 From London, England, it's theCUBE. Covering Discover 2016 London. Brought to you by Hewlett Packard Enterprise. Now, here's your hosts, Dave Vellante and Paul Gillis. Welcome back to the banks of the Thames, everybody. This is theCUBE. We're live here at HPE Discover. Paul Gillin and I, Paul, we walked over this morning. It was pretty cold. I thought the Thames was going to freeze up. I've never, never seen that cold. It's warming up here in London now, and we're going to talk more cloud. So, Ken Wanis here is the Director of Cloud Solutions Marketing at Hewlett Packard Enterprise, and he's joined by Mark Jewett, who's the Senior Director of Cloud Platform Marketing at Microsoft. Gentlemen, welcome to theCUBE. Thank you. Thanks for having us. It's exciting times. It is exciting times. We're seeing, every time we come to Discover, there's something new happening. The split, the spin merges, the software merges, but big news here, at least part of the big news is the relationship between Microsoft and Hewlett Packard Enterprise, Azure Stack, which was announced in October. You guys, obviously, fundamental party of strategy. So, Ken, set it up for us. What's going on? So, we're seeing a huge amount of interest in customers who want to deploy a hybrid type of environment. Clearly, there's a lot of growth and interest in the public cloud, but we're seeing a lot of interest in private cloud as well. So, we know that this hybrid cloud environment is really important, and one of the challenges that a lot of our customers have is being able to have consistency between these two environments. Today, if you want to deploy an app into public cloud and one into private cloud, typically you have to do some code changes or some changes to the underlying application in order to do that. So, the really exciting thing that we're doing with Microsoft is this Azure, Azure Stack hybrid environment, which allows us to have an application that you write once and deploy it to either an Azure public cloud data center or an on-premises Azure Stack environment in your data center. No changes to the code, completely the exact same application. So, huge benefits from a developer standpoint, a maintenance standpoint, and a deployment standpoint. Well, now, Mark, Azure Stack, can you give us something on Azure Stack? It was delayed for a while. Are you shipping now? What kind of customer base do you have? So, it's available as a one-node system today. So, it's in a preview form that customers have been looking at. We've had thousands of downloads and deployments of that so far. We ultimately are working on integrated systems and that's some of our important work with Ken and the HPE team to develop that into a system that not only helps streamline the deployment of what ends up being a pretty complex and dynamic system, but also, importantly, the updates. Because it's a system that's going to need to keep up with the innovation that we're showing in Azure. And so, it's going to need to be a frequently updated system. So, is this a partner play? Those systems come a little bit later. Is this a partner play? I mean, you said you had a lot of downloads, but is your primary distribution medium going to be through partners like HPE? So, our focus is on the systems. We want to make sure customers are successful deploying and updating those systems. And so, yeah, HPE is a great example of somebody we're betting on to make sure that those systems arrive in a good state with the customer. Mark, talk about the strategy from Microsoft's standpoint. It's considerably different than some of your other large public cloud competitors, particularly Amazon, but also Google, who seem to be resisting putting any kind of on-prem infrastructure in place and enabling that. You've taken a different strategy. Why is that? And why are you confident that that strategy is the right one? The reason we're confident is because it's what we hear from customers. Every single customer out behind us here has a situation where some of the systems that there are some of the applications they want to deploy into the public cloud and some of the applications are not ready for the public cloud yet. And so that became the basis of our strategy and being able to serve that dual environment without customers having to, as Ken said earlier, write the applications in a different way, use a different set of skills, use a different set of management technologies. That introduces a ton of complexity for them. And so that's why we come at it that way. I think it happens because our roots are really in the enterprise. And as the enterprises come to the cloud computing model, we see them facing this both opportunity and then a set of barriers that we need to help them with. So Ken, I wonder if I can get your perspective, a little different question for you. You saw the VMware AWS deal. A lot of us felt like that was sort of a one-way trip into the public cloud. And this debate about that, many of the people in our community felt like, oh, that's a good thing. But generally speaking, we saw it as kind of a capitulation by VMware to say, okay, we give up, we can't win, join them. Are you concerned that your relationship leads to a one-way trip to the public cloud? And if not, why not? You know, I think what Amazon and VMware did was a little short of what customers are really looking for. You know, they're looking for that ability to have the exact same environments in their public cloud and the private cloud. And it's just too complicated to have different environments to manage, to have different code bases for applications to deploy into. And so this strategy that Microsoft and HP together are following around the Azure and Azure Stack just makes it simpler for customers to take advantage of the speed that you can get applications up and running, whether that's in a public cloud or a private cloud. And that API compatibility is super important because it makes it so simple for customers to be able to have that choice of deployment. It becomes super important where you have issues like data sovereignty, you know, that's a huge concern, particularly in Europe and actually many countries around the world around where you have data privacy requirements, compliance requirements where the application just cannot work well in a public cloud. So now with this Azure Stack solution, we're able to deploy in the both in your on-premise data center and in the public cloud. As I said, exactly the same app. That's a huge value. Lay out the landscape of what you'll support. We just had Bobby Patrick on talking about plans to support SUSE, OpenStack. You're going to support Azure. Are there other cloud implementations you'll be selling and supporting as well? Well, what you heard Bobby talk about is our game plan is to give our customers choice, right? And we're doing that by supporting OpenStack environments, VMware environments, Azure environments. And so that's our game plan in an open, as open way as we can. Because we know that most customers are deploying or using multiple cloud technologies. You know, we actually find that most people don't just stick to one, that often they may use multiple, different departments, different use cases may require different cloud technologies. And we want to give them that choice. But they will be looking to you for guidance. Can you give us layout, some guidelines for helping them make that decision? Certainly. You know, the customers who are heavily Microsoft shops, customers who are using Azure already, public cloud, those who are developing apps and .NET, Java types of applications are great examples of customers who are ideal for Azure and Azure Stack solution. Now OpenStack, as much as it's much more mature as Bobby talked about, it's much more mature than it was years ago now. It's really largely designed for people who need some sort of customers or special environments. It's not designed for the cookie cutter of what we're doing with Microsoft. So it's really a different use case for Azure and for OpenStack, really depending on what the customer's looking for. And Mark, can you define, I mean, for Azure Stack, is the intention to make this a completely transparent platform migration will customers be able to allocate their workloads dynamically between the cloud and their on-premise environments, move them back seamlessly? How will that play out? By creating a platform that is transparent, that is absolutely the vision. That takes orchestration tools and things on top of it, that will be, I think, a journey. But if you look at some of the tools that we have, for example, the operations management suite, OMS, that was something that they focused on in the keynote yesterday. That'll give you a common view, no matter where those resources are sitting. Could be Azure, Azure Stack, could even be some of the other environments that we're talking about OpenStack and AWS and others. And so that is an example where we're already starting to build that orchestration, that monitoring that'll allow you to look across your hybrid cloud into those environments. And that's the primary gate. So thank you for that honest answer, by the way, and I have a follow-up. I want to poke at that a little bit. But is that the real gate? Is that orchestration layer? Are there other components that need to facilitate that? To facilitate the transparency of the environment? That's, as Paul was saying, the same on-prem as in the cloud. Yeah, it really does start with the consistency of the services. And so if I use VMs as a service, if I use websites as a service, and if I use analytics as a service, the APIs that I use, the code that I'm writing, it must start there. The layers on top are often about process, not just the technology, right? And so organization needs to build up the skills and the process and things around it. But yeah, some of the orchestration, I think is one of the more key things that'll... So I want to follow up with that because I often have debates with my old friends at Oracle when they say, we're the only ones who can do, they have the same, same strategy, you've heard it. And I say, what about Microsoft? And they say, oh no, that's not the same, same, because they're using different hardware or... And notwithstanding that Oracle's cloud is immature in the service, but the vision is clean. And essentially you're laying out a very similar vision, except with partners. Am I right? Or is there nuance there? To help us understand and differentiate that notion of same, same. Yeah, there are, in both cases, there are two things on either side. And perhaps some with position is same, same. What I would position is actually, we have something a little bit different on the other side, which is a hyperscale public cloud. The advantage of building the consistency between those things is that you get all of the innovation. I think we can agree the amount of innovation that's happening, not just at Microsoft in the public cloud, but the public cloud generally. Yeah, absolutely. Is surpassing innovation pretty much anywhere. And so being able to take that pace of innovation and have it apply in other people's data centers, it's frankly a tricky act for us to pull off, but we believe in the mission of being able to do that. Nobody else sits on the enterprise on one side and the public cloud on the other side. And that's part of the strategy that we have to bring a different... Yeah, so what you described is you're basically bringing your hyperscale prowess on-prem. Which is... Yeah, and we're matching it with, I think, our enterprise prowess. There's an act there that's, like I said, it's tricky, but it's important. Which Oracle is essentially taking its enterprise prowess and saying we're going to bring that to the cloud, which is perhaps a little different than hyperscale in, right? I mean, I think there's interesting questions about what's hosting versus what's cloud. What is a real cloud computing model? I think that's fair. What are the elements of a cloud? Certainly Azure is in that category. It's strongly in a cloud. And think of this as expanding essentially the footprint of where Azure can operate. Yeah, Azure's not hosting. Azure's not hosting. And you could say that about soft layer. It's kind of hosting plus and it's getting there, but clearly Amazon, Google, and Azure are hyperscale clouds. We can agree on that. Okay, we can agree on that. I think all you need to do is look at the level of investment. There is not many, and it's maybe the few that you mentioned there. And there's maybe one in China, and one in Japan, maybe. Yeah, we can discuss how deep the list goes, but it doesn't go very deep. It doesn't go very deep. And bringing that then to other people, taking that innovation and making it available to other people for those scenarios that Ken was talking about, where hybrid is really the answer. And then Ken, I have to understand now, the only company that's going to be using Azure Stack, what's different between the HPE implementation of Azure Stack and some of Microsoft's other partners? So one of the challenges that customers have as they're moving to this hybrid IT world is the management, the operations, and the financing aspects of this. And that's the areas where we are different. As an example, as we're managing it in an environment today, most customers have a traditional IT environment, and it seems fairly complex to manage from an operations, management, monitoring, orchestration standpoint. Well, as you move into this hybrid IT world, you have to do that same function for your public cloud, your private cloud, maybe managed cloud, maybe multiple cloud environments. So what we are enabling our customers to do is to have a consistent management across all of their hybrid IT environment that's with our Opsbridge management product that allows us to have a consistent application performance, infrastructure performance, monitoring experience across all of this whole hybrid IT environment. So there's that management capability. You have the same concern from a security standpoint. So we know that security is a huge concern of everyone going to the cloud. And so we want to provide the ability to deploy or to provide consistent security policies across your traditional environment, your public cloud, your private cloud, and we can help customers with that consistent security as well. And finally, I'll say from a investment standpoint or financial standpoint, we have ways through our flexible capacity program to actually make the whole infrastructure, the Azure Stack that we can deploy to be paid for as a pay-as-you-go model. So it's not a capital upfront purchase. You can do it as a pay-as-you-go, just as you do it with public cloud, which is one of the reasons why everyone loves the public cloud. You can just pay as you use it. So that financial flexibility that we give, and along with that, a single bill that covers both Azure and Azure Stack, that's something that you can only get that from HPE, provides simplicity from a financial standpoint to our customers. So there's actually a number of reasons. There's that management, the security, and the financial flexibility that HPE can offer because of our experience in the enterprise, that you're just not getting from the other vendors. Will you be doing anything on the technology front with Synergy or CloudWorks to optimize them for the Azure Stack platform? We have a lot of new technologies that are coming down the pike, right? With Synergy and our hyper-converged platforms, and we expect that over time, we'll see more happen around Azure Stack and on different platforms. Today, what we're doing is we're focusing on a very well-defined environment because we want to make sure that customers' experience with Azure Stack is positive, it's simple, it's easy for them to play into. So actually, our first implementation of our integrated solution is based on the world's most popular server, the DL380s because they're so reliable, they've been so successful into the marketplace. It gives us a very solid foundation to provide this Azure Stack environment on. Mark, what's the timeline on Azure Stack going forward? You said you're in a single processor version right now. How does that evolve? How quickly does that evolve? So it's in a single server form factor right now. You can run all of Azure Stack on a server, essentially. It needs to meet some certain requirements. You can see how it's running, not in a cluster. Great for testing how you're going to integrate with your systems, seeing how it's working. We also have customers that are developing in Azure today with the idea that they will be solutions deployed to Azure Stack. Coming back to the consistency, that's part of what you can do, dev in one environment and then deployment to Azure Stack. The systems themselves, getting into the multi-node systems, we're talking about middle of next year. That's our targeted date, middle of 2017. One of the things we're hearing from HPE is we want to make hybrid IT simple. Sometimes I like to do a little research on theCUBE and it's something that's brewing in the Wikibon community that I don't fully understand. Maybe you can help me parse through it. One of the complaints that we hear, despite all the great innovation that's going on in the public cloud generally, and I'll pick on Amazon specifically because nobody usually picks on them. We always talk about how great they're doing and they are doing great. But one of the complaints I hear is that if you're using data services inside Amazon, it may be the same for Azure, I'm not sure. But whether it's a key value store or you're doing streaming or you're doing block storage or object storage, whatever it is, they're different proprietary APIs. And the API creep and the complexity is problematic for people. Trying to understand where hot data should go, where cold data should go and which one to use and what the bill is at the end of the month. That's complex, that's not making IT simple. Can you help solve that problem? Does Azure take a different approach and can HPE on-prem through its single API, perhaps, help me solve that problem? Can you help us educate us a little bit on how you guys approach that? Well, I'll go first and then you talked about Azure. From an HPE standpoint, there's a couple of things that we're doing. First of all, we are aligning to a single API infrastructure through OneView to dramatically simplify the management of the infrastructure. So when you're managing tens or hundreds of servers, updating, patching, so on, it gets incredibly complicated. So through OneView, we can simplify that quite dramatically. And with Azure Stack, now we don't have a separate set of APIs that you're dealing with for your on-premise private cloud. You have the exact same APIs that you're using in your public cloud. So that's a huge benefit. I would argue that's one of the top reasons why so many customers here at Discover here are so excited about this because it does give that simplicity of fewer APIs that they have to deal with across their public and private cloud. And from Azure's perspective, you've got a more consolidated API approach or is it pretty much primitives at each service? So I'm going to build on Ken's answer because I think it's on target, which is you introduce optionality. I heard you talk, Dave, about a couple things there. One, I think was complexity. Another was am I getting locked into an environment? I kind of heard that, you know, you said you're hearing that from customers. I need an exit strategy just in case something changes. You're absolutely right. Part of the discussion that we have around Azure Stack is that it's in addition to giving the capability to deploy in the same way those applications in private environments, it also gives me optionality on public environments so that I'm deploying to a set of APIs that I don't have to change the application if I bring that to another environment. If you contrast that to some other places that you might build, you really don't have that optionality and so I think that locking can be hard. So I think that's a key point that you're making there. That's good. So we're super excited about the partnership where, you know, amazed and actually in awe of what Microsoft has done and how the whole culture has seemed to change literally overnight. I mean, it's really great to see Microsoft sort of back. It's been fun to see from the inside. So that's great. Congratulations on the partnership and last word Ken, vibe of the show. What's it like out there? Well, we've got an incredible amount of activity. You go out to the show floor, so many interesting conversations going on, just packed with people talking to folks across all the different demonstrations. We have a ton of area, a big area for all of our partners. So a lot of activity in the partner booths. So really exciting time. I think everybody here, particularly I know all the HP guys are all tired because we're having such great conversations, you know, and evening events. So it's been a very exciting few days. All right, Axel, with theCUBE, we never get tired in theCUBE. Gentlemen, thanks very much for coming on the show. We really appreciate it. Thank you very much. All right, keep it right there. Paul and I will be back. For the next guests, we're live from HPE Discover 2016 in London. You're right back.