 Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE. Covering VMworld 2017, brought to you by VMware and it's ecosystem partner. Welcome back, I'm Stu Miniman joined by Keith Townsend. Happy, welcome back to the program, a multi-time KubeLon Patrick Osborne who's the Senior Director of Product Management with Hewlett Packard Enterprise. Patrick, great to see you. Great to be back, thanks for having me. Yeah, what number of VMworld is this for you? Oh gosh, I can't count it at this point, too many. Yeah, it's like I've been working with VMware for 15 years, it's the eighth one of these for me. Keith, I know you've been, what's your take so far, the show, big ecosystem, a lot of news going on, what do you think so far? Yeah, so from my perspective, VMware has been such a huge ecosystem partner for HPE for forever, it covers everything from our perspective on the compute, networking, storage side, certainly services. So for me, it's always good to catch up with old colleagues and kind of understand what's going on in the industry, a lot of talk today around private cloud, multi-cloud, what people are doing around automation, certainly a lot of things around software defined, software defined network, software defined storage. So a lot of good topics, it's always good to see the customers here too as well. Yeah, the joke a few years ago was VMworld became storage world. So in your space of availability and data protection, on a walk through the show floor, HPE's got a big booth, but I see a lot of companies that are attacking different angles of that, you brought up cloud being an increasing piece. What's top of mind for customers that are coming to you and what sort of things are you working on these days? Yeah, so from our perspective on the storage and data management landscape, I think that you see a lot of vendors in this space right now. Some of them are certainly part of our ecosystem. You see folks like Veeam and other folks that we partner with out on the floor. There is an increased look from the customer perspective on availability. It's the segments changing, the requirements are changing. I don't think people are tackling availability in the same way with sort of traditional data protection architectures. So we see customers, especially when they're looking for certain inflection points in their infrastructure, like I'm going to go to all flash or deploy some new storage. They're definitely rethinking the way they're doing availability from an application standpoint. So we're trying to meet those market demands through our own technologies as well as having a pretty robust ecosystem here that we partner with. So a lot of talk, not just at this show, but at previous HPE shows about hybrid IT. It is obvious the data center isn't going anywhere for the majority of customers, but we have the complexity of cloud. How does cloud impact practically data protection, data availability? Yeah, so from our perspective, it's certainly an opportunity to help customers out. We've, from a strategy standpoint, we've put a couple solutions and things in the market that we hope address some of the use cases. So when you talk about nimble cloud volumes, being able to have your data in a co-located facility very close to public cloud, so you can do some compute arbitrage and ultimately be able to control your data. And then we do other things, for example, store one's cloud bank, being able to back up to the cloud, which is a pretty established use case. I think from our perspective, helping customers make that move in terms of, you can set up the data path and make the bits move, but when we talk to mid-sized and especially large enterprise customers, the governance around that, I think is really important in the user experience to make sure that what you're sending out to the cloud is certainly protected, it's audited. We even have customers coming to us. We just had a big customer that you've had on here before 21st Century Fox, right? A big customer of HPE. Talked last week about, I want to back up workloads that are in the cloud to the cloud, right? There's not a lot of great tools for that today and I want that audited. I want a paper trail around that for their own internal capabilities. So I think there's a lot of opportunities in the space. It's very nascent. Patrick, I think you're bringing up a great point. We were talking a lot at this show, kind of the multi-cloud world. I've got my maturation of what's happening, my data center deploying a bunch of SaaS on one or multiple public clouds and there's certain things like security or data protection and availability. I need to get my arms around all of it. HPE's looking to fill some of those gaps and help customers. What's the overriding story and how you're not one of the big three public cloud providers? Why does HPE have a position in this discussion and maybe you can help us kind of round out that story a little? Yeah, so we have a position in that discussion because we are a very large infrastructure provider to a lot of customers, right? In terms of providing on-prem hybrid IT experiences, from a public cloud perspective, we're very sort of public in our strategy of not having a public cloud within HPE but we certainly partner with folks and we've got a very long-standing partnership with Microsoft. We come to market with things like Azure Stack and we have a number of integrations we do with things like Nimble and in that area we resell Azure from an HPE standpoint. So we're really looking to provide full experience for customers in that space and at the end of the day, like you said before, people are still going to buy and deploy in their data center, right? But they want to buy and deploy in their data center with the thought that multi-cloud is going to be a possibility and they want to have infrastructure that's going to allow them to do that. So what we're doing is incrementally, in our product portfolio, I care about storage, is to be able to provide those experiences. I buy a three-par all-flash. I want to be able to tier that or back that up to the cloud. I have Nimble, right? And I want to be able to replicate that to a co-located provider that provides Nimble cloud volumes and then assign compute to it from the cloud, right? So a bunch of things that we want to get customers ready for and make it easier for them. So can we talk a little bit more about that Nimble story? Yeah. The three-par we understand it. It covers a great depth of use cases and enterprise. Where does Nimble fit in the strategy? Yeah. So we're super excited to have Nimble in the portfolio. For three reasons, they have a great team, number one. They bring a really good go-to-market engine and a sales team with that, and they have great products. So from the product angle, which we're very interested in is a couple of different areas. Info site, predictive analytics, right? It's something that we want to apply to our entire product line. Hands down. Things that they do around VM vision, right? With VMware, we want to apply that the three-par, right? And essentially give people the simplicity that it takes to manage a very large, virtualized environment. They have a lot of things that they've done that are very unique. I mentioned Nimble cloud volumes before. That's a use case for primary storage, but can easily be extended to backup, data protection, object storage, right? As not only just a technology provider, but as a way to price it and consume that type of storage. And then they also bring a number of things around in the availability space, which we find is very interesting. Secondary flash, right? So you think all flash as high performance, maybe a higher cost, right? But certainly it's going to help you with the application acceleration. We just released the Nimble secondary flash array for workloads that are test dev cloned workloads, things you can automate, and that you need some performance on it. But it's more performance than your backup storage, not as much cost and not as much storage as your primary. So think about secondary flash as flash for secondary workloads, very cost optimized, more performant, maybe a little bit more expensive than your backup tier. So there's a lot of things that they bring to the table from a technology standpoint that we want to take advantage of. Patrick, HPE's got a broad portfolio, but still to meet all the needs of the customers, especially in the virtuals HN ecosystem, requires a lot of partnerships. Where are kind of the deep integrations that your team's been doing? Where are the places where customers have been asking you to kind of pull things in? Any solutions that you want to highlight specifically? Yeah, so I think more and more what you start to see is portfolio vendors like HPE, they bring great technology that we build organically or that we go and acquire. I think one of the big things that customers rely on us as well that doesn't get a lot of airplay is that we're bringing a vetted ecosystem to a customer. So the whole kit and caboodle from compute, networking, storage, services to bring that all together and an ecosystem that's supported and we basically put the HPE stamp of quality and support behind that. So when it comes to VM, where obviously this has a huge ecosystem. So we do a lot with innovating with VM where I mentioned Nimble, VM vision, things we're doing there to make hypervisor environments quite a bit more easy to implement for customers from a storage angle. You talked to Jesse from the SimpliVity standpoint. We do a lot around data protection with certain things with 3PAR and Nimble. So there's a lot of integrations that we do for VM where specifically and then in other areas of the portfolio, especially automation. So we've got fully supported solutions. I think we got one of the best docker implementations for storage with Nimble, huge partnerships with Puppet and Kubernetes and Chef. All these great things around the automation side. So when we go out and partner with somebody, we're going to go provide a whole solution, a complete solution to a customer that's vetted, RAs, supported. So from my perspective, partnering is actually one of the most important things we do at HPE. So from a customer's perspective, HPE, usually important key industry player for most CIOs, you guys are still very, very trusted in that year. You have a huge ecosystem, huge portfolio. What should CIOs, CTOs, high-level architects be focused on at this point? What's like the consistent theme that you're telling your customers you really need to pay attention to this part of the industry? So I mean, from a corporate perspective, we've got a couple of things that we're working on. So we talk about hybrid IT and that transformation from I would call it established methodologies of application development to a new style. And we're definitely helping customers along that journey. And a lot of it is around bringing to this vetted portfolio and ecosystem along with the services. So the services I think is one thing that HPE is very unique in the fact that we've got a very, very broad set of services in terms of, we can go and help CIOs and CFOs and CTOs understand, where are you along that journey? All the way to implementation. I think one of the things that we're going to be very, very focused on over the next couple of years is providing everything in our portfolio as consumption-based pricing. So all the things that you like about the cloud, the things that are implied there are elasticity, agility, consumption-based, moving from a CapEx to an OPEX model, making that more predictable. So we want to be able to model that and provide those experiences. Definitely one of the things that we're really focused on at HPE is IoT and the Edge, right? So that's a very fundamental part of our business that we're going to be looking at to make a lot of investments in big data. Certainly some of the assets are on Edge line and Aruba and all the implications around security for that. So those are some of the key areas that we are, we talk to CIOs every day about. Patrick, from an availability and data protection standpoint, what does something like IoT mean? I have to think, we're not going to store all the data. Lots of it's going to be just processed at the Edge. We're talking a lot about Edge. So I'm curious, what are the things that you're looking at? Maybe start there. I think about containers or a lot of times going to be something that is going to fit at that kind of maybe even serverless at the Edge. So I seem to think back when we talked about, oh, we're going to go to Object Store and therefore the way I do everything changes. So are we going to, a couple of years from now is this going to be a very different discussion? Well, I think, yeah, I think it's an interesting topic. When you talk about that volume of data and the fact that it's very dispersed, being able to do apply traditional availability techniques to something like that, it's difficult. It's next to impossible. So what we see is customers buying, in these type of ecosystems, you're not buying along horizontal lines. You're not buying a specific server vendor or a networking vendor or a storage vendor and then going best of breed and trying to integrate that yourself. A lot of these things are vertically oriented now in terms of you're buying a stack from a portfolio vendor or going to a service, an integrator. And I think with the volume of data that it takes to do some of these implementations. So we have very large customers, autonomous cars, big implementations of Hadoop and analytics. I mean, a lot of that stuff is built in. I think one of the things you're starting to see is that those type of deployments are outstripping or outpacing, running away from the support of the traditional IT folks. So we have customers that are operationalizing very large Hadoop customers, for example, who don't have methodologies for backing that up and replicate it. So I think there's a lot of technology that needs to catch up with some of these implementations. We see it all the time. So I think there's different techniques from a technology standpoint. When we try to approach these from a customer perspective, we want to provide a full stack for Edge IoT. But from a data protection availability standpoint, that's a difficult problem to solve. All right, well Patrick Osborne, always a pleasure to catch up with you. Thanks for all the updates here. Looking forward to tracking some of those emerging areas that you were just talking about. Yeah, we look forward to talking to you guys in Discover in Madrid. Absolutely, so theCUBE, so many events. Check out siliconangle.tv or actually thecube.net is where you're going to be able to see everything. Nice shorter URL, keeps the branding in theCUBE. For Keith Townsend, I'm Stu Miniman. Stay with us, lots more coverage here still to come VMworld 2017. You're watching theCUBE.