 From around the globe, it's theCUBE. Covering HPE Discover Virtual Experience, brought to you by HPE. Hi, and welcome to theCUBE's coverage of HPE Discover 2020, the virtual experience. I'm Stu Miniman. Of course, this year we're getting to talk to HPE, their customers and their partners, where they are around the globe. We've said many times these, where together, even while we're apart, happy to dig into a really important partnership with HPE and VMware. Welcome to the program, first time guest on the program, Christa Satterthwaite. She is the Vice President of Product Management for Compute with Hewlett Packard Enterprise. And welcome back to the program, Lee Caswell. He is the Vice President of Product Marketing for Hyperconverged Infrastructure at VMware. Of course, we're talking about vSphere and how that gets bundled into everything else. Kristin Lee, thanks so much for joining us. Thanks for having us. All right, so Kristin, let's start with you. So I'd like to know a little bit about your background and of course the HPE and HPE relationship with VMware, goes back to the earliest days, but gives a little bit about where in the portfolio you focus on and how VMware fits in. Oh, sure, sure. So I've been with HPE for 23 years now and I'm leading the business for Proliant and Synergy and talking a little bit about the relationship with VMware. So we've been partnering for 19 years and we have over 200,000 joint customers together. And I'm actually often asked about the partnership and how we partner, and we really partner across all fronts. So it's from the innovation to the co-engineering, to working with specific customers on what solutions are good for them to servicing our customers. So we're really working across the board and a lot of customers we work with closely are really impressed with how closely we're working together because that's what they look for. Yeah, and Lee, it's an interesting relationship to watch. Obviously, the long history Kristin talked about on the compute side, but the VMware HPE partnership is more than just the compute. Maybe it gives a little bit of a view inside the joint engineering, joint go-to-market efforts that you do. Yeah, you bet. I mean, customers always sit up straight when we talk together because both of our companies are just raw engines of innovation. And they look forward to not just the capabilities that we're bringing, but also the seamless way that we integrate that and make that seamless and easy for customers to digest. So, certainly on the server front through vSphere, that's been a long-standing participation. The VMware Cloud Foundation, then this fully software-defined stack became a really interesting way for us to go and partner and show joint value to customers who are trying to basically get more speed, we're going to talk about a lot of that today. And then finally, the VMware Cloud Foundation that we've opened up into storage systems, right? So there's certainly a hyper-converged element of it, but now what we do with Nimble, 3-part and now Primera is a really interesting way for us to take the VEVOL technology that we have and extend a common operating model. So really just interesting innovation for customers to take advantage of as they look to innovate themselves. Yeah, Krista, from a research standpoint, we were really early in watching new models of building out storage. And we said, the pendulum had swung back to pull it much closer to compute. You talked about, you've got a broad portfolio in compute. Synergy has some really interesting ways to be able to compose things and leverage software capabilities. So maybe give us a little bit about how HPE differentiates in the market. Because VMware does partner with lots of people, but what separates these joint solutions from everything else out in the market? Sure, and Synergy's a great example because what we're seeing is a really, really high interest on Synergy with VCF. And the reason for that is because customers want a software-defined infrastructure that they can compose, compute, storage, and networking as they need to to address any workload they have. And they want to do that with a partner like VMware and VCF. So what we see is customers choosing those two things together and building their hybrid cloud environments on those two. When I think of some of the customers that we have, I'll give a specific example. So Banko Santander is one of the largest banking groups in the world. And they are really trying to drive innovation across all of their locations that are in North America, South America, Europe, Asia. They're trying to drive innovation across. They have a big project and they selected Synergy and VCF in an as-a-service GreenLake model to help them transform their business. And they're really excited because what they think this is providing to them is a reduced data center space, reduced power consumption, and reduced costs. And all of that with automation, more automation than they've had in the past, more flexibility than they've had in the past. Yeah, I'm so glad you brought up the GreenLake because those as-a-service models, cloud obviously has been a big discussion for the last few years. Lee, VMware is no stranger to working in multi- and hybrid cloud environments. Give us a little bit about what you're hearing from your customers. If you mentioned the GreenLake solution, how's that fit in the overall VMware multi-cloud offering? Well, we all know these are uncertain times, right? And customers in uncertain times are looking for flexibility. How do they go and basically invest smartly, right? Look to come out of uncertain times stronger. And what we're finding is that the flexibility, starting at, we're really impressed with the synergy platform, by the way, the idea of being able to flexibly configure, compute and storage to tie into external arrays from that and to have the VMware cloud foundation as a unifying, software-defined data center concept that's available on-prem and then extends into the hybrid cloud, this basically gives investment protection to customers who are looking for how to invest. You mentioned GreenLake as well, and I just mentioned that innovation on GreenLake is about true consumption-based purchasing models, if you will. And that's different than just a financial engineering aspect. I mean, that's real innovation and real technical innovation in terms of how customers can go and apply infrastructure at the time that they need it relative to the compelling business models. Yeah, and I'll chime in there too. I'll tell you a little story about when I first presented the GreenLake model, at that time it wasn't called GreenLake, but I presented it to a bunch of customers, about a hundred customers in an advisory council. And I have never had so many people come up to me afterwards trying to figure out how they can get that for themselves as I did when I had that presentation. What really resonated with people is that they wanted to take advantage of the latest and greatest technologies, but they didn't have big budgets. And when they did take advantage of those technologies, one of the challenges has been growth. So when they need to expand, that's another procurement cycle. You have to wait, you have to stand it all up. With GreenLake, you actually have that added capacity on site and then also painful what you use. So they were attracted to all of those things. And I feel like right now in the environment we're in, many people had big, big projects, things they wanted to do, and they may have planned those a capital expenditure for that, but that money may not be there. So GreenLake is one of those things that can help overcome that challenge. And what we found is when people use GreenLake, we don't see many people go back. So I was talking to the GreenLake team and I said, what happens if they decide not to do GreenLake? And they kind of paused and they're like, well, we really haven't run into that very often. So it's very, very popular and customers were really happy with it. Yeah, talking about innovation and helping customers take advantage of new technologies. Lee, maybe we'll start with you and Chris to definitely want your input. Been a lot of feedback about vSphere 7. Of course, one of the big pieces of that is how cloud native containerization Kubernetes can be pulled into the virtualization platform. So we're talking a lot about VCF Lee, that's the way to get it, the Kubernetes piece today. Tell us a little bit about that and what you're hearing from customers. And then Chris, I'd like to understand how that fits into the HPE offerings. Yeah, the data we have shows that 95% of new applications are being developed on containers. Why? Because it's the speed of development. And so at VMware, we've rearchitected vSphere for the first time in the last five years. And look carefully at what VMware integrates into the hypervisor because that's what we believe is going to be really benefiting from performance efficiency and management. And so we've integrated Kubernetes directly into the hypervisor itself and then through our Tanzu portfolio introduce an upstream compatible Kubernetes development environment so that we have developer ready infrastructure. And that's really important because at the speed of new applications, basically you need to be able to respond quickly to those and what VMware has always offered, right? Which is a resilient underlying infrastructure with an intrinsic security model built in. And exceptionally important when containers are being spun up more quickly, destroyed more quickly, they're being portable and they're portable across the hybrid cloud. Those models, right, mean that you need and can value, right, from this integrated model that leverages all of the experience and knowledge that people have around how to run vCenter and vSphere. So really exciting. And it's available in VCF4 with Tanzu. I actually see the interest. I see customers asking about it, inquiring about it. If I can definitely second everything that Lee just said, I think, Lee, you're going to see a really fast transition over because there's so much value added in. Excellent. Krista, while I've got you on the compute piece, Lee said that 95% of new applications are being built on containerization. How has that impacted architecture and how you're working with customers? Yeah, so what I find is that customers are very interested in containers. What we're doing is we're helping them from a services standpoint, a consulting standpoint, many of these customers are adopting for the first time trying to figure out how this could, they could leverage containers in their environment. So from our standpoint, it's making sure that we have the right platforms and we're advising and consulting and helping customers get there. Excellent. Lee, Krista talked about, as saying, Tander, wondering if you've got any customer examples you'd like to share. Yeah, great one is Portion. I love the Portion example just because, Portion is just the epitome of speed. And so the idea of this flexibility, and what you're finding is the flexibility, starting from, let's say, from a synergy, I'm flexible on the hardware allocation, and then with VCF right now being able to be flexible across the hybrid cloud. And now with VCF4 with Tanzu, the flexibility of introducing new modern application support. And finally, layering GreenLake on top of that, which Portion is also using, it gives you this idea that, especially in uncertain times, but regardless, the changing business environment where everyone's responding to app development, pressures, timelines, and innovation, we've got a really interesting model now for customers to invest responsibly and be able to respond quickly. Excellent. Krista, I guess the other piece, since we're at Discover, any updates in the portfolio, expanding the BMR solution that you can share? Yeah. Yeah, so I'd like to talk a little bit about our pre-validated Synergy VCF solution stack with built-in automation. So we've literally gotten rid of hundreds of steps, pre and post deployment. So we could speed deployment by five times. So we're talking deploying in hours instead of weeks. So we're really, really excited about that. We're working together to make sure we're making things easier for customers, making that journey to a hybrid cloud, very, very simple. So we're really happy to offer that to customers. Great. Lee, any final words you can share on the VMware-HP partnership? Yeah. What I might say is that the pace of innovation from our company is so great, that really VMR Cloud Foundation is a way, in our joint effort and joint delivery rate, is a way for customers to assimilate all of this innovation so that day zero, it's guaranteed to work. And that day two, you can lifecycle manage all the individual components from a common SCVC manager interface. That's the value that we're bringing together today is that, listen, putting all this in place can seem daunting until the VMware Cloud Foundation with Synergy, with all of the joint value we have basically makes it manageable so that you can go and basically stop looking down at infrastructure, look up at the apps. All right, Kristen, I'll let you have the final word and final takeaways from HP Discover. Okay, sure, thanks. Together, what we're trying to do is simplify that journey to hybrid cloud, make sure that customers can innovate faster, provide stable operations, and reduce their costs. Well, Kristen Lee, thank you so much for joining us. Congratulations on the progress. Looking forward to watching down the road. All right, thanks, too. All right, stay tuned for lots more coverage from the CUBE HPE Discover 2020 virtual experience. I'm Stu Miniman, thanks for watching.