 Okay, we're back at HPE Discover 2023. The Cube's continuous coverage. We go out to the events. We extract the signal from the noise. I'm here with Rob Streche. I'm Dave Vellante. John Furrier is actually in DC, doing Mongo. So we got a lot going on on theCUBE.net. Ryan King is here. He's the Senior Director of Global Hardware Partner Ecosystems for Red Hat and Rocco La Vista is back. He's the Vice President for Worldwide Sales and go to Market Lead for Green Lake at HPE. Guys, welcome to theCUBE. Thank you so much. I really appreciate it to be here. You were here last year, Ryan. We're talking about when you guys sort of announced the partnership with Green Lake. Now we're seeing the whole thing coalesce. So it's awesome to see the progress. Give us the update. What's new? Yeah, I mean, if I just rewind from last year, we were coming into it really, you know, talking about our Bonafides and talking about how OpenShift had reached 48% of the container platform market. And then this January, we announced it. It hit $1 billion in ARR. And then to come into this week and to be recognized by HPE as their global technology partner of the year is just amazing. It's the last award given. It kind of feels like best picture at the Oscars. I won't talk so long, you play the music. But I will say, like, it's a recognition of the great work we've done over the past year. But again, it's just a milestone in our 22 year partner history between the two companies. And we're going to do more and better every year. And we're looking forward to the next year of innovation. So, okay, so that's what this is, right? Partner of the year? That's it here, yeah. And in solid crystal, one of our Red Hatters will bring that back to corporate headquarters and place on the shelf. And probably to hit weight, they're going to have to like throw their shoes out to get their luggage on. What does it take to win that award? For me, it's an easy one, right? For HPE GreenLake, we don't get to do cloud without Red Hat in the boat with us. And so the partnership is so key in that way. I mean, that cloud operating model, cloud native application development, containerized platforms, that is why they win this award in my opinion. They should win it every year because you're going to see the proof from our joint customers and what they're able to do with Red Hat and HPE GreenLake. You know, it's interesting. On the key notes, we didn't hear a ton about cloud native. Is it because it's kind of just assumed now, it's in there when we talk about cloud, it's cloud native and customers are sort of getting used to it? I think so. I mean, I think when I look at it like, you know, last year we were just talking about things landing on GreenLake, right? So we said, hey, open container platform is upcoming. You know, it was going to come, you know, we're saying subsequent quarter. The rest of that year we landed OpenShift. We landed Ansible Automation Platform. We landed REL. So things are there. So kind of to your point. And then we built upon that. So we added the ISV optimized cloud module version of that. And that took what is kind of just general availability into preconfigured capabilities for it. So easy to click and deploy, small, medium, large type, you know, for our customers. And that's really a recognition of like, think of it as like, you're just saying cloud paradigm. Like, okay, so now it's like instance paradigm and like preconfigured ways of deploying these, these platforms on GreenLake. Oh, sorry. Yeah. Well, it would seem that this is actually ties in really well with the edge to cloud message that we've been hearing as well. In the fact that, you know, really, if you're going to build cloud native apps in Red Hat is everywhere, right? So is that, was that the thinking with the partnership and how you guys see that as well? Well, so while we said, you didn't hear a lot about cloud native, think about the continuum and what we're discussing about edge to cloud platform. The biggest next challenge for our customer base while they're still trying to optimize their data centers, move out, move to public cloud. The next biggest challenge is optimizing at the edge. You need to have that cloud native operating model at the edge. Red Hat being everywhere at the edge with HPE GreenLake and what we're going to solve for the customers there is that next place, that at scale is where our customers are asking us to look at. They're super cloud native. Yeah. Think about that. That's what we're talking about. Maybe that's why. People think, okay, cloud, public cloud, moving beyond that, cloud is expanding out to the edge. Yeah, and we have progressive layers of edge. So we think about near edge and what we can do with OpenShift after that. Last year we were doing a lot of work around the EL-8000 and what we can do with OpenShift, that configuration. It's a four node configuration. So we're able to put a four node cluster on it, do a factory install, shift this out with GPUs on it, be able to do that inference or training at the edge. We're going to build on that. We have Red Hat device edge. We can go out to the far edge and the capabilities that we can deliver there with including Ansible. So yes, we've got a lot to come. And then I would like to tie it back to private cloud enterprise and the announcements we've made this week. Well, that's right. And so with private cloud enterprise, we make it easy to deploy Red Hat OpenShift container platform. And going back to this edge theme, if you think about it, if I was an application developer, I'd want to spend my time focused on developing the best application I can. And based on some checklist items, data sovereignty, gravity, SLA, cost, latency. I want to deploy that app in the most consistent way that I can based on where it makes sense. And the fact is, where transactions and data lives is where you do business. And that's usually at the edge. And so if we can simplify how you deploy containerized platforms on HPE private cloud enterprise, we're simplifying how customers operate with consistency at the edge in their core, which is their data center and COLO, inclusive of the public cloud because there's still lots of great value that you can get out of some of the automation and tooling that's out there. And we want to deliver that hybrid cloud experience across that continuum for our customers. And we do that with Red Hat. So paint a picture of what you're seeing from customers these days. What's the typical customer look like? What's the spectrum look like? Can you give us a sense of that? Yeah, I mean, if I look at a really popular industry that they want us to solve for across that continuum, I look at retail. They absolutely operate at the edge. That's where their customers live. That's where their transactions are occurring. They typically have hundreds, if not thousands of stores they have multiple data center locations and they've gotten used to doing things in the public cloud. But they've said, hmm, for me, I live on razor thin margins selling products at retail. I know it's highly competitive. Look how many of them have gone out of business. And so they have to optimize that IT operating model and they do that with consistency across the full stack that we deliver and are helping them deliver. Yeah, I mean, I think you hit on a good point there which is I just want to tie in which is the cloud operating model and that would seem to tie back to private cloud enterprise and the pay-as-you-go methodology. Obviously Red Hat has other partners and stuff and is in that business already. So that would seem like a really strong fit for exactly what you're talking about people want to pay OPEX in certain places for that. That really the problem you're solving with these customers, joint customers? I look at it even more simply put that customers are tired of having hardware contracts and software ELAs that are mismatched in timing and mismatched in capacity and mismatched in even life cycling the platform together. And so what we do with HPE GreenLake through our marketplace is we're able to closely tie the two elements together, the maintenance contracts, the renewals and simplify for customers with the flexibility of scale up, scale down and pay-as-you-go. I think you bring that compute layer to say, hey, we can put an infrastructure anywhere, right? Across cloud to edge, and that is going to be a great enabler for our customers and they're looking for a consistency of platform experience across that because they know they just can't place all their compute in one place, right? They need to have a distributed pattern and then, but what they want is consistency across it but at the infrastructure layer as well as the platform layer and together that's what we provide. And they is so diverse, right? I mean, you think about retail and you go into telco but so you guys have to provide a horizontal platform. You're not going to customize for every industry. This is what we're seeing, right? So like, you know, if we talk customers, we were mentioning specific customers back at, you know, our CUBE interview at Red Hat Summit a few weeks back but like just speaking generalities like in manufacturing, global manufacturing company, they're deploying, you know, rel in a virtualized environment into their factory which is, you know, a near edge use case. We have in the telco space for their core networking and what they're doing with OpenShift Compliance Platform to optimize and modernize applications in that space. We're seeing the same modernization, cloud native application in the FSI space in the government space. We have a customer that's doing something in e-government around application modernization specifically on OpenShift. So really we can walk industry from, you know, all of those and say that like they're all taking their particular journey on the hybrid cloud, you know, path towards fully automated infrastructure and application platform. But you have to do it with consistency. Yeah, the fact is is that if you deploy and operate at the edge one way, which is at a very large scale and you run and operate your data centers another and the fact is is if you consume one public cloud or another, it's still a different type of snowflake that you've created in your operating model. The expertise that you have to hire, the cost structure, the different tooling, that becomes a complex and expensive value prop for IT to continue. And with HPE GreenLake, with private cloud enterprise, the standards that we're driving with cloud modules and then partnering with Red Hat, we're hitting the mark for our customers across all those. I'd like to build on that if I could. We have a no snowflake policy in terms of how we work with the ecosystem. I love it. And so you could think of snowflakes as kind of two things, right? Like unique, right? Not everything should be unique, right? That's where we start, right? It's funny, we'll be at Snowflake Summit next week. Oh my God. It's no Snowflake Summit, we love Snowflake. No offense, yes. But I always hear this all the time. It's a funny name when you think about it because everybody's trying to standardize on their platforms. I mean, I've been on just like a mission around this because we start with like no snowflakes, people get, okay, fewer patterns. I'm like, that's not just it. I go, it's also about product life cycle. And that like, these things can't melt, right? They need to be persisted in terms of like, we need to work together, that like nightly build to this stuff, go in and are actually done in a CI environment and stay fresh too, right? So it's also it's uniqueness. And then, you know, the age of it that need to be, you know, squash in terms of no snowflakes. No offense to the company. We also got to be smart. You got to meet what customers where they're at. This is not an overnight transition. And one of the things that we see with customers adopting public cloud is, they see this great operating model. And unless you were born in the public cloud, you just can't get there that easily. So you have to start someplace in cleaning up your own organization, optimizing the operating model of your own organization before you even consume public cloud to take advantage of some of the technologies we bring forth is our common goal. Meet customers where they're at, help them with modern infrastructure, then help them with the cloud operating model thereafter. This is where Telco gets interesting. In Telco, you got this hardened stack that's fossilized and it's getting disaggregated. The cloud is coming in. The Telcos are like, some of them are leaning in maybe for the BSS systems, but there's an opportunity here to actually transform Telco in a new way that is not just public cloud, cloud first, et cetera. It's a new model that's emerging and they're so far behind that transformation from the traditional data center, but there's a lot that can learn from it, I think. They're having to deal with 50 years of legacy operations and how do you modernize that? On top of adding new services that are important to their customer base. Like I love autonomous driving and the models that are coming out of that and why the edge is so important for that. Because for autonomous driving to optimize the AI model, it's not like an overnight batch, run, provide the feedback, reload the cars up with the model. Yeah, no way. If you can't do that real time, how are you ever going to respond to pedestrian, traffic, weather conditions? And so that to me is the best use case of within Telco that takes advantage of a very specific workload when I think about autonomous driving. That's going to help society overall. You drive a Tesla? No, not yet. Don't take your hands off the wheel, it'll yell at you. I'll tell you what I'm talking about. Also not getting rid of my V8s. Those are going to be a dinosaur soon. I do drive a Tesla because I've just been so enamored by the whole deep learning process and where it's come from in the early days and just wanted to have my hands on it. It's exciting in many ways, but I would just get back to the Telco piece. It's something we showed how we have a sustainability trend that we're looking at in Telco and specifically around the optimization of that workload. There's so much work just to lower the power profile of even what 5G looks like out in the real world that will be truly impactful. And to deliver that back to doing this in a cloud native way where you can adopt, enhancements are being done in silicon is just being released all the way into something that makes it into a cell tower is pretty amazing to see us kind of accelerate that from concept to actually something that you know, it's now on your phone, so to speak. Yeah, I think again, back to Dave's point and I actually brought this up to Fidelma that I haven't heard a lot about open source at the conference. And I think a lot of the stuff that your Fidelma is doing in her group in sustainability which was interesting is I tied it back to what some of the stuff that Red Hat is doing with LF Energy which is how do I have the right workload run in the right place at the right sustainability cost so power cooling and things of that nature that Red Hat's working on in the open source community ties back to where actually HPE is working in the CTO's office too. So it also to your points on edge, I think some of the announcements around single node edge open shift. For instance, seems to fit everything that not only telcos have to do but retail and others that are looking to do and bring those cloud native. And you know, speaking of the platform, we've released our sustainability dashboard. We're putting our money where our mouth is to prove to customers that using the HPE GreenLake cloud platform, you can reach or monitor and see how you're meeting your goals. Look, executives today have KPIs, bonuses based on meeting sustainability goals. And so if they can't measure and show the results, a lot of unhappy people. It comes up to a macroeconomic level. You can actually look at whole countries and say what does 5G mean to their energy profile, right? And that's meaningful and a big ask for sustainability. Okay, where are we at today? Like what can I get from GreenLake that's. Yes, OpenChip is available on GreenLake, Red Hat, Ansible, Automation Platform is available. So is REL, so all is available. All the flavors of REL are available on HPE GreenLake. Easy to deploy, the blueprints are there, all the flexibility you would expect. We're driving kind of the automation blueprints for customers so that when you buy PCE, Private Cloud Enterprise, those blueprints are there so you can easily deploy anything from Red Hat and then tie that together in the consumption model, the flexibility, the pays you go, the scale up, scale down, elasticity, that's what customers expect from us right now. And then more, more, more, go ahead. I would just add so like I think with PCE in particular, like we're designing that experience with customers right now and so we're talking a lot here but what we really want to do is listen to customers and have them bring that to us and we want them to challenge us right around where we can take this and this experience together. We know that the pattern of GreenLake and that infrastructure capability is going to be endemic to a lot of customers and them being able to use that on a platform like OpenShift or REL or with Ansible, we think it's a killer combo. And then co-creating with an ecosystem. Co-creating is a huge theme at Red Hat and with our ecosystem, so I appreciate that. Guys, thanks so much. Appreciate you coming on. Thank you. Good to see you again. Good to see you again, yeah. All right, keep it right here. Rob and I went back with one of the shining stars in the HPE portfolio, Phil Matrim, who runs Aruba. Go right back.