 Hey, welcome back everybody. Jeff Frick here with theCUBE. We're in Santa Clara, California at the Open Compute Project Summit, OCP Summit for short. It's great they used to have a version which was one year off of the year but now they've just standardized on 2017. A lot easier to keep track of. We're excited to be joined by our next guest who represents a company that's been playing aggressively and open for a long time. You may or may not have known that. It's Justin Hotard, VP and GM, hyperscale and OEM solutions for HPE. Welcome Justin. Thanks Jeff, great to be here. Absolutely, so give, for folks that aren't as familiar maybe with the open source kind of background and ethos at HPE, give us kind of an update as to where you guys play. Why is it important to HPE? Sure, I mean this has actually been a significant part of our business for a few years now. And we got, you know, we obviously have a huge Solbase and Enterprise and a lot of what we, you see as traditional infrastructure, our ProLiant products and three-part flash platforms but we saw the opportunity to move into open because we saw this is a different way to service new and emerging customers. And a few years ago we announced the JV with Foxconn that you may remember from a couple years ago here at OCP and we built on that. We built out a huge portfolio of products and this year we're starting to take it to the next level. But it's kind of an interesting play, right? Because you guys obviously have very smart technical expertise inside of HPE. Terrific fellows, really one of the great cultures for keeping really smart people on board and developing things. Go back to my intel, I-64 days, that's another story, but open is different, right? Because now you're basically conceding that all the smartest people are not necessarily inside your four walls and it brings a different type of innovation that you can't get when you just keep everything closed. Yeah, that's right. I mean, I think actually there's a great synergy for us because you have, we have some of the best and brightest engineers in the world as you highlighted but we're shifting that focus from just building our own systems to leveraging this open ecosystem and truth be told, we've been doing that for years. I mean, the ecosystem we've cultivated in X86 and even going back to Mission Critical, which you mentioned, I mean, we've had great partners in those environments and we understand actually that to be successful and deliver great solutions for customers, we have to do that with a partner ecosystem. So this is, to me, this is really just the next step in a new market opportunity growing business for how we innovate and evolve our business model for some of the things we've done in the past. Yeah, it's interesting because when we see you guys at OpenStack all the time, obviously we see you at Discover which is a terrific event, but it's a really different way and what's interesting now is the hyperscale and for Facebook to open source their internal spec for their dataset is pretty interesting but even more interesting is to see the adoption by the ecosystem because at the end of the day you need a thriving ecosystem to make open source work. You guys clearly participating in an aggressive way. Yeah, that's right. And I think from our perspective, we look at it and when we see, with Open, we see the opportunity to bring customers a really flexible set of choices. So from a component level to a system level to tuning and tailoring that system to their specific workload, all the way into how we deploy it, service it, support it throughout the lifecycle for our customers, making sure they're getting the best performing platform, the right TCO, hitting their key SLAs and business metrics. So there's a lot of, again, a lot of the things that we've done in the past where we may engineer it into a product, we're now doing that as a part of the solution delivery to our customers. Which is such an interesting point too, right? Because at the end of the day, there isn't just a customer, right? There's many problems and many solutions that need to be delivered inside of an individual company but it's really workload specific and it's really horses for courses. What's the right solution set choice for the customer to solve that problem? So you have to be open to a solution, not necessarily product A, product B, product C. That's right. I think if you look at our activity over the last few years, both organically and even through acquisition, we've been really aggressive in making sure we build out the broadest portfolio of tailored solutions for individual workloads. And so I think open, as we look at it, it's really a part of that journey, right? A part of that evolution. We're hitting the accelerator on it. We're excited about a lot of the things we're doing and building that complete solution stack for customers. But it fits right in with our leadership in HPC through the acquisition of SGI. Some of the things we're doing in hyperconverged, emphasized by the acquisition of SimpliVity and our HC380. So it's really complimentary. And again, what we want to be able to do for any of our customers, traditional customers or our cloud service provider customers is be able to give them exactly the choice to buy what they need, how they need it and implement it and operate it with our support in whatever manner fits their business model best. It's perfect, give them the choice. So last thing, if I let you go, I know you're giving a talk later today for the folks that aren't in Santa Clara. What's your talk about? Give them a little preview. A little plug. Yeah, we're going to talk a little bit about just some of the things we just talked about. What we're doing to really extend our leadership and open. You know, we think we've got a great platform, the best platform in the business to be able to help develop, deliver solutions both early on in a business's life cycle and at scale in this space. And so I'm going to be talking a lot about that and how we can help. All right, well, Justin, break a leg at your talk and thanks for stopping by. Great, thanks, Jeff. All right, he's Justin Hussard. I'm Jeff Frick. You're watching theCUBE from Oakland Community Project Summit 2017, Santa Clara. Thanks for watching.