 TheCube presents HPE Discover 2022 brought to you by HPE. Hi everybody, welcome back to theCube's coverage of HPE Discover 2022 from the Venetian Convention Center, formerly the Sands Convention Center in Las Vegas, Dave Vellante with John Ferrier. We're here with Brad Parks who's the Chief Product Officer at Morpheus Data and Brian Thompson who's the Vice President of GreenLake Cloud Product Management at Hewlett Packard Enterprise. Gentlemen, great to see you. First time on TheCube. Wow, I just assumed we've known each other for so long. We've been around a long time now, I'm happy to be here and thanks for making the change. Yeah, you've put a lot of people on TheCube. Morpheus Data, when we first met, I mean with your new role here several years ago, give us the update, what's Morpheus do? Why do people need Morpheus? People need Morpheus because IT is messy, right? Technology promise, simple, better, faster but it's only gotten more complex, more heterogeneous over the last decade. We are a unified orchestration and automation platform that makes kind of the messy labyrinth that is enterprise IT kind of simpler to navigate. Primary use case is self-service for developers who want to push a button, get a database and an app stack deployed into their on-prem or their public cloud without having to wait on IT. So you've been through the hyper-converged world, you've seen all that hardware come together, the VMware, Nutanix, of the world's kind of hardware. Now you got this software abstraction where you got operations, you got AI, you got all kinds of ops, AI ops, dev ops, data ops. Yeah, machine, you know, they're all there. And so you got developer environments, you got operating environments, it's just getting more complicated at scale. This is a huge challenge, you guys are tackling this. And then by the way, throw an automation in there too, right? So all that's kind of coming together. How does self-service work? All that complication. Well, so I was just talking about the Robert Christensen, I know he's probably think he's been on theCUBE, he's on the Fidelmas team. And the Venn diagram that we see in hundreds of enterprises we talk to is there's a need for central platform engineering at an enterprise to enable developers to hit a button, get their database, run an IPI line, get their app stack deployed. They also want to do the same thing with Kubernetes, right? Microclusters deployed, you know, out of service. Same thing with Terraform and Ansible. There aren't enough skilled operators who have moved up that stack, so you have to automate and canonize that knowledge and make it easy. Brian, one of the sort of pillars of GreenLake and as a service is data. And we see a change in the way data platforms are being architected, data organizations. And one of the things that is a critical principle of sort of what we see as the new data era is self-service infrastructure. Where the operation of the technical details are an operational detail, not the be all end all, you have to go beg and get data out. Okay, so you guys are building out, I think consistent with that principle, self-service infrastructure. So where does Morpheus fit in in terms of that objective? What's your relationship like? And help us understand that. Yeah, within GreenLake specifically, thinking this is a broad portfolio of different as a service offerings. Part of that key is meeting customers where they are and where they want to be. So we have that array of things which are fully self-service if you will, but serving an IT admin type of persona. So it's where as a enterprise, I still have those resources. I want that granularity of control. All the way through, how do we deliver some of our more advanced cloud services? Really trying to serve the end user to your point, how do I empower application owners, developers to bring in and work with those services? This is key in some of those cloud services we're delivering. Morpheus is a key component that we work as we bring to again provide those interfaces. How do I provide everything from API CLI through a GUI experience that can span across multiple form factors, bring together that more of a homogenous experience? What options are out there to solve this problem today? I mean, what are the best practices? Is it do it yourself? Is it a little bit of VMware here? A little bit of other tooling there? What do you see out there in the marketplace? I'll give kind of my perspective kind of outside the tools that we see when we walk into an enterprise. You got a company that's got a lot of VMware, maybe a little doontanix, they've got some AWS. They want to use OpenShift for their clusters. They got Terraform and Ansible and they got ServiceNow. And there's a poor IT ops team in the middle trying to wire all that together. And each of those domains have tried to go up this hill. VMware has done it with vRealize Automation. OpenShift will say, no, we're the way. And you can use Kubevert to do your virtualization. ServiceNow will say the same thing, right? So our goal is, we started in the middle, right? Middle app, right? We started unifying that for self-service for developers and finance teams. And we're agnostic. We don't have a dog in the fight, right? We don't have a hypervisor business, a hardware business, an ITSM business. We're all about bringing the pieces together. But that said, we work with partners like HP. You have a footprint of thousands of customers who are solving that same problem and need to move up stack. So it's been a good win-win. So you're not trying to be the cloud operating system, per se. I mean, the way VMware wants to be. Or you could even argue, well, I guess open. You got the hyperscalers coming down. You got VMware moving up. But again, they all, at the end of the day, are trying to control their cash cow, right in their hardcore business. We want to make them all transparent. So your bet is it's gonna be all of the above. That's not gonna change, right? That's the complexity. Is that right? Or do you think they're gonna consolidate? No, I think there's definitely something to that. I also think there's enough disparate technology that's not gonna be one size fits all or one to rule them all. In fact, I think that's part of the examples. In the past, like private cloud, as we announced yesterday, private cloud for enterprise, it's not a new term. People do that for quite a while now. But they are typically fairly brittle, hand rolled, disparate technologies. Some poor IT team trying to hold it together. So where we can provide that kind of life cycle management in a cloud operating model, remove that complexity and provide that stability and in that experience across, what will be interchangeable parts at times. I think that's really the direction. Yeah, you guys talk about this whole, it's starting in the middle. I like that because there's a skills gap as well, right? Not only is there a challenge on IT that transforms, there's not enough people actually know how to manage a Kubernetes cluster and spin one up. So there's been a rise of managed services. We're seeing come out of the woodwork, almost in all areas where it's complex. How does that fit into the makeup as customers engineer or re-architect or just evolve to edge on-premises and public cloud in a cloud operating way? Because if I got managed services, do they just plug in? I mean, you're orchestrating services, managed services, all the above. Take us through this dynamic because we're seeing more and more customers saying, just give me the service. I know from our perspective, this kind of goes back to that portfolio of meeting customers where they are. There are some that have that expertise in house, they're opinionated, they just want a different consumption model. But on the other side of that, it's difficult to attract and retain that type of talent. And if I have limited resources, am I going to focus on the care and feeding of that underlying infrastructure or am I going to try to up level and focus on things more strategic to the business? So that's where we've certainly been focusing. And I think this type of management capability is what feeds into that. Right, talk about the trust aspect because if I'm going to do a managed service, it better work. I need to trust it. It's not a zero trust environment. It's actually a trust and verify. But you're seeing the software supply chain as a big discussion point. Developers don't want to have to get back off their CDC pipeline to go in and manage stuff. So a managed service has to be verified. There's a huge trust factor in there. How does, what's the status of this now? Is it real? I think one of the, one of the things we see in terms of trust, organizationally, I mean, people in process is always harder than the tech usually. And a lot of the trust is just internal yet, developers don't trust the ops team, right? Security doesn't trust anybody. Finance doesn't trust who's billing them. Part of what we do as a stack is we give each of those stakeholder groups the ability to get their core needs without getting each other's way. And from a delivery perspective, where we partner with HPE is we are, we're a platform framework, we're a technology provider. We're inside, you know, products like the private cloud. We work with their GMS team, the managed services team, if they want to take on more of that operational concern, right, they use us. Or if the customer wants to manage it themselves. So we, we're all about enabling them at the end of the day and HPE brings them. And how hard, Brad, is it to unify? Unification is a great word, a lovely, let's unify everybody. So how hard is that? Can you scope that problem statement for us? What does that mean? I'll separate it from a technology perspective and then the people process. So a lot of the traditional people that have played in that space, the do-it-yourself you mentioned, right, scripting it all together is hard, right? And if you change from cloud A to cloud B, you're set back six months. Like why we exist is we want to very quickly pull the pieces together. We can usually get a POC up and running in about two hours, right, that's a self-service VMware private cloud, right? That doesn't mean you've solved the organizational inertia, you know, that takes time, weeks, months, and that's where people like Accenture, GreenLake, other SIs, other channel partners bring that together to help make that change happen. How mature is the platform? Where are you in terms of determining product market fit? Are you scaling at this point? The great part about our origin story, right, we got our start as an internal tool set inside a two and a half billion dollar private equity firm that was transforming IT at dozens of companies. So we were built for the use case. Product market fit happened because a bunch of guys needed to get their jobs done. So we've been outbound since 2015, right? We were top of the stack ranking, you know, all the MQs, all the quadrants, all the analysis. So we think we're there, product market fit. The nice thing is customers have actually moved to where we are, right? Five years ago, cloud management meant cleaning up the lift and shift mess. Now it's automation, platform engineering, so it's a fun time to be us. It's operationalizing, they're operationalizing. What's your go-to-market model? Maybe you could double click on that. Through partners, so honestly, through HP is a big one, we're small, right? We want to be the best unified platform we can be. Our go-to-market is via technology partners like HPE, right? The other systems integrators, other channel partners globally, so yeah. So then you've got kind of a tiger team overlay, Salesforce, is it? Yeah, we've got teams globally. So we've got about 700,000 workloads under management around the world, about 70% of those are on-prem, Vmware Nutianics, the rest are up in the public cloud, so we work with partners, solution providers, services engines to help deliver that to customers. What do you make of the $61 billion acquisition of Vmware from Broadcom? I think your analysis was spot on. It is going to be a war of what is the most profitable to that new Broadcom business and things like, if you realize automation, some of these fringe products that are core to customer use cases but may not be driving a lot of bottom revenue for Vmware, I think are going to be on the bubble and we've seen more interest in the last few weeks from people who just want to hedge their bets, right? They want to be able to switch from hypervisor A to hypervisor B, or cloud A to cloud B without being locked in to anyone's stack and that is why we exist. You want to comment on that? I mean, for HPE and from a GreenLake and even just historically, right? It's about customer choice. We have a strong relationship with Vmware. We have, I don't know how many bajillions of servers out there running Vmware that we support with. So it's all just looking at that ecosystem and helping deliver those customer solutions and outcomes is our focus. All right, thank you. Brian, talk about the GreenLake success with partners. We're seeing ecosystem is a big part of that and we know the formula for ecosystems, create value. What is the pitch that GreenLake's making for the marketplace right now to attract more folks to build and or integrate into the platform? I mean, GreenLake started with a vehicle of how do I start to deliver an OPEX model, a consumption model for traditional infrastructure that we've been providing. More and more as the services and solutions really have emerged and evolved. It's gone from how do I just give you kit and a consumption model for it to now looking at embedded solutions with third-party ISV software, building or wrapping those services around it, really delivering outcomes and solutions. You're seeing and hopefully you saw just from announcement more and more of that where we have kind of turnkey solutions with key partners. How do we bring a marketplace ecosystem together? How do we help enable those kind of full solutions? Because we're not going to build it all ourselves, right? We want to make sure that we can deliver those outcomes. So marketing is often and should be ahead of the actual product. The early days of GreenLake, it was really a financial model. Where do you see GreenLake today? How far has it matured? We saw some of the announcements yesterday. We saw some demos. Where are we at? So this actually I think really the exciting part is you might have heard Antonio referred to as that journey to one. Each of our different businesses within HPE, they've all been building these cloud services in GreenLake enabled services. But as you saw Fidelma share the path to the HPE GreenLake cloud platform, that really is bringing these services together into a functional platform, right? Common identity, common telemetry services, bringing these together as now integrable, interoperable services. Like you're starting to see that come together and you can really see the Chrome trail of where we're going with a very powerful hybrid cloud experience, right? Spanning private, public, on-prem, Kolo and a full solution set within there. So that's the exciting part for me. And Brad Morpheus will be a capability inside of GreenLake that a customer can consume. Do you have to write to GreenLake APIs to enable that? Or is it more just certify that you work inside of GreenLake? What has to get done? I'll say a lot of what they've done is actually written into our APIs. We've normalized hybrid IT. We have a database model of every load balance or cloud endpoint automation tool. So we're all about making it easier to consume IT and the vision that Fidelma and HP has around GreenLake fits very well with why we exist. So they're able to extract metering data from our API. We know who provisioned what, where, how much they spent. So we're a good repository and platform partner for them to build. It's great for that console that you guys have. Yeah, you got the open APIs. You publish those. You guys take advantage of them. And then boom, then you can consume. Got it. All right guys, hey, great to see you again. All right Brad, thanks for coming on. Hey, thanks for having us on. Our pleasure, great stuff, congratulations. Okay, keep it right there. This is Dave Vellante for John Furrier. You're watching theCUBE's coverage of HPE Discover 2022 from Las Vegas. We'll be right back.