 All right, everybody, welcome back to HPE Discover 2023. You're watching theCUBE's continuous coverage. Day three here, wow, last night, John Fogarty was rocking the house. Everybody was having a blast. But we made it here today as did a number of folks you can see behind us. Jason Newton is here. He's the vice president of integrated marketing, events, messaging, HPE. He's got a lot of new responsibility, but a longtime friend of theCUBE. Jason, good to see you again. Thanks for coming on. Hey, it's great to be back. I always enjoy this. It's the last day, but hey, I'll take it. Well, but you and your team make a lot of this happen, and we really appreciate having been here so many years and watching the transformation of HPE. You've got an expanded role. Can you explain that? Yeah, so in addition to kind of driving the messaging across the company, driving our customer advocacy, all that kind of stuff, we added HPE GreenLake marketing to my team, as well as software marketing, services marketing, and industry marketing. Obviously, HPE GreenLake is the future. How we're going to get to that journey to one that Antonio was talking about. And we feel like combining those assets together, putting them more front and center and big activations, like these different events, but also then downstream with what we're doing with the sales team could be really powerful. So that's the idea. And then I'll be partnering with my colleagues across Jim's organization to bring that to life, but also pull through the rest of the core portfolio and everything we do. So it's cool, as you know, because I've known you for years. I'm a product marketing guy, so I get a lot of energy and someone bringing a new problem, like this thing that we launched Tuesday, like we think we have something here, can you make it make sense, right? And that's what we do. And then we create the megaphone. Well, so I want to come back and, because I've watched the transformation, I want to come back to even the logo, okay? So I remember when you guys did that and you got some heat. We call it the element. The element, yes. Okay, the element, beautiful. But you said to at the time, we are going to use this element in a lot of different ways just you watch it. You really have. And it's been a home run. You've got to be really pleased. But you had to be- Shout out to Marissa for three months. Yeah, yeah, shout out to Marissa. In fact, I was just doing some searching on our Cube AI and she popped up and some of the stuff we've done. But seriously, you had to really believe in the research that you did and your convictions. And there are some other fundamental assumptions you made around hybrid, around the unification. The shift from sort of product slash box centric to that unified message. And again, you've probably got a lot of internal heat for that as well as external heat from the product guy. So, but it's now, it's taken some time, which these things always do, but it's now coming together in a way that's coinciding with what I'll call the equilibrium in cloud and sort of extended cloud spend, right? Yeah, I would say the market's definitely moving to the strategy. We firmly believe in the strategy and I think what you're seeing over the last five years is that bed at the edge, people kind of scratched their head and said, okay, but then we invested and we delivered. Then we started talking about cloud and there's a need for hybrid. We identified that need. I said, nah, you're full of it. It's all going to go to the public cloud. Hybrids won. Despite what you put on Twitter the other day, I think that it's clear that hybrids won that battle. Well, but I think that my tweet, I think I would agree with you that I think Antonio is on the right side of history in that little battle. So both times, edge, hybrid, hybrid cloud, need a platform, need common experience. You have to have both. You can't do hybrid without edge connectivity securely. You would have an incomplete hybrid cloud or a cloud by accident he talked about. Once you have those two elements, you can now start to unify the experience but most importantly, unify the data and start to bring the right resources to the data. Another thing they laughed at us at was when we bought SGI and then Cray. And I remember Antonio saying, look, I'm looking at the trend lines. If the data keeps going like this, it doesn't look like it's slowing down. These workloads aren't getting smaller, they're getting bigger. At some point, we're going to need that kind of capability to deal with that complexity of data. And here we are now with entering the AI cloud market. I'll say this, I didn't laugh at the time. I said, nah, okay, that's nice but I didn't predict the serious intersection of the two spaces, the way it's come together. And I'd say, in fact, I got to meet with Jim and your team, the extended team in the analyst sessions. And I think one of the things that was brought up and I'd love to get your view on this is the fact that you're going out and you're talking to people like different personas now like data scientists, for instance. That's got to really change how you do your job and how you bring a bigger tent in with those different data science personas, data personas, LLMs are not a IT thing. How does that work for you guys? Well, yeah, I mean, you look at some of the new assets. Something that I've been really interested in is what we're doing around observability and some of these tools. We talk about AI ops and the more I learn about it, I realize that it changes the conversation, the nature of the conversation. So if I could say, look, Mr. Customer, this is a business customer, I'll come into you. I'll give you a view of all your workloads, what they're running on, maybe have some opportunities that we could create to improve your outcomes of what you're doing there. It becomes a whole different conversation with the customer versus, so now I'm selling the opportunity or I'm selling the problem we solve, I'm not selling the thing anymore. And it's a much more strategic conversation that leads in a lot more directions where if you come into the product, it's usually a yes or no, right? Or maybe, you know, best case. When you come at it from that perspective, with backed by data, all automated, you can put it in front of the customer. Oh, well let me introduce you to this person. Oh, let me introduce you to this person. Oh, yeah, we need to have a conversation about that. It just widens the aperture of the opportunities. And yeah, we're building those new relationships in an event like this is where we get those, you know, those first handshakes and start to build those new relationships. Esmeral being part of your scope is kind of cool. We had those guys on yesterday. And they sort of describe this. Think of Esmeral as our software group. And we remember HPE and HP Split, a software piece was sort of sent over to Micro Focus. It was like, all right, I said at the time, now HPE has an opportunity to re-architect its software strategy. It must do that, was my claim at the time. And you've done that, tuck in acquisitions, some of the major acquisitions. But it's part of a differentiated strategy. It's not just about optionality for customers. You've got that too. But it's also about HPE on HPE. You don't talk about in those terms, but that's something that I would think over time is going to attract more customers and create more stickiness to GreenLake. Yeah, absolutely. I think what we're doing in software is way bigger than just Esmeral. I think Esmeral is an awesome solution in the unified analytics space. A lot of people are leveraging Databricks and Snowflakes and doing some stuff with their data in the public cloud. The opportunity that that team is developing is saying, well, why am I limited to that data? Why can I not unify all the data at scale across all of my different silos, on-prem, Edge, multiple public clouds? What can I then do with that? So that's Esmeral, super powerful. Then you start adding the other acquisitions that we've been, you said, tucking in and adding to it. Most of them have all been software. So then we did packet-derm, we did determined AI. Now we have ops ramp. So we're able now with HB GreenLake to have not only edge conversations and traditional private cloud conversations, but now we're starting to talk about analytics workflows. We're starting to take a look at workloads across the entire environment. So these software acquisitions are really aimed to fulfill Antonio's strategy, Edge, hybrid cloud, AI. And here's the software services to go start the journey. One of the things that Antonio said when we talked to him yesterday, which really came into focus, he goes, we do these acquisitions, it's not just about getting the technology, it's about getting the talent. Because I was asking about M&A versus Organic, and he said, now once you have these people in place, they can now start to develop organic capabilities that stitch them together in a way that's unique for value add for customers. Yeah, I think what's really interesting about the strategy, and I think this goes to the marketing of it, that the fact that it is a software group, and I know Mohan came on board just a little while ago, and has been doing a lot to really bring a lot of that together. Totally overhauled, I mean, it's almost unrecognizable from two years ago. It's amazing, sorry. And I think that the key is also the same group also having the cloud, the private cloud enterprise, and then you start, you have your announcement with private cloud business edition, which unfortunately gets called PCBE. The whole different story from an acronym perspective. I think, where do you see that group going? Because then it seems like you also have an ops ramp, which is off in the CTO office. Does that tie together? 100%. No, it's back to the journey to one that Antonio sees. So we're going to have one portfolio, the HB GreenLake portfolio. We can do custom solutions. We're starting to call that HB GreenLake Flex solutions, and that's the core of our business today. But where it's going is hybrid and cloud solutions delivered as SaaS software or infrastructure as a service. But the key is the platform, right? That's going to be what differentiates. That's what you didn't hear from Dell last month when they were talking about it. They're kind of moving in an area of more customization, more solutioning, more complexity. We have the biggest portfolio. Great, we're going simple and we're going to a platform-powered experience. So all of those things that you see as different teams that have come up to talk to you, they're all either going to manage through or run on that platform. And that's going to be really powerful, especially when the data starts coming in, the insights that's going to create for us to then share with the customer and continue to grow and expand different ways that we can help solve their problems. Well, I'm glad you brought up Dell. You're not afraid to talk about others. It's fine. Customers do it all the time. You very clearly have a more unified message when it comes to as a service. There's no question about it. You're ahead. You got there earlier. You got more that LLMs as a service is something that they didn't announce. But the piece that I wanted to talk about was what we're doing tomorrow. Rob and I are flying back in the red eye. I do a weekly series called Breaking Analysis. Andy Turai is coming in. We just did last week was Uber. We had Uber on it. It was amazing. It's gone viral. It's still going crazy. And we're going to focus on your LLM as a service announcement and really unpack that. And essentially ask the question, is it a viable and differentiable strategy and what's the impact for customers going forward? So we really want to dig into it, understand, help people understand exactly what it is. Because it's not like you're serving up in super computing infrastructure. That's not the play. It's right. That's not the play. And so I'm interested. You got this whenever you got it a month ago, whenever and said, here, how do we communicate this at Discover? And you had this, it's like that scene in Apollo 13. Okay, make this oxygen thing work. The first thing I did as I went to the person that built it. So Nick Dubay. And he's also the guy behind and his team that delivered frontier. And I said, explain this to me and the strategy and the what's and why's of why we're unique. And what he really focused in on was that there's general purpose clouds and cloud architectures. And that's how all clouds run. And the goal is to maximize the use of capacity. So lots and lots of nodes with running lots and lots of different workloads, maximizing utilization and that's the economic model. That's where the margins come from there. AI, large language models, especially the next generation, the big stuff is a totally different workload and a totally different architecture. Whereas over here, three nines of availability is fine and general purpose cloud. What we're talking about here is, I think Antonia called it an AI native architecture. One workload across a whole lot of different nodes that all have to be running at multiple nines of availability. Simultaneously, if any of those fail, that job ends in a failure. You have to restart it. Now we're talking hundreds, thousands in some cases, tens of thousands of GPUs failing, restart failing. How many resources, how much money, how much power are we wasting? So the special sauce is because we have the expertise of running those things in that type of environment, we can make those models run very successfully. So very high completion rates all the way through, very accurate, very efficient. And the customer through the service doesn't have to know how to do that because I promise you, there's not many people in the world that know how to do that, right? That's the value of this new offering is that we've done this for the biggest environments in the world. And at the same time, we've been working with HB GreenLake as a new type of experience to simplify all the hard stuff. You put those two together and you get something like HB GreenLake for LLMs. I'm super excited to talk about that tomorrow, Rob. We're going to unpack that and really dig into it. Jason, thanks so much for having us here. Thanks for coming back on theCUBE. It was a pleasure. Good luck in the new role. Yeah, thank you. All right, okay, keep it right there. We're going to rerun the interview from Antonio Neary yesterday where he basically told us, I am not putting my craze in the public cloud. So that's the unique advantage that Jason just talked about. And we got a little clip of Norm Follett in the background messing up the sound last night with John Fogarty. Norm Follett. Norm Follett. You don't want to miss that. All right, keep it right there. theCUBE from HPE Discover 2023, right back.