 Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE, covering HPE Discover 2017, brought to you by Hewlett Packard Enterprise. Hey, welcome back everyone. We are here live in Las Vegas for SiliconANGLE meetings of CUBE's exclusive coverage for three days for HPE Discover 2017. We're on day three, down to the wire here. I'm John Furrier with SiliconANGLE, with my co-host Dave Vellante, my partner in crime with McGee Bond. Our next guest, Rick Lewis. Software-defined cloud senior vice president, president, GM of HPE. Welcome back to theCUBE. And Kate Swanworth, senior vice president, tech communications and strategic alliance, DreamWorks Animation. Welcome back as well. Great to have you guys back. It's good to be here. So obviously DreamWorks, you guys are a big customer. Rick, you are now leading of the team for software-defined infrastructure, as we call it, programmable infrastructure. A lot of great things. Synergy we talked heavily about last year. I kind of was geeking out with you on that in terms of all that programmability and automation. Meg's story this week was simplifying hybrid IT, which is the key part of where software's coming in. That's exactly right. And so we got DreamWorks here. What's your vision and how that's going to happen? How do you take that simple message and put it into practice? Yeah, so we're completely about making hybrid IT simple. And we have three primary vectors that we're driving in order to make that happen. The first is our hyper-converged appliances that we deliver. And the second is HPE Synergy, our composable. And the third is our hybrid IT management stack software that we have. And we've got momentum across all of those. In hyper-converged, you guys know we acquired SimpliVity. It closed in February. Got a lot of customers on that. We had Red Bull on stage here at Discover talking about their use case of that in their racing. It was packed house. People completely interested in all the things we're doing in hybrid IT. That's SimpliVity Synergy. We now have almost 400 customers that have adopted Synergy. We started shipping in volume in December. And Dreamworks Animation is one of those customers. And I'm really excited for you to hear a little bit about how they're using it. But I think we had around 10 customers from Synergy across all kinds of verticals and use cases, including service providers that were on stage here. And the final thing is our hybrid IT management stack, a program that we introduced here at Discover called Project New Stack. So that's what's going on in software-defining cloud. It's a lot. And we had a SimpliVity customer on by the way. They were really lowing. Great to see that. That was a great story. Great, great story. Kate, so Dreamworks, you guys have a business. You got to put a product out there. And so you got to look at technology and make it work for you. And sometimes you got to get in the weeds, the speeds, the speeds. End of the day, you've got a product to deliver. How are you guys taking some of the things that are coming out at HPE and putting them into action? What are some of the things you're doing? Well, I think one of the things that is often surprising to people is just how much technology we consume to make a CG feature-animated film. These films take 80 million compute hours to render the images, petabytes of storage. And we're typically working on five or six active films in production because they take us four or five years to make. And so we want to be able to have the capability of releasing two or three films a year. We must have simultaneous production. But of course, not all of the productions are exactly the same. And we've also got other media opportunities, whether it's television or theme park. And so what's critical to us is that we're actually able to provision the right amount of digital resource to the right project quickly and easily so that as those creative inspirations are growing and burgeoning at the studio, we've got the resource behind it in an effortless fashion. And how are you making that happen with the synergy, for example? Because last year, we were looking at it, well, this has got a lot of potential. I mean, you could do the orchestration and making the management work kind of takes that, abstracts away a lot of the complexity. How are you guys dealing with that? I mean, how have you put that into action? Well, we've been working within a hybrid environment for years now. So the idea of a hybrid environment isn't new to us. The key, however, is that it's labor-intensive. It's time-consuming. In order to get all of the right configurations of the networking, the storage, the compute to actually work in a real-time environment for our artists, that has taken us an enormous amount of effort over the years. What we're looking for in the synergy deployment is to reduce those weeks down to days and those days down to hours. Once we're able to do that, our engineers can go off and focus on the niche technology solutions that actually matter to the artists. And that's where we want to get the business benefit. And with Synergy, compute storage and fabric, all managed under the same management domain, single API that you can get access to all those resources. So it makes it super easy. It's the world's easiest way to do infrastructure as a service. It's built into the platform natively. That's right. And one of the things that's been so impressive to us is that we've been working with the Point Next team to come in and actually configure this for our environment. Everybody uses a high-performance compute environment, but nobody's is exactly the same. The configurability of this and the customability of this to our environment has been critical and we've seen incredible benefits from that. So Rick, we kind of pushed you in the cube last year because you were saying this is nothing like this in the marketplace. And we say, well, okay, define what's different. One of the things you touched on was the fluid pools of infrastructure. Yes. And Kate, what you just described is bringing technology to different digital teams. Dynamicism, if you will. Absolutely. Being able to dynamically configure the thing. So let's test it. I mean, it sounds like that's exactly what you're doing. And how is this different than the infrastructure that you used to have? So the reason that's different is that we've got a, simply said, a single infrastructure. We've got a compute farm. We've got storage. And historically, what we had to do was actually partition off certain pieces of that for certain productions in order to protect their resources. The problem with that is that any given day, particularly in a creative environment, maybe they're using all of it, maybe they need more, maybe they need less. The challenge is that historically, if they needed less, we can't reprovision that to another production in order to take advantage of their inspiration and their business motivations. Now we can. Now we have the opportunity to actually have the infrastructure be as dynamic as our creative environment, and that's saying a lot. So what is- You can configure those resources. Three clicks, five minutes, you literally can deprovision- So the old way they're on the net, they're like pitching and moaning. Where's the servers? And you're running around scrambling. They're on order. Yeah. There's six weeks. I mean, no, this is, we're talking about, this is about speed, right? I mean, this is- Absolutely, yes. All right, so I want to ask you a question about the HP event. You mentioned you're here. So a lot of people go to these events and they're trying to extract only action. We heard a lot of first last year of Synergy versus big claim there. We're hearing some security stuff with servers here. As a practitioner that comes to these shows, what's your strategy when you come to an event like HP e-Discover and actually the schmooze is going on, you get wind and dine by HP, a big customer. But like when you go in there, you're like, what are you looking for? How do you connect the dots? What tea leaves do you read? What's your strategy? Well, I'll tell you, one of the things that really interests me about Discover is we've got a deep partnership with Hewlett Packard Enterprise. We're talking to Hewlett Packard Enterprise all the time. So we might actually think that we know what's going on. It's not true. There's so much innovation happening that when we bring our team to this show, we learn things that could really help our business. I'll give you a great example. So we learned this week about SimpliVity. Now we had sort of heard about it, but we had not taken our time out of our schedules to really understand how that could help our VM environment. Our team's sitting in one of the panels this week and he's texting other engineers on our team going, we have got to look at this next week at DreamWorks Animation. That's the kind of environment this is. I'll tell you something else, Newstack, we're going to lean heavy into Newstack because we believe that the innovation that we're seeing in that space is really finally going to deliver on this promise of cloud that's been out there. What's specifically about Newstack do you like? I want to just double down on that. Is it the roll your own? Is it the flexibility? What's the big thing there? Again, this is one of those things where our team today is actually writing code and creating architectures that are sort of Newstack-like, but we're having to do it. We're having to invest our own time. It's trial and error. Some of the things work, some of the things don't, and that time is not being spent focused on our animation productions. The fact of the matter is here's Hewlett Packard actually doubling down and making sure that there is going to be a robust solution that works that we can bring into our environment. We're in enterprises across the world every day. We're having these conversations and most enterprises are doing kind of roll your own cloud kind of thing. They're playing with OpenStack. They're playing with Kubernetes. They're playing with all these tools. They got a bunch of custom code. What we're really trying to do with Newstack is take the best of what they're all trying to do, constrain that down, take our standard software-defined infrastructure as the base, put a stack on top of that that they can count on to do a private cloud with bridge to hybrid capabilities that's standard, that ships, that delivers, and has updates so that they're not messing around with it. Their developers don't want to spend time doing that. They just want to have a private cloud installation that has hybrid capabilities. And have it installed. This is super relevant. This is super relevant. We call you a tech athlete because you want to go out there and deliver value to your group and actually build products, right? You're in the film. But Dave's team just put out the true private cloud report which shows on-prem cloud-like environment, $260 billion tan. But the notable thing is that the labor costs for non-differentiated spend is going to be $150 billion shifting in 10 years. That's exactly the point here that you're talking about is my guys aren't working on the product that they need to be building. They're doing the R&D. So the OpenStack and all these things you're talking about, they're doing the R&D. Here, you're doing the R&D, delivering the product to the customer. Well, and when we deliver that, we're still going to leverage all of those technologies. OpenStack is a key part of NewStack. Kubernetes is a key part of NewStack. But what we're doing is pulling that together so that they don't have to curate their own private cloud. We create that, deliver it in a way that's an appliance-like way, just like we deliver hyperconverged today, and a control plane that manages that hybrid IT estate and gives them visibility into public cloud uses and private cloud. And it's really going to help them a lot. And it's going to help a whole lot of other customers because we're making it standard and easily deployable. Well, we've seen this story unfold over this decade where the corner office has said, I don't want to spend money on that patching and provisioning. Okay, so go to the cloud. And then IT said, well, we can't do that. Okay, and so they're going to pack an enterprise day and others say, what's the answer? Okay, but what you've described is this horizontal infrastructure capability that you can throw any workload at. That's right. And so my question is, what does it mean for the business? Does it mean you can do things faster, you have happier animators, you can do more movies? What does it mean? I think it means a couple of things. First of all, opportunity cost. In our business, a new opportunity for a creative endeavor that comes up all the time. And the key is, is that you want to be able to explore that as quickly as possible. Creative ideas work out sometimes, sometimes they don't. But the key is, is that if it takes you time and effort and money to just explore it, you've got an opportunity cost you don't want. Something like Synergy will allow us to provision resources to new ideas and new potentials quickly enough, easily enough, and at a cost effective measure so that we can actually determine which creative endeavors are going to work more quickly in our environment. That's a huge deal. So you were missing opportunities because of the infrastructure limitations, is that right? The Hawke Ups and everything, you have to get done on the CG work. Again, when our filmmakers have a new idea for a new sequence, a new character, those types of characters, they take tremendous amounts of resources. I often talk about the dragon in Shrek. Back in 2001, we released Shrek and it had this beautiful, huge pink dragon in it. And she was fantastic, but frankly, she was so complex and so computationally heavy, we actually had to cut her out of parts of the film because we couldn't produce the shots she was in. Fast forward a few years and we decided to make a movie called How to Train Your Dragon, that's nothing but dragons. The key is, is that we never want to be in a position again where we're tabling a great creative idea because we can't resource for it. And solutions like SimpliVity and Synergy and particularly where we're going with Newstack and the ability to actually harness the cloud without having to do all the work ourselves, that's going to bring that potential to reality. And then your application in this opportunity cost is for your business, other companies have apps. So their opportunity costs are very similar. This is the classic How Shadow IT was born. And people want to experiment, show proof of concept, not a PowerPoint and actual demo, a real working product. It may not have the scale there, but you get to that point of where it's workable. Every business is facing some element of this right now. And I will tell you the other reason of the two reasons that I think that this is going to make a difference. It's future-proofing our environment. The world is so dynamic right now. Things are changing so quickly. Even in our environment with media and entertainment, the world of what people want to consume and how they want to consume it and the nature of how we're looking at innovation in both filmmaking techniques as well as new media opportunities, the key in all of that is, is that we have to be dynamic in order to be future-proofed. These types of solutions give us the confidence that we're actually putting the money in the right place. It's an investment in our future. Earlier you mentioned point next services and the narrative from Hewlett Packard Enterprises, my inference is it's more cloud-like. Different types of business models. Are you seeing that? I mean, is it more than just a new name, a new brand? Are you starting to see an evolution of the way in which you engage with Hewlett Packard Services? We absolutely are. And it's one thing to talk about strategy, but at the end of the day, you don't call up your technology and have a conversation with it. You call up people. And what we're seeing is that Hewlett Packard Enterprise is investing in a level of expertise within the point next services organization that is unparalleled. That is a massive change over the course of the last five, six, 10 years. These folks are coming into our environment now and we are finding that we are inspired by their strategies. We're not having to teach them about our business. They're actually coming in with all of these other learnings that they've gotten from all of these corporations and they're looking at our ambitions and going, hey, we think we've got some ideas here. I'll tell you, our engineers are hard to impress. That's the truth. They are used to, what was your phrase, rolling it on their own? They are used to being responsible and they have very little tolerance for actually giving other people time within our organization. Point Next has blown them away. We could not be doing the work that we're doing on Synergy as quickly and as effectively, installation and strategy around that without the Point Next. Well, that's the proof. That is the proof in the pudding, in my opinion, when your people who are, I won't say cocky, but they're kind of, sounds like they're pretty cocky. But you're in a media entertainment. It is one of the most disruptive, being disrupted markets right now, smart cities, IOT, media entertainment. You're the leading trend in IT right now, media entertainment. And in our team, I mean, there's simply no tolerance at DreamWorks Animation for technology getting in the way of the business. The fact of the matter is technology always has to be enabling the storytellers, enabling the filmmakers, enabling the business ambition. And the key is that our engineering team, they feel responsible to that. One of the things that we're finding with the new Hewlett Packard Enterprise, the Point Next team, Rick's team, with the synergy deployments, is that we actually feel like we've got a partner that can up our own game. Good, for sure. And we do deep beta programs with them on everything that we're doing to make sure that we're meeting that next generation of what they need. It's a fantastic partnership. Well, Rick, congratulations on the success. And Kate, thanks for sharing all the great stories and your experience at DreamWorks Animation. Great, great to see that trend. Again, media entertainment, you guys are doing a great stuff. We're doing our share with digital TV here. We're moving on to the edge of the network with theCUBE here at HB Discover with DreamWorks Animation. I'm John Furrier, Dave Vellante. Stay with us for more day three coverage here in Las Vegas at HB Discover. We'll be right back.