 Live from Chicago, Illinois, it's theCUBE. Covering VeeamON 2018, brought to you by Veeam. Welcome back to the Windy City, everybody. You're watching theCUBE, the leader in live tech coverage. My name is Dave Vellante, and I'm here with Stu Miniman. VeeamON 2018, hashtag VeeamON. The husband of Mrs. Philbin is here. The Astros, Warriors, Eagles, and whoever wins the Stanley Cup this year fan, Bill Philbin, senior vice president and global chief technology officer for hybrid IT, for Hewlett Packard Enterprise, good friend of theCUBE. Hey, buddy. Awesome seeing you again. Good to see you. Thanks for coming on. Every time you introduced me, it's something new, so I can't wait to share that with Mrs. Philbin. Well, like Stu says, that's where you go for the information. That's exactly right. That's exactly right. Another great keynote here. You stole the show last year, you're vying for top spot, top gun this year, so how do you feel? I thought it was good. I mean, you know, I said, I think the funny thing about Veeam and Hewlett Packard is we have so much in common. The agenda is the same. It was almost hard to actually have, create a unique slide set that was different from what they said versus what we said. And I think that after 32 years, Mrs. Philbin and I were not quite to finish the other sentences, but I know what she wants me to do without her telling me at this point. So Veeam and HPE have that kind of relationship. Well, Veeam has a tendency and a way of inserting itself into an ecosystem that certainly embedded itself into the HPE ecosystem. And I think that's a lot of credit to Peter McKay. You know, he's joined now what it was 23, 24 months ago and he sort of brought that partner-centric viewpoint, grew the team around us, and they're really a, they're who we sort of pull out for other partners and say, hey, look, this is what these guys are doing. This is what you need to do to be successful in a sprawling enterprise like Hewlett Packard. So he's not a really, really good job, I think. So give us an update on that sprawling enterprise. We make hybrid IT simple. Is your mantra, how's that going? Where does your group fit in? So we're a couple quarters into the new tenure of Antonio Neary being the CEO, the engineer, sort of turn CEO. Got to make you happy. Yeah, absolutely. It makes me and the thousands and thousands of engineers happy. Great first quarter, we'll see what happens sort of in quarter number, in quarter number two. There's a lot of focus within the company now that we've sort of have divested ourselves with the things that were less important, focused on enterprise infrastructure customers around a couple of key concepts. Certainly we're pushing Synergy, sort of the Synergy platform. Second, pushing and talk about OneSphere or hybrid IT, hybrid cloud offering. Three, we've had a lot of success in storage. Certainly the nimble acquisition, which is hard to believe was now almost consummated. It's almost a year ago, right? So a year ago, actually in May, I just got off a holiday with Mrs. Philbin. Last year in a holiday, I was closing the nimble transaction in the middle of the Indian Ocean, talking Wi-Fi on the boat via Google Voice to San Jose. There's nowhere now. Always on. Always on, exactly right. Talk about hyper-availability. And so I think we're pushing on that. And then we've got, we renamed our services offering to point next offering, focusing around transformation, et cetera. So I think the business is really clicking on all cylinders. And I think focus is actually quite interesting. You often focus on what we don't have versus only focusing on what remains. And just like any startup, you focus on the first market segment, second market segment. Healer Packard is focused on enterprise infrastructure as a profession. I think that's both well first. Bill, one of the things we were talking about in the intro is Veeam getting much deeper with their partners. One of the things we highlighted is there's a couple of partners having in the price book. And what does that mean from a go-to-market standpoint that it's a little bit more seamless. It's not invented by HP, but part of the whole solution. Well, I said to Peter McKay on stage, 18 months ago we did this transaction, which at the time was considered pretty revolutionary given the fact we had other things in the portfolio that point that did data protection. And it was what, first and foremost, is what our customers wanted and asked for. They wanted a more seamless transaction between the two organizations. So we sort of went ahead and did that. Second, there's always been a strong engineering relationship between the two companies. But if it's still talking to two partners at the end of the day, it doesn't matter. An integrated offering on the same price list, on the same PO supported by both companies together is really what customers are looking for. And as I said in the keynote, we closed the single biggest transaction in Veeam's history, which was a Hewlett Packard and Veeam win. For every $7, I think it was a Hewlett Packard that we closed a dollar that was Veeam. And that's sort of the power of the partnership demonstrated by the two companies coming together. And it's hard to believe. It's again, 18 months. That's a pretty impressive track record. Yeah, you're obviously not sharing any names on that deal. But can you share with us any other information that's public? Why did you win? Maybe you could share the sort of, the type of win that it was. Why HPE and Veeam? Yeah, so the customer obviously is not prepared to have a sort of talk about their name for now anyway. But essentially, what the customer was looking for was a complete sort of backup and recovery solution that covered not only sort of traditional virtualized environments, but also gave them an outlet to the cloud. More and more customers, as I said in my keynote, it's more than keeping a copy of your data between your primary and secondary. You need a third copy because guess what happens? And I said this last year, if you remember, boo-boos happen quickly, right? Something changed and deleted here, actually fast replicates here. You need a third copy to be complete. They were looking for that and third, they were looking for sort of the, they're already an HPE customer. They were looking for solution offerings that would allow them to amortize their existing real estate. And so those are the free reasons. And it's, but your third copy model is different than having to build a third data center. Correct. It's a much more space efficient, you know, a modern approach. Can you explain that? So together with Veeam and our store once, this is our disk-based backup target. Roughly last year, we announced this capability called CloudBank, which allows you to sort of keep a copy in any S3-ish compliant interface. So it could be on-prem and on open stack implementation, or it can be in any of the web services providers. And it's done in an efficient sort of data protected DDoP capability. So it's an efficient way to sort of keep a copy of what we call Hail Mary data, right? You hope you never need it, right? Efficient way to sort of do that. Okay, one of the big topics of discussion these days is ransomware. What are your thoughts on ransomware? Well, you know, it's funny, you know, I always thought ransomware was something that you wore when you were dropping off the money, right? And so apparently it means something more than that. Yeah, it makes sense. Now, so at last year at Discover, we had a customer who was a meat processor, okay? A meat processor. Now, you know, you can imagine what kind of customers you're going to ask, the customer does meat processing. But it actually infected their servers that actually helped them run their meat processing capability. Now that is not a business that you would expect. So I'm going to call you up and say, hi, we have your data. Give us $1,000 and we'll give you your data back. It's a meat processing company, or you know, or a gourmet food provider, I think is probably more typical way they would present it. But if that's happening to that sort of line of business, imagine what's happening to power plants, you know, et cetera, et cetera. And so the ransomware stuff is real. So if you think about, you know, HP, we developed the most secure server with our Gen 10 platform, right? We actually guarantee and actually look at changes being made in a firmware environment and we'll cover them for you automatically. We've got the Veeam sort of capability to sort of recover. And I think we're talking about in the preview, we used to measure availability and how many nines you had. Now, unavailability is the only thing that customers care about. And if you go to a customer and say, you know what, it's okay, you're only .0001 of the rest of our customers. That's not a good story, right? It's not about when something happened, if something happens, it's when something's going to happen. And the power of sort of a Veeam and HP together prevents, you know, bad things from happening, right? Bill, it's interesting. I know in my career, it's been a significant shift. It used to be, let's harden it as much as we possible. Dual redundancy, hardware focused, but hardware eventually breaks. It does. Today, it's a software world. It's distributed architectures. I look at, you know, things like your synergy solution. It's much more modular and componentized. Maybe you could talk a little bit about some of those shifts as to how we build availability architecturally, how solutions like the HP and Veeam meet the new needs of what we need, as opposed to kind of the old way of doing it. Yeah, so it's actually interesting, you know. So a lot of customers are looking at software-defined infrastructures as a way of amortizing their existing infrastructure, and it's actually a cost savings. But I equate it to sort of making a decision to buy Mrs. Phil, but a chest of drawers at a furniture store, or going to Home Depot, buying the wood, milling the wood, and actually creating something myself. Now, the good news about software-defined infrastructures is just like me making Mrs. Phil, but a chest of drawers is at the end, it's mine. I've got it to my specifications. The bad news about software-defined infrastructures is when there's a problem, Mrs. Philbend isn't calling the furniture store. She's calling me, right? And so when you think about software-defined infrastructures, you have to imagine two things. One is, are you prepared to write an application that is ready to resolve the kinds of data resiliency and data availability capabilities that the hardware manufacturers have built into systems for 20 years? Now, if you've got a unique system that does one thing, it's probably easy. Imagine hosting 160 different applications, like that was mentioned on the stage today, and creating resiliency for that. So my conversation with customers of our software-defined is political and wide open. Number two, please think about resiliency, not at the storage level, but also think about resiliency at the application level. You have got to provide for a time when something is not as available as you think it is, and make those steps consciously. Let me ask you sort of from a technologist's perspective. If I understand you correctly, so if I'm Oracle, I can do things in the application to accomplish that outcome, but you're not an application ISV, so you have to do things in your architecture and assume that any application that's running can recover. Is that right? So can you help us understand that, how you approach that problem architecturally? Well, so I think, and we haven't talked about big data, or infocyte, but if you think about it, the way to actually best protect the customer's infrastructure is to actually monitor their infrastructure, compare their results to what others are receiving, recommend ways that they can actually tune up their infrastructure, and then eventually act in their behalf to make the changes to the infrastructure so they're always protected. As I said in my keynote, it's getting to a point where you actually can't do all that stuff yourself. So one of the key strategies around our Hewlett-Tackard Enterprise is to take the infocyte capability, which is basically machine learning, artificial intelligence sort of capability, and deliver a system which helps customers be always on. That's the first thing that I think you can do, Dave. And you're going to be really good about making sure I get out of it. I am. We got like two minutes and I want to use every second I have of you. So, okay, so I want to follow up on the infocyte. You've brought that out beyond just Nimble. That's right. I think you brought it to three par and you're pushing it out throughout your entire portfolio, right? Yeah, so for customers who are going to see us at Discover, we've got some interesting things we'll talk about there, but effectively it is to roll it out across the portfolio because as I said in my keynote, it's not really easy to sort of predict why availability is an issue. Is it a host issue? Is it a software issue? Is it a networking issue? Is it a storage issue? What infocyte eventually provides is a set of hooks that allow you to meter and measure and manage your entire infrastructure and get it to a point where it's actually subscribing to the best practice of the organization or application provider. One of the things you hear a lot about is how do you take backup and recovery, which is largely an insurance business and create value out of it. GDPR is this sort of heinous set of regulations that everybody's got to pay attention to it. Are we finally seeing the day where the backup data protection, governance approach can actually bring value to the rest of the organization? Or is it still just insurance, deal with it? So I think, I would say two things, Dave. One is I think if you look at what the Nimble's just announced with their secondary flash array where we can keep it a very cost effective copy of the data on an array that looks like the array you copied it from that can be used for DevOps, can be used in the event of a failure, et cetera. I think we're starting to see technologies available now that where that happens. Second, the ability to sort of make a copy of that in the cloud and actually bring up your most critical applications in the cloud by using a synergy or a one sphere capability so that you can actually keep a hot standby. I think we're starting to see that. So I think, you know, backup is moving from a cost of doing business to something that's vital in the enterprise but always remember that the best time to think about a backup is before you need it. That's the worst time to think about a backup is when you need it. Yeah, and I think you'd agree that the data protection as a topic is moving up in the minds of CXO and boards of directors and the like. Yeah, and I think unfortunately some of these bad actors that are out there, right, the CNNs and they has, this has caught more than just the IT community press. It's actually caught the business press and I think it's drawing a lot more attention around the reason why people should think about availability. All right, you got to go. You got to catch your plane. But just give a little tease for HPE Discover. It's coming up in June. It's a great conference that you guys have every year. Twice a year you do this, the US one in Europe, give us a tease for June. I would say this is going to be the most exciting HPE Discover on record. And this is sort of Antonio's opportunity to sort of talk to you about what's headed forward for Hewlett Packard. So be there or be square. Okay, dating myself. Well, okay, we're square. All right, all right, thank you, Bill, for coming on theCUBE and we'll be right back right after this short break. We're at Veeamon 2018 in Chicago. Thanks for watching.