 Live from Madrid, Spain, it's theCUBE. Covering HPE Discover Madrid 2017. Brought to you by Hewlett Packard Enterprise. We're back in Madrid, everybody. This is theCUBE, the leader in live tech coverage. My name is Dave Vellante. I'm here with my co-host, Peter Barris. And many times, Cube guest Xavier Prasan is back. He's the vice president of Cloud 28 Plus and service providers worldwide for Hewlett Packard Enterprise and he's joined by Eugene Viscovic, who's the chief business officer beyond Cloud 28 Plus partner. Gentlemen, welcome to theCUBE, welcome back. Xavier, it's good to see you again. Thank you, hi. It's hi. So give us the update on Cloud 28. It started out as this sort of focused European effort. It's exploded now globally. What's the update? So I don't remember, I don't know if you remember that it was last year, the same event. We were in London, I believe. Right. And we're saying, okay, we are 300. How many you will be next year? I took the back would be 700. We are 700. Wow, congratulations. 700 members who have been expanding in the different geographies. So also in Europe, Middle Eastern Africa, but we expanded in North America, in APEC, Latin American, Caribbean. So now we are present in 60 countries. We are proposing 24,000 cloud services. So the catalog has been expanding dramatically. We are offering capabilities, data center capabilities from all partners in 33 countries. And we can offer from 400 data centers already. So average, we have a 40,000 hits per month on the platform, acquiring members and so on. And yes, it has been a delight to launch that everywhere on its, it's really taking off very, very quickly. And the basic value prop is that you got, you are essentially enabling cloud partners to create cloud-like business capabilities. Yeah, so what we do is first of all, we enable the partners to get known on the market on this side, to publish other services, build and consume also. So it's not only just by SaaS, but also integration services and so on, because it's a comprehensive value check. Then what we do, we are not a marketplace where people go and live. In the center, they can speak every day. So they publish articles, thought leadership articles around security, big data manufacturing and so on and so on. This year, only this year, they have published 600 articles. So when you are a customer, you go to this platform, you can see the offering, but you can see how the vendor is positioning himself around the market is value-add on what they are doing. So digital marketing a lot, also for them, we have been increasing the value on the market of many of our partners with social media because we have very good activity in this area. And also lead generation engine, because now we have so much offerings that we can target specific campaigns for our partners in specific geographies and generate a lot of leads on the market. Last but not least, the market is evolving. We have a lot of partners, so we create platform-connected offerings. Example we have done is a specific cloud in a box for manufacturing for plants, where in six clicks, you can provision from Plateau 28 plus all your information system for the plant. So this is also the kind of things that we do. Great, okay Eugene, tell us about Veon. Why are you in business? What's your story? Okay, just take a few minutes about Veon because it's not a very well-known name around the world and don't be ashamed if you don't know Veon because it still is a seventh largest mobile operator in the world. It's significant where today around 42,000 employees over 12 different countries. I have to say very unusual countries, not the type of countries you may choose you're not to go for holidays, but it would be a shame because honestly some of them are good. Like you know, all the regions, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Armenia, Tajikistan, Kazakhstan, Georgia, Russia, we have also emergent market, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Algeria and one, only one European market which is Italy with Veon, Veon 3. Which means it's a very large region. We are dealing with 10, more than 10% of the total population of a global 235 million customers, which is significant. And within this organization, there is an enterprise division which I'm leading which is around 4,500 people dedicated for enterprise and wholesale for revenue around $3 billion just to give you a scale on who we are. Again, not very well known, but definitely within our footprint we are the number one in this particular region of the world. It's sizable, substantial. Yes, yes. So what's driving your business today? Obviously, mobile is exploding. Yes, it's clear we came from the mobile business. We are number one mobile operator in the majority of these countries. We have what we call some fixed business and since the last two, three years when I joined the organization, we completely reorganized our business model and moving more into what we call validate services, ICT services. And one of the components, definitely, was to try to find a partner for a cloud proposition. You need to understand that we're in a very emerging market for this type of subject. We're still in a very traditional way. You know how enterprise operating, they own the infrastructure, they own data center, they own their servers, the management platform and their own people. And they have not yet shifted to this new model which is to try to outsource some of the infrastructure. And this is where we came into the game as a global provider in order to have enterprise really to operate this ship. There is also another interesting situation is every time we build a cloud proposition, usually we try to centralize this and have different country. In our part of the world, it's not possible. We have to set up a cloud platform in each and every single of our country for regulatory constraint which is not very economical but definitely it's an opportunity for us to lead this market especially with the HP Enterprise. Well it allows you to differentiate as well from some of the mega cloud providers that everybody knows, everybody talks about. So is that a primary way in which you compete? Completely, it's clear the big player today are not very well implemented in this part of the world because of this particular constraint outside of Italy which is a little bit different game. But it's clear in Russia and in Asia, yes today there is a opportunity. We believe that we want to be the single provider within this region operating across different market segment because we're covering from SOAP to multinational account, even government and having a set of value proposition we can offer across every single of our countries. So is it common that amongst the cloud 28 plus partners there's that theme of local presence of course but is there also a differential in terms of what the partners will do, the types of work they'll do, customizations? Yeah, typically the case of Veyron is very specific because it addresses very specific markets. Some other players will ask different things but what is very important in the case of Veyron is first of all to have a ready to deploy solution that you can industrialize in different countries. So this is the reason why we played with one of the technology partners of cloud 28 plus with Ormucco who has a cloud in a box solution that can be deployed unmanaged remotely if needed but that was fitting the needs of the market, okay? Then what we need to do is really to engage locally. So in this particular case, what we are going to do is to engage with the HP organization in order that when we have the needs for our customers to go for cloud computing kind of workloads, we say, okay, we have the solution, we have a partner, a cloud 28 plus partner who took the decision to go with us and we trust each other. So you Mr. Customer, you want to do backup as a service, disaster recovery as a service, compute storage as a service or security as a service, Veyron is there. And the good point is, Veyron is there on very qualified hardware of HP synergy with a very good solution which is one of the solution ready for service providers of HP and operated by a very serious tech operator with the number six on the market, this is Veyron. And we go together. So in this particular case, what was interesting was to have a solution that can be deployed everywhere the same with workloads that may fit with the different expectations on the market, engage the HP people to play with, and then we market and with that on TFS we'll amplify their message, we will be able to drive lead generation campaigns, we'll be able to onboard our resellers because one thing I believe is that in this kind of regions people don't go, as you said Eugene, directly to the cloud. They continue to go to their resellers. What do I need to do? And here you know that we have the largest reseller network in the industry. So we will introduce this solution to our resellers and you know that when a reseller of HP is in front of such a case you can have the mind to say, okay, let's engage with Veyron. So this is the way we're going to operate. So when I think of many of the Pakistan countries, I think of natural resources challenging topography, challenging terrain. How does the reality, the physical reality and the industries that typify that region impact the way you're providing cloud services? It's clear, we're talking sometimes a very, very large geography in terms of country sizing. When you take only Russia, mountainous, 11 times zone, you have one single country. And when we operate, yes, we have to spread our capability in order to be able to touch every single country, including in terms of infrastructure, especially as a carrier, let you imagine how much we need to pull fiber, cable across the country and have these different set up of infrastructure, cloud proposition to make sure we can serve better in terms of latency, especially when we're talking about financial sector and so on, which brings some level of complexity. And as I said earlier, also some level of efficiency in terms of investment because we're not in a perfect world especially when we talk about the regulatory constraint which, yes, we need to find some middle way, how we can have a better, being still competitive but at some time still delivering the expected quality. But you're right, this particular part of the world require a lot of work in terms of physical infrastructure and also in our team, our people are spread across these different countries. And for that reason, yes, it's not an easy situation. Does it drive, are you likely to see a higher demand? HPE talks about the intelligent edge. Are you likely to see a higher demand for things like the intelligent edge because of the nature of the natural resource industries, petrochemical, et cetera, mountainous regions and a lot of the communities that you serve. Is that going to be a driver of new services or is it going to be something else? What do you think? I think there will be two aspects. The first one, there is definitely a requirement. Driven very often by very large multinational corporation, you'll be surprised how these multinational companies are covering this part of the world. You have natural resources, all the Western industry is present and because they are present, they need to bring their standard in terms of infrastructure they're using within this particular country. Now, the reason, yes, the demand is coming from there. At the same time, you have the rest of the market in terms of large local businesses where it's clear, they are moving. If you're looking at our part of the world, we are exactly when we were 10 years ago in Europe in North America and Asia. We are really into emerging in face in adopting this type of infrastructure. It's clear, it's going to go much more quicker because on top of that, enterprises have big pressure to reduce cost but at the same time, not to sacrifice the quality, what they're looking, which again, together we're capable and we can demonstrate they can get better for less and this is a big work and that the reason when Xavier was mentioning about working together in each of the country, this was one of a critical element in choosing with HP Enterprise because I'm a mobile operator and fixer. I'm not yet recognized as a nice city service as a cloud. It was very important for me if we wanted to go very quickly to associate a brand with a leading organization like HP and I have to say, I've tested several times, every time we say, okay, we are in partnership with HP Enterprise, we're part of the cloud 28 plus, this ring immediately the bell of the, and you know, the enterprise we're meeting and it's easier for us to move quicker but definitely I think we have a big, big opportunity, large market to address but definitely you know, something interesting to go after. In its early days, it's only been two years now, what do you want from Hewlett Packard Enterprise and what are you guys going to deliver? Let's talk roadmap a little bit, first from the partner slash customer, what are you driving HP and Xavier to deliver? For me, there will be three axes in terms of development. The first one in terms of value proposition, we want to be able over the next 12, 18 months to be able to offer to the market a full set of proposition. As mentioned earlier by Xavier in terms of public, private, hybrid, cloud and moving to different solution, we're talking about security and also we're moving into more vertical market approach, we're talking about IoT where we'll be also some direction. This is the first axis. Second one, it's in terms of countries, we're not going to launch our platform in every single, as I said earlier, we need to do it country by country, we're starting with Russia, Ukraine, Pakistan will come behind Algeria, very quickly over the next 12 months we're going to launch one by one these different countries. And the last element for us which is also very key is market, you know, segment. We are organized as I said by market segment. So small, medium enterprise, large-scale account, multinational corporation and government and each of the same have different requirement and we need to customize our approach. And this is where working with HP and Omoko, we want to have a very customized by market segment from highly customized to other shell that proposition. But for me, this would be the three key access in terms of development working with HP Enterprise. And Xavier, how does that align with your roadmap? Well, you know, it's fully aligned in the sense that, first of all, we are expanding a lot the value prop of Cloud Enterprise with ISV, software vendors. And the problems of Telcos and service providers moving to the cloud, that's correct. There is ICT branding and there we can help. But this is the content because, you know, one day or another they will face what the others have been facing even in these countries, meaning yes is not enough. So if you have a portfolio of applications verticals, horizontal applications that they can use to continue to satisfy the demand of the market. So it will be great for them and we are investing a lot in this area. The other thing is today, I believe that we have now reached a maturity on digital marketing with Cloud 28 Plus, which is impressive. We had a big event yesterday. I will not give to you the number of impression we had only in four hours. It has been massive. If we take that, we put this at the disposal of this partner in every single country, we will speed them on the market. So these are the two big elements. The third element is what I said about these platform-connected solutions. Because the more we go, the more we see that our outside-in approach with Cloud 28 Plus, thinking customers first is excellent, we need to continue on that. But as you were mentioning, the move to the edge, we see more and more solutions for energy, for manufacturing, oil and gas, environment that will need pure hybrid because you cannot put everything into a cloud. And where we are lucky with Veron is that they have the network. So you can imagine they have their big cloud in a country, but they could deploy also some private cloud very, very quickly in specific area within an oil and gas land or I don't know where, in energy, mining. Well, you have not that. And you cannot, because of latency issues, you cannot go directly to the cloud, but you need to handle at the edge, send back to the cloud for analytics, for AI and so on. And this will be at the disposal for them. And I believe the combination of the two for that will be for the benefit of the customer. So this is my opinion. I completely agree. I think today our approach in terms of the partnership, as I said, I think when we're going to deal with very large organization, it's going to be very infrastructure type discussion driven, but when we're going to go down, it's purely, definitely services, content. I want to be able to address, for example, the marketing department, how we can help them to understand the behavior of a consumer by using our data, big data, analytics in terms of delivery for an organization, using fleet management, into manufacturing, using more IoT. But when you look in these different solutions, what is below is a type infrastructure, is to have a cloud infrastructure where we can rely on a strong partnership of bringing this solution and offering to our customer, definitely a very cost effective, but also agile. Very able to move with the market demand in a very vertical way, but definitely this is a way we want to work together. Excellent, all right, we have to leave it there, gentlemen, cloud is exploding. Cloud is going to be local. We've talked about this a lot, hybrid IT, intelligence edge with a local flavor. Gentlemen, thanks very much for coming. Thank you very much. Congratulations for all the success. Thank you. All right, keep it right there, we'll be back with our next guest. This is theCUBE, we're live from HPE Discover Madrid 2017. We're right back.