 Welcome back to our coverage of HPE's GreenLake announcements. We're going to talk about transformation, acceleration. Who doesn't want to go faster as they're transforming, right? Everybody is transforming, and they want to go as fast as possible to get time to value. Keith White is here. He's the Senior Vice President and General Manager of GreenLake's commercial business at HPE. Vishal Lal is GreenLake Cloud Services Solutions at HPE. Gents, welcome. Good to see you. Awesome. We're here. Thanks so much. Great to be here, Dave. Yeah, Keith, we've been talking virtually for quite some time now. Q3 earnings, beat and raise, focusing on some real momentum, want to understand where it's coming from. ARR, I've said, it's headed toward a billion. I think you said 700 million is where you were at last quarter. 1,100 customers. Orders were up 46% last quarter. Revenue up over 30%. Where's the momentum coming from? No, it's fantastic. And I think what you're seeing is the world is hybrid. So in essence, customers are looking for that solution that says, hey, mirror my public cloud with my on-premise scenario and give me that hybrid solution. And we're just seeing just tremendous momentum and interest across a variety of workloads, across a variety of vertical solutions. And frankly, we're seeing customers basically lean in on really running their business on HPE GreenLake. So we had a pretty exciting announcement with the NSA a couple of weeks back. Huge. $2 billion deal. But again, this shows the value of what GreenLake and the on-prem requirements are. High level of security, high level of capability. They're doing analytics on all the data that's out there. I mean, this is the number one intelligence agency in the world. So super excited about that. And it just validates our strategy and validates where we're going. The other thing that's really exciting is we're seeing a lot of customers with this whole SAP migration. So ONGC, one of the largest oil and gas companies in India, I want to say it's one of the top five SAP implementations in the world, has chosen GreenLake as their opportunity as well. Huge retailers like Woolworths. So worldwide, we're seeing tremendous momentum. That's great. Congratulations on the momentum. I know you're not done. Vishal, new role for you. Awesome. When we discovered Discover this year in theCUBE, we talked about new workload solutions that you guys had. SAP, as Keith was just mentioning, ML Ops, VDI, a number of those workloads that you were really focused on the solution side. How's that going? Give us the update there. No, no, it's coming along really well. I mean, you highlighted some of the big ones there. I mean, the way we are thinking about GreenLake, right? I mean, we talked about the great momentum that we've had. The question is why are we having that, right? Why are we seeing that momentum in the market? And I think I'll kind of call out a few features of the GreenLake platform that's really making it attractive to customers, right? What is the experience? What we're trying to do is make it a very, very seamless experience for them, right? Quick provisioning, easy to manage, easy to monitor, kind of an automated solution, right? So that's kind of a key element of what we're trying to offer. Performance is another one, right? I mean, end of the day, what we are doing is we are building out our infrastructure stack and the software stack in such a way that it's optimized for the performance, right? I mean, if you take data, for example, it's called the right elements to make sure that the analytics can be done, you know, machine learning algorithms can be run. So those are like, you know, some of the performance I think is a great experience is a big factor, TCO, right? I mean, customers are very, very focused on their cost base, right? Especially as they are starting to run up the bills in public cloud, they're like, man, this is expensive. I need to start thinking about costs here because costs catch up pretty fast. So that's kind of another element that people are really focused on. And I would say the last one being choice, right? I mean, we provide this platform which is open, right? So customers can use it. If they want to migrate off it, they can migrate off it. We are not blocking them in. So those are some of the value propositions that are really resonating in the marketplace. And you're seeing that in numbers that Keith just talked about. So Keith, speaking of transformation, you guys are undergoing obviously a transformation. You're a cloud company now, okay? So part of that is the ecosystem, the partners. Talk about your strategy in that regard, why you're so excited about welcoming the partners into this whole Green Lake world. You bet. And I'm a big fan of one plus one equals three. My seven-year-old daughter tells me that doesn't actually add up correctly. But at the same time, it's so true with what we're doing. And as Vishal just said, an open platform that allows partners to really plug in so that we can leverage the power of SAP or the power of Nutanix or the power of Citrix. At the same time, all of these are solutions that require deep system integration and capabilities to really be customized for that customer's environment. So whether that's Infosys or Accenture or Wipro, we need those partners as well, along with our own advisory and professional services to help customers. But at the same time, we talked about the fact that this is really about bringing that cloud experience to the on-prem world. Might be a data center, but we're seeing a lot of customers get out of the data center management business and move into a colo. And so the fact that we can partner with the Equinixes and the Cyrus ones of the world really enable a whole new environment so that customers, again, can run their business and not get caught up with keeping the lights on and managing power and those types of things. And then finally, I'll say, look, the channel itself is actually migrating to offer more services to their customers, managed service providers, telcos, disney and resellers. And now what we're providing them is that platform with which to offer their own managed services to customers in a much more cost-effective cloud experience way with all the benefits of being on-prem, secure latency, integration and that sort of thing. So it's exciting to see the ecosystem really get a garden of the momentum and really partner with us closely. So follow up on the partner question, if I could. So partner services are part of GreenLake. It's a journey, right? Not everything, all at once. But so it's essentially as simple as saying, okay, I want that service, that's my choice. You're giving them optionality. That's right. It's ideally as seamless as it is in HPE service. Is that the direction that you're going? That's right, yeah. So the API set that Vishal and team are building are basically saying, hey, leverage our cost analytics capabilities, leverage our capacity management, leverage the interface so that you can plug into that single control plane. And so they're making it super simple for our partner ecosystem to do that. And what I think is really important is that if you are a partner, you want to basically offer choice to the customer. And if the customer decides, hey, I want to use Red Hat's OpenShift for the container platform versus our Esmeral offering, then they can get just as good of a first class offering with respect to that. If someone wants to use Citrix or Nutanix or VMware for their VDI solution, they have that choice. And so we want to make sure we're offering customer choice for what's best for their situation, but also making sure that it's fully integrated with what we do. Very good, thank you. So we see more software content, Vishal. I wonder if you could, I mean, certainly Esmeral is a big piece of that. I talked earlier about margins hit record for HPE, almost 35% gross margins. This course of software is gonna obviously push that further along. Lighthouse is another one. How should we think about the direction that you're going with software? Absolutely. So if you think about what we are building out here is the solution, right? It's a solution that's very tightly integrated between the infrastructure stack and the software and the software that enables it. So really there are three or four components to the solution day, right? So think about Lighthouse, which is an infrastructure stack that is optimized for what's going to run on that, right? If it's a general purpose compute, it'll, the infrastructure will look different. If it's a storage intensive workload, it will look different. If it's a machine learning workload, it will look different, right? So that's kind of the first component is just optimizing it for what's going to run on it. Second is what we call the GreenLake platform, which is all about managing and orchestrating it. And what we want to do is we want to have a completely automated experience, right? From the way you provision it, to the way you run the workloads, to the way you manage it, to the way you monitor it, to the way partners link into it, right? To the way, you know, software vendors kind of sit on top of that, right? And then we talked about Esmeral, Esmeral is the engine that runs it, right? From a container platform perspective or we spent some time talking about unified analytics today, those are the types of data integrations that power GreenLake. And the last piece of software I would say is, as we kind of think about the ecosystem that runs on top of GreenLake, whether it's our software or third-party software, right? They all have a place, equal place on top of the GreenLake platform. And we are very focused on building out that ecosystem, right? So as a customer or an enterprise who wants to use GreenLake, should have the choice to run, you know, 40, 50, 100, 200, 500, different software packages on top of GreenLake. And it should be all in automated fashion, where we have tested that in advance. There's commercials behind that. So it becomes a very, very self-service provision, seamless experience from a customer's perspective. Great, thank you. Keith, 2020 was sort of like something called the forced march to digital, right? And some customers, they were already there. So there's a maturity. Now that we've been through, you know, this awful year and a change, customers are kind of rethinking their digital strategies and their transformations. That there can be a little bit more planful now. You know, the world didn't end and, you know, IT budgets kind of stabilized a bit, actually, you know, did better than perhaps we thought. So where are we in terms of transformations? What's the business angle? What are you seeing out there? Yeah, I mean, customers found a lot of holes that they had in their environment because of the pandemic. I think customers are also seeing opportunities to grow pretty aggressively. You know, we just announced Patrick Terminals, one of the largest shipping companies in Southpac. And, you know, that whole shipping craziness that's going on right now, they needed a new digital transformation in order to really make sure they could orchestrate their container ships effectively. I mean, even we talked about Woolworths, they're now changing how they deal with their suppliers because of the GreenLake platform that they have. And so what you're seeing is, hey, you know, first phase of digital transformation, public cloud was an interesting scenario. Now they're being able to be planful, like you said, and say, where's the best place for me to run this for the latency required with that data, for the choice that we have from an ISV standpoint, you know, for the on-prem capabilities of what we're trying to do from a security standpoint, et cetera. So the nice thing is we've seen it move from, you know, hey, we're just trying to get the basic things modernized into truly modernizing data centers, monetizing the data that I have, and continuing to transform that environment for their customers, partners, employees, and products. Kind of a left field question, a bit off topic, but certainly related, it's Edge. You guys talk about Edge a lot. Hybrid is clear, I think, in people's minds. You got an on-prem, you're connecting to a cloud, maybe a cross-clouds. Is Edge an extension of hybrid, or is it today sort of a bespoke opportunity that maybe will come back to this new version of cloud? What's happening at the Edge that you see? Yeah, so let me just, I mean, think of the Edge as, it's a continuum, right? The way at least we think about it, it's not data center or the Edge, right? Think of it as, you know, there's a data center, there's a hyperscale data center, there's a data center, there's a closet somewhere, right? There's a co-low opportunity, right? And then you're running something in a store, right? So let's take the example of a retailer, they're running something in a store, and what are they running? They're running point-of-service applications, or they're running IoT devices, right? And at some point, they have to connect back into the cloud, right? So we actually have software-defined band capabilities that connect, you know, the Edge devices, or Edge analytics back into the cloud. We actually have a small form factor, Kubernetes operating system that runs on the Edge, right? So we think of all of that as kind of a distributed environment in which Edge is one place where the application runs and where the data resides, but it needs to be connected back. And so we provide the connectivity back, we provide the mechanism by which we run it, and then there's a security model, especially around SASE that is emerging, around securing that. So that's kind of how we think about it, as part of the overall distributed architecture that we are building, and that's where the world will be. Another node in the cloud. Yeah. Another node in the distributed world, yeah, exactly. Yeah, I think the other thing to think about with the Edge is that this is where the majority of your data is actually getting created, right? You talked about IoT devices, you know, you'll hear from Zen's Act and what they're doing with respect to autonomous driving with vehicles. You know, we talk about folks like ABB that are building the factory of the future, and robotics as a service in order to be able to really make sure that that precision happens at that point. So a ton of data is coming from that. And so again, how do you analyze that? How do you monetize that? How do you make decisions off of it? And it's an exciting place for us. So it's great to have all the connectivity we talked about. Last question, maybe both could address it. We used to see this cadence of products, oftentimes in the form of boxes, come out from HP and HPE. Now we're seeing a cadence of services. We're seeing more capabilities across this green lake estate that you guys are building out. What should we expect in the future? What are the kinds of things that we should evaluate you on? Well, I'll start and then maybe you can jump in. But the reality is, we are becoming much deeper partners with our customers. They're looking to us to say, help me run my data center, help me improve my data and analytics, help me at the edge so that I can have the most effective scenarios. So what you're seeing from us is this flip from hardware provider into deep partnerships with the open platform. I'd say the second thing that we're doing is we're helping them fuel that digital transformation because again, they're looking for that hybrid solution. And so now they're saying, hey, HPE, come and showcase all the experience you have from point next, from your advisory and professional services and help me understand what other customers are doing so that I can implement that faster, better, cheaper, easier, et cetera. And then from a product standpoint, got a ton of great things coming up. Bring us along. Yeah, that's exactly right. I mean, we are taking a very, very focused customer back view as we are looking at the future of green lake, right? And exactly the way Keith said, right? It's all about solving customer problems for us. Some customer problems are still in the data center. Some of them are in colos. Some customer problems are in the edge. So they're all fair game for us as we think about what we are going to be building out. And to your point earlier, Davis, not about a server or a storage, it's about solutions, right? And the solutions have to have integrated hardware, integrated software stack, integrated services, right? There are partners who sell that, who service that, and all that entire experience from a customer perspective has to be seamless, right? And it's just on our cloud platform, we kind of help the customer run it and manage it and we give them kind of the best performance at the lowest cost, which is what they're looking for. So that's kind of what you'll see us. You'll see more of a cadence of these services come out, but it's all going in that direction in helping customers with new solutions. A lot of customer problems out there with your opportunities. And you know, generally the hyperscalers they aren't good at solutions. They're not a lot of solution folks like that. That's a wonderful opportunity for you to build on top of that gift, the CAPEX gift that the hyperscalers have given us all. That's right, and we're seeing the momentum happen so it's exciting. Yeah, that's cool. All right guys, thanks a lot for coming to theCUBE. Always, yeah, thanks for having me. All right, okay, and thank you for watching. Keep it right there, more action from HPE's GreenLake announcements. You're watching theCUBE.