 The Cube presents HPE Discover 2022, brought to you by HPE. Welcome back to the Venetian Convention Center. You're watching the Cube's coverage of HPE Discover 2022, the first discover live discover in three years, 2019 was the last one. The Cube, we were just talking about this, has been at HPE Discover now HPE since 2011, my co-host John Furrier. We're pleased to welcome Phil Matrim, who's the executive vice president and general manager of HPE Aruba. And he's joined by David Hughes, the chief product and technology officer at HPE Aruba. Gentlemen, welcome to the Cube. Good to see you, thank you. Thank you. Okay, so you guys talk a lot, Phil, about the intelligent edge. Yeah. What do you mean by that? Yeah, so we're kind of focused on is providing technology to customers that sits out at the edge. And typically the edge would be any location out of the data center or out of the cloud. So for the most part, our customers would deploy our technology either in their office premises or maybe retail premises, shops, maybe deploying out of the home where their employees are on a factory floor. We're really talking about technology to connect both people and devices back to systems and technology throughout an organization. So sometimes I call it the near edge and the far edge. The near edge maybe is we saw Home Depot up on the stage yesterday. Far edge is like space, right? You're including all that, right? That's the deep edge. Yeah, and actually we've got a broad range of technology that actually works within the data center as well. So what we're focused on is providing network technology, software and services. And for the most part, our heritage is at the edge, but it's more pervasive than that. So if you have the edge, you've got connectivity and power. That's an edge. How much is the physical world being connected now? You're seeing robotics, automation and with machine learning specifically in compute, really driving a new acceleration at the edge. How do you guys view that? What's your reaction? Yeah, I think, look, I think as connectivity is improving and that's both in terms of Wi-Fi connectivity. So Wi-Fi technology continues to advance and also you've got this new kind of private 5G area. Just generally connectivity is becoming more pervasive and that's helping some industries that haven't previously embraced it. And I think industrial is one of the big ones. So historically it was difficult for kind of car manufacturers to really enable a factory floor, but now the connectivity is better. That gives them the opportunity to be able to really change how they do things. So David, if you take an outside in view and when you talk to customers, what are they telling you and how is that informing your product strategy? Yeah, well, I think there's several themes we hear. One is it's really important to better work from anywhere. They want to enable their employees to get the same experience whether they're at home or on the road or in the branch office or at headquarters. People are also concerned that as they deploy all of this IoT in pursuit of digital transformation, they don't want those devices to be a weak point where someone breaks into one device to move laterally across the network. So they want to have this great experience for their customers and their users, but they want to make sure that they're not compromising security in any way. And so it's about getting that balance between ease of use and security. That's one of the primary things we hear. You know, Dave, one of the things we talked about many, many years ago was when hybrid and was starting to come out, the multi-cloud was on the table early on, we were saying, hey, the data center is just a big edge. Right, I mean, if you have cloud operations and you see what's going on with GreenLake here, now the momentum, hybrid cloud is cloud operations, right? An edge off data centers to a big edge and on-premises and you got the edge. As you have cloud operas like, say, GreenLake plugging in partners and diverse environments, you're connecting not just branch offices that are perimeter-based, you have no perimeter, and you have now other companies connecting. So you got data and you got network. How do you guys see that transition as GreenLake has a very big ecosystem part of it, partners and whatnot? Yeah, so I think for us, the ecosystem of partners that we have is critical in terms of delivering what our customers need. And I think one of the really important areas is around verticals. So when you think about different verticals, they have similar problems, but you need to tailor the solutions to each of those. We're talking a bit about devices and people. When you look at, say, a healthcare environment, there can be 30 devices there for each patient. And so there's connecting all those devices securely, but we are partners that will help pull all of that together that may be focused on medical environment. They may be focused on stadiums. They may be focused on industrial. So having partners that understand those verticals and working closely with them to deliver solutions is important in our go-to market. So another kind of product question and related to what you just said, David, I got connectivity, speed, reliability, cost, security, or maybe I'm missing something, but you said earlier, you're going to get a balance those. How do you do that? And do you do that for the specific use cases? Like for instance, you just mentioned stadiums, maybe one, and how do you balance those? And do you tailor those for the use cases? Yeah, well, I think it depends on the customer and different people have different views about where they need to be. So some people are so afraid about security, they want to be air-gapped and completely separate than the internet. That would be one extreme. Other people look at it and see what's happened with COVID, with everyone working from home, with people being able to work from Starbucks or the airport, and they're beginning to think, why is the branch that much different? And so what I think we are seeing is a reevaluation of how people connect to the apps they're using. And you've probably for sure heard people talking about zero trust, talking about micro segmentation. I think what we see is that people want to be able to build a network in a way where rather than any device being able to talk to any device or any person, which is where the internet started, we want to be able to build networks where people or devices can only talk to the destinations that are necessary for them to do their job. And so a lot of the technology that we are building into the network is really about making security and transit by limiting what can talk to what. That's actually micro segmentation, zero trust. These all point to a modern, the modern network. As you say, and Antonio Neary was just on theCUBE talking about programmability, substrate, the words like that come to mind. What is the modern network look like? I mean, you have to be agile. You have to be programmable. You have to have security. Can you describe in your words, what is the modern network these days need to look like? How should customers think about architecting them? What are some of the table stakes and what are some of the differentiators that customers need to do to have a modern network? Yeah, well, you covered off a few important ones there with security and so on. Let me pick one that you didn't mention. I think we are seeing a lot of interest around network as a service. And when we think about network as a service, we think about it broadly. For consumers, we're getting more and more used to buying things as a service versus buying a thing. When you get Alexa, you care about how well she answers your questions. You don't care about what CPU is or how much RAM Alexa has. And likewise with networking, people are caring about the outcomes of keeping their employees connected, keeping their devices and systems running. And so for us, what NAS is all about is that shift of thinking about a network as being a collection of devices that get managed to being a framework for connectivity and running it from the point of view of those outcomes. And so whether it's about CAPEX versus OPEX or about do it yourself, managing the network yourself versus outsourcing that. Or it's about the Greenfield versus Brownfield. Each of our customers has got a different starting point, but they're all getting heading towards this destination of being able to treat the network as a service. And so that is a key area of innovation for us. And whether it's big customers like Home Depot that you heard about yesterday, where we kind of manage everything for them on a store basis for connectivity. Or the recent SKU-based NAS that we launched, which is a really scalable foundation for our partners to build NAS offerings around. We see this as a key part of network modernization. Yeah, and one of the things, again, that's great stuff. Infrastructure as code, which was really kind of pioneered the DevOps movement in cloud kind of as a platform level. And you got data ops now in AI at the top of the stack. We were always wondering when network as code was going to come. And where you actually have it, it's programmable. We all know what policies do. That's all great. Network as code, and that's the concept. That's like DevOps. It's like, make it work. Just seamlessly, just be always on and smart. People are always looking for the easy button. And so they want things to operate easily. They want it to be easy to manage. And I actually think there's a little bit of a conflict between network as code and the easy button, right? So it depends on the class of customers. Some customers, like financials, for instance, have huge software development organizations that are extremely capable that can go with programmability that want things as code. But the majority of the verticals that we deal with don't have those big captive software organizations. And so they're really looking for automation and simplicity. And they want to outsource that problem. So in Aruba Central, we have invested a lot to make it really easy for our customers to get what they need. You know, is that movement of zero code? It's more like zero code. They want something packaged. Now, the headless networks. Low code, no code kind of. Yeah, that's right. And obviously for people that have the sophistication that want to do the most advanced things, we have APIs, and so we support that kind of programmable way of doing things. But I'd say that those are more specialized customers. So, Phil, is that the strategy? I mean, David listed off a number of factors here. Is that Aruba's strategy to modernize networks, to actually create the easy button through network as a service, as simple as dial tone? Is that how we should do it? I mean, the way I think about the strategy is, I think about it as a triangle, really. Along the bottom, we've got the products and services that we offer, and we continue to add more products and services. We either buy companies such as Silver Peak a couple of years ago, or we build additional products. And by the way, that's in response to customers who are frustrated with some other suppliers and want to move en masse over to companies like ourselves. So at the bottom layer, you have the products and services, and then the other side of the triangle, one would be NAS, which we talked about, which is kind of moved to buying network as a service. And then the other side of the triangle is the platform, which for us is Aruba Central, which is part of HP GreenLake. And that's really all about, you know, kind of making it easy for customers to manage networks. And Aruba Central right now has got about 120,000 live customers on it. It connects to about 2 million devices, and it's collecting a lot of data as well. So we anonymously collect data from all of our customers. We've got one and a half billion data points in the platform. And what we do is we let that data kind of look for anomalies and spot problems on the network before they happen for customers. So Aruba Central predated GreenLake. GreenLake. Yeah. And so did you write to GreenLake through GreenLake APIs? What was the engineering work to accomplish that? Yeah, so really, Aruba Central is kind of the genesis of the GreenLake platform. So we took Aruba Central and made it more generic to build the GreenLake cloud platform. And, you know, what we've done very recently is bring Aruba into that unified infrastructure along with storage and compute. So the same sign-on applies across all of HP's products, the same way of managing licenses, managing devices. And so it provides us a great foundation going forwards to solve more comprehensively our customers' automation requirements. So just quick follow-up. So Aruba actually was the main spring of GreenLake from the standpoint of, okay, like you said, single sign-on, a platform that could evolve and become more generic. So, okay, so that was a nice little bonus of the acquisition, you know, because now the whole company is... Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Aruba taking over HP. He said, well, it's like a global product. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. There's been a lot of work to, you know, make it generic and widely applicable. Right, yeah. Because you were purpose-built for... Yeah, well, it's foundational. Yes. So foundational for GreenLake, they build on top of it. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Phil, you mentioned the data points, billions of data points. So I got to ask you, because we're seeing this more and more with machine learning driving a lot of acceleration because you can do simulations with machine learning and compute. We had Neil McDonnell done earlier. He's a compute guy, you've got networking. So with all these services and devices being put on and off the network, humans can't actually figure this out. You can discover what's on the network. How are you guys viewing the discovery and monitoring because there's no perimeter okay on the network anymore? So I want to know what's out there. How do you get through it? How does machine learning and AI play into this? Yeah, I mean, what we're trying to do is obviously flag trends for customers and say, hey, look, you know, we can either see something happening with your network. So there's a particular issue over here and we need to, I don't know, free up more capacity to solve that. Or we're looking at how their network is running and then comparing that with anonymized data from all of our other customers as well. So we're just helping find those problems. But yeah, you're right. I mean, I think it is becoming more of an issue for organizations. You know, how do you manage the network? But you see machine learning and AI playing a big part. Yeah, yeah, yeah, I think AI massively. And other technology advances as well that we make. So recently we also announced the availability of location awareness within our access points. And that might sound like a simple thing, but when companies build out their networks, they often lose, or they potentially could lose the records as to, well, where were the access points that we laid out? And actually, where are they? Not within, you know, 20 feet, but where actually are they? So we introduced kind of location finding technology as well into our access points to make it easy for customers. So Aruba, one of the best, if not the best acquisition, I think that HPE has made. It's made by, three par was, you know, it saved the storage business. Okay, that was more of a defensive play. But to see Aruba, it's a growth business. You guys report on it every quarter. It's obviously a key ingredient to enable GreenLake. And that's another example. Nimble was similar, much smaller, sort of more narrow, but taking the AI ops piece and bringing it over. So it was great to see HPE executing on some of its M&A as opposed to just leaving them alone and not really leveraging them. So guys, really appreciate you guys coming on and explaining that, congratulations on all the great work and thanks for coming on theCUBE. Okay, thank you guys. Yeah, thanks for having us. All right, John and I will be back right after this short break. You're watching theCUBE, the leader in enterprise tech coverage from HPE Las Vegas 2022. We'll be right back.