 Welcome back to the sales community executive event here, Randy Seidl's abode in Massachusetts. Awesome event, about 40 big time execs. One's here with me, Patrick Osborne, Senior Vice President for NGM of the Cloud Data Infrastructure Group at HPE Storage. Recent promotion, congratulations. Thank you very much. Great to have you back on theCUBE. This is new, Patrick. We've never had a cube like this before. I love it, I love it. Cube on the road. But I want to start with Tech Tackles Cancer. It's a great cause, helps young people with cancer. It's an event that Chris Lynch kind of heads, right? And it's basically live karaoke, but it's misleading because this is a live band. You're singing this year. Absolutely. Okay, and you play in the sax. Yes, sir. So can you tell us what you're singing or is that kind of a secret? Well, it's kind of a secret. It's definitely in the funk genre. So we're going to get funky. As you know, I played saxophone my entire life. I got a couple of bands. So I figured if I can help out for a great cause, actually a couple of folks got me into this Chris Sellen. George Hope's done it before, right? So a long lineage of fantastic performers. I'm really looking forward to it. It's a great cause. You know who was really good last year? I was impressed with Du Plessis. Oh, excellent. Yeah, Du Plessis was really good. And there were so many just excellent performers and the bands were fantastic. Now I know you and I were in New Orleans. I think I want to say a Veeam event one year in New Orleans. We went to the Frenchman part of this and not the French Quarter. That's where all the tourists go. You took me to the Frenchman. You brought your sax. And then you were up playing with the band. This man is good. So Tech Tackles Cancer is a great cause. Just Google Tech Tackles Cancer, make a donation. Okay, so tell me about the new role. I mean, it's kind of new, but you've been doing this for a while, but what's the focus? Yeah, so the role and the team are fantastic. We have a huge opportunity in front of us with data. So we've created this new group at HPE called the Hybrid Cloud Group, led up by one of our favorite folks in the industry, Fidel Maruso. And it brings together a couple of different themes. We've got data and storage management. We have what we're doing around private cloud, some of our hybrid SaaS offerings, including some of the data services like Zerto and Ops Ramps and really fantastic stuff for our customers. And then the green light cloud platform, right? And so for us, the data is sort of the thread and the key piece that runs through all four of those business units. And we help customers bring those workloads, automate those workloads around the data and it's a great business. Now we were talking earlier, Esmeral is not part of that group, but you partner with the Esmeral team, right? Explain how that works. Yeah, so we have a lot of customers out here doing a couple of things, right? So number one, they are modernizing the data center around automation. That's one of the reasons why we made the Ops Ramp acquisition that's scaling. One of the reasons why we're bringing that cloud operational experience with actually the green light cloud platform, not just the financial consumption portion of it, but actually the cloud experience. And then one of the areas that we've seen a lot of growth is for analytics, streaming data analytics, and now some of the great things that people are doing around gen AI on-prem, right? And so when we have something like Esmeral and the data fabric and all the things we do around storage and data management, it's definitely one of those unique times in the industry where people are carving off quite a bit of budget, right? Big strategic projects around AI and analytics. Yeah, we're definitely seeing in the spending data. I mean, the top line, as you know, it's not growing. People aren't saying, oh yeah, that's good times again. It's not like during the pandemic, it was just sort of throwing money at tech with interest rates up and earnings concerns or whatever, geopolitical concerns. The macro is not growing. So people are taking sort of from one bucket, putting it to AI. That's what our data shows anyway. So if you're in a strong position in AI, that's goodness. Number one, number two is a lot of customers are saying, look, I'm worried about IP leakage. I want to train my own data sets. I definitely want something that's more private, you know, or hybrid potentially, do some dev in the public cloud. But I want that on-prem, are you seeing that? Absolutely, in spades across multiple customer segments. So I have the pleasure of being an exact sponsor for some of our largest customers, some of them in the insurance vertical, some of them in the healthcare vertical, some of them are who are MSPs and CSPs are building their own services, and they all have the same concern. So next three to five years, I understand that it's easy to start with the tool chains in the cloud, right? But really what they have an issue with is data provenance and data gravity, right? So being able to do those large language models, the tuning, the inference on-prem where they already have that data, they're re-architecting their data lakes, they're looking for new solutions around unstructured data. So we have our GreenLake for file, GreenLake for object storage. And so a lot of customers are coming to us asking how they can, how we can solve that problem. And then they apply the workloads to the data. Are customers' data estates, if you will, in good enough shape for AI or are they having to spend a lot of time sort of fixing data before they can really take advantage of AI? There's a little bit of both. I think for us, we're pretty much focused on the storage and the data management and the automation plane. So a lot of things that you're talking about, which is data efficacy, some of the pipeline data, that happens a little bit farther upstream in the application process, but the workloads are certainly getting employed on-prem. So we have a ton of customers that do sort of Mode 1 application development, VMware, your sort of standard database as a service. But now we're seeing is folks wanting resilient servers, networking, storage, infrastructure, automation for these Mode 2 workloads, that all running these really fantastic AI workloads, some of the things around streaming data analytics. And so big opportunity. Seeing analytics really pick up lately. We saw it during the pandemic. We see it, obviously AI is hot, security is hot. The analytics is right up there in terms of priorities. What's driving that? So I think a lot of efficiency, I can tell you that we use analytics on a daily basis in our products, right? And so for us to provide the next generation, the best in class product experience, the best customer success and support experience, the best sort of efficiency around, hey listen, we're going to manage all this infrastructure for you and you can worry about your data and how that's going to be applied to your business. We do that through AI ops, right? We do that through machine learning, even just simple things like how can we provide very intelligent chat experiences for our customers? So for us, we're applying analytics to our own products in new and different ways for our customers just to have a better experience. So you guys have a big year, but you made a bunch of storage announcements. In April, we were down there for storage day. HP Discover was the best discover I'd ever been to. You guys, one of the few companies, if not the only company that announced LLMs as a service as part of GreenLake, so excited about that. And you've got Discover in Barcelona, Cube's going to be there, Rob Streche's going to be there with Rebecca Knight. Same week as Reinvent, so I would much rather be in Barcelona than Vegas, but you know, I'll be there with thousands of our customers, so it's going to be exciting. Yeah, and we're going to keep building on what we did in Houston, right? Which is our GreenLake for storage day. We've got some great, people obviously equate HPE with great products, right? So we've got amazing products, amazing platforms. For example, HPE Electra, the fastest growing data management platform we've ever had at HPE, then that continues to work for us. And then as we go into Discover Barcelona, AI is obviously a hot topic, right? We've made some acquisitions in the software space there. We've captured not only just some of the largest super computing and AI opportunities on the planet of the earth, like just enormous, enormous implementations for national labs, research. We also have a ton of customers doing it in the commercial HPC. And then super compute 23s in Denver this year in November, so you guys are going to be there. And then it's really not your wheelhouse, but then we roll into MWC in Barcelona in February. We'll be there, so, it just keeps going, Patrick. Yeah, absolutely, yeah, we have our investor day coming up around a number of pretty exciting announcements there as we go and take a look at what's going to be unfold for HPE and FY24. I'm definitely going to check that out. It's, I think, Thursday. I'll be watching online. All right, so again, Tech Tackles Cancer, go. If you're in the area, definitely go. It's cool venue, the Sinclair. The Sinclair is awesome. Make a donation, go vote for Patrick. I'll be there, brother. Thanks a lot. Thank you very much as always. All right, keep it right there. For more action from sales community, executive event at Randy Seidel's Abode, right back.