 Live from San Francisco, it's theCUBE. Covering Red Hat Summit 2018. Brought to you by Red Hat. Hello, welcome back everyone. Day three of wall-to-wall coverage here at Red Hat Summit 2018, live in San Francisco, California here at Moscone West. I'm John Troyer, your co-host of theCUBE with John Troyer, analyst co-host this week. He's the co-founder of Tech Reckoning, advisory and community development firm. Our next guest is Arvest Suthi, Senior Vice President General Manager Ulu Packard Enterprise's point next, HPE. Great to see you, thanks for coming on. Great to see you as well, thank you. So I'll see, there's no secret HPE's been partners, been partnering with companies for many generations. Red Hat is one of the big strategic partner. A lot of services, opportunities, a lot of transformation happening. And the biggest thing is that true private cloud and hybrid cloud and public cloud, it's all happening in IoT Edge. It's kind of seeing pretty clearly what's happening. On-premise isn't going away. It's going to look like clouds, going to run like a cloud, has to work with a cloud or clouds, plural. And then you've got the IoT Edge out there, all kind of coming together with software, Kubernetes, containers, all kind of being glue layers in here. So it must be good for you guys to think, okay, customers can now see what you guys have been promoting. So what is HPE doing with Red Hat? How does that tie into that transformation with the cloud? You said it very well, John. In fact, when we talk to our customers, whether they realize or not, it's a hybrid world and their environments are hybrid. And like you said, private class are also not going anywhere. In fact, we did the CTP acquisition, RedPixie acquisition, and this is really all to help clients on their cloud journey. It doesn't really matter to us whether the workload ends up in AWS, Google, Azure or on-prem or dedicated infrastructure. So that's actually been a huge plus for us to really have a seat at the table, to have a discussion around customer workload strategy. Now, partner like Red Hat, I mean, we've been together, working together for probably about 18 years now, and it's been a long-standing partnership who are their number one OEM partner, but also the point you made, I think from services standpoint, it's just a huge opportunity. Customers tell us anyone can do infrastructure service when they're looking for platform as a service. So jointly with our consumption capabilities and Red Hat OpenShift, now we're giving them true container platform as a service. Containerization, we were talking yesterday on our wrap-up, you can bring in the new without killing the old, and, but it's really fundamental because people want cloud scale, they want horizontally scalable application, DevOps and programming, infrastructure as code, but they can't just throw out their legacy stuff. What containers does allows them to nurture those applications and workloads and let it take its natural course. This is actually good for services because you can, there's a solution there. That's right, there's absolutely, in fact, customers tell us when they're looking for the platform, it's not just to help them on their new build. They're looking for help also to run the existing environment. And most of the times it's not practical to refactor, re-architect every single of the legacy applications. And because some of them applications, as you know, they were done to leverage the performance optimization on the underlying infrastructure piece of it. And so one of the things we're doing jointly with Red Hat is leverage containerization to provide the portability for the applications to move in between the different environments. And whether it's private cloud, public cloud, but the key thing is portability and mobility and that's a great spot for containerization. Give some use cases of customers, take us through a day in the life of maybe a couple of different examples where you guys are engaging with Red Hat where you're coming in, the customers are like, okay, here's my situation. What are some of the trends and patterns that you see with customers? What specifically, are you aware, is a workload moving it to the multiple clouds? Is it more, you know, re-platforming on-premise? What are some of the things that you guys are doing to serve us? I would say bulk of our engagements, and that's one thing that we feel really good about jointly with Red Hat, we have really shifted our engagement model to be much more outcome-driven. So the discussions with the clients always start off with like a workshop. And within that workshop, we're actually understanding where the customer really is trying to go, what business outcomes they're trying to achieve before we start to kind of push a specific technology stack or specific solution set. And by having that alignment, in fact, we talk about that IT needs to be embedded with the business, not the alignment, embedded with the business. And because the role of IT has changed, so when we talk about workload, right, it's about, you know, no longer, and I talked about this earlier today, you're no longer running workloads just within the four-wall data center. And the traditional view of that IT owns and operates the four-wall data center, that's just dead. And so it's really more about managing the supply chain. And so we talk about the overall workload strategy, which workloads make the most sense to go in public cloud, private cloud. And then the discussion also centers around their application portfolio and really understanding which applications truly need to be cloud native, which ones do really need to be just the lift and shift. And this whole portability concept comes into play. And that's one thing, jointly with Red Hat, because Red Hat is really good jointly with us on driving these kind of innovation workshops. And you heard this earlier today as well. And that's just the fun of it. I mean, no longer you're talking about PowerPoint presentations, this and that. It's getting in a room, getting on a whiteboard and talking about what kind of journey really makes sense for that particular customer. That's been really notable here this week at this conference, right? There's a lot of tech, a lot of software talked about. But also on the keynotes, a lot of people talking about culture, transformation, getting beyond your process and the places you get stuck as IT professionals. So that's a great way to approach it, right? Nobody starts with a list of skills. And absolutely, the other point is that one of the things that always gets missed is the focus around the management of change. And that's one of the key pieces we emphasize so that not just the business processes, but the culture, the people, how do you kind of bring them along the change journey? So we actually put a lot of emphasis on the whole area around management of change. We actually have a practice that does, this is one of the key areas they focus on. And so you're absolutely right, key focus area. I did want to flip to the products for a second. There was an announcement here now and talk a little bit about HP Synergy, Composable Infrastructure with OpenShift. Maybe if you have a headline on exactly how you guys describe Synergy and then maybe how are we working with OpenShift? So the HP Synergy, the best way I can describe it is it is truly industry's first composable infrastructure. And it gives you the ability to pool fluid resources and with software intelligence built in and unified API, it really gives you the ability to pool the resources that you need for specific application. In fact, I use the analogy, it's kind of like building Legos and you kind of pull it together based on what you're trying to do at a given moment and then you decompose it and build something new. So it's all done via software and truly gives you that flexibility that the customers have been seeking. So it's just to me, it's got a great market traction across the globe and we're just seeing country momentum and jointly with Red Hat, what we've done is now with announcing new solutions like the one you refer to to support Ansible Automation of the Red Hat OpenShift on the Synergy platform with the three bar and the nimble product lines. And it just helps scale the OpenShift and while making container operations simple, scalable, and more importantly, repeatable. I got to give you a props. I want to make sure that I get this out there because you guys were early with Composable. Dave Vellante and I had a debate on this that one of your HPE discovers where I was really loving the Composable message. Although it's kind of for a different reason, but at that time, DevOps was really picking up steam, but it's actually happening now. This is three years later. The level of granularity now at the services level as microservices as it comes to the architecture of the future, the services model is literally what do you want? If not, here's the solution. It's like what do you need, right? So you're buying off the menu, if you will. So that changes the game. So congratulations on having that Composable message first, but I got to ask you the impact to the engagements. So you now have menu of services. Does that change how you guys go to marketing? You mentioned you do kickoff meetings, you do the needs assessments. I get that, you know, check, good approach. But the customers now, they just want to make sure it's custom for them. How does that change your engagement? Yeah, you know, at the CXO level, the discussion, no matter which way you start the discussion, it tends to kind of follow into, you know, a few buckets. Whether it's about generating additional revenue, going to market quicker, or it's about safe to invest, reducing their operating expenses, or it's about securing their information network. And so one of the things we find is, especially if you take a look at even the containers, you know, applications, deploying it, it's one thing to deploy in the test and development environment. But if you're trying to scale that within an enterprise, the enterprises look for added features, whether it's security, whether it's persistent storage. And again, the focus always turns into what can you do to help drive the total cost of ownership down? And I think with Red Hat, this is one thing that works great with open standards. The focus is really much more around not just the simplicity, reducing costs, but it's also about improving performance, whether it's in physical or virtual environment. So if you're right, the menu of services, whether it's talking about IoT use case, and I think you're going to see more and more of that with the user experience focus that we talked about, context of your apps. Look at, I mean, I used the example of going to the airport or getting into whatever transportation you're using these days, but going from point A to point B, you're no longer fumbling through cash or credit cards, but it's a very easy experience, much more personalized, much more usable. And a lot of what some of the hospitality franchises are doing, whether you look at Starwood properties, Marriott, you know, now you use your mobile device to access your room. And as soon as you get into some of the hotel properties, as soon as you access their Wi-Fi coverage, all of a sudden you can actually, the hotel property picks you up, they can provide you with the navigation, how to get to your room. And depending on your profile and whether you've opted in or opted out, they will push and their partners will push some specific services to you. So how are we able to create that kind of experience and drive additional revenue? And all that is possible to the point you just made is truly a flourishing ecosystem of microservices and apps driven by the APIs. I think the business has now seen that, which is great about having a clear line of sight that these new apps and new experiences is going to drive top line revenue for your customers. I got to ask you about the services now. With more services comes more delivery, right? So options, ecosystem. You guys have a pretty big ecosystem, Red Hat has a lot of other providers. You guys always worked well with multiple companies. How are you guys engaging on point next with now new sets of service providers in your network? You got cloud service, and you got someone actually, maybe it could be an integrator, it could be a software developer. How do you deal with the new stakeholders in your equation? You know, after all the spin matches have been completed now, and I think after the DXE one, it really opened up the door to get a lot of the system integrers back to the table because they don't really view us as a competitor anymore because we no longer have for this, the large, the EDS acquisition that we had now with DXE. So, you know, whether you look at Accenture, whether you look at Deloitte and other key asides, we're actually partnering with them very well, both in terms of joint solution creation, but also when we talk about two digital transformation for a client, the lot of expertise they bring to us is very complementary to what we have. So one of the things we do very well is really around the technology advisory services. What some of these asides do, they kind of bring more of the business advisory services as well as the specific vertical depth around the specific verticals, whether it's the FSIs, whether it's retail. So when somebody's talking about retail of the future or something like that, you marry the two together and you have a strong value proposition. So I think the area that we have to put a lot more emphasis upon is more around program management. And because now you actually are trying to show that one outcome for the client, so it's very important whether you're working with the ISVs, whether you're working with the asides, whether you're working with the other integrators and your own resources, how you kind of bring that pool together around specific tracks to deliver a one common objective for the client. So program management plays a huge role in this process. For the folks watching, what should they know about HPE Pointnext that they may or may not know about or should know about that highlights what you guys are doing and you can simplify, what is the value proposition that Pointnext is bringing to customers? Yeah. You know, as the brand itself states Pointnext, it's really about working with the clients on defining what's next in their journey. And so one of the things I will say is and a lot of people get surprised by this, even after all the spin merge, we are 25,000 plus people strong. And we have a lot of great differentiation when it comes to some of these solutions. And one thing we do very well is partner. And whether it's Red Hat and other asides and bring some unique innovative solutions to the market. And one of the things Jim talked about here is all about accelerating user-driven innovation. And when you take a look at some of the use cases we're rolling out, and I talked about the analytics with the OneAI project and how we're helping manufacturing clients or other use cases to truly analyze patterns and predict failures and increase productivity. These discussions customers truly trust us. With the Red Pixie and CTP acquisition, we no longer just having on-prem discussions. We have a strong public cloud knowledge and it doesn't matter whether your cloud journey involves AWS, Google Azure and whatnot, we're able to actually provide a very objective roadmap for the workload strategy and the transformation journey. The users in the communities, as Jim pointed out, he interviewed me yesterday, the communities in open source are now also your customers. So your customers are also participating in these projects upstream. Are you guys doing an open source work? What's Pointnext doing? Are you guys relying on that community? Is there a crossover between your customers and those users in the open source community? Yeah, I mean, you know, we've always had a very strong partnership with the open source communities. We contributed a lot to the open source communities. And if you take a look at now, as we're working with the number of this next generation of partners, whether it's Docker, Scalety and Redhead and others, it's truly opened up the boundaries as to what can we push to drive new kind of solutions there. And I love what some of the speakers said yesterday. You remember the example from Boston Children's Hospital where they talked about where they didn't want to deal with the complexity. They'd rather focus on what they do best. And so one of the things we're focused on with the open source communities is the driving more standardization and automation. And so you can run applications at scale. You can run analytics at scale. And I think those are some of the things we bring to the table. And then the real thing about what's going on now is with these abstraction layers is an opportunity to create new services and accelerate the services. So congratulations, great to have you on the program. Thanks for sharing the update. And congratulations on your deep partnership with Red Hat. Good to see HP point next doing well. Thanks for coming on. Thank you so much. Live coverage here in San Francisco, California for Red Hat Summit 2018 will continue. I'm John Furrier, John Troyer. Stay with us. More coverage after this short break. Oftentimes the communities already know about a facility that's a problematic because they smell it, they see it, but...