 We're back on theCUBE unpacking HPE's GreenLake announcements. I'm here with Keith Townsend, the CTO advisor. Keith, always awesome to see you, man. Good to be back on theCUBE. So let's talk about these announcements. Let's break it down. Where do you want to start? Cloud services? Cloud services. One of the things that we've gone back and forth with HPE over the past few years is that I don't understand GreenLake. Like, is it a financial scheme? Is it a cloud services? And I think data services, the data services announcement around Zerto and Marketplace really elevates GreenLake to a cloud service. Kind of on par with some of the hyperscalers on how they think about architectures around data centers and fabrics and services to enterprise customers. When you say on par, in what regard? So one of the things I didn't get separate to the GreenLake announcement, we've heard a lot about HPE's container services as well, and they have a data fabric and it does things that the storage solution does. Okay, that seems like a marketplace upon itself. And then the data services with the Zerto acquisition, completely different marketplace? No, HPE is bringing all of that together logically. So a cloud architect, similar to how they can go to AWS's console, select some services, deploy those services in their AWS VPC. Now I can conceptionally do that with HPE. I can go to HPE's GreenLake console, choose the services I need to build my app and deploy it. That is something new within all these traditional OEM providers. Because of the cloud nativeness on prem, bringing that capability? So bringing the Aruba Central concepts, you know, Aruba Central, I think I read a stat, 100,000 customers on Aruba Central with a million interactions an hour. So this scale, this hyperscale scale, this base to have a centralized marketplace and have those cloud-like services but on-premises or in Nicolo, I think puts HPE near the top, if not the top, for building private cloud services on-premises. Let's say you're a CTO at an organization that's an HPE customer or an architect. You're all in on HPE, been working with the company for a long, long time. Wouldn't you want a view of your estate, your applications and workloads where you could manage on-prem, cloud, whether it's AWS, Azure, Google, take advantage of the cloud native, go across cloud, abstract all that complexity away, maybe eventually go out to the edge? Is that what you want? That's what I want. It's aspirational. No one between Microsoft to HPE, no one is able to give me that today. So as a CTO, I'm looking at platforms and seeing is the building blocks there. We talked to the HPE storage team of how they're building the abstractions that they can take anything from their pro-liant line, build the necessary storage underlay and then abstract that away with GreenLake. You can do that with AWS, EBC, Azure storage. It really doesn't matter because they're building the abstractions. So aspirationally, they're there, they have the right vision, it's about execution. Okay, so that is the right direction in your view. I mean, I think that that is clearly where customers want to go. A lot of work, a lot of work to get there and it's a race, right? I mean, that's, you know, I feel as though as a service is good starting point, but there's a long way to go. And so how do you feel about HPE's, you know, chances there, how they're positioning relative to not only their other sort of on-prem competitors, but public cloud players? So they're asking the right questions. They're asking the right questions of the right players. It's about relationships. Dave, you know this more than anyone, that if you don't have the right relationships inside of the customers, you're not going to get there. And I think that's HPE's number one struggle. No slant to the VP of operations, but the VP of operations doesn't want to change his operations. He doesn't want disruption. What COO was coming to you and saying, I want to be disruptive. Same thing in VP of operations, IT operations. They don't want disruption, but this has been HPE's traditional customer. HPE needs to get into the chief data officers, the chief marketing officers office and have these very difficult conversations and sales so that they can eventually show that they can't execute it. I think that's one of their primary challenges. So okay, so that's good. I'm glad you brought that up because I think Esmeral starts to go in that direction. It feels as though the first phase is, let's pick off analytics. Let's make analytics on-prem as attractive and simple as it is in the cloud. And then beyond that, let's support this notion of decentralized data and federated governance. And that is aspirational today, but as to your point, nobody really has that. AWS really, they're not going after that across clouds at this point in time. Microsoft is with Arc, I guess, and Google kind of has Anthos and they're kind of doing it, but I'm not sure you're going to trust your cloud provider to be that player. So it's kind of like jump ball here, isn't it? You know, AWS has to make a strategic partnership with one of HPE's primary competitors because there was a gap. We know Andy Jassy, former president and CEO of AWS, doesn't typically partner with traditional OEMs unless there's a real gap in his portfolio that he needed to do. He did it with VMware, and he did it with HPE's primary competitor in storage or one of their primary competitors in storage. HPE sees the opportunity. The question is, do they have the workforce? Do they have the field teams? The field CTOs, the solution architects that can go and talk to talk to these customers and this new audience that they need to convince that HPE is just as respected as Snowflake in this data area. Can partners fill that gap? Partners definitely can fill that gap, but HPE still has the same challenge with partners, transforming partners from speaking boxes to solutions. I've spent a short stay at VMware. I was surprised at how rigid the channel is and these large organizations and making that transition. The other thing, when you think about it as a service that at least that I look for, I wonder if you could comment is the pace, you know, we all, we go to these events, we go to reinvent and it's this fire hose of announcements. We're seeing HPE on a cadence. You know, it's not like a once a year dealio with GreenLake. We're seeing, you know, some stuff with HPE, we're seeing the acquisition of Zerto, the DR services, the data protection as a service, Esmeral. Do you feel like that pace is accelerating and is it fast enough? You know what, I famously said on theCUBE that VMware moves at the pace of the CIO. HPE needs to move a little bit faster than the CIO because the CIO isn't their only customer. They have the opportunity to get customers outside of the CIO and I think they're moving fast enough. This is really hard stuff, especially when you start to deal with data and the most valuable asset of an organization. Can you move too fast? You absolutely can. One of the other analysts said that you don't wanna become the forgotten about data services company of the 2000s. You don't wanna make that mistake in the 20s. So right now I think I feel as if HPE is making the right cadence, bringing along the old customers, new customers. Challenge of all of the big OEMs is how do you not erode your base customer base and but still move fast enough to satisfy the move fast break stuff crowd. Keep close to your customers. Keith, we gotta leave it there. Thanks so much for coming back in theCUBE. Love to have you back. They have a great time. All right, and thank you for watching. Keep it right there for more great content from HPE's GreenLake announcements. You're watching theCUBE.