 Live from Madrid, Spain. It's theCUBE, covering HPE Discover Madrid 2017. Brought to you by Hewlett Packard Enterprise. We're back in Madrid, everybody. This is theCUBE, the leader in live tech coverage. My name is Dave Vellante, and I'm here with my co-host, Peter Burris. This is day one of HPE Discover Madrid. Parvez Sethi is here as the Senior Vice President and General Manager of the Global Client Services at HPE Point Next. Parvez, thanks very much for coming back in theCUBE. Last time we saw you, you were 30 days into the job. That's right. Maybe 45 days. So how's the first six, seven months been? It's been busy. It's actually been very good. In risk of the transmission change that's taking place within the company, it's actually been really good to also working with the clients on the hybrid IT journey side of the house. And since last we spoke, we also did the CTP acquisition, which has been very well received as well. I love it. You guys go and talk about transformations to customers. They say, we're experts. Yes. We lived this. We lived this every day. Does that, can you enter into the discussions with your customers? It must, right? Yeah. No, I think it gives us a lot of credibility, especially when you take a look at the journey they're on and who talk a lot about hybrid IT today, making it simple. And one of the things we always talk to them about is that hybrid IT is not just the infrastructure cloud. You really have to take a look at the full spectrum of the services and how they've been delivered. Could be as a service providers, could be subscribing to a platform and hosting it on-prem, off-prem, private, dedicated infrastructure, or public cloud. Just a mix of those and being able to decide as to what are the characteristics that you should look at and what will decide as to what goes into public cloud, private cloud, or where should those services come from? What do you tell the skeptics? They guys, yeah, why should I do hybrid cloud? Why don't I just put everything in the cloud? Do you get those questions or is it more customers saying, hey, help me with my hybrid problem? What's the... Almost every single client meeting that I've been in, everyone acknowledges the world is hybrid IT. And I have not met a single client yet who says, all of your workloads are going into public cloud. I think a lot of it depends on what they want to achieve. If they want a lot of elasticity and if they need SLAs or if they want to bring the workload back in, security compliance or organizational, cultural governance processes, performance characteristics, a lot of those factors coming to play as to deciding what goes where. And I think almost everyone says that, it's never going to be 100% this or that. It's just based on the characteristics that would really dictate where the workload or the application says. And that's the characteristics of the data. Is that fair? Because it used to be, oh, security. And public cloud, fine security, maybe not exactly the way you want it done. But is it more the realization about you just can't move all the data into the cloud or you can't force your business into the cloud? What are customers saying? Yeah, I think part of it also comes into, for example, governance as well. There's HIPAA compliance workloads as an example. That may dictate your decision in a certain way. But you're right though. I mean, security used to be one of the big concerns, but it's more about now, if a person has decided they want to move a certain workload over, it's really more about how do you get them comfortable? How do you de-risk that move? And this is where thinking through the journey road map really becomes critical. But just because of that one aspect, it's not necessarily stopping people from moving, but it's really baking that into the design criteria as to how you move it. Well, while we're on security, I mean, in the last five years, it's obviously become a board level topic. People have, I think, come to the recognition, maybe the recognition, maybe the spending hasn't shifted, but the mindset's shifted that you can't just create a moat, you know? They're going to get in. Once they get in, we have to respond. We need analytics and response mechanisms. And so how are they coming to you for help? What are they asking you for? How are you helping? So I think it certainly comes into more into place. Cannot be an aphrodot. It's really more about security in and the governance has to be kind of baked in from the front end of it. So everything that we do, whether it's any solution that we're doing from IoT perspective, all the way to the hybrid IT, from an architectural blueprint perspective, we have made sure the security is front end center of every one of those designs, as well as the discussion criteria with the client. And so when you start looking at, it's not about security posture assessment, it's also kind of looking at designing security from an architectural blueprint perspective and making sure that if somebody's talking about hybrid IT architecture or an IoT use case, that security is front end center of the design criteria. If you think about the challenges that your sales, well let's step back, if you think about the challenges that everybody has at conceiving of how best to associate data, workload, and cloud implementation, hybrid, on-premise, off-premise, whatever it is. There are, you have to have a common framework, what used to be called a computing model, a way of thinking of how you address the problem that your salespeople have to have, your support people have to have, you have to have, your customer has to have, are there like two or three things that you're telling your people to look forward or look for and working with their customers to help provide those clues? So crucial to getting everybody on the same page early as to where workloads are going to end up, where data is going to end up. Yeah, that's a great question. And one of the things that we're making sure that our folks are not just talking about the hardware piece of it, it's really more about, before the hardware discussion takes place, making sure that we completely line on the workload strategy. As part of the workload strategy, we will do workshops and we'll make sure that we totally understand in terms of what is it they're trying to accomplish in terms of the workload migrations. And before we even get to the migration topic, we really go through this criteria in terms of assessing the workloads, which workloads are most suited to go into cloud environment. And in areas which you may need to re-architect the application or rewrite it, we also kind of put those into a specific category and take a look at making sure that is the performance criteria more, is it security, is it more about the TCO? And more and more you start to see it's not really a brokerage discussion, it's really more of strategic sourcing discussion because you're more and more starting to talk about where is the best source to get the service from? Because there's no shortage of choices that they have today and where they can provide the services from. So it's really more about understanding what they're trying to achieve and then understanding the sourcing policy, understanding the alignment between the IT and the governance piece of it, the whole business side of it and the IT side of it. And then it's really more about the supply chain management. You heard about once a fair today, but it's really more about how did you take this complexity out of the hybrid IT environment and making sure that you can provide the automation and that capability to provide it as easy of an environment for them to have a single pane of glass. So those are the key pieces of the framework that we try to make sure everyone is on the same page. You mentioned cloud technology partners. We heard about OneSphere today, that's obviously their CTP is part of that announcement. Small company, but very high quality customer base. It's very specialized. Take us through the rationale for the acquisition, kind of what the value is to your customers and where it's headed. I think, you know, last day when we spoke, we talked about our overall strategy. One of the key pillars is really around making hybrid IT simple. And we know when we talk about hybrid IT, it cannot be just the on-prem part of the storyboard. You have to talk about the public cloud side of it as well. And this is where the CTP acquisition really comes into play to really plug a hole. I mean, we had some capability in-house, but not to the extent of what CTP brings to the table. I mean, they are premier partner to AWS, premier partner to Google, silver partner to Microsoft Azure. And so having that kind of credibility and the recognition in the US and North America certainly gives us some more credibility with our customers talking about the hybrid IT story. And then taking that skillset assets in the IP, we want to take that and leverage our channel community as well as our install base, as well as our capabilities in Europe, as well as Asia and help scale that globally is really the way we're going to leverage this skillset in-house. So we're in beautiful Madrid, Spain at the Amia Discover. Cloud is a global phenomenon, but it's not uniform. From your perspective of providing services to customers that have global needs as well as local needs, take us through how Europe is different. Start from the observation that we've got North American cloud players, public cloud players. We've got Asian public cloud players. We have not an obvious European cloud player. How is it different on a global basis? And what is HP doing to mass those differences, HPE doing to mass those differences from your global and local customers? So I think one of the things you're finding here is the need, and we talked about this earlier today, the need for as a consumption models. And you're seeing that trend globally and more and more people, more and more customers are talking about not wanting to own but how do they pay for what they use? And so one of the things we do is from a framework perspective, we've really deployed a very consistent framework, unified transformational framework, UTF and who did apply for a patent for it as well. But the idea there is to leverage a common methodology, a common framework to take a client through in terms of how to go about this cloud journey. Everyone is on a different place in terms of the cloud adoption, the digital transformation journey. But through the experiences that we have, I mean we do well over 10,000 engagements a year, leveraging that IP, we have really built like four interconnected journey roadmaps. And so a client, you can take any client, whether a service provider enterprise, they're somewhere on that journey roadmap and they may be in a different place, but being able to talk to them, leveraging that common IP and say look, this is where you're at today, here's the roadmap that you can take to get to your desired end state. And that has really resonated with the clients. And if they truly don't want to own the infrastructure and they just want to pay as you go, and this is where the whole HPE GreenLake announcements have really come into play. So I think that those teams, when you take a look at the performance characteristics, organizational governance issues, because one of the things that we find is 70% the clients that we talk to, they have not been able to really maximize the full potential of what hybrid IT gives them. And one of the major hurdles is see, and doesn't matter whether you talk to a client in North America or EMEA or APJ, it's really the lack of focus on management of change. It's the organizational, the cultural barriers that get in the way, it's the competencies, the organizational processes that get in the way. So those are the pieces we want to make sure as part of the UTF framework, IT is just one of the principles. And out of the other domains, management of change is one of the key elements that we see which is common across all the client base that we talk to. When you go back to the early part of this decade and you observe sort of the big, the member of the big data meme that sort of exploded in 2010, 2011, 2012, it ended up being a very complex, of course, but also very services led engagements because it was so complex. IoT is somewhat similar. It's very data-oriented, it's very complex. So talk about services and the relationship with IoT, the opportunity for you and how you're helping add value to customers. Now that's a great question also, Dave. I think when you take a look at the IoT, I think we're starting to get past that hype cycle. And a lot of players will talk about that they got 100 plus proof of concepts going in their lab, but they just have not been able to bring it into the mainstream. And so one of the things we're talking to clients about is start to move away from the terms like proof of concept, focus on proof of value. Because at the end of the day, if you cannot help your line of business accelerate time to value, no matter how great of a concept you have, it's never going to see the day of light. So this is where the point next services really come into play with the whole advisory led motion because it's still very much a services led motion today, working with the clients around how they can really help shorten the time to value, accelerate time to value. And if we can take even one or two use cases, they have in their labs today and show them how they can get to $50, $60 million of savings like one of the oil and gas customers who we're just talking to, same thing we see in the retail manufacturing, is just taking some of the spoof points and saying this is how you can actually bring them into the mainstream and make sure they also start to have the business alignment. That's one of the common things you hear from the CXOs here this week is the business alignment between the IT and the OT side. If they're talking to the IoT use cases because without the business alignment, believe me, you're not going to be able to get the management change that you're seeking to drive. So do you expect or you're seeing yet, you know, new business models, you talk about the cost savings, but what about sort of new business models emerging from those discussions and opportunities? No, definitely. I mean, if you take a look at whether it's the hospitality suite, you know, Keith, you talked about main stage, about even the retail experience. So it just started to be very different. So when you look at the new value that's been created, you know, a lot of us who travel to get here, when we check into the hotel, a number of places now, you can check in digitally, 24 hours in advance. You never have to stand in line for a queue, don't have to flash up your credit card because the hotels have really now started to leverage the digital transformation where 24 hours in advance, you can check in online, they'll give you a digital key. So on your phone, when you walk into the hotel, as soon as you're within a threshold, you get onto your Wi-Fi network and you see a personalized message. And it has also the directions to your room. And when you get to your room, you use the digital key to get in. Think about the possibilities it creates to launch new services. For not just the hotel, but it's also affiliates, the partners, for pushing specific targeted advertising offers while you're in Madrid here or some other place. So you start to see these new value creations, even though behind the scenes, you still have them integrate a lot of the digital critical business systems like CRM, reservation systems, or smart buildings. You have to still make sure the security is in play. And so it is really you checking in, not someone else, as well as making sure the room is available. But it's really more focused on the business outcome. And this is one of the things you've seen even in our portfolio shift, it's no longer talking about some implementation services, integration services. When we sit down with the clients, it's really more focused around what outcome are we delivering. It's not talking about look, who can sell you X number of servers or who can sell you devices. More about here's the business outcome that will deliver for you. And this is what you're going to be able to do with that additional value creation. Do you mean I might be able to not have to wait in line a half hour when I check into a Las Vegas hotel in the future? Absolutely. No, that will never happen. No, definitely. I mean, you see improvements every single year. And hopefully, you know, whether you walk into a retail shop, be able to experience differently, you know, walking from home into a branch store and what that experience will look like, it'll be very, very different than what some of the people experience today. Lots of changes coming all sort of based on the data. Parvesh, thanks very much for coming to theCUBE. It was great to see you again. Absolutely, it's great to be here. Thank you so much. You're welcome. All right, keep it right there, buddy. We'll be back with our next guest, Dave Vellante from Peter Burris. This is theCUBE, we're live from HPE Discover Madrid 2017.