 Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE, covering HPE Discover 2017, brought to you by Hewlett Packard Enterprise. Okay, we're back live here in Las Vegas. This is theCUBE's exclusive coverage of HPE Discover 2017. SiliconANGLE means flagship program. Go out to the events and extract the civil noise. I'm John Furrier, my co-host, Dave Vellante, our next two guests is Dennis Dean, Vice President, Global Advisories and System Integrated Strategic Alliances for Hewlett Packard Enterprise. And Mayor Baroff, Vice President of Alliances for HPE. Guys, I mean, you can't talk about a more partner-centric vision with the simplicity of hybrid cloud up on stage today with Meg Whitman talking about the clean messaging. Again, back on the same vector it's always been on, hybrid cloud, IoT, which is all the data, all those infrastructures in the hood. Welcome to theCUBE. Thank you. Thank you. So what's new? I mean, you got the partner-friendly transformation happening. Right. So as you know, we've been playing some pretty interesting corporate restructuring efforts recently. We had the HPE Inc. spin-off, which essentially created an industry-leading company with PCs and printers. And now what's happened is we've recently just had ES Spin Merge with CSC creating DXC. And really what happened in that case has left us with a very, very focused infrastructure portfolio. And a lot of our system integrator and global advisory partners have seen this and gone, hey, you know, there's an opportunity here to really partner well. Our portfolio now is extremely uncomplicated to understand. It's industry-leading, it's world-class, and with our point-next services divisions, we've got some asset centricity now where they can help package into a really nice way for our other system integrator and services partners to take it to market. Talk about the impact of how you guys work in the services companies. You mentioned it's pretty clear. Just lay it out real quick. Right. So we got a concept which we call precision partnering. And really that's differentiating who these partners are. So you start with the global advisories and that's really going to be the PWCs, the Deloitte's, and the KPMG's, right? They're off on pre-RFP. They're up there consulting very large clients even before they know that they're going to transform. Further, as you move into the system integration space, you go into Accenture. You go into Capgemini. And very, very quickly, you start finding yourself in the traditional space where DXC now plays, which is in the service provider outsourcer world. So that's where you have Tata Consulting. You have Wipro, Infosys, Cognizon, HCL, and Take Mahindra. So classic swim lanes kind of situation. Absolutely. So what's the customer impact of this? I mean, as they are looking at solutions, how does it impact the customer engagement for you guys? So I think it's pretty clear. Nobody can go this alone. And I think that's become even more evident with the technology that we have out there today. It's an ecosystem play from soup to nuts. The other thing we've done in the company is we've established these industry verticals. Well, the industry verticals, guess what? These system integrators have been at it for several decades. So we've just started this journey now. We want to make our products and our services very much in line with what the workflows are from those industries. And who better to help us than the system integrator partners? So Maya, what are you seeing in terms of some of the early action with these relatively new, I mean, they've always had some kind of relationship with you guys. How has that changed and where are you seeing the heat spots? First of all, it's great to be back at theCUBE. And I do want to make an emphatic statement that the India global system integrators are going to be the growth engine for you to pack at enterprise. I don't believe it. We're going to hold it to you. Yeah, we can hold it to it. We can hold it to it. Today, we're cranking. Yeah. So we've seen great traction with the India heritage global system integrators. What we've been doing over the last year is actually a lot of co-innovation with these system integrators. Obviously with the enterprise services business now, spun off as DXC, all of these system integrators previously had some perceived conflict of interest because of our own services arm and they don't see that anymore. So HPE becomes a very valuable company to partner with. They recognize that partnership is not DNA. We've been great partners ever since the company got founded by Bill Hewlett and Dave Packard. And the real ethos of this company is partnership first. You have heard Meg say it, it's part of the core values of Hewlett Packard Enterprise which is partnership first. So HPE is a very, very valuable and attractive partner proposition for these companies. And what we have done on the innovation side is actually a lot of business model innovation. You heard the CEO of Vipro who was on stage recently and he spoke about what we're doing with flexible capacity services which is really offering a paper use model. So again, we couldn't be in a better spot in HPE, Dennis and myself in the strategic alliances organization and we're really excited about it. Well I love what he said about we either eliminate it, we hyper-automated, we can't hyper-automate it, then we agile it. Agile it. It was very aggressive sort of stance. And he talked about retraining. I think 61,000 professionals. Yep, massive numbers that we're talking about here. So your prediction is maybe hold some water. It does hold some water. I mean, we're very excited about where these partners are and the potential they hold for us. I keep telling our leadership team, I really believe we're at the tip of the iceberg where these partners are concerned. You take somebody like a Tata consulting services, they are $18 billion in terms of revenue, 300,000 employees all over the world and I think they just hold a huge value proposition. And just to add on to what Dennis was saying on the precision partnering line, what we've really done now is we've identified where each of these partners have core strengths by industry vertically. So for example, I know that in the financial services industry, a Tata consulting services and enforcers are very strong. We know somebody like a Vipro is very strong in the oil and gas industry. We know somebody like a Tech Mahendra is very strong in the telecommunication space. So rather than spreading ourselves thin and trying to do everything with everybody, we're really choosing specific industry verticals to partner with each of these global system integrators. This is the swim lanes we were talking about. This is interesting. And tell us about that, Dennis. This is because the specialism of knowing the areas are important because you have data, there's applications, but also you have the horizontally scalable multi-cloud market right there, which is going to be ultimately the end game here as hybrid cloud starts to grow. You're going to have multiple clouds, multiple use cases, multiple industries. So you want that horizontally scalable, yet the specialism. We do. I think rather than call it swim lanes because at the end of the day these partners are enormous. They bring an enormous scale to us as well. Canal. Canal. And I'd say ring fencing is almost a way to go about it. And in some cases they do compete, right? And in some cases even our services will overlap a little. So what we're trying to do with it is call out where the complementarity lies, agree on a set of accounts and a set of industries in a specific geography and even with a value proposition that we can go to town with. Whether that be hybrid IT with Deloitte or network as a service with Accenture, going down into flexible capacity services with Wipro. And what's emerged is if you look at our portfolio you kind of heat map which partners playing where with us and that's by design. We don't want to say anything's exclusive. Every partner can work with us and we will absolutely go to market with them. At the end of the day, they have their own install base, right? We'd love to be part of that. And what they see from us is we bring the innovation which helps them be more compelling and more competitive to position their services. Well, a customer wins at the end too. I mean, the point about the swim lanes and the canals there is a huge opportunity but each one has their own DNA as a culture, right? Some are, I mean, PWC for instance, they do their thing and everyone does their thing but the customer is simplified. I mean, to the customer, it's not the confusing who am I talking to? I mean, is that one of the main things you see? It is. So there's two things we see. The first thing is that the customers are a lot more savvy. Okay, they know exactly what they're looking for. You know, the CIO is no longer some irk in the back office with IT. They're now part of the lines of business. They're talking directly to the CEO. In most cases, IT is entrenched so much in these different customer bases that they have a very precise notion of what they're looking for and it's supposed to be outcome based on solutions. What does that mean? Complexity. This is not about product pushing. It's about solutions, selling solutions. And I think what we see with the partners is that in every single major engagement we have, it's an ecosystem play. You may have a PWC like you said before at the advisory level. You might come in then with Accenture doing some system integration and guess what? Infosys runs the whole back end. So that's a very common occurrence these days where you have multiple partners in the same customer base. We have to be smart about how we engage each one and keep it as a very structured approach for Mr. Customer. You know, the thing that Dave and I always talk about and it's been more amplified this market the world now is with open source and all the greatness that's happening. Coexistence has always been an ecosystem game and you throw a few wolves in there. Next thing you know, things are starting to grow. As an example, we've been talking about it with how things grow and balancing. So there is a coexistence. But talk about examples. I would like to get some specifics. If you can share some use cases of what you guys are doing with partners just to kind of put an exclamation point on the new post-spin merge engagement. Give us some examples of the ecosystem. You mentioned a few doing the back end thing. Just going back to this coexistence. So we were just with the CEO of Vipro and he was telling us that he was with the CIO of a major oil and gas company and the CIO tells him, listen, I partner very well with HPE. I partner well with Microsoft. I partner well with GE. But maybe there's an opportunity to form a consortium of sorts and all of you come together and talk to me instead of me talking to all of you independently. So I think that's also reflective of the maturity in the marketplace where increasingly I think both customers and partners now are very conscious that one company can't do it all and that all of us have to coexist in this particular space. So I think that's an example. You're talking about where that was just a few years ago. I mean, this is a new dynamic or how new is it? I mean, that conversation seems to be typical now. It's not just force fitting, hey, just get along and play well. It's actually table stakes. It's table stakes, yeah. And I think increasingly both customers and partners are realizing that each of us bring very complimentary offerings to the table. So all of our customers and partners, the feedback they've given on some of our recent acquisitions, for example, SimpliVity, Nimble, SGI, they see it as a very complimentary acquisition to the services that they offer. So when I talk to Vipro in the oil and gas segment and they say, we want high performance compute and now that we have SGI as an acquisition, they see it as very complimentary. So I think that's where it's an excellent dovetail between what we offer and what the partners need to serve the end customers. And customers across both today, they're talking about digital and digital transformation. So I think that's where the power of HPE and the partner comes together. I mean, Dennis, this is the portfolio benefit. I mean, ultimately, the bigger the portfolio, the better the fit for those kinds of conversations. You know, and it's even more so than that because, again, you look at our portfolio, it starts to looking pretty extensive. You know, we now have a series of very interesting acquisitions which start to fit beautifully in our framework, but you got to stitch it all together. Nobody's going to buy a single server standing on its own. They need a connectivity to go with it. Then you have to start looking at what kind of compute workloads do you need. And which cloud do you want? Oh, you want both of them. And then that's probably got an ecosystem play with someone like a GE Predix, for example. So we've got a lot of triangulation that then starts happening with our ISV partnership. So out with Microsoft, you know, out with some of the Docker, some of the Mezospheres. So what ends up happening is you end up with a beautiful set of raw ingredients, but who's going to mix the salad, make it look beautiful and serve it up to Mr. Customer at the right price point. And I think that's what we've seen a lot of innovation come from our HPE financial services to underpin that traditional CAPEX model and deliver it on an OPEX basis for consumption selling. And guess what these partners love more than anything? OPEX based services led, that's what they're all about. Good gross profit, but also the point that we don't get to because it's an HPE show, you have competition and your customers have bought, have potentially competition in there, whether it's Dell EMC or other things happening, the partner model works because now that's their mix in the salad and the good stuff, new stuff comes in and the better stuff will always win in that model. So how are you evaluating success? I mean, obviously revenue and EBITDA, what other things are you looking at to determine that you're getting a return on the activities with the partners? Then you can sort of prioritize where to spend your time. That's a great question. So we actually talked about that with Peter Ryan, our global sales chief and we were talking about what is not only success criteria, but what does good look like? And I think what it comes down to is this is a partner model, right? We have to have a lot of trust with each other. We actually have to look at each other in the eye and say, I'm going to work with you on this customer. I'm going to stick with you. I'm not going to go running off to the competition. So it starts with trust. The second point is, what is that differentiated value that they bring? We actually have to go and deliver together. If one fails, the other one's going down. So at the end of the day, when we look at the complementary nature of how we go to market together, it has to be because we're market leading in a similar space together. So they bring the industry differentiation, they bring a services mix, they bring an advisory capability that we don't have. What we do is we bring world-class infrastructure, mixing it all together. That's tough stuff right behind the scenes. And guess what? When you're out in front of the customer and he says, you know, I love this stuff. I'd like it at a certain price point. You both have to take a bit of a bath sometimes to make that deal stick and certainly lock the customer in for a future-proof roadmap. And I think that's what we get down to enablement. They have to understand our portfolio. We are on the hook to enable them, to invest in them, to give them resources which are sometimes on-site, on-premise, on their staff even, who think about HPE every day. And it's not just today. It's what's happening next year and the roadmap that evolves from there. So there's a lot of tightness that expands and people say, oh, look at HP, you know, you guys are getting smaller. As far as we can tell, we're getting a lot bigger. We have a lot more conversations. Across the partners we named, it's 2.5 million employees in those partners. That's how we look at it today. It's an ecosystem play, not just one company. Yeah, ecosystem is a great point. I mean, Mayor, you talked about the Indian growth opportunity that also brings up the global question. So one of the themes here this year, and I'll see what's different from this last year and this year is obviously the structural changes and the simplicity on the messaging and the organizational engagement. But the simplicity of execution. Talk about how you guys are going to make it simpler for the customer to span the geos of global execution. It's not easy. Yeah, no, it's not easy. So one of the areas which we are focusing on in the avatar of the new Hewlett Packard Enterprise is really ease of doing business. So with the India global system integrators, the approach we have taken is, how can we make it very easy for you to do business with us, thereby serving your end customer? So right now we have launched on several business process re-engineering within our internal process so that we are very attractive for the partners and customers to work with us and that's a project that we have just launched under the overall tag of ease of doing business. All right guys, final word on this segment. Just in general, obviously very partner friendly. We heard that simplicity, hybrid cloud, no brainer on that relative to the transformation. Business transformation is really where the rubber meets the road. Your thoughts on business transformation and what's happening at the show here. Let's share with the audience your thoughts on those two things. So I think the proximity to the lines of business. What we're actually doing now is we're no longer selling into a black box and saying we hope this works for you, Mr. Customer. We're putting skin in the game, not only by financing the equipment and we're actually taking risk. And what we're saying to some customers is we're saying we're going to do this outcome based. In fact, in some cases, and we have a beautiful actual case study in the public sector up in Canada where we actually only get paid as the customer makes money. If you look at some of our showcases which we've done even in Santa Clara with the Aruba enablement of the stadium, the 49er stadium, you think about the business value that happened there. We monetized the game. So the Aruba Wi-Fi enablement, that was just a point play. What actually ended up happening is the entire stadium makes more money as a result of this geolocation where you can order food, have it delivered directly to your seat and not miss a single second watching the game as you eat. And that's a great use case. That's a business outcome that has nothing to do with serving wireless to people as a speeds and feeds. It's basically an enablement for an entirely different experience. And it's a language we have to learn to talk, right? I think, again, that's where we fall back very heavily on our advisory partners. I mean, if you look at the language that Accenture uses, KPMG uses, Deloitte uses, I mean, they speak this language every single day. They're in the C level boards. They're having these conversations before we even get involved. And I think that's a huge value there. Final, final question. I know we got to wrap, getting the sign, but low hanging fruit in terms of industries, you mentioned obviously we need entertainment, that's the sports, you mentioned manufacturing, retail, these low hanging fruit, what are the low hanging fruit areas that are ripe right now for business transformation? We've spoken about industries, but I think the biggest low hanging fruit for Yulitpac at Enterprise as a horizontal is across the IoT space. Each one of our partners has an IoT strategy in very niche areas. And I think Yulitpac at Enterprise is just beautifully positioned right now to take leverage of what's happening in the IoT space. And again, final words from my side is that the India global system integrator is going to be the growth engine for Yulitpac at Enterprise. Now Yulit, we're going to hold it to you. Dennis Mayure, thank you for joining us on theCUBE here. Partner update there, partner friendly, clear lines of engagement. It's a great opportunity to IoT. It's theCUBE bringing you a lot of internet of things with video. I'm John Furrier with Dave Vellante. Stay with us more for live coverage of our three days of exclusive HPE Discover 2017. Stay with us after this short break.