 I think they're doing a... Welcome back everyone to theCUBE's live coverage of HPE Discover Barcelona. I'm your host, Rebecca Knight, along with my co-host and analyst, Rob Strecce. Hola to you, Rob. Welcome to Spain. I'm excited to be here again. I haven't been here in quite some time, having come here a lot with HPE back in the day. I always love coming to Barcelona. The European folks that are here, there's so much energy in the air, they also take a look at things a little bit slightly different than we do in the US, which I love as well. Yeah, no, exactly. It's really exciting to hear new vantage points, new perspectives, but obviously this is an area you know well and you are an HPE veteran yourself. We should definitely lay that on the table. We just listened to the keynote address and it sounds as though the messages we're going to hear, sustainability, security, and of course, AI. What are some of the most interesting questions on your mind as we start our two days of coverage? I think what was great is they brought together, again, atmosphere, which was the Aruba acquisitions, their conference, and it brought all of that energy. That's a very, I would say, loyal fan base of Aruba. And a lot of Green Lake has been built on Aruba Central, which they talked about a lot this morning. They talked about the growth that they're experiencing and how they're growing in the actual core networking of the enterprise. I think on top of that, how they're making that more efficient and sustainable for folks as well. So I think that some of the questions that I think we'll be able to get answered is how does sustainability play a bigger role? We're seeing it in our research jump up on the number of RFPs and inquiries that are going out and it could actually be a determining factor if you win the business or not, which is super exciting because I think we all need to do what we can for the world and I think this is great to hear. I think on the security side, security inside, zero trust and SACE and CASB and they were talking about all of the good stuff built into the network and how do you make it simpler to configure things using AI? So it's not just a lot about kind of chat bot type stuff which I'm sure we'll hear a lot about that this week because AI, if you don't, you're going to get kicked off the internet as I would say, you have to talk about AI but I think they've been using AI inside for quite a while inside the GreenLake platform. So I expect us to hear not only a lot about GenAI and how they're enabling that but how their partnerships because they're partnered with all of the Silicon providers and I know we'll be talking to all of them over the course of the next two days and I think it's how do they differentiate themselves from the others out there in bringing their technology to bear. Right, okay so let's actually drill into sustainability, maybe not the best verb there drilling into sustainability but going back to sustainability and as you said, this is really becoming a determining factor of whether or not companies win business because there is so much more attention being paid rightly so as you point out to making sure that we are doing the right thing by our planet. How do you think HPE is doing on that front? Are you excited by what you're hearing and what do you think that they should be doing? I'm excited to hear how they position it today. Their report came out over the summertime frame, the US summertime frame that is around how they've been doing in scope one, two and three. I think we'll get an update on that. We actually have some people on tomorrow to talk specifically about that so I'm really excited about that because I think one of the things HPE has done is they pulled in from 2050 to 2040. That's a check mark, that's a good to see. They're up there with the people that are really leaning in. I think that they also do a good job of providing visibility throughout all of the different scopes and how it is super detailed especially in scope three in giving all those numbers and you know again, it's a process and a journey and I think that they're going along that journey and I think they're making progress and it's exciting to see how they actually look at it because there are competitors out there that are really aimed at this and they're doing things within scope three around reimbursement for usage of the products and things of that nature that's super interesting but how much of it is marketing versus actual really offset and helping the world or not. So super interested in that. But I think HPE does a pretty good job especially in the transparency aspect of it. Okay, now let's go on to security because this is, and you and I have covered this on many shows in the past together. This is really on the minds of CISOs everywhere across the globe. How are, and this is something that could be a human error. It could be a malicious attack. How do you think that this company is going to be talking about security at this conference and what are some messages that you think that they should really be hitting on? So I think that they started in with the Aruba discussion this morning around building insecurity, talking about how on average the ransomware attacks were 1.8 million, I don't know if that was Euro or dollars, I don't remember, but that's a lot of money per ransomware attack. I think a lot of the security experts as we've talked to, there's a lot of social engineering going on. It's not about that. So they talked a lot about zero trust and as we know, authentication and authorization is a key part of that. So I think that there's going to be a lot of talk about how it's being built into the products and that's where the questions come up. It's, you know, everything has to be zero trust, not just talking about a zero trust framework. How do you play within those NIST frameworks and how do you really help these organizations going forward? And zero trust, there is so much psychology to it. It's not, I mean, we think so hard about the hardware itself, but there really is, because it is humans operating this stuff, there has to be a lot of training and a lot of understanding of our own fallibility in these processes. Absolutely. The person is a big piece of security. As we would say, probably a main piece in the education that goes into that and helping them along. I think there was a lot going on around explaining and breaking down zero trust in the keynote this morning or this afternoon, and I think that we'll continue to see that drumbeat in tomorrow's keynotes as well and especially in Fidelma's keynote on Friday as well. Okay, now finally AI, which is, we are going to be discussing AI on the show for sure. And I'd be remiss to not point out that there's another show going on right now over across the pond in Las Vegas, AWS re-invent. So how HPE is not as big as Amazon. It is not as big as Google, but it's certainly a player. Absolutely. Particularly in the world of AI. So what do you expect we're going to be hearing about AI and its journey to getting more AI in the hands of customers? And not to mention Super Compute was just a couple of weeks back and they had a lot of announcements and I think that's kind of where the Cray acquisition comes in and that HPE really leaning into Super Computing and Super Compute as a service and being able to bring that to people to make LLMs that much simpler. And I think that what we're going to hear and hoping to hear at least is how they're doing that because it's not all about just calling up Jensen at NVIDIA and saying or Intel and saying, hey, I need GPUs or AMD. I need co-processors to go and do this. It's about the right product at the right time for the right AI workload. Is it, are you doing inference at the edge? And I think they're going to be talking a lot about edge here this week. Are you doing the core training models where you need that big compute, you need all those GPUs, be it from one of their three different suppliers that they utilize. How do you really take that forward? I think we're going to hear some interesting things from the hardware up and then from the software down and how it all meets in the middle. That's what I'm interested to hear from them. Okay, now I know you said this is not, certainly not your first rodeo with HPE Discover. You worked at HPE. You've also been here as an analyst before. Talk about what it's like for you as an analyst to be meeting up with old buddies of yours and sort of the energy around what's happening right now in this industry. I think what's exciting and what HPE is really bringing to the table is that it's not all going to be done on public cloud. And I think what they're looking at, and Antonio really leaned into this early on into a hybrid, a multi-cloud, what we would call super cloud. And they've been leaning in on that for quite some time now. And I think that really it's starting to pay off in the Green Lake vision that they have here. And so when I talk to my friends and understanding, okay, here's what we're bringing out. Here's how we're talking about it. Sometimes the marketing meets up with mass marketing from a cloud provider or something like that and they kind of go head to head. And it sounds really similar, but I think it's going to come back to ROI and how do I have the right AI use case in the right place? Also, what is the total cost of ownership? I think a lot of people are getting sticker shock on public clouds in general. And we're seeing, you know, in our research, it's balancing, it's getting to kind of an equilibrium between on-premise and cloud. And I think in that equilibrium, you find out that the TCO really is, how do I make this sustainable, not from the sustainability, just the sustainability perspective. But how do I continue to pay for it, especially in an economy where it's, you know, should I be building a chat bot, you know, using Gen AI? How is this going to help me? Is this going to reduce my support costs? Is this going to reduce my time to sale so I get more revenue? It's figuring out those use cases and I think we should hear and they have a lot of good stories that they've been working with customers under the hood as the provider that they're going to start to expose this week as well. You mentioned the economy and there's a lot of uncertainty hanging over it. I think we've been heading for a recession for about a year and a half now. It's still not quite materialized, but the retailers are saying it's going to be an off holiday. What are you hearing from your clients and in terms of the companies that you cover, in terms of how they're spending right now, particularly because as you said, they're being torn in so many different directions with AI and not necessarily knowing, okay, do we spend money here? Do we take away money here? What are some of the biggest questions on their minds? Yeah, I think the biggest question is where do I get the money to go to AI? And it's what different aspects of my IT infrastructure am I going to put on pause to steal that money because spending is down, if not flat still. And we're seeing that projections are going into next year. That's going to be the case for 2024. As HP is now in their 2024, that started November 1st, you start to see as things go. It's even Antonio did talk about this briefly and I'm sure we'll hear more from him tomorrow that it's in a tough cycle. They're doing pretty good. And I think we've heard that from the others out there as well that this is a tough IT environment where you are making these trade-offs. And it's not, hey, I got a new pile of money to go and do Gen AI for a particular, to go play with it. No, here's the use case, here's the ROI out of it and this is how we get back to there. Well, Rob, I am thrilled to be here in Barcelona with you and this is going to be a really great show. I'm excited to be here with you as well. I think the two of us breaking this down will be a lot of fun. I think so too. So I hope you will stay tuned for more of HPE Discover Barcelona. I'm Rebecca Knight for Robstretche. You are watching theCUBE, the leader in high-tech enterprise technology coverage.