 Buenos tardes, everyone. Welcome back to theCUBE's live coverage of HPE Discover Barcelona 2023. I'm your host, Rebecca Knight, along with my co-host and analyst, Rob Strechek. Rob, how's this conference going for you? I think it's been going great. I think there's a lot of energy. It's great to be back in Barcelona. I know they did Madrid, a little bit smaller, but in London before that, before the pandemic, but it's great to be back in Barcelona. I think just the energy and the people that are here and the conversations and talking about hybrid cloud and how we see it from a research perspective that it's evening out between, in the public cloud and on-prem. And I think that hybrid nature, cloud is becoming an operating system. And I believe that we have the right people on to talk about that right now with the partnership between Microsoft and HPE. Indeed we do, indeed we do. I'd like to welcome Christophe LaRue. He is the Enea Cloud Sales Lead at Microsoft. Thanks so much for coming on theCUBE. Thank you, Rebecca. Direct from the south of France. Exactly, exactly. Super happy to be here in this fantastic event. So Microsoft is a sponsor here at HPE Discover. Why? What's the thinking behind that? That's a good question. Actually, if we talk about hybrid, we have to mix two worlds together. One is the on-premises world, where HPE is a leader, clearly. And the other world is the public cloud world, where Microsoft is a leader. So imagine the power of bringing that together to serve all the customer needs, that is in the data center or in the remote sites. Yeah, I think what's nice is that it really brings together a lot of different technologies. And I think we were kind of reminiscing before that I was at HPE a long time ago and actually built a hyper-converged system with Microsoft that was maybe not as elegant as it is today. And I would say, and I think I've seen how it's really evolved. And the fact that you have Azure Stack, you have Arc, you have the hardware, you have OpsRamp, all of it brought together as part of a GreenLake offering, which gives people really, I would assume, a very close to experience to Azure itself, but on the on-premises or at their edge. Is that really what kind of the target you're looking for? Yeah, absolutely, and you're right. It has been a journey. We've not suddenly brought that up and say, oh, look, this is our solution. No, it's years of refining and clearing the customer expectations that with HPE and Microsoft together until we reach that GreenLake offer. GreenLake, that is, let's say, the ultimate solution that we have to deliver hybrid, combining Microsoft and HPE together and selling everything as a service. From the hardware platform to the software, to the deployment, the management, all that in one single as a service offer. So I think we have gone far and customers are really happy with what we are putting together now. Well, can you share a specific example, though, of how this partnership benefits customers? Yeah, absolutely. So I have a customer in mind. It's Co-op. It's a retailer in the UK. It's a public customer, so I can talk about it. And Scott Robertson, who is the CIO of Co-op, was explaining how much he has saved in terms of power. Imagine 4,000 pounds, 400,000 pounds every year saved in power. Today, as we talk about sustainability, this is very important. But not only, he has simplified the whole stack, simplified operations, and then it's another kind of savings on time because the IT team tend to reduce, not to expand. So we need to operationalize, we need to simplify, we need to standardize. All that come with HP and Azure Stack HCI on top together. So we have a demonstration with Co-op that it works in a production context where there is a lot of stress. If you know retail, you know that they are peak and it's very stressful for the infrastructure and that delivers on-premises. Yeah, and I think it's really unique at how long a relationship HPE and Microsoft have had and the fact that you keep evolving it, like you said, as part of the journey. What are some of the benefits that customers are seeing from GreenLake for Azure? Yeah, I think the first benefit is to have a package solution. It used to be that you have to pick your hardware, then you have to pick your operating system, then you have to bring it together, hopefully it will work, and then you have to connect that one side on the public cloud, the other side on your private cloud and your databases. The first benefit of GreenLake and Azure Stack HCI together is to have all that in one single box. You tick, you select the box, the OS operating system is already preloaded. You connect it to the cloud, check, check, check, check, and then it is deployed and operational. It's not always as easy, but this is a trend, this is where we are going to have it really seamless in terms of deployment and orchestration. So Microsoft just had its own customer conference ignite. Can you tell our viewers a little bit about what is new for the Microsoft HPE customers? Yeah, absolutely, so we had a great conference announcing a number of news. Third thing is automation. What I've just mentioned where you connect to the cloud and then it deploys automatically is something that comes with a new version of the operating system. Security is core to all our customer concerns. We used to have 80 rules of security that were optional. Now we move to more than 200 rules that are mandatory. So we have reinforced security. We have added a number of features that comes from Azure into the system so that we ensure that we have the best solution for the customer. And the third thing is that ability to host Azure services. You were saying Azure is an operating system or the cloud is an operating system. I would say it's a model that can be deployed anywhere, not only in the public cloud data centers, but in your own data center. Now with Azure Stack HCI, you can take Azure services, deploy them on Azure Stack HCI, and run them with the data stored locally. So this is, those are great announcements that we have done at Ignite. And I think that will help a lot in the customer transformation. We'd be remiss if we didn't talk, we talked sustainability a little bit there and we'll come back to that in a second, but we'd be remiss if we didn't touch on AI. Because I mean, another announcement that you had at Ignite was a whole bunch of new co-pilots there. How does that really tie in with the infrastructure? Because HPE has a very deep, I'd say relationship with Supercomputing, with the Cray acquisition that they made. And how does that all relate with all the co-pilots and what Microsoft is doing there and AI and what is going on here at HPE? Yeah, there is a lot of noise and news around generative AI. And we have launched co-pilot in our Microsoft office, in Teams. And now in Azure, you have an assistant that helps you configure Azure Stack HCI on top of HPE. So it makes it easier. But we have not waited for generative AI to do AI at the edge. What we would call industry AI is about running machine learning models that we train in the cloud and that would capture data, select who is in, let's say in a safe zone who is not in a safe zone or accelerate the pace of a machine or detect quality defects, for instance. So this is industry AI and that runs today on an HP GPU equipped machine and on Azure Stack HCI. So we have a number of use cases that run today in production, in factories, in hospitals, in retail stores that are about AI at the edge, in fact. So, yep. So AI is a very energy intensive technology and sustainability is really at the forefront of so many technology professionals' minds right now. Your role in sales, how much would you say are customers thinking about this, asking you about this and is there a difference between your cost? I mean, obviously you're based in EMEA, but how do you see the US customer versus, I mean, maybe there is no such thing because you're dealing with such global brands. So there is a variety of needs in the EMEA region which is a very diverse region. And we can talk about US customers as well versus EMEA customers. What we see in every country, we'll see mature customers, innovative customers, early adopters. They will think about how to optimize processes thanks to AI. And those one will be the first one to implement those models that they train in the cloud and execute at the edge. And you will have other customers that are more conservative that are really looking at their infrastructure and then decoupling the process from the infrastructure. And those one, we have to help them and we discuss with them on what is your next transformation step? What is your next challenge in being more competitive? Or how do you, do we help you reduce costs? And by having that conversation on transformation, on cost reduction, on efficiency, sometimes AI comes naturally. So it's about feeling how the customer perceive innovation and where we help them in their next step. And thanks to HP and Microsoft, we have the portfolio to support early adopters and to support those that are in the early stage of the journey. So we are there together for that. We heard yesterday around, partially around the solution as well, that the transition or the end of life for 2012 is also a big thing. How is that playing into what's going on with the customers and what you're seeing? Yeah, absolutely, absolutely. Since it's a common theme for customers, a number of infrastructures are obsolete today and they keep on running because you cannot change the application anymore. You don't have the developer in the house or it's just so critical that you don't want to touch it. So basically you will be stuck with your Windows Server 2012 for a few years. In that case you have to buy from Microsoft extended security updates which can be costly. We can talk about $100,000 and maybe more. With Azure Stack HCI, we waive that cost. So basically we give you the space to invest in infrastructure and services while we remove the cost of the software. So this is how we, again, we help our customers in their transformation, modernizing the infrastructure, having a better performance, a better storage, but keeping the application if it cannot be modified, for instance. The pace of change is just head spinning right now. I mean, we are, this is ChatGPT's birthday, November 30th, the day that it was unleashed to the world. Can you just reflect on that a little bit in the sense of how much you've seen interest and hype around AI and AI products? Antonio Nere was on the main stage this morning saying that in the past nine months they had a 250% increase in AI interest. And now the question is how do we fulfill those? So what are you thinking about right now in terms of what you've seen this past year and then looking ahead to 2024? Absolutely, there is a big hype around AI but it's not only hype. I'm using Copilot every day. It's fantastic. I do my team notes, my meeting notes in one click. I save time, so I save money for my company. So it's a very pragmatic approach that we have taken on AI. It helps employees do a better job every day. Now, I don't think we can imagine today how far we will go with that power, is that we have a nascent solution, nascent technology and customer will have the imagination of using it in their context. And they will come to us and say, you know, I can use it for that and I can use it for that. And we didn't imagine those use cases and this is what is fantastic with AI. You have the customer have the power to transform what is data into something that is completely new that is a process. And basically we give them the tool, they build the business with it. This is what we do together with HP, platform, intelligence, get the data, transform it into a process. Great, excellent. As we kind of get to the end here, one of the things that I always come back to is that hybrid makes a lot of sense, especially in AMIA, where are you seeing like, to me, a lot of the regulations with GDPR and other things and the different countries having different data regulations and different regulations on even Azure and the big hyperscalers. Are you seeing the people are leaning in on HCI and the Azure Stack HCI solution because of that and they want to actually be able to have it in both places because they have different needs for that and for their data. Absolutely, it's part of the recurring requests from customers. Help me modernize while keeping my data locally because I have to be compliant with some regulation or with some internal processes or because I have latency constraints. So, but on the other hand, I don't want to be blocked with my legacy system. I want past services, I want DevOps, I want SecOps, I want all that and you have that in Azure. So bring me that goodness that you have in Azure and help me deploy it locally for those workloads. So hybrid is not private or public, it's private and public. So what makes sense to be deployed in the public cloud for more agility and more power? We use it in the public cloud and what makes sense to keep locally because we have latency or regulatory constraints then we keep it local. Excellent, Christophe, thank you so much for coming on theCUBE. A real pleasure having you on. Thank you both, that was great. I'm Rebecca Knight for RobStretch. I stay tuned for more of theCUBE's live coverage of HPE Discover Barcelona 2023. You're watching theCUBE, the leader in enterprise technology coverage.