 Live from the Mandalay Bay Convention Center in Las Vegas. It's theCUBE, covering VMworld 2016. Brought to you by VMware and its ecosystem sponsors. Now, here are your hosts, John Furrier and John Walz. And welcome back inside Mandalay Bay. The convention center here is theCUBE continues our coverage of VMworld here on the flagship broadcast of SiliconANGLE TV. I'm John Walz, I'm John Furrier. Good to have you back with us here live on theCUBE as we continue our insights and perceptions and the gathering of great intel. And to help us do that is Colin Ruegemeyer, who is the Senior Director of Product Management at HPE. Colin, thanks for being with us. My pleasure. We appreciate it. First off, we don't talk about the show floor a whole lot here, but I couldn't help but notice yesterday I was down there late in the day. Lot of energy, lot of buzz. I mean, how are you feeling about your presence here? And just how would you characterize that for people at home who haven't had the chance to get out and see it for themselves? Yeah, it's been a ton of energy, a lot of foot traffic. HPE has a big presence right at the entrance, so people get to come by. And I got a couple of people on my team there. We have a hyperconverged booth and just all day long said hundreds of people coming through, I watched them talk about 100 people were sitting listening on the hyperconver... It's just a lot of energy. And you can see as you just walk around, there's so much buzz from all these different vendors. So it's very exciting. And so those questions that you're getting then, I assume that reflects this general appetite right now in the marketplace, right? There's a lot of interest, particularly in hyperconverged. There's a lot of vendors here, obviously. So for us, it's all about telling the HPE story, what makes us unique and differentiated in solving the customer's problems. So a lot of questions around that. Let's unpack and tell that story. I want to give you a chance because I think this is important for what we've been seeing. We've done a lot of HPE discoverers over the years. Now HPE discoverer in London's coming up in December. And also you had HPE discoverer we were at last time. This was the centerpiece of the conversation was hyperconverged and then also composable, which is gives you that cloud-like feel from a developer and resource pool standpoint. This is a key building block. So first describe, take a minute to explain what is hyperconverged, what does that mean from a product standpoint? And then what does it mean from an architectural standpoint? Because this is a key shift we're seeing across the industry. You mentioned it's kind of noisy and crowded, but you guys had this going on for quite a long time. In fact, HPE coined the term converge infrastructure. And hyperconverged, which we're all over, the Wikibon team knows all about. But explain what it is and how does it fit into the ecosystem. Well, the underlying technologies of hyperconverged in a lot of ways have been around for a while. The compute building block, the software defined storage, HPE's been investing in this for five, 10 years at this point. And then what really makes it hyperconverged is then taking a different consumption model and user experience wrapped around those compute and storage. So for the VM vending and that experience, simplifying that to make it really easy so that anyone can go and procure and provision their virtualized resources. And then the lifecycle management and the upgradeability and just making it very easy to maintain and operate these over time. All of this through a common management construct. It's fully integrated though, right? This is a fully integrated system? Exactly, exactly. You would integrate that all into the experience through the software. And it's all, I mean, the idea is taking all those software defined constructs, coupling that with the speed and performance of the flash, and then putting them all together, making it easy for customers to provision virtualized resources. You know, what HPE can bring unique to that is one, you know, where the industry leader and compute. And you know, okay, this server's, it's not always the sexiest thing in the world, but at the end of the day, every customer needs them and they're becoming even more important as you're bringing all of that software defined capabilities onto the server. Your storage now is residing the server, not necessarily out on a sand. So if your compute platform is really critical, with thousands of customers who've standardized on DL380s, they love the performance, they love the reliability, they love the support arrangement that we can provide them, and they're looking for better ways to then go and extend that in their data center. So that's the starting point. We think we have a compelling storage platform integrated into that. And the real hard work we're doing is in that management software plane, bringing in more and more features. No, so we actually have designed this one from the ground up. It incorporates aspects of OneView. Some of the great things OneView can do around orchestration and life cycle management, patching and those types of things built into the foundation, but we really wanted to design something from the ground up specifically for a hyper-converged experience. And so that's what we're doing in layering into this. Integrates with VMware and... Go with the VMware component. What's going on with VMware? There's obviously the turn key fully integrated. It's a nice solution, but virtualization makes that more powerful, doesn't it? Oh yeah, totally. It's absolutely core to the solution. VMware is a really critical partner in what we're doing here. And it's not going away. It's not about supplanting what you're doing with the hypervisor and getting access. It's just saying that for a lot of those things day in, day out, I don't necessarily want to have to have a really specialized resource to understand every single minutia of your ESX or vSphere. I just want to be able to stand up DMs and get access to them quickly. And so that's what we're trying to do to the console. But for many of our customers, vCenter is absolutely critical to their operations. And this doesn't, it's not about supplanting that in all cases. We want to embrace them as a partner. HP, I think, has gotten a bad rap in this area. I think you guys have a great product. I think the merger and the split, or the split, I should say, from HP to HPE and all that noise that went around that kind of dampened some of the goodness around this area. So, you know, what is, share some of the case studies and use cases there where it's the hyperconverge is being used. Why are they winning? Why is it winning? Can you share that? I think you guys have a great product here. And the trend certainly has catch up to HP in this area. Yeah, I appreciate that. I mean, that there is a lot of, you know, HP we're just such a big company. And we've got so much stuff, right? It was very distracting. Everyone's talking about the fun out there. So, as we go out with our account teams, you know, we've got to help them understand how hyperconverged amongst all the different things we have really helped solve the customer problems. And the places where we've really seen the most traction are, at least for us is around this Robo use case, right? So, manufacturing sites, oil rigs, retail stores where they're looking for dense, easily deployable, easy to manage resources that they don't necessarily need a dedicated IT on staff all the place. And then the nice thing is, you know, when they do it, they can standardize across many, many different sites. What does Robo stand for? Pardon me, remote office, back office. Just to make sure you get that out there. Not the back office, but remote office, kind of a remote site type model. Think stores, manufacturing sites. You'll have your core data center, and then you'll have, yeah, you'll have like this edge of the network type thing. Exactly, so we've seen a lot of success, a lot of interest there. You know, VDI is an interesting use case for hyperconverge because you get the linear scalability discreet. You start small, you can get a rapid POC, stand it up, test it out, and then just start adding node by node by node as your needs evolve over time. So, another very good use case we've seen a lot of traction in. The last one is just a general server consolidation play. Right, they're just not getting the density and the utilization out of their resources, and they're just looking for a new model to say, I want to do this better. You know, do this differently. So, how can you help me cut costs, give me an easier operating model, and then redeploy those resources. It's not about taking people out all the time. It's about saying, how can I redeploy these people from operations to actually, you know, thinking big around how can IT be a service provider to the businesses? You know, and as you look at hyperconverge and companies are considering this move, who is it or what sector is it if there is one that you think this is like prime target? This is an area that I think we ought to spend maybe, you know, concentrate our time on because we think this is where we can do the, have the biggest bang for their buck. Yeah, well, I definitely, as HP, you know, we're so big, we touch all the different verticals. But as I was saying, the areas where we've really seen the most interest is healthcare. A lot of interest there, so giving them an easy way in their hospitals to go and have local dedicated resources, manufacturing is a big one. But that could be in the form of consumer goods for their manufacturing sites. And then oil and gas is an interesting one. Those oil rigs and just giving dedicated data centers out in those oil rigs. Yeah, I mean, we've seen a big trend towards more turnkey, I won't say purpose-built boss. In this case, that's an old word, but this integrated system, certainly with the convert, hyperconverge, is definitely a trend. And that's kind of the IoT trend too. And the joke we were saying at HP that you discover was, put the data center out at the edge. The form factors are getting so compelling that you can actually have this remote box with basically data center-like functionality built into the machine with horsepower. Yeah, I mean, the innovation around the core storage technologies, the physical technologies. So the performance and density you can get is pretty crazy what you can then get in these small packages. And so that's really changing things a lot as well. How's the roadmap look? Can you share some vision around? So now you guys, I know how HP works, you sit in the room, look at the roadmap, constantly evaluating features, you go to market and market development, all that good stuff. But now with Composable as another option down the road for cloud kind of play internally, how are you guys deciding which features make the roadmap and what are those features? What's the vision of the product? Where does this go? Yeah, the big thing for us is that experience. So bringing in as many interesting features integrated into the experience. And then being able to extend that experience, leveraging the goodness of the storage and compute platforms we have and apply it against different use cases, increasingly high performance use cases, more core to the data center. So you can imagine seeing things around bringing different HP platforms. We already have our Apollo 2K platform, so you get a really nice two, four no dense form factor, but there could be other ones. So is that monitoring, analytics, those types of things to give you that real insight at your fingertips? That's really where we're prioritizing a lot of the efforts we're doing. Yeah, when you talk about roadmaps, obviously feedback and input have a lot to do with that from outside, external, not just internal. So at an event like this, when you meet so many customers or prospective customers and you're hearing from people, what kind of take away do you have when you hear from folks that maybe you'd go back to your team and take, have thought about this, or maybe this is a next level consideration. Anything like that pop into your head? I think the big thing is we need to push harder on one, why HP specifically, that this key points of differentiation, what makes it sneak, and just get really, really crisp on that because you just got to cut through the noise of all the different vendors saying hyperconverge this, hyperconverge that. So that's part of it. The other thing is just everything we do, the customers they come, they just talk about complexity and the cost and the pressure they're in on both of those. And so how do we just, how do we solve that on a whole variety of dimensions and making sure it's built into every single one of our meetings, the way we think, the way we design, how we market and talk to customers end to end. So is that just education then? Because it sounds like, with hyper you're making things simple in so many ways, but yet maybe there's a gap between appreciating that and fully realizing the potential there? Yeah, I mean, part of it's the conversation that you have with customers and just keeping it simple with them. And then part of it is the technology itself, right? I mean, innovation can be difficult at times, right? And you're realizing on the vision can take a little time. So we're working hard to just continuing to solve those things, making it easy to procure, order, working with our partner community, for example, deploy things, service and support, all these stuff, it all comes together. And if it doesn't, it's just not simple enough for people. We had a guest on earlier, an entrepreneur, and he was saying, you know, the infrastructure, solving all these complex problems is about overlap of systems. He says, the infrastructure itself is actually pretty good and getting better. And his whole point was the new complexity is the overlay systems. Certainly with cloud that brings in another dimension. Your thoughts on that statement? I mean, obviously you guys are an integrating system, so you see consolidation of the technology into one solution. But, you know, the infrastructure is doing well, but it's getting better. What are the areas that are complex? What do you see? Do you believe in that statement? It's overlapping? Is it the complexity? Yeah, I mean, it's one, you can get proliferation of architectures in your data center. And that alone becomes difficult to manage. So you have discreet use, something for VDI, something for my SAP HANA deployment, something for here. So that's complex to manage. And then you're dealing with a lot of different vendors, right? And that's how HP can help, because we can help on all these things, of course. But once you get past, okay, we're solving simplicity by bringing storage onto the compute. Great. Well, what about the network then, right? And then plugging into the data center and the complexity that comes with managing the network as well. So there's a lot of different pain points. You know, you solve one thing and maybe a new pain point gets pushed elsewhere. But the trend right now is, is put the server and the storage together. And again, the bottleneck might shift to the network, but that seems to be a first order of operations for IT right now. I think so. That's definitely what we're seeing. Yeah, we're seeing that. Our customers are seeing that. There's a lot of benefits to be gained. But, you know, we're also seeing, and I have to give a shout out to my storage colleagues, of course, that there's still huge demand for all flash arrays like our three-par array, right? There is a real use case for these in the data center. It's just for certain types of things. Wow, you can get a lot of cost and simplicity from moving to a hyper-converged model. Well, Colin, thanks for the time. We appreciate that. Thank you very much. Hope it's been a good week for you. It's been fantastic. We've been very, very excited. It's been a great week for us. We appreciate the time and input here and wish you success down the road. Great, thank you so much. Good to be here. Colin Ruegrimer from HPE. Back with more here on theCUBE from VMworld. We're after this.