 We're back, we're assessing the as a service space, HPE's GreenLake announcements. My name is Dave Vellante, you're watching theCUBE. Dion Hinchcliffe is here, along with Holger Moeller. These are the constellation kids, extraordinary analysts guys, great to see you again. I mean, super experienced, you guys, you deal with practitioners, you deal with your technologists, you've been following this business for a long time. Dion, we spoke to Holger earlier. I want to start with you. When you look at this whole trend as a service, you see a lot of traditional enterprise companies, traditionally hardware companies making that move for a lot of obvious reasons, are they sort of replicating in your view a market that you know well and in SaaS? What's your take on how they're doing generally that trend and how HPE is operating? Well, HPE has had a unique heritage. They're coming at the whole cloud story and the hyperscaler story from a different angle than a lot of their competitors. And that's mostly a good thing because most of the world is not yet on the cloud. They actually came from HPE's original world. You know, their line of servers and networks and so on. And so they bring a lot of credibility saying we really understand the world you live in now, but we want to take you to that as a service future. And since we understand you so well and we understand where this is going and we can adapt that to that world, we have a very compelling story. And I think that with GreenLake, when it first started about four years ago, it was off to the side with all their other offerings. And now it's really grown up, it's matured a lot. And I think as we talk about the announcements, we'll see that a lot of key pieces have fallen into place to make it a very compelling hybrid cloud option for the enterprise. Let's talk about the announcements. Was there anything in particular that stood out? I mean, the move to data management, I think is pretty interesting. Is it TAM expansion strategy? What's your take on the announcement? Well, the unified analytics story, I think is really important. Now that's the technology piece where they say, we can give you a data fabric, you can access your data outside of its silos. It doesn't address a lot of the process and cultural issues around data ownership inside the enterprise, but it's having it in the actual platform and actually articulating it as a platform, that's one of the things that was also evident. They're getting better and better at saying, this is a hybrid cloud platform and it has all the pieces that you would expect, especially that things like being able to bring your data from wherever it is to wherever people need it to be. And that's the holy grail. So really glad to see that component in particular. I also like the cloud adoption framework saying, we understand how to take you from this parochial world of servers that you have and do a cloud data hybrid world and then maybe eventually get you to a public cloud. We understand all the steps and all the components. I think that's, I have a study that fully in depth, but it seems to have all the moving parts. Ho, chime in, anything stand out to you? No, I think it's great announcements and the most important thing is HPE is in transformation. And when you're in transformation, people realize who you've been the old and they hear maybe the master of the new, but an experienced technology buyer will not right away say, oh, it's going to happen, right? It's going to happen like this is going to be done, it's ready, it's mature, it's ready to use and so on. So this is going to give more data points, more proof points, more capabilities that HPE is moving away from whatever they wear before. Let's not even say that to a software services as a service, as you mentioned, provider. It's been challenging. You look at the course of history for companies that try to go from being a hardware company to a software company, HPE itself sort of gave up on that. IBM, you could say, semi-succeeded, but they've struggled. What's different? They're just trying to spend 30 billion, right? Yeah, 34, exactly, and so, and of course Cisco is making that transition. I mean, every large company's in that transition. What about today, well, first of all, what do you think about HPE's prospects of doing so and are there things today in the business that make that more fasa, whether it's containers or the cloud itself or just the scale of the internet? I mean, it's a fascinating topic, right? And I think many of the traditional players in the IT space failed because they wanted to mimic the cloud players and they simply couldn't muster up the capex which you need to build out public cloud, right? Because if you think of the public cloud players, they didn't put it up for the cloud offering, they put it up because they need it themselves, right? Amazon is an online retailer, Google is a search and advertising giant, Microsoft has organic load from office which they have to bring to the cloud so it was easier for them to do that. So no wonder they failed. The good news is they haven't lost much of their organic load. HPE customers are still HPE customers, servers still have to be procured and they're on premises. And now they're bringing the qualities of the cloud, they're as a service, the pay-as-you-go capabilities to the on-premise stack, which helps an IT leader to reduce complexity and go to what everybody in the post-pandemic world wants to get to, which is I only pay for what I use. And that's super crucial because business goes up and down, we're riding all the waves in a much, much faster way than ever before, right? Before we had seven-year cycles, it was kind of like cozy. Almost now we're down to seven weeks, sometimes seven days, sometimes seven-hour cycles. And I don't want to pay for IT infrastructure, which was great for how my business was two years ago. I want to pay for it as I use it now, as I pivot now and I'm going to use it now. Diane, how much of this, thank you for that, Holger. How much of this is what customers want and need versus sort of survival tactics on the vendor's part? Well, so I think that if you look at where customers want to go, they know they have to go cloud, they have to go as a service, and that they need to make multiple steps to get there. And for the most part, I see GreenLake as being a highly credible market response to say, we understand IT better, we help build you guys up over the last 30 years, we can take you the rest of the way. Here's all the evidence and the proof points, which I think a lot of the announcements provide. And they're very good on cloud native, but the area where the story may not be the fullest strength it needs to be is around things like multi-cloud. So when I talk to almost any large organization, CIO, they have all the clouds, they need to know how do I make all this fit together, how do I reconcile that? So for the most part, I think it's closely aligned with actual customer requirements and customer needs. I think these have additional steps to go. Is that a, do you feel like that's a priority in other words, they got to kind of take a linear path, they got to solve the problem for their core customer base or is it, do you feel like that's not even necessarily an aspiration? It seems like customers want them to go there is what I'm inferring that you're saying. I do, well, let's go back to the announcement specifically. So there are two great operational announcements, one around the cloud physics and the other one around InfoSight. It gives a wealth of data, full stack about how things are operating, where the needs are, how you might be able to get more efficiencies, how you can shut down silicon you're not using, a lot of really great information, but all that has to live with a whole bunch of other counts of consoles and everybody is really craving this single piece of glass. That's what they want is they want to reduce complexity as Holger was saying and saying, I want to be able to get my arms around my data center and all of my cloud assets, but I don't want to have to be checked each cloud. I want it in one place. So, but it's great to see those announcements position them for that next step. They have these essential components that are, that look, you know, they look best to breed in terms of their capabilities. They're certainly very modern. Now they have to get to the rest of that story. Holger, you were mentioning CAPEX. I added it up, I think last year, the big four include Alibaba spent a hundred billion on CAPEX and, you know, generally the traditional on-prem players have been defensive around cloud. You know, not everything's moving to the cloud. We all know that, but I see that as a gift in a way that the companies like HPE can build on top of and to Dion's point that, you know, extend cross clouds out to the edge, which is, you know, this trillion dollar opportunity, which is just massive. What are your thoughts on HPE's opportunities there and chances of maybe breaking away from the pack? Yeah, I think definitely, well, there's not much of a pack left. There's only two, three. It's a triumvirate, if you want to say. It's a good thing from a margin standpoint. Maybe to duopoly for margins and stuff. There's not a long list of people who give me hardware in my data center. But I think it increases their chances, right? Like I said, it's a transformation. There's more credibility. There's more data point. There's more usage. I can put more workloads on this. And CIOs will pay attention to that and look at that for the transformation, no question. Yeah, and speaking of CIOs, what are you hearing these days? What's their reaction to this whole trend toward as a service? Do they welcome it? Do they feel like, okay, it's a wait and see. I need more proof points. What's the sentiment? Well, you have to define the CIO market basically two large groups. One is the ones that are highly mature. They tend to be in larger organizations. They're very sophisticated consumers of everything. They see the writing on the wall and that for most things, certainly not everything as a service makes the most sense for all the reasons we know, agility and time to value, scalability, elasticity, all those great things. And then you have the other side of the market where they really crave control. They have highly parochial worlds that they've built up that are hard to move to the cloud because they're so complex and intertwined because they haven't had that high maturity. They have a lot of spaghetti architecture. They're not really ready to move the cloud very quickly. So the second audience though is the largest one and the hyperscalers are probably getting a lot of the first ones. But the bigger markets really the second one where the folks that need a lot of help and they have a lot of legacy hardware and software that they need to move and that HPE understands very well. And so I think from that standpoint, they're well positioned to take advantage of an untapped market or relatively untapped market in comparison. Hey, in our business, we all get pulled in different directions because we got to eat. But what are some of the cool things you guys are working on in your research that you might want people to know about? I just did a market overview for enterprise application platforms. I'm a strong believer that you should not build all your enterprise software yourself but you can't use everything that you get from your typical SaaS provider. So it's focusing on the extent integration and build capabilities. Build is very, very important to create the differentiation in the marketplace and all the known SaaS players basically for their past. My funny example is always to speak in cartoons, the peanuts, there's liners of this comfort blanket. The past capability of the SaaS player is the comfort blanket. We don't fit 100% there or you want to build something strategic or we'll never get to that micro vertical we have a great enterprise application platform. Interesting topic, especially when you see what's happening with Salesforce and ServiceNow trying to be the platform platforms. I have to check that out. How about Diane? Well, and last year I conducted a survey with the top 100 CIOs at least in my view about what they're going to do to get through this year. And so I'm redoing that again to say, what are they going to do in 2022 because there's so many changes in the world. And so last year digital transformation, automation, cybersecurity were at the top of the list. And it's going to be very interesting. Cloud was there too in the top five. And so we're going to see how it's all going to change because next year is the year of hybrid work where we're all going to have to figure out how half our businesses are in the office and half are at home and how are we going to connect those together and what tools are going to make that happen. Everybody's trying to figure out how to get hybrid rights. So definitely want to check out that research. Guys, thanks so much for coming to theCUBE. It's great to see you. Thanks Dave. You're welcome. Okay, and thank you for watching everybody. Keep it right there for more great content from HPE's GreenLake announcement. You're watching theCUBE.