 TheCube presents HPE Discover 2022, brought to you by HPE. Hey everyone, welcome back to Las Vegas. This is Lisa Martin with Dave Vellante live at HPE Discover 22. Dave, it's great to be here. This is the first Discover in three years and we're here with about 7,000 of our closest friends. Yeah, you know, I tweeted out the smile. I think I've been to 14 Discovers between the U.S. and Europe. And I've never seen a Discover with so much energy. People who not only psyched to get back together, that's for sure. But I think HPE's got a little, you know, spring in its step and is feeling more confident than maybe some of the past Discovers that I've been to. I think so too. I think there's definitely a spring in the step and we've got, we're going to be unpacking some of that spring next with one of our alumni who joins us. Keith White's here, the executive vice president and general manager of Green Lake Cloud Services. Welcome back. Great, thanks, thanks for having me. It's fantastic that you're here and you're right. The energy is crazy at this show. It's been a lot of pent up demand but I think what you heard from Antonio today is our strategy is changing dramatically and it's really embracing our customers and our partners, so it's great. Embracing the customers and the partners, the ecosystem expansion, so critical, especially the last couple of years with the acceleration of digital transformation, so much challenge in every industry. But lots of momentum on the Green Lake side. I was looking at the Q2 numbers, triple digit growth in orders, 65,000 customers over 70 services, eight new services announced just this morning. Talk to us about the momentum of Green Lake. The momentum's been fantastic. I mean, I'll tell you the fact that customers are really now re-accelerating their digital transformation. You probably heard a lot, but there was a delay as we went through the pandemic. So now it's re-accelerating, but everyone's going to a hybrid multi-cloud environment. Data is the new currency and obviously everyone's trying to push out to the edge and Green Lake is that edge-to-cloud platform. So we're just seeing tons of momentum, not just from the customers, but partners, we've enabled the platform so partners can plug into it and offer their solutions to our customers as well. So it's exciting and it's been fun to see the momentum from an order standpoint, but one of the big numbers that you may not be aware of is we have over a 96% retention rate. So once a customer's on Green Lake, they stay on it because they're seeing the value, which has been fantastic. The value is absolutely critically important. We saw three great big-name customers. The Home Depot was on stage this morning. Oak Ridge National Laboratory was as well, Evil Geniuses. So the momentum in the enterprise is clearly present. It is and we're hearing it from a lot of customers and I think you guys talk a lot about, hey, there's the cloud, data and edge, these big mega trends that are happening out there. And you look at a company like Barclays, they're actually reinventing their entire private cloud infrastructure, running over 100,000 workloads on HPE Green Lake. Or you look at a company like Zenzac who's basically they do autonomous driving software. So they're doing massive parallel computing capabilities. They're pulling in hundreds of petabytes of data to then make driving safer. And so you're seeing it on the data front. And then on the edge, you look at anyone like a Patrick Terminal, for example. They run a whole terminal shipyard. They're getting data in from exporters, importers, regulators, the works. And they have to real-time analyze that data and say, where should this thing go? Especially with today's supply chain challenges, they have to be so efficient that it's just fantastic. It was interesting to hear Fidelma keep this morning on stage. It was the first time I'd really seen real clarity on the platform itself. And it's obviously her job is, okay, here's the platform. Now you guys got to go build on top of it, both inside of HPE, but also externally. So you're ecosystem partners. So you mentioned a financial services company like Barclays. We see those companies moving into the digital world by offering some of their services and building their own clouds. How do you, what's your vision for Green Lake in terms of being that platform to assist them in doing that and the data component there? I think that was one of the most exciting things about not just showcasing the platform, but also the announcement of our private cloud enterprise cloud service. Because in essence, what you're doing is you're creating that framework for what most companies are doing, which is they're becoming cloud service providers for their internal business units. And they're having to do show back type scenarios, charge back type scenarios, deliver cloud services and solutions inside the organization. So that open platform you're spot on for our ecosystem, it's fantastic. But for our customers, they get to leverage it as well for their own internal IT work that's happening. So you talk about hybrid cloud, you talk about private cloud. What's your vision, you know, we use this term super cloud. Is this in a layer that goes across clouds? What's your thought about that? Because you have an advantage at the edge with Aruba. Everybody talks about the edge, but they talk about it more in the context of near edge. That's right. We talked to Verizon and they're going far edge. You guys are participating in that, as well as some of your partners and Red Hat and others. What's your vision for that? What I call super cloud. Is that part of the strategy? Is that more longer term? Or you think that's a pipe dream by Dave? No, I think it's really thoughtful, Dave, because it has to be part of the strategy, right? What I hear, so for example, Ford's a great example. They run Azure, AWS, and then they made a big deal with Google Cloud for their internal cars, and they run HP GreenLake. So they're saying, hey, we got four clouds. How do we sort of disaggregate the usage of that? And Chris Lund, who is the VP of Information Technology at Liberty Mutual Insurance, he talked about it today, where he said, hey, I can deliver these services to my business unit, and they don't know. Am I running on the public cloud? Am I running on our HP GreenLake cloud? Like, it doesn't matter to the end user. We've simplified that so much. So I think your super cloud idea is super thoughtful, not to use the super term too much, that I'm super excited about, because it's really clear of what our customers are trying to accomplish, which it's not about the cloud. It's about the solution and the business outcome that gets to it. Well, and I think it is different. I mean, it's not like the last 10 years, where it was like, hey, I got my stuff to work on the different clouds, and I'm replicating as much as I can the cloud experience on-prem. I think you guys are there now. And then to us, the next layer is that ecosystem enablement. So how do you see the ecosystem evolving, and what role does GreenLake play there? Yeah, this has been really exciting. We had Tarkin Manor, who runs Nutanix, and Carl Strohmeyer from Equinix on stage with us as well. And what's happening with the ecosystem is, I used to say one plus one has to equal three for our customers, right? So when you bring these together, it has to be that scenario. But we were joking that one plus one plus one equals five now, because everything has a partner component to it. It's not about the platform. It's not about the specific cloud service. It's actually about the solution that gets delivered. And that's done with an ISV. It's done with a COLO. It's done even with the hyperscalers, right? We have Azure Stack HCI as a fully integrated solution. It happens with managed service providers delivering managed services out to their folks as well. So that platform being fully partner enabled and that ecosystem being able to take advantage of that. And so we have to jointly go to market to our customers for their business needs, their business outcomes. Some of the expansion of the ecosystem, we just had Red hat on in the last hour talking about. We're so excited to partner with them. Yeah, that's great. What's going on there with OpenShift and Ansible and RHEL. But talk about the customer influence in terms of the expansion of the ecosystem. We know it's, we've got to meet customers where they are, they're driving it, but we know that HPE has a big presence in the enterprise and some pretty big customer names. How are they from a demand perspective? Well, this is where I think the uniqueness of GreenLake has really changed HPE's approach with our customers. Like in all fairness, we used to be a vendor that provided hardware components for us. We talked a lot about hardware costs and blah, blah, blah. Now we're actually a partner with those customers. What's the business outcome you're requiring? What's the SLA that we offer you for what you're trying to accomplish? And to do that, we have to have it done with partners. And so even on the storage front, you know, cumulow or cohesity on the backup and recovery disaster recovery. Yes, we have our own products, but we also partner with great companies like Veeam because it's customer choice. It's an open platform. And the Red Hat announcement is just fantastic, right? Because hey, from a container platform standpoint, OpenShift provides 5,000 plus customers, you know, 90% of the Fortune 500 that they engage with, with that opportunity to take GreenLake with OpenShift and implement that container capabilities on-prem. So it's fantastic, yeah. We were talking after the keynote, Keith Townsend came on, John, myself and Lisa. And we said, okay, you know, what about startups? Cause that's kind of a hallmark of cloud. And we felt like, okay, startups are not the ideal customer profile necessarily for HPE, although we saw evil geniuses up on stage. But I threw out, and I'd love to get your thoughts on this, that, you know, within companies, incumbents, you have entrepreneurs, they're trying to build their own clouds or super clouds as I use the term. Is that really the target for the developer audience? We've talked a lot about OpenShift, but there are other platforms, SUSE as a partner. And we just announced another extension with Rancher. Yeah, I saw that. And you have to have optionality for developers. Is that the way we should think about the target audience from a developer standpoint? I think it will be as we go forward. And so what Fidelma presented on stage was the new developer platform, because we have come to realize we have to engage with the developers. They're the ones building the apps. They're the ones that are delivering the solutions for the most part. So yeah, I think at the enterprise space, we have a really strong capability. I think when you get into the sort of mid-market SMB standpoint, what we're doing is we're going directly to the managed service and cloud service providers and directly to our DISTY and VARs to have them build solutions on top of GreenLake, powered by GreenLake, to then deliver to their customers, because that's what the customer wants. I think on the developer side of the house, we have to speak their language and we have to provide their capabilities because they're going to start articulating apps that are going to use both the public cloud and our on-prem capabilities with GreenLake. And so that's got to work very well. And so you've heard us talk about API-based and all of that sort of scenario. So it's an exciting time for us, again, moving HPE strategy into something very different than where we were before. Keith, that speaks to ecosystem. So I don't know if you were at Microsoft when the sweaty Steve Bama was running on the on-line. I was. Absolutely, developers, developers, developers. That's about ecosystem, ecosystem, ecosystem. I don't expect we're going to see Antonio replicating that, but that really is the sort of, what you just described, is the ecosystem developing on top of GreenLake. That's critical. Yeah, and this is one of the things I learned. Being at Microsoft for as long as I was and leading the Azure business from a commercial standpoint, it was all about the partner. And in all fairness, almost every solution that gets delivered has some sort of partner component to it. Might be an ISV app, might be a managed service, might be in a colo, might be with our hybrid cloud, with our hyperscalers, but everything has a partner component to it. And so one of the things I learned with Azure is you have to sell through and with your ecosystem and go to that customer with a joint solution. And that's where it becomes so impactful and so powerful for what our customers are trying to accomplish. When we think about the data gravity and the value of data, the massive potential that it has, even Antonio talked about it this morning, being data rich but insights poor for a long time, every company in today's day and age has to be a data company to be competitive. There's no more option for that. How does GreenLake empower companies? GreenLake and its ecosystem empower companies to really live being data companies so that they can meet their customers where they are. I think it's a really great point because like we said, data's the new currency, right? Data's the new goal that's out there. And people have to get their arms around their data estate so then they can make these business decisions, these business insights and garner that. And Dave, you mentioned earlier, the edge is bringing a ton of new data in. And my Zenziac example is a good one. But with GreenLake, you now have a platform that can do data and data management and really sort of establish and secure the data for you. There's no data latency. There's no data egress charges and which is what we typically run into with the public cloud. But we also support a wide range of databases, open source as well as the commercial ones, the sequels and those types of scenarios. But what really comes to life is when you have to do analytics on that, right? And you're doing AI and machine learning. And this is one of the benefits I think that people don't realize with HPE is the investments we've made with Cray, for example. We have, and you saw on stage today, the largest supercomputer in the world. That depth that we have as a company that then comes down into AI and analytics for what we can do with high performance compute, data simulations, data modeling, analytics, like that is something that we as a company have really deep, deep capabilities on. So it's exciting to see what we can bring to customers all for that spectrum of data. I was excited to see Frontier, actually achieve. We hosted an event, a co-produced event with HPE during the pandemic, Exascale Day. But we weren't quite at Exascale. We were like right in the cusp. So to see it actually break through was awesome. So HPE is clearly a differentiator for Fuel Packard Enterprise. And you talked about the egress. What are some of the other differentiators? Why should people choose GreenLake? Well, I think the biggest thing is that it truly is an edge-to-cloud platform. And so you talked about Aruba and our capabilities with network attach and network as a service capabilities. Like that's fairly unique. You don't see that with the other companies. You mentioned earlier to me that compute capabilities that we've had as a company and the storage capabilities. But what's interesting now is that we're sort of taking all of that expertise and we're actually starting to deliver these cloud services that you saw on stage. Private cloud, AI and machine learning, high performance computing, VDI, SAP. And now we're actually getting into these industry solutions. So we talked last year about electronic medical records. This year we've talked about 5G. Now we're talking about customer loyalty application. So we're really trying to move from these sort of baseline capabilities. And yes, containers and VMs and bare metal, all that stuff is important. But what's really important are the services that you run on top of that. Because that's the outcomes that our customers are looking at. Should we expect you to be accelerating? I mean, look at what you did with Azure. You look at what AWS does in terms of the feature acceleration. Can HPE, should we expect HPE to replicate? Maybe not to that scale, but in a similar cadence, we're starting to see that. Should we expect that actually to go faster? I think you couched it really well because it's not as much about the quantity, but the quality and the uses. And so what we've been trying to do is say, hey, what is our swim lane? What is our sweet spot? Where do we have a superpower? And where are the areas that we have that superpower and how can we bring those solutions to our customers? Because I think sometimes you get over your skis a bit, trying to do too much, or people get caught up in the big numbers versus the, hey, what's the real meat behind it? What's the tangible outcome that we can deliver to customers? And we see just a massive TAM. I want to say my last analysis was around $42 billion in the next three years. TAM and the Azure service on-prem space. And so we think that there's nothing but upside with the core set of workloads, the core set of solutions and the cloud services that we bring. So yeah, we'll continue to innovate. Absolutely, amen. But we're not in a, hey, we got to get to 250 this and 300 that. We want to keep it as focused as we can. Well, the vast majority of the revenue in the public cloud is still compute. I mean, notwithstanding, Microsoft obviously does a lot in SaaS, but I'm talking about the infrastructure and service. Still, well, I would say over 50%. And so there's a lot of the services that don't make any revenue. And as that long tail, that's, if I hear your strategy, you're not necessarily going after that. You're focusing on the quality of those high value services and let the ecosystem sort of bring in the rest. This is where I think the, I mean, I love that you guys are asking me about the ecosystem because this is where their sweet spot is, right? They're the experts on hyper-converged or databases, a service or VDI or even with SAP. Like they're the experts on that piece of it. So we're enabling that together to our customers. And so I don't want to give you the impression that we're not going to innovate. Amen, we absolutely are. But we want to keep it within that, that again, our swim lane, where we can really add true value based on our expertise and our capabilities so that we can confidently go to customers and say, hey, this is a solution that's going to deliver this business value or this capability for it. And partners might be more comfortable with that than, you know, they always have one eye, sleep with one eye open in the public cloud. Like, okay, what are they going to, which value of mine are they going to grab next? No way. Yes, your spot on. And again, this is where I think the power of what an edge to cloud platform like HP GreenLake can do for our customers. Because it is that sort of, you know, I mentioned it, one plus one equals three kind of scenario for our customers. So we can have your customers. Last question, Keith, I know we're only on day one of the main summit, the partner growth summit was yesterday. What's the feedback been from the customers and the ecosystem in terms of validating the direction that HPE is going? Well, I think the fantastic thing has been to hear from our customers. So I mentioned in my keynote recently, we had Liberty Mutual and we had Texas Children's Hospital and they're implementing HPE GreenLake in a variety of different ways from a private cloud standpoint to a data center consolidation. They're seeing sustainability goals happen on top of that. They're seeing us take on management for them so they can take their limited resources and go focus them on innovation and value add scenarios. So the flexibility and costs that we're providing and it's just fantastic to hear this come to life in a real customer scenario because what Texas Children is trying to do is improve patient care for women and children. Like who could argue with that, right? So yeah, it's great. Awesome, Keith, thank you so much for joining Dave and me on the program talking about all of the momentum with HPE GreenLake. You can't walk in here without feeling the momentum. We appreciate your insights and your time. Always, thank you for your time. Yeah, great to see you as well. Likewise. Thanks. For Keith White and Dave Vellante, I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching theCUBE live, day one coverage from the show floor and HPE Discover 22 will be right back with our next guest.