is outside the public cloud and 50% is at the edge. And when you think about the real time use cases, actually 30% of that data will need to be processed real time, so which means you need to establish inference at the edge, and at the same time run the analytics at the edge, whether it's machine learnings or some sort of simulation they need to do at the edge. And so that's why we can provide inference, we can provide machine learning at the edge on top of the connectivity and the edge compute or cloud computing at the edge. But also we can provide on the other side AI scale for massive amount of data analytics. And will that be part of the GreenLake consistent experience? We already offered that. We already offered that as a HPC as a service. It's one of the key services we provide at scale and then you also have machine learning operations as a service. So we have both and with the data fabric, now we're going to take it to one step forward so we can connect the data. And I think one of the most exciting services I actually am a true believer of that is the capability we develop through HP Labs since you asked for that, which is called the Swarm Learning Technologist. Of course, yeah. I've talked to Dr. Gullab. There you go. So. He will do a better job than me explaining that. Hey, I don't know, you're pretty good at it. He's awesome, I mean, I have to admit. And Yukino, you specifically took the time to mention your support for women's rights. Yes. Will HPE pay for women to leave the state to have a medical procedure? Yeah. So what happened last week was a sad moment in our history, I believe. We as a company felt compelled to stand up and take a position on the rights of women to choose. And as a part of that, we already offer, as a part of our benefits, the ability to travel and pay all the medical expenses related to their choice. Yeah, well, thank you for doing that. I appreciate it as a father of two daughters who have less rights than my wife did when she was their age. I applaud you for your bravery and standing up and thank you for doing that. How excited are you for Janet Jackson? I think it's going to be a phenomenal rap of the HPE Discover. I think it's going to be a great moment for people to celebrate, to come in together. One of the feedback I got from the meetings early on from customers is that put aside the vision, the strategy, the solutions that they actually can experience themselves is the fact that the one thing that I really appreciate is that they can be together. They can talk to people. They can learn with each other, from each other. That energy is obviously very palpable when you go through it. And I think the celebration tonight, and I want to thank the sponsor for allowing us to do so, is the fact that it's going to be a moment of reuniting ourselves and look at the future with optimism, but have some fun. That's great, Antonia, as I said, I've been to a lot of HPE and HPE Discover's. You've brought a new focus clearly to the company, an outstanding job of getting people aligned. I mean, it's not easy. It's 60,000 professionals around the globe. And the energy is like I've never seen before. So congratulations and thank you so much for coming back in the queue. Thank you, Dave, and as always, we appreciate you covering the event. You shared the news with all the audiences around the globe here, and that means a lot to us. Thank you. Thank you. And thank you for watching. This is Dave Vellante for Lisa Martin and John Ferrier. We'll be right back with our next guest live from HPE Discover 2022 in Las Vegas.