 Live from Copenhagen, Denmark, it's theCUBE. Covering Nutanix.NEXT 2019, brought to you by Nutanix. Welcome back everyone to theCUBE's live coverage of .NEXT Copenhagen Nutanix. I'm your host Rebecca Knight, co-hosting alongside of Stu Miniman. We're joined by Craig Routledge. He is the Vice President HPE Greenlight Sales. Thank you so much for coming on theCUBE. Yeah, good afternoon. So why don't you start by telling our viewers a little bit about HPE and Greenlight? So HPE is the part of the old HPE empire that's focused specifically on the hybrid computing world. So in the data centers, the hybrid cloud world and at the edge, and we're providing technology and services to our customers and our channel partners and we'll continue to do so. And the thing, the announcement that we've made this week here in Copenhagen is the announcement of Greenlight for Nutanix. So I'm not sure how much of our audience is very familiar with it. I've got plenty of experience with the various HPE cloud initiatives over the years, but this is at its core as a service, my understanding and help us understand where that fits in a customer's overall kind of cloud portfolio. Yeah, if you kind of take it back to the, go back to real basics, actually almost before cloud, customers access HPE technology and infrastructure through capital purchase, through leasing, in some cases through subscription models as the industry calls them. And then Greenlight was born about nine years ago in fact to help customers match cost to revenue. So it's a pay-per-use model and that's where it was originally born before really the cloud was almost, it's kind of around but not really in any scale. And then over the years, we've adapted Greenlight to be the private cloud solution for many direct customers, then for channel customers, for service providers and partners. And now we've added the Nutanix partnership as well, which we've been announced as being ready for sale today on stage, which was great timing by my engineering team, I'm pleased to say. They were up late last night finishing it off. So it's gradually evolving, but it's we're not just doing the private world. We're increasingly working in an environment where the equipment is installed in a colo, but it's still dedicated to that customer. It's not a shared service. And we're also increasingly through our analytics portal connecting to the public cloud world. So we've announced we have significant partnerships with the public cloud providers and we can meter and monitor the customer's usage in that solution. So we can provide a single tool sets that gives them the private cloud usage and who's using it and connect them to the public cloud world so they can get the same functionality in the public cloud. So they could see how much our marketing department are spending on compute and storage and networking and virtualization, et cetera. And it's a very different way for customers to think about it. And in many ways, it should become more natural. If I got it right, it heard you say it's, you know, by the VM or the container or by a certain flash increment. Maybe explain that a little bit. And, you know, when and where would a customer say, oh, well, I need an increment of something that underneath has Nutanix. Ah, well, it's interesting. You make an interesting point there, actually. It is about customers buying workloads. And in the same way you buy a film on Netflix or you buy a series or you might choose to buy episode two, three, five, 10 and 12, but not the whole book effectively, not the whole library. And you buy that by the unit of measure. So in Netflix, it's a video or something. In the, in the GreenLake world, it's by virtual machine at the VRAM level effectively. It could be by container. So it's at the actual Kubernetes container level. It can be at the gigabyte of high-performing storage level. So we've disconnected the linkage between infrastructure. So the customer doesn't choose that infrastructure. The customer gives us a workload and then we specify how that workload is designed. We have some recommended architectures. And we're just about to launch the second iteration of our quoting tool so that the customer can get a quote on their smartphone or our salespeople in the pilot stages will be able to produce a quote on the, now when that moves into operation, it's our service team that are monitoring the customer's usage. 24 by seven, we own the metering and the management technologies. So we can snapshot the customer's usage and their infrastructure environment as often as we need to. So on Black Friday, you can guarantee we snapshot every retail customer in our portfolio at least every 30 minutes. And if there's a financial services crisis as various presidents pick a fight with a global trade war, share prices bounce up and down and dollars go in different directions and the RMB goes, you need to meter the usage very rapidly, very accurately and very often. And that's what our metering technology does. Now the service part of this is not only do we kind of make sure that's all running 24 by seven, our part of our service is to do the capacity management for the customer. So we take that responsibility off them. And if they, if we think they're, if the portal is telling us and the intelligence built into the portal and into the experienced service managers saying, you need an upgrade, we need to upgrade this piece, then we can produce a change control note, one or two days, sign it and then we can get some more infrastructure capacity rolled in of the chosen architecture for that customer. Just describing what you were saying about the retailers on Black Friday and then watching the currencies fluctuate based on whatever our world leaders are tweeting about. How has this in your mind changed the way the business world works today? Just the fact that we can see all this information, this real-time data, I mean, wow. It's changed the speed and I think it's the change of speed at which companies like ourselves have got to operate. And I think it's changed the speed at which the IT teams inside the end customers have got to operate. And they get, I think they've probably got the harder job than we have. But we, an IT manager in an organization these days not only has to watch those macro factors, the dollar going up and down, Britain's finally sorts out its position on Brexit and we won't go into that one. And the IT team have got to look at that and see the impacts on the business. But they've also got to cope with a very rapidly changing environment and a whole user base. I mean, I don't know if any of you, I presume you have to download the app on your smartphones, you press it and if it doesn't download in three seconds you're going something wrong here. And that level of expectation in terms of the delivery of new application requests is inherent in the user base now, particularly the younger people that are coming through in the wave of early stage employees in our customers. They expect instant gratification almost. They want a new app, didn't, they were a bit vague about how they want it to run but they want it today now and they want to pay a low volume price per click basis. So that's kind of, you know, we're partly reacting to many of those trends and part of our solution is in fact, we provide a, if we think the initial size is, let's just say we need 500 VMs or we need 400 Nutanix, Greenlate Licenses, Nutanix and Greenlate Licenses, we always provide a buffer and in the early stage, let's just say it's 20% buffer and that gives the customer some overflow room. So not only will we provision above their utilization but we'll add a buffer to de-risk it for them at our risk and that's to make sure that the service is seamless and that's something that IT departments are not used to it but it matches the expectation of the internal, I call them the IT consumers really in business or out or customers of a bank. You know, you dial your bank up on your app and you want to know what your balance is and if you want to move money from that account to that account, you want it to go straight away. I had a chastening experience on Sunday. My bank, the app is online on Sunday but they don't move money on other weekends and I went, what? That was a bit of a stunning, and so my expectation is fueled by this kind of instant society that we live in. So it's orderable now? Yes, it's orderable now. We finished it yesterday. Available within 30 days. I mean we think we'll have it available by the end of the month for delivery. Great, and from a customer standpoint, will the customer be asking for Nutanix GreenLake? How does it, how do you give them the decision tree or is it a customer saying I wanted Nutanix? We have some people that are far more technically oriented than I am, technically literate than I am. We have some pre-sales specialists inside the Nutanix team and inside the HP teams and we have some sizing tools as well to help us. So if the customer comes to us and says they want a particular workload, because we've expanded the choice, if they're talking to HP, we'll look at what's the right solution. And if it's Nutanix, then we use the Nutanix pre-sales teams to help us. And that seems to be a very popular message in the marketplace and is resonating very well. So we're helping the customer make a choice and obviously in an indirect motion, the partners will be helping the customer make that choice and then coming us to, they'll specify the technology solution and they'll come to us with a specification. We'll turn that into a detailed specification and a detailed cost and contract. So just Greenlake's been around for nine years now. Is this the first HCI based offering in the Greenlake portfolio? No, we've been working on the, we've had Greenlake on SimpliVity, which is the HP owned HCI solution, two and a half, maybe three years now. And very successfully it's working very well in a few large cases. But it works at a different level with different scaling parameters. And so this is actually the Nutanix partnership and the reason why the two CEOs were excited was this gives the customer another choice. And it gives them another choice other than the default virtualization engine which everybody uses. And it also brings in the Nutanix expertise end user computing, they call it VDI as I would call it, but that expertise and in the database world it bring their expertise in that space is very valuable to us. So it augments our portfolio and it brings two solutions to them, not just the Greenlake solution, pay-per-use solution, but it also brings the proven HP server technology into their appliance portfolio. And the alignment on the optionality is really what is also driving this. Yes, and it is, we both genuinely believe in customer choice, in options. If the customer's only going to have one choice, A, you only give the customer one choice and you might win or might lose, but you're going to have a resentful customer. If the customer says they want to go with HP and we only give them one choice or can only give them one choice, doesn't make for a long-term relationship. And certainly I think both companies, HP clearly, we believe in having lifetime, we value a customer for its lifetime relationship with us. So it's very important that we offer the customer choice, then narrow down to the right solution, refine that solution and draw it up into a contract. Excellent, so it's the right choice. Yeah. Craig Routledge, you are now a CUBE alum. Thank you so much for coming on theCUBE. Thank you very much, thank you. I'm Rebecca Knight for Stu Miniman. Stay tuned for more of theCUBE's live coverage from .NEXT.