 From the CUBE Studios in Palo Alto in Boston, connecting with thought leaders all around the world, this is a CUBE Conversation. Hi, I'm Stu Miniman and welcome to a CUBE Conversation. I'm coming to you from our Boston area studio. We've been digging into Pensando and the technology that they've been doing. Happy to welcome to the program Steve Hirschkowitz. He is the vice president of worldwide sales with Hewlett Packard Enterprise, part of the HPC, HPE Pensando relationship. Steve, thanks so much for joining us. Thanks for having me, Stu. Really happy to be here. So, obviously, Pensando made a bit of a splash when they came out at the end of 2019. We were really excited to have the CUBE at the launch, had some big name guests there, including your CEO, Antonio Neary. HPE has an investment and is an OEM of Pensando. So, bring us in as to why this partnership, why this investment from HPE standpoint. Well, thanks Stu. So, obviously, there are a lot of reasons why HPE would be interested in a partnership with an innovative company like Pensando, standing the fact that you have the MPLS team that had developed industry-changing technologies for their previous company at Cisco and leveraging their expertise and their market leadership to bring new innovation to the market, which was very interesting to us, as well as the partnership that was launched between Pensando's chairman, John Chambers, and our CEO, Antonio Neary. And when you hear them speak, they talk about being partners for life. And so I think what's unique and what's interesting to us is you'll hear our CEO, Antonio, talk a lot about HPE's evolution as a company and how we are absolutely the edge-to-cloud platform as a service company. And when you have a strategy that involves service and consumption, you have to follow the innovation engine and the market transitions to be able to satisfy your customers and get out in front of some of the market trends. And so the technology and the innovation that Pensando brings to the market is unlike anything else that's available today that anybody else can do. And we saw this as a great opportunity for us to really serve our customers as they move more of their data to the edge and want to apply and distribute a lot of the services to the edge where the data is created and of course where most of the data is consumed. So it's an exciting partnership for us. We also have a board seat in the company and we're very, very excited about the opportunity and our customers are really excited as well about the partnership. Yeah, it's interesting. Those of us that have watched the industry long enough, I remember back, John Chambers for many years, HPE was one of Cisco's biggest partners for a long time. It's really interesting what you're talking about, some of the new opportunities, what's going on with Edge. Bring us inside the partnership a little bit. How has it been going? You've got about six months since it's unveiled the world. What can you tell us so far now that it's seen the light of day? Well, so the partnership is very, very strong. And I think if you asked some of the senior executives on the Pensando side, including some of the board members, they would tell you that the partnership with HPE is different than any other relationship that they have with any other company. And it is that way because we've created a very unique bond through our global business unit that's responsible for bringing these products to market and defining the roadmap to a very, very unique go-to-market strategy that we've developed where we actually have myself leading a go-to-market engine of people that are helping with the enablement, with the training, with the customer interactions, qualifying opportunities, and really helping to make a market for this technology as we do have first mover advantage. So we work very closely with all aspects of the Pensando team. Our business units are aligned. Our development teams are aligned. Our sales teams are very, very closely aligned. Their chief revenue officer, Frank Palomo and I, are tied at the hip as we bring this technology to market together with both of our sales teams. And then as we look at further innovating together, you know, we are completely locked and aligned on the combined roadmap. So it's a unique partnership. It creates unprecedented opportunity for HPE through this partnership to gain architectural control and help our customers gain architectural control over these next-generation data center networks and really make a leapfrog over any of the technologies that are available today. And, you know, really two focuses, right? One is in helping the cloud service providers that wanna better compete with the 800-pound gorillas with a much better technology, a faster technology and a technology that leapfrogs anything that they've built. And the other side of that is our ability to help enterprises as we sell more as-a-service offerings and more edge solutions, help our enterprises make their environments much less complex, much more secure and really help them improve, you know, business application performance so that they can sustain competitive advantage and make their data center networks look a lot more like what the hyperscalers have built, but only a lot better and a lot faster and a lot more secure. Yeah, I tell you Steve, one of the things that I've always been really admired about HP over the years is, you know, baking these solutions together. It's not just a bunch of pieces, get them at the customer site and figure it out, but, you know, both, you know, I worked on standards, I've worked on a lot of solutions over the years and HP and now HPE always make sure when it gets the customer, you know, it's together, it works, the time from getting it, being able to use it, you know, really is minimized and that focus on simplicity is something that, you know, I've seen time and again from HPE. When it comes to the Pensanda solution, how does this fit in with the HPE products? You know, where does it fit in? What do those solutions look like today? It's a really, really good question, Sue. So, initially, we're going to market on our ProLiant Rack server platform and we will launch in June general availability of these solutions. We've been offering them to customers, very select number of customers through a private SKU that we've created, but it fits initially within our Rack server portfolio, but over time, you'll see us start to begin to integrate this, you know, across the entire compute portfolio where it makes sense and where there's a market and where customers are asking for it in addition to some integration points, you know, with different business units, right? So, we have, this relationship is so exciting that almost every business unit within HPE is interested in figuring out what the leverage points are to help solve customer problems and create opportunities for customers. So, everything from our blade servers through synergy through our Aruba relationship, through our software stack, you know, we're going to be doing a lot more integration. So, I think you look out for initially an opportunity to install this digital services platform where you have a lot of Rack servers and you want to reduce the complexity and really distribute a lot of those network services that are provided today in a centralized fashion through a number of different black boxes with a number of different operating systems, a number of different service contracts, move those to the compute edge at the exhaust of an HPE server on a platform that's factory integrated and that we stand behind and we support and sell. And you made another comment about support and how HPE does a really good job at making sure that when we sell a solution, it's a tightly integrated solution that scales, that works together, and that customers can count on. And versus something that's loosely coupled and disjointed as you see a lot of partnerships which we try and avoid. So, one of the parts of this relationship that's unique is that HPE is actually going to be supporting and providing the L1 and the L2 support for this product on a global basis. So, when our customers have an issue or they need help, they come to us and it really rounds out the relationship. So, it's not just taking a portfolio or a solution and putting it into an HPE server. It's a factory integrated, factory tested solution with a lot of different integrations that we stand behind that we sell and it scales. It'll work just as well with 100 DSPs and servers as it will with 100,000. I'd love to drill in a little bit on really the customer use cases there. When you talk about edge computing, first of all, there's a lot of misnomers out in the industry. Edge can be anything from the telco edge. I've seen lots of things like network function virtualization. I've talked to HPE about those network offerings in the past through down to kind of IoT devices and everything in between. You said you've got some customers that have been getting early access. Are there any patterns or anything you can tell us about what are those edge use cases that this solution is a good fit for? Sure, Stu. I think when we started this journey six months ago, we initially thought that the most common use case that customers would be interested, especially the large New York financial customers or the large financial customers in general, would be security, right? And so we had a lot of conversations about things like east-west firewall. 70, 80% of the traffic as we talked to customers nowadays is east-west, right? It's application to application traffic where it used to be north-south and that east-west traffic, especially in a virtualized world with virtualized networks and virtualized servers has created a lot of complexity for customers. So we thought originally security, micro segmentation, east-west firewall encryption would be the use cases. But interestingly enough, as we started to talk to customers, what we found out pretty quickly was that many of these customers have lost track because of the sprawl in the growth of the data in their data centers. It really lost track of which applications are talking to which applications, which people are talking to which people. And in fact, we had some customers tell us that if we were to put your system in and turn on firewall services from day one, we could potentially bring our network to its knees because we've lost track of where everything is going. So what that's led itself to is a lot of customers very interested in the first use case, which is around visibility, observability and telemetry, giving our customers the ability to really graph out and see their application patterns because what you can't see, you really can't secure. And then what we believe will happen over time and we're starting to see this play out is that those customers, once they have a handle on what their traffic flows are, and they have some good telemetry, they have some good services on being able to get that visibility, then they'll start to define security policy based upon those traffic patterns and use the centralized Pensando policy services manager to distribute that policy, whether it be micro segmentation for managing and securing virtualized traffic or east-west firewall, and then later on encryption in a future release. So that's what we're seeing. Excellent, oh, great customer data already. What you've been saying really resonates. Customers today know that that pace of change and keeping track of things is really challenging. It's gone from something that people might be able to get a handle to with to knowing I have to have the automation, the systems, the intelligence baked into the system to be able to handle it. All right, so June, this month, you've GA the product, congratulations on getting that. So tell us what you expect to see, the Pensando HP relationship, are there expanses in the product line we should be looking forward through the rest of 2020 or any other pieces as you look forward? Sure, so we are excited about the June launch. We're also excited about the fact that we have our large customer show coming up this year, HPE Discover, and we're gonna be profiling the new Pensando partnership at Discover and giving customers the ability to see the power of this technology and how it can really help them solve their most pressing business and technical priorities. But we have a full roadmap that we've built out jointly with our partners at Pensando that involves taking this platform across different parts of our portfolio. One of the things that we'll be doing as we launch almost immediately is we're gonna be putting this on our flagship GreenLake offer, right, which is our as a service offering. And so customers will have the ability to purchase Pensando solutions under GreenLake and then over time, we'll enhance that to provide the detailed metering that our customers have come to know through that platform. So I think you'll see a big splash there and then there's a lot of work being done to leverage the SDKs that Pensando was providing to provide better integration into some of our workflows and some of our tools. And again, as I mentioned to you earlier, Stu, almost every business unit in our company has got meetings going on with Pensando trying to figure out how they can leverage the power of this technology to help HPE gain and sustain long-term competitive advantage as customers move from these old legacy, three tier networks that are very complicated to run and they have to stitch VLANs together. They have to go through different service chaining to get simple things done. I think there's gonna be a lot of work going on across all of our business units to keep Pensando front and center and help us deliver this platform jointly so that we're differentiated. One other thing I think it's important Stu is that we're also building a whole host of differentiated services around this platform. So things like professional services, training services, security assessment services, right? We're getting a lot of experience through the trial and proof of concept process that we're going through right now and we're building runbooks, right? To be able to sort of document exactly what we've learned as we do these big implementations and these trials and be able to bring those to our customers in the form of services that they can use as they look to migrate and modernize these legacy networks. Excellent, well, Steve, sounds like just the GA is step one. You and your team have your hands full with a lot of pieces as you go to market with this and expand that offering. Really impressive, we're taking this. Want to give you the final word? Pensando, HPE and what customers should be looking for? Stu, I think our customers should look forward to the GA launch coming out towards the end of June and this technology is very exciting because if I had to sum it up in basically three statements, it would be this solution combined with what HPE has the ability to deliver and support will absolutely help our customers simplify their environments, reduce a lot of operational complexity thereby reducing significant cost as they look to re-architect and build their next generation data center networks. Secondarily, this solution, our combined solution together will help every customer especially those in the financial industry or highly regulated industries really substantially improve their security posture and reduce the amount of risk that they have in their environments. And then lastly, and I think almost equally as important is the fact that this solution because it's built on a highly programmable, customized ASIC that's traditionally used in networking technology, not necessarily seen at the exhaust of a server is gonna give our customers the ability to exponentially improve their application performance so that when business applications run faster, it gives them opportunities to get to market faster with their own products and drive additional revenue to sustain long-term competitive advantage. So we're excited about the opportunities, Stu. It's going to be a lot of fun. Excellent. Well, Steve Hershkowitz, thank you so much for the update. Congratulations on the launch and absolutely we'll be keeping track of the progress. Thank you for your time. Happy to be here. All right, I'm Stu Miniman and thank you for watching theCUBE.