 Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE. Covering Discover 2016 Las Vegas, brought to you by Hewlett Packard Enterprise. Now, here are your hosts, John Furrier and Dave Vellante. Okay, welcome back everyone. We are here live inside theCUBE here, winding down day one of three days of wall-to-wall live coverage from Silicon Angles theCUBE, our flagship program. We go out to the events, to extract the signal from the noise. I'm John Furrier, this is Dave Vellante, our next guest, Cube alum, Rick Lewis, senior vice president, general manager of the Converge Data Center Infrastructure Group at HPE for Enterprise. Welcome back, great to see you. Great to see you guys again. So HPE Enterprise, straight and narrow, post-split. Now we're at London for HP Discover. Now we're here. What's the update on Converged? What's the big trend? What's the big highlight this week that we can get into some of the conversation? Yeah, so last year, one year ago here in Vegas, we announced this bold vision to do something we called Composable Infrastructure. And the whole industry was, what is that? What exactly are you talking about? Here we are a year later. You guys were with me at Discover in London in December and we talked about, okay, not only are we going to do this vision of Composable Infrastructure, but we're now launching the platform that's the first instantiation of this Composable Infrastructure. And when you were on theCUBE last year here, talking about Composable, and we, if you remember, we were all over it because we're like, we love DevOps. We love this notion of agility. Now the whole theme is agility here. I mean, Meg's keynote essentially is about data at the center, speed of fast. I mean, that must make, get some good validation there. I mean, that's great here. What are the customers saying? Yeah, so the customers love the vision. The key to it was being able to do both traditional IT and the new style of IT or idea economy IT, DevOps environment, cloud native applications, all of that on the same infrastructure without having to do two separate things. Some analysts say, oh, you do the traditional stuff when you're on-prem infrastructure, and you do mode two or the new style in the public cloud. Customers are telling us, no, no, no, no. We want to be able to use our infrastructure for both. And we want to have that security, compliance, all the benefits of having on-prem infrastructure for some of that. Sure, we may have a hybrid environment, but we know we're going to have some on-prem infrastructure, and we'd like it to be able to do both types. So that was the core vision. We launched that first product here, Synergy, at Discover London in December. We're now, we have customers with those in their hands. So our three customers are on stage here at Discover talking about their experience with Synergy, and we've got a hundred more customer units headed out over the course of the next few weeks. Before I die, I know Dave's got a question, but I want to just validate that we had our past three guests just gone, Shetty from the HTCDA from the storage group. We had Dom Wildon from networking, and we had Duncan Campbell and Don Jones from the Alliance group, all talking about infrastructure as code, kind of in their own different words. Alliances want programmable infrastructure for value creation, networking, certainly they need, they want to make their networks programmable. And then the storage side, they're simplifying things, abstracting away, almost being invisible. All that's composable, right? I mean, in different words. Absolutely, at the core of it, when we say what is composable, really it's cloud made easy, and what does that really mean? Infrastructure as code. You don't have to deal with all the infrastructure stuff like firmware updates and how to deploy it against applications, and it flexes automatically to workloads as needed. It's built around some key technologies, fluid pools of resources, storage, compute, and fabric. So you need that all in your fluid resource pool. Software defined intelligence that wraps around that. Our software defined intelligence is known as OneView. And then an API on top of that to make it easy to get at. And with a single line of code, you can deploy infrastructure, not server, not compute, not just storage, but infrastructure to a given workload. Operational infrastructure. Operational infrastructure, single line of code blasted out there. And in fact, we show demos where you can drag a container with an application to a set of resources. When those resources are done being used by that application, they return to the pool and can be flexibly assigned. Just like people kind of assume happens in a public cloud, it's all magic behind the scenes. Well, this is their on-prem infrastructure that can do that same level of flexibility. And it's working. On the earnings call, you talked about converged infrastructure. Yep. You guys kind of are one of the first to use that term. 19% growth in constant currency terms, which is significant, and you can confirm this is a significant business. This is not like a million dollar business for you guys. It's a large. I know you can't give me the numbers, but it's a meaningful component of your business. It's absolutely a significant business for us. You confirm that, right? It's a significant business for us. North of a million. And it's growing. And in the end, it's a billion. Yeah, exactly. No, I would say no. No, to lump in my whole business, it's more in the several billions. Yes, right. Yes, kind of range. So this is 19% growth on a business that's billions. That's significant. And where the action is is really, everybody talks about, oh, there's so much growth in public cloud. What they're not looking at is there's a lot of growth in private cloud. And what it's really about is simple, simple, simple. Customers don't want to take a bunch of infrastructure pieces and paste them together now. They just want something to show up and be able to apply it to applications. Is this part of the progress as a driver? Because we hear, obviously, simplicity, total cost of ownership. I mean, that's kind of like being thrown out like a punchline. But the reality is that they all want to move to the cloud around changing their operating model. That's a theme that Dave brought up earlier. We've been hearing on theCUBE for the past year. More recently, this year, heavily, my operating model has to change. So I think when you hear that operating model, in our old mindset for traditional, it was about because of cost minimization, I want to do X, Y, Z. The power has now shifted to the lines of business themselves. And what they want is agility and speed. And so they don't want to deal with a bunch of stuff putting it together and procuring it and taking a while. So if they have a composable infrastructure, they can immediately apply that to applications. Composable is not the only big thing we talked about here, but we also have our new hyperconverged 380 system that we shipped, just shipped it here in May. And it's a really capable system. Deploy VMs in five simple clicks. It's a VM vending machine is what we really call it. It has competitors out there like the Nutanix's and SimpliVities, et cetera. What we love about ours is it's built on the number one server platform in the industry, which is our DL380. And it's extremely easy to use. A generalist on a remote site can install and use this thing and immediately be running applications on VMs. It says easy to deploy. Any cost metrics there? Cost metrics are looking great. For a VDI example, one of the things we're talking about here in the show is $11 a seat per month. Compare that to public cloud, which comes in at about $18 a seat for VDI. And we think we're probably in the neighborhood of roughly 20% less than the other hyperconverged vendors that are out there. So really cheap per seat on that, whether you compare public or private, this is big stuff. It's cheaper than go-to meeting. Yeah, so I got to ask you, you're going to this. I know you're going, thank you for your time by the way coming today. Of course. I know you got a big CIO event you're going to. What are you going to be talking about there when you go see the CIOs? Dave and I are focused now this year on the CXO agenda on how to talk to the boardrooms, but also down in the plumbing, down in the boiler rooms, things are changing as well. What's your discussion? What's your talk to CIOs today? It's really about CIOs want to be relevant to the organization. Their pressure isn't just keep the stuff running in the back office and make sure it doesn't crash. That was kind of IT of 10 years ago. Today it is, how can you generate revenue and profit for the company? So how do you enable me to develop apps faster? How do you enable me to be relevant with all of the mobile applications that are going on? How do you still have that be secure and compliant like my traditional infrastructure, but make it so those lines of business can immediately roll out applications and be relevant to generating income for the business? For you, what percent of the CIO staff spending is on non-differentiated hardware stuff, management, patching and so forth? That is your primary value proposition. You can help the CIO shift that to all the cool stuff. We've looked at it over the years and we used to say quite a while back 80% went in to just keeping the lights on, just maintenance, et cetera. It's come down, but it hasn't come down enough and we think we can make a big shift when we get to composable infrastructure and now we're shipping it, so it's awesome. Well Rick, I got to ask you a question. I always like to ask this question when I meet execs that are knocking it out of the park on the product and positioning side you guys and it's been great to see you get home run and it's been fun to watch you announce it. We got to get a great path. No doubt it's clearly going to happen. It's been a fun ride on this, I can tell you that. But the challenge now is, okay, you pat yourself on the back, golf clap, good job, you still got a P&L to deliver. How are you going to go to market with this? What are you going to do to take them to the finish line? How are you going to get customers to buy it? How are you going to market it? Because you're doing something different and new. Is the old ways of lead gen, demand gen, sales enablement, all those things that are the blocking and tackling of go to market. Are you going to do the same things? What are you going to do different? Strangely enough, it's new, but it's not that different from the old. And that is, a lot of us grew up in infrastructure that was sold in a value way. I'm going to sell you infrastructure that solves some problem for you. Myself personally, I came from the mission critical business. I'm going to do mission critical better than anything else. In this new era, it's about simplicity and speed and being able to provide dynamic infrastructure. It's different value, but the customers value it and they're really interested in it. So it requires having a conversation about the problem they're trying to solve rather than how do I just get you something cheaper from a play? Sales, direct indirect, both mixes? Direct indirect for sure. When you look in the hyperconverged play, the majority of those will be sold through channel and channel partners are absolutely key to us. And so we've done. They can wrap services around it like you know it's business. They can wrap services around it. They love it. They make good money on it and we're investing heavily to make sure that those channel partners are trained and able to sell our hyperconverged solutions. But that's not just there. Even in composable, partners are an important part of the equation. So it's both direct and indirect. And you know, we're for Clark Press. There's an opportunity here. There's growth in this segment and we're trying to capitalize on it. So obviously composable kind of indicates this DevOps developer environment. Is that too higher up in the stack for you? Is there an ecosystem for you there? Or what is your ecosystem look like? Absolutely not too high in the stack. In fact, one of the things we're talking about is the phases of our composable delivery. We started with phase one, which was our ecosystem API built around OneView. We announced that this time last year. We moved to phase two, which is really about delivering the platform. We called it infrastructure as code, but what it really was about delivering the synergy platform, the next phase we call it continuous service delivery. What it's really about is integrating more of that vertical stack so that customers can just have a cloud, private cloud solutions show up on their premise and not have to worry about any of it. Whether it's converging the hardware or adding the software stack on top. And OneView had an announcement this morning too, I believe, went out. OneView 3.0. OneView 3.0, we started shipping. It's got some great new features, global dashboard capability at thousands of units of all of our Perliant rack servers, Apollo, my blade system servers, 3PAR, and now integrated as well with IMC to allow us to program downlinks from top of rack switches, whether they be HP switches, Cisco switches, or anybody who sees an IMC. Big expansion of your market there. Big expansion, really happy about that. We also tightly integrated OneView with Cloud System 10 so that you can immediately deploy infrastructure from a cloud portal in our Cloud System 10, which is built around Healy and OpenStack as well as our CSA software. We got a lot of things going on. It's a busy show. You should relax and have a big steak dinner tonight. Well, I might have to, but I still got a lot of meetings left. Final word, just take 30 seconds to a minute and explain to the people watching, potential customers that might not be customers yet. Why, what you're doing is important and why should they work with you guys? Yeah, what we're doing, I think you've seen this revolution in the consumer space where now all of a sudden, all these consumers have devices and they're simple. And I know in my house, I used to be the IT administrator for all of our laptops, even my kids and that. Nobody needs an IT administrator anymore in my house, right? The kids know how to do it better than I do. And the devices are so simple that everybody just uses them and it's ubiquitous. It's really simple. I think we have the same thing coming in enterprise infrastructure, even on-premise where companies don't want huge IT staffs to be able to deal with this stuff. They just want it to show up, run applications, be able to be dynamic and be able to be installed simple. That's what we're really trying to bring to customers. And when they see that and say, good, I can shift my investment from dealing with all the stuff, being the sys admin for all of this stuff into generating revenue for the company and focusing on developing applications, I win as a CIO, I win as a customer. That's what we're trying to enable. That's what businesses want to do. They're in business for a reason to make money and serve their customers, so. That's right. That's the value. That's the point. Rick Lewis, C-Vice President General Manager, converged data center infrastructure group. Thanks for spending your valuable time and I know you're going to catch a car to the CIO summit. Again, thanks for joining us. It's theCUBE connecting the dots, converging the data and all the ideas right here on theCUBE. Day one of three days of coverage. We'll be right back with our wrap up after this short break. You're watching theCUBE.