 From around the globe, it's theCUBE. Covering HPE Discover Virtual Experience, brought to you by HPE. Hi, and welcome back to theCUBE's coverage of HPE Discover 2020, the virtual experience. I'm Stu Miniman, and happy to welcome back to the program. One of our CUBE alumni, Partha Narazimhan, he is the Chief Technology Officer of Aruba, which of course Aruba is an HPE company. Partha, thanks so much for joining us. Thank you, Stu. All right, so HPE Discover is a big event, but for the networking people, of course Aruba has its own event, atmosphere, which happened just ahead of Discover. You gave a keynote there, some news there that we'll talk about, but just bring our audience up to speed a little bit about the role of the networking inside of HPE with Aruba. Right, and so while Aruba's primary focus is networking and security, we really have expanded, in the past few years, the scope of the problem set that we work on to what we call the intelligent edge, and we define the edge as where people are, where action is, and how do you think about the kinds of experiences that end users care about, in addition to just connecting security to their absence of data on the other side, but also about the experiences in the physical world, and then there are these stakeholders that care about efficiency, productivity, and so on. So the intelligent edge is, it includes networking and security, but it really focuses on people and business stakeholders. Yeah, that's great. Often we talk to the business outcomes that matter and experiences. It's so much about people. The current global pandemic absolutely has put a real focus on people. From a networking standpoint, of course, everybody's working from home a lot more. VPN services need to be considered, and I'm curious the impact from your business and your customers as to what's happening. Right, and this is where the focus on the intelligent edge, on people's experiences and business outcomes is actually, even though we got started earlier, it was being highlighted now with the presence of the pandemic, and if you define, go back to the definition of the edge as where people are and where action is, in the last two to three months, a lot of that is just in people's homes, in all of our homes, that's where I am right now and that's where we all have been. So what does that mean for where the edge is? And so we kind of see at least three phases in here where right now we're focused on business continuity, which is how do you now enable employees to continue to stay productive and connect securely to the enterprise data and apps, but also when some of this subsides, how do you bring people back safely into physical spaces and that's what we call business recovery. And then as I talk to customers, there's a spectrum of opinions about what is going to stick and if you call that the new normal, when the pandemic goes out of our lives, it doesn't look like we're all going back to where we were in January or February this year. And so what is the new normal and how does the edge prepare for it? And that's really what we're focusing on. That's so important right now. Partha, when you look at enterprises, rapidly adjusting to situations is not necessarily what we think of. Of course, in the last few months, we've had to move very fast to be able to enable the workforce. Love to hear what you're hearing from CIOs there and customers and how are you helping them react to things much faster than they might have pre-COVID. So a lot of the business continuity, actually the focus is on IT, right? Because how do you deploy technologies or actually leverage the technologies that have already been deployed in order to allow employees to stay productive from their homes. And there's been a spike in demand for work from home solutions. Believe it or not, Aruba had, we had built a solution for the remote access point way back in 2005 or 2006, when there was a different pandemic at that time as a business continuity solution. But given the intensity of how this pandemic is affected all of our lives, there was a spike in demand for work from home solutions, not just from a connectivity and security perspective, but also every employee's home is very different based on the speed of your internet connection. How many other people are at home? How many other devices are connecting to the home network? And what else is happening at the three Netflix streams running in parallel? And in which case, in that kind of an environment, how do we now provide some visibility for IT to help the employee in getting their work done? So while we built the remote access point as a security solution, we ended up realizing that what we really saw for the end user was a better user experience where they just see the same network that they see in the office they see at home. But more again, helping IT forget some visibility and maybe troubleshoot some issues employees might have. And so all three of these have been integral components of that solution and it became even more front and center when the pandemic hit in terms of the spike in demand for that. Yeah, when I think about security has really, in the last five years or so escalated not only to the C-suite, but up the board level for constant consideration. Has the current situation really raised the visibility of networking to the C-suite? It has, right? Essentially, the focus until now could have been that, okay, all of my employees get into the office and how do I now create an environment within the office building that allows for collaboration that allows for seamless connectivity and security. But the pace at which we all had to go to this work from home situation was the time window was so short that IT had to respond quickly. And they had to respond quickly, where they could have dealt with a few dozen office buildings to now thousands of employees homes. And so the all of the effort that we had put in to create that solution earlier now paid off because we were ready for this situation, even though we all live in interesting times and I never want to see this again in my lifetime. But the fact that we had a focus on it for the last 15 years or so made it ready for us. But more importantly, as we look at, as a business continuity phase was about IT, the business recovery, which is, which is probably where we are starting to enter right now of how do we now bring people back safely into physical spaces. Now the stakeholders, that set is expanding, right? Whether it's, at HPE, we have this team called the crisis management team that is looking at, okay, how do I now manage not just the crisis but bringing people back in facilities important because if things space has to get rearranged in order to meet certain density or spacing objectives. So they have some interest in their marketing, if you're retail or hospitality and so on, they get interested in it. So there's a lot of other stakeholders now rely on the infrastructure that IT has deployed primarily for connectivity and security. Now that same infrastructure is gonna go benefit other stakeholders so that you get competitive advantage in the business recovery phase, right? If I'm able to safely bring a lot of my key employees that are required to be in physical spaces back in while addressing all of their concerns about the health and the safety associated with the recovery, that definitely gives me a competitive advantage. And we believe that the solutions that Aruba has provided to IT until now are now there's a spotlight shining on it because a lot of people, a lot of other stakeholders could benefit from that infrastructure that has already been. Yeah, there's a lot of conversation going on in the industry about what things look like post pandemic. And while there's still obviously a lot of uncertainties, we really think there will be some hybrid modes going on. So work from home might not stay permanent but many companies are talking about being more flexible. So how does that impact what you're offering? Because I think about from the enterprise, I needed a certain density. Now I need to think about, okay, how do I make sure that whether you're in the office or working remotely that I can have you participate and have the same kind of experience wherever you are. Right, and this is again, this is where we rely on the network infrastructure, right? Because if you create a connectivity network that enables mobility is secure and is always available, it drives participation. That participation leverages network data to provide visibility into physical spaces, right? And think about even the recovery phase and we see actually three, at least three interesting scenarios in our conversations with customers on how the network can help them in the recovery phase and it points to distancing requirements or how do I reduce density so that I get some level of increased distancing amongst my employees. So that way you can look at network data and figure out, okay, where the hotspots are in terms of people density and can I go make changes to those to try and lower that meet my internal guidelines or public safety guidelines. Two shared spaces are also a medium of transmission of this particular virus or disease. And so shared spaces like conference rooms, cafeteria tables and others that we can again use the network to figure out usage of those and potentially provide guidelines to cleaning crews to pay more attention to certain spaces in favor of others that are not necessarily seeing the same level of usage. And three, if in the unfortunate situation that some individual becomes a person of interest, we can quickly figure out all of the spaces that they have been in in the past certain time window, including who else they could have overlap or being close to within that space, right? So at least you're not relying purely on human memory for contact tracing. There's a certain level of additional data that can be used to enhance or refresh human memory. That is really what we see happening in the business recovery, but you made a good point on what is a new normal because as we, again, talk to customers, trying to gauge what is going to stick beyond the recovery phase, right? And if you fast forward, let's say a year from now we have a vaccine and the virus is under control, are we all going to go back to where we were before the virus entered our lives? And the common opinion seems to be that some things are here to stay. And you look at work from home, you made a reference to that. A lot of our customers do believe that there is going to be an increased amount of work from home that stays with us, even after the virus is out of our lives. That again, refreshes all the things that we built for the business continuity continues forward, even as some of, we start to get back into physical spaces. Security again is paramount, right? The home, essentially as far as IT is concerned is an uncontrolled environment because they just don't have control over many things that happen in employees' homes. And so how do we bring in a layer of visibility and some degree of control in an environment that is inherently not subject to that level of control, the same way that an office building can be? And those are the kinds of things that we're looking at. When we talk to higher education customers, for example, they are looking at plans for this upcoming fall semester or for the next academic year of running their classrooms at 30% occupancy. So if you have 100 students sign up for a class, physically in the classroom, they only want to have 30 students and the other 70 could be on campus but they're all dialed in remotely or online into the class. But how do you manage this process? So which 30 people get to be in the classroom for any particular day? And we believe that a lot of these, the workflows and interesting use cases that directly address the intelligent edge are going to become important as we get into the new one. All right, and I'm glad you talked about the intelligent edge. So your keynote that you gave at Atmosphere was accelerating innovation at the edge. And you had the tough task of being right before the SpaceX speaker too. So give us a little, our audience a little bit about the innovation. How should we be thinking about the edge? So at Atmosphere Digital, two weeks ago, Ruba announced the Edge Services Platform or ESP for short. And it's a little bit of a play because we really believe that we're building solutions that have a sixth sense in sensing what end users are looking for, what stakeholders are looking for, when problems show up and how do we quickly resolve them, right? So that degree of focus on data-driven AI operations was the key in us starting to coin the term ESP or Edge Services Platform, right? So it really looks at addressing not just connectivity, connect and protect, but also analyze and act because the telemetry data coming out of the network is really the same data that helps with the business recovery, but we want to actually bubble that up and put it into a common data lake that helps us deliver a better connection and connectivity and security service, but also enable all of these experiences and outcomes at the edge. And so the ESP or the Edge Services Platform was the key announcement at Atmosphere this year and we see that as the foundation on which everything that we're going to do starting now is going to get built up. Yeah, I'm curious. You know, we talked about some of the things that have been accelerated due to the current situation. I have to respond, work from home and the like. When you look at Edge environment, is that something that, you know, is that something you see people, you know, accelerating them or are they pausing them? Is it just kind of happening at the same pace? Any data or sense that you have from users right now? So Edge is going to become even more important, right? And we used to focus on the Edge. We've had the focus on Edge for a while, but until now, until the pandemic hit us, the assumption is always that people are going to show up in physical spaces and then let's focus on the experiences and the outcomes. I believe with the pandemic coming in, some of the power of choice has shifted towards the user or the person in choosing whether they want to consume a particular service or experience by going to a physical space or by staying at home and doing it online, right? I look at the past few weeks, we've had a few birthday parties where we used to meet in person and now we're all doing it over Zoom or other video conferencing technologies. So that choice moving over to the person means that we can't just assume that people are going to show up in physical spaces and then focus only on, okay, once they show up, what can I do about the experience or the outcomes? The focus on Edge is now shifting to where we have to even look at enabling technologies and experiences that entice people, that convince people to come into that physical space and consume that service or experience. And that means that, okay, the scope of what we do at the intelligent edge actually is going to increase, it's going to widen. And that's the reason why it was timely that we were working on the Edge services platform. Even, we had started working on it long before the pandemic ever showed up in our radar, but that focus is now putting us in the right place from a competitive perspective to leverage all of the technologies that we built so far to package it up together, to offer our customers something that is far beyond just connectivity and security. Great, final question I have for you, you're talking about these, not necessarily in-person experiences, here we have the Discover Virtual Experience. Give our audience just a little bit as to what they expect from Aruba and what you want people to take away from the Discover Virtual Experience when it comes to Aruba and networking at HPE. Right, and the common, we kind of, when we talk to some customers, there's always an association of the Aruba brand to a wireless LAN and over time in the past five years as being part of Hewlett Packard Enterprise, we've kind of expanded that to include all of networking and some of the security functions that we offer. But more importantly, I'd encourage everybody to go look at some of the technologies that we package together as part of the Edge services platform and how they can help our customers, not just IT, but also all of the other stakeholders within their organizations to create that compelling experiences and outcomes at the Edge. Excellent, well, thank you so much for joining us, appreciate all the updates. Thanks for having me Stu. All right, stay tuned for more coverage, HPE Discover Virtual Experience, I'm Stu Miniman and thank you for watching theCUBE.