 Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE covering HPE Discover 2017 brought to you by Hewlett Packard Enterprise. Okay, welcome back everyone. We're live in Las Vegas. It's theCUBE's exclusive coverage of Hewlett Packard Enterprise HPE Discover 2017. I'm John Furrier, the co-founder of SiliconANGLE, media with my co-founder, Dave Vellante, and also co-host. Our next guest is Alistair Winner, Vice President of HPE Point Next Portfolio. Welcome back to theCUBE, good to see you. Thank you, great to be here. So, okay, Point Next Portfolio, Point Next New Presence. Take a minute, Alistair, just explain Point Next, how are things fist together? I know it's a little bit redundant for you, but let's start that off. Sure, great, now I'd be delighted to explain. So, as you're aware, the company has gone through a number of transformations and transitions, one of which was the spin merge of enterprise services to CSC, now DXC technology, and they're here on the show floor, so a great partner of ours. But of course, that created a lot of noise in the market and confusion, nonlessly, with our customers as to whether or not HPE was in the services business or not. So, the idea of the rebranding was to make it very clear services is critically important. It's not the third part of our company's strategy, so we have hybrid IT, IT edge, and the expertise to make it happen, and that expertise is HPE, Point Next. And the branding was chosen deliberately not to replicate what you would find in other traditional vendors. We don't talk about services in our brand, and Point Next is literally to help our customers point at what's next in their digital transformation journey, so that's where the brand comes from. So, what's the brand promise for Point Next? I mean, for us it's about giving customers access to our expertise, and we talk about really a complete life cycle of an experience. So previously we had consulting and support, those terms have gone now, so we're looking clearly end to end a customer's experience, and already starting with the outcome they're looking for, and then having the advisory, professional, and operational services that connect those things together to deliver the outcome. And what is the Spin Merge made up of? HPE services, and was it the CSC? Yeah, so we had a very significant really IT outsourcing business, which was called Enterprise Services, it was the previous EDS business, so yeah, that spun out and joined CSC to become DXC technology. So how should customers look at you vis-a-vis HPE and the enterprise? Partners, obviously they're the combination. How do you guys, where's the lines, where do you guys shake hands, where's the handoff, what are some of the engagements, like share with us some of the day to day tactical execution of the portfolio? So I guess, I mean we're still relatively new in terms of the brand, and we're trying to really connect the dots internally to ensure that we present to our customers a seamless experience. I guess one of the things that the Spin Merge has enabled us to do is to engage much more actively with systems integrators and other consulting companies where previously it was quite challenging to do so. So with the likes of PWC and KPMG and WIPPro, so previously we had, I mean they were interested in buying our technology, but from a services point of view, there was always some conflict. Now we have clarity, right? So part of our strategy is to really ensure we're engaging very actively with systems integrators. And likewise, we're also working very actively with our reseller partners, so clearly HPE has a long history of partnering and we have a channel. Yeah, chat as we call it, channel. And our channel partners are also going through a transformation because selling hardware is no longer a sustainable business for them in the long term. So really helping them to transform their business from being product led to services led. And I guess the other thing we're really focused on is, what are the solution areas? What are the business outcomes that we as an organization can really focus on? Because as you know, digital transformation is a huge, I mean it's, well I'm glad you brought that up about the decline in the server business from a business model standpoint, but because we were saying on our opening, on our editorial segment that a lot of people get hung up on that, but when reality, the numbers are all pointing to massive growth, Wikibon just put out a seminal report around true private cloud at a $250 billion opportunity, market town. So that's just private cloud, that's just cloud liking your infrastructure on-prem. That's not including hybrid cloud. So when you factor in true private cloud, which is current state situation, with hybrid cloud and then now the, what I call the kind of the long reaching but viable vision of multi-cloud, those are really key dots that are connecting for customers. So okay, margins of hardware might shift to places, but the services, whether it's IoT and app integration, really is at the center of this. It absolutely is at the center of it, and of course, I mean there is still clearly value from our products and our product innovation, but the way we present that value to our customers has to change, and I mean you're quite right. Many of the customers, in fact the majority of the customers I talk to really view private cloud as their principal delivery vehicle, in turn the IT view as their principal delivery vehicle, and what we're doing through solutions like flexible capacity is enabling an IT team to align the supply and demand of IT through an OPEX model rather than a CAPEX model and really helping them right size the environment so they can manage the fluctuations that they see, because with digital there are many more, the frequency of change is much more significant. So the dollars are shifting to services and certainly the edge, but you brought up channel. This is a huge opportunity because now the channel's reconfiguring both at the global system integrator side as well as what was traditionally VARs and Vabs and ISVs as they get closer to the customer. So you guys are kind of the glue layer between what was once HPE, get some training, speeds and feeds to much more solution oriented. Any trends there that you can highlight that should be notable for customers in around how the services is leading some of that change at the front lines? Well, I mean you're absolutely right and I would say for us it's about outcomes, we're not trying to sell the customer something, we're looking for an outcome that the customer needs and then translating that into a chain of technology, people and process changes that they need to implement. And there are many examples on the show floor actually of services led solutions. We have the Intelligent Spaces Cube for example where we're helping customers to manage a very valuable real estate in their property where you're always looking for spaces to meet your colleagues, when you turn up you want it to be digitally enabled. We can combine all of these great technologies whether they're HPE or partner, ISV technology into a solution and then present it to the customer as a service. So you consume it as you use it as opposed to buying all the pieces, having to integrate it together yourself, you own and operate, that's clearly the model that's the model of the past. Palastro the CIOs in our community if I could summarize they're telling us okay I got to run the business, I got legacy systems that I have to manage. I have to grow the business, I have new apps, maybe some of those are IoT, certainly many of them are data oriented, AI, big data, whatever you want to call it. And then I have to transform the business. So that's their digital transformation, that's certainly their IT transformation, their hybrid component. So is that a valid way to sort of look at the business and then how specifically is Pointnext helping in those three broad areas? So I would completely agree. I mean in fact the way that we think about our portfolio is one of accelerating what's next. So this digital transformation, this change and how do we accelerate and make customers much more agile in addressing the business requirements because IT and the business are really synonymous now with each other, it's not a back office thing anymore, it's the way that a customer engages with their customers, with their employees, with their partners. I mean it is the interface now in which we work. So we're all about accelerating, how do we accelerate that? And then you're absolutely right, the majority of our customers have an existing install base, they have many layers or previous generations of technology, it's homogeneous, it's complex, there are different ways of managing all of these assets. And the way we help there is really by simplifying. So we're encouraging our customers to work with us, allow us to manage the complexity, which frees up resources and money for them to then go and invest in the accelerating what's next. So we're doing for example activities like, we call it an operational support service. So we're monitoring and managing remotely the assets of the company that the IT team would have historically have done. You'd go into like a mission control center and see all the lights. I mean we can do that for a customer. The customer doesn't have to do that anymore. And the resources that frees up, they can go and invest in their digital transformation. So that's not outsourcing per se, but you're certainly managing infrastructure on behalf of your customer. They own the assets, it's on their books. So we can do it in a traditional capex model where it's on their books. Or we can include it inside of a flexible capacity arrangement where they're actually paying per use. And that experience is part of the solution. So we can integrate it into a pay-per-use model. I mean it seems like one of the things that HP services has done over the last several years is sort of envision and reimagine that entire services experience and try to make it as cloud-like as possible. I mean you got ahead of that. I mean this has been three, four, five years in the making. So kind of give us an update on how that's gone and then on a scale of one to 10, and how far did you get? Are you at a five, a six, a nine? And then what's new from here? So it's a great question. So I'd probably give us a six. We're probably at a six, I would say. So the offer itself, so flexible capacity is, I mean we had it in the market for five years now. So yeah, we know how to do this and it's very successful. We've never lost a customer. We have net promoter scores in the high 90s. So yeah, where we've landed it, customers love it, right? So we know it's very successful. And really what we now need to do as a company is sort of amplify that model as our principal go-to-market, okay? So we're a product company. We sell products. So there's a pivot that we're approaching, I would say, where we need to use that really as being the lead model. So I think a solution designed for IT where IT consume units of IT, we've got that nailed, right? I think it's great. But flexible capacity doesn't address every customer's requirement. So for an enterprise customer, it works really nicely. For a tier two, tier three service provider, it works very nicely. We've got a whole tranche of customers who really don't have the scale to benefit from flexible capacity that still want insights into their utilization and their capacity. So we're actually, as part of our Gen 10 launch, we're introducing something called HPE Capacity Care Service. So we're sort of extracting the secret source from flexible capacity. We're not actively managing the capacity on behalf of the customer, but we're giving the customer the assets to do it themselves. So that will be available by the end of this calendar year. So we're very excited about that. And the other thing we're doing is actually to move away from selling units of IT service like virtual machines or containers or cores and actually trying to focus on outcomes. So we're starting to talk about things like backup as a service, big data as a service with Hadoop. So again, really trying to create a platform that the customer can consume and all the complexity is abstracted and we present it as a service. So we're at the early stages there. We've got very big aspirations for that. We think that's the way that our customers will want to buy from us. They don't want the pieces. They want a platform. They want an outcome as a service. Alice, they're great to have you on the queue. Thanks for sharing. My final question for you to end the segment is pretend I'm a CXO, CIO, CDO, CSO, whatever, CEO. Alice, they're bottom line me. How are you going to make IT easier for me and simpler? Go. So I'm going to make it easier by ensuring that we present you with our expertise. We're going to create an environment through which you can consume IT and we're going to accelerate your digital transformation. All right, accelerating change. Obviously the digital economy's here. There's no doubt about it. It's got a little cloud flavor, hybrid cloud, multi-cloud. It's the queue bringing you all the data here from HPE Discover. More live action for three days of exclusive coverage with the queue. We'll be right back with more after this short break.