 theCUBE presents HPE Discover 2022, brought to you by HPE. Hi everybody, Dave Vellante and John Furrier wrapping up theCUBE's coverage of day two HPE Discover 2022. We're live from Las Vegas. Vishal Laila here, he's the Senior Vice President and General Manager for HPE's GreenLake Cloud Services Solutions. Vishal, good to see you again. Likewise Dave, good to see you. It was about a year ago that we met here or maybe nine months ago. Yeah, that's right. It was September of last year. New role for you, is that right? I was starting that new role when I last met you. Yeah, but it's been nine months, three quarters now. What have you learned so far? I mean, it's been quite a ride, right? I mean, when I was starting off, I had about three priorities. We've executed on all of them. So I mean, if you remember back then, Dave, we talked about improving a cloud experience. We talked about data and analytics being a focus area and then building on the marketplace. I think you heard a lot of that over the last couple of days here, right? So we've enhanced our cloud experience. We added a private cloud, which was the big announcement yesterday, or day before yesterday that Antonio made. So that's been, I mean, we've been testing that with customers, great feedback so far, right? And we're super excited about that. And down there, the test drive section, people are testing that. So we're getting really, really good feedback, really good acceptance from customers. On the data and analytics side, we launched the S3 connector. We also had the analytics platform and then we launched Data Fabric as a service a couple of days ago, right? Which is kind of like back into that hybrid world. And then on the marketplace side, we've added a ton of partners, gone deep with them, about 80 plus partners now, different ISVs. So again, I think great. I think we've accomplished a lot over the last three quarters or so. A lot more to be done though. The marketplace is really interesting to us because it's a hallmark of cloud. You got to have a marketplace. Talk about how that's evolving and what your vision is for a marketplace. I mean, you're exactly right. I mean, having a broad marketplace provides a pull for the platform, right? It's a chicken and egg. You need both. You need a good platform on which a good marketplace can sit but the vice versa as well. And what we are doing two things there, right? One is we're expanding coverage of the marketplace. So we are adding more ISVs into the marketplace, but at the same time, we're adding more capabilities into the marketplace. So for example, we just demoed earlier today, click to deploy capabilities, right? So we have an ISV in the marketplace. They're tested. They are, they work with the solution, but now you can click to deploy directly on our infrastructure. Over time, we'll add commerce capabilities, licensing capabilities, et cetera. But again, we are super excited about that capability because I think it's important from a customer perspective. Michelle, I want to ask you about that because that's, again, the marketplace will be the ultimate arbiter of value creation. Ecosystem and marketplace go hand in hand. What's your vision for what a successful ecosystem looks like? What's your expectation? Because now that GreenLake is up and running, I say up and running, but like we've been following the analysis, it just gets better, it's up and to the right. So we're anticipating an ecosystem surge. What are you expecting and what's your vision for how the ecosystem is going to develop out? Yeah, I mean, I've been meeting with a lot of our partners over the last couple of days and you're right, right? I mean, I think of them in three or four buckets, right, their ISVs. And the ISVs come in two forms, right? They have bigger solutions, right? I think of Veeam, Nutanix, right? Comvault, you know, bigger solutions. And then there are smaller software packages, right? Think Mongo, think about open source, right? So again, one of them is targeted to developers, the other to the IT ops, but that's kind of one bucket, right? ISVs. The second is around the channel partners who take this to market. And they're asking us, hey, this is fantastic. Help us understand how we can help you take this to market. And I think the other bucket is SI's, system integrators, right? I met with a few today and they're all excited about, they're like, hey, we have some tooling. We have the managed services capabilities. How can we take your cloud? Well, they build great practice around Accenture, around, sorry, AWS, around Azure. So they're like, how can we build a similar practice around GreenLake? So again, those are the big buckets I would say. Yeah, yeah, that's a great answer, great commentary. I want to just follow up on that real quick, if you don't mind. So a couple of things we're seeing and observing and I want to get your reaction to is, with AI machine learning and the promise of that, vertical specialization is creating unique opportunities on with these cloud platforms. And the other one is the rise of the managed service provider because expertise are hard to come by. You want Kubernetes, good luck finding talent. So managed services seem to be exploding. How does that fit into the buckets or is it all three buckets or do you guys enable that? How do you see that coming and then the vertical piece? So really good question. What we are doing is through our software, we're trying to abstract a lot of the complexity away. Take Kubernetes, right? So we have actually automated a whole bunch of Kubernetes functionality in our software. And then we provide managed services around it. With very little, I would say, human labor associated with it is software managed. But at the same time, what we are trying to do is make sure that we enable that same functionality to our partners. So a lot of it is software automation, but then they can wrap their services around it and that way we can scale the business, right? So again, our first principle is automate as much as we can through software, right? Abstract complexity. And then as needed, add the managed services capability around it. So get some functionality for HPE to have it and then encourage the ecosystem to fill it in or replicate it. Or replicate it, right? I mean, I don't think it's either or. It should be both, right? We can provide managed services or we should have our partners provide managed services. That's how we scale the business. We are end of the day, we are a product and product company, right? And it can manifest itself in services as customers consume it, but it's still IP based. So let's quantify some of that momentum. I think in the last year, we've called your over $800 million now in ARR. You're growing at triple digits. You got a big backlog, if we get the exact number. Give us some... Yeah, I mean, the momentum is fantastic, Dave, right? So we have about $7 billion in total contract value, right, significant. We have 1,600 customers now, unique customers running GreenLake. We have triple digit growth year over year. So in the last quarter, we had 100% growth year over year. So again, fantastic momentum. I mean, the other couple, one other metric I would like to talk about is the stickiness factor associated with... Tension, N-R-R, how do you measure that? Is retention, right? Is renewals, it's running in like high 90s, right? So if you think about it, that's a reflection on the value proposition of GreenLake. And that's kind of on a unit basis, if you will. That's a number... On the revenue basis, yeah. On a revenue basis, okay. You know, the 1,600 customers, can you just talk about the size? I mean, obviously big numbers must be large companies that are... They're both, right? So I'll give you some examples, right? So I mean, they're large companies. They come from different industries, different geographies. We are seeing like the momentum across every single geo, every single industry. I mean, just to take some examples, BMW, for example, I mean, they're running the entire electric car fleet data collection on data fabric on GreenLake, right? Texas Children Health on the healthcare side, right? On the public sector side, I was with Carl Hunt yesterday, he's the CIO of County of Essex, New Jersey. So they're running the entire operations on GreenLake. So just if you look at it, Barclays is the financial sector, right? I mean, they're running 100,000 workloads of GreenLake. So if you just look at the scale, large companies, small companies, public sector. In India, we have Steel Authority of India, which is the largest steel producer there. So we're seeing it across multiple industries, multiple geographies, great, great uptake. Yeah, we were talking yesterday on our wrap up kind of dissecting through the news. I want to ask you the question that we were riffing on and see if we can get some clarity on it. If I'm a customer, CIO or CISO or a buyer, or HPE, I've been working with you or your team for years, what's the value proposition? Finish this sentence. I work with HPE because blank, because GreenLake brings new value proposition. What is that filling that blank for me? Yeah. So I mean, as we speak with our customers, customers are looking at alternatives at all times, right? Sometimes it's other providers on premises, sometimes it's public cloud. And as we look at it, I mean, we have value proposition across both, right? So from a public cloud perspective, some of the challenges that our customers see are around latency, around cost predictability, right? That variability in cost is really kind of like a challenge. It's around compliance, right? Things of that nature, it's around open systems, right? I mean, sometimes they feel locked into a cloud provider, especially when they're using proprietary services. So those are some of the things that we have solved for them. As compared to kind of like, you know, the other on-premises vendors, I would say the marketplace that we spoke about earlier is a huge differentiator. We have this huge marketplace now that's developing. We have high levels of automation that we have built, right, which is, you know, which tells you about the TCO that we can drive for the customers. What the other thing that is really cool that we introduced in the public, in the private cloud is fungibility across infrastructure, right? So basically on the same infrastructure, you can run virtual machines, containers, bare metals, any application you want. So you can decommission and commission the infrastructure on the fly. So what it does is increase- No matter where it is. No, in the same- On-premises. On-premises, right? But earlier, I mean, if you think about it, the infrastructure was dedicated for a certain application. Now we've basically made it composable, right? And that way, what really, that does is it increases utilization. So you can get an increased utilization, high automation that drives lower TCO. So you've got a horizontal, basically, platform now that can handle a variety of workloads. Yeah, and these workloads can sit anywhere to your point, right? I mean, we can have a four-node workload out in a manufacturing setting to multiple racks in a data center. And it's all run by the same cloud trains, same software train. So it's really extensive. And you can call on the resources that you need for that particular workload whenever you need them. Exactly right. Excellent. Give you the last word, kind of takeaways from Discover. And when we sit down and talk next year at this event, where do you want to be? I mean, I think as you probably saw from Discover, this is like very different. Antonio did a live demo of a product, right? Which was cool, right? I mean, we haven't done that in a while. So I mean, you start- It didn't die like Bill Gates's demos, man. No, no, no. Well, I think you'll see more of that from us. I mean, I'm focused on three things, right? I'm focused on that cloud experience we spoke about. So what we are doing now is making sure that we increase that time for that, make it very attractive to different industries, through certifications like HIPAA, et cetera. So that's kind of one focus, right? Just drive hardware at that adoption of that private cloud, right? Across different industries and different customer segments. The second is more on the data and analytics I spoke about. So we'll have more and more analytics capabilities that you'll see building upon data fabric as a service. And the third is the marketplace. So that's like, it's very specific. It's the three focus areas and we're driving hardware. We'll be watching for that. All right, number two, instrumentation is really key. It is absolutely key. And the marketplace too. I mean, you mentioned, you know, Mongo, some other data platforms that we're going to see here. That's going to be, I think, critical for monetization on GreenLake. Absolutely. Michelle Lowe, thanks so much for coming back in the queue. Thank you. Good to see you guys. Thank you. All right, keep it right there. We'll be back up to wrap up the day with a couple of heavies from IDC. You're watching theCUBE.