 Welcome back to Las Vegas, everybody. This is Dave Vellante with Rob Strecce, and we're here at day three, HPE Discover 2023. Big party last night. John Fogarty was rocking the house. But you know, you look around, there's actually people here today. They showed up for day three in the getaway day. Alexia Clements is here. She's the vice president of worldwide sales and go-to-market lead for HPE GreenLake Cloud Services, the commercial business at HPE. It's kind of exciting times right now. And Gwen Bork is here, the assistant vice president in information technology services at Saskatchewan Polytechnic. Ladies, welcome to theCUBE. Good to see you. Thank you. Thanks so much for having us. Yeah, so did you guys make it out last night? Did you go to the conference or? Well, I went to the conference and I went to the concert. Yeah, he was great. I thought he was great, too. Yeah. Put me in coach. I was really excited. So, Gwen, what's your story at Saskatchewan? Saskatchewan, I can say Saskatchewan, right? Okay, yeah. But you've got a really interesting background. Military, right? You were an educator. Now you're an IT, right? Tell us about that. Yeah, so I am in the military. I've been there since 1992. So it's been a really interesting journey with the military and SaskPolytech. I've not actually taught before, but what I have done is work in our IT division and I've done many different jobs there. So now I'm currently the Associate Vice President at SaskPolytech. So, yeah. Tell us more about the institution. What's the focus and what do you know about it? Well, so we are a post-secondary institution and we offer trades training. We have diploma degree and also master's programs at SaskPolytech. And what we really do is we give that sort of just-in-time training for our students. We work with industry partners, so we understand the training that is required and we get them out into the workforce as quickly as possible. So we're a huge catalyst for economic growth and making sure that Saskatchewan can continue to grow. Very cool. So, Alexia, you picked the right spot. I think you skated to the puck, as they say. What's happening in your world? What's hot? What's hot? It's all about HPE GreenLake is hot, but I would say really it's about, I'm pretty excited about our strategy and all the announcements that we made today. So I think HPE's, the strategy spot-on we're really aligning to the three big megatrends going on in the industry around Edge, Hybrid, Cloud and AI. And we're seeing some exciting announcements this week. So I feel like I'm in the right spot right now. So there's some exciting things happening, especially with HPE GreenLake. So, Grant, if we take those megatrends, Edge, Hybrid, Cloud and AI, are you one of those, all of those? Tell us where you're at on those various- Absolutely, Hybrid, Cloud and AI. That is very big on my radar right now. We need that. You know, at SAS Poly, we were actually with the pandemic and we had a cyber incident a while ago. Those have huge value to us in our organization. So, yes. Can you tell us more about that? I mean, so what can you share about the cyber incident and how does Hybrid help? What I can't share about the cyber incident, it was pretty scary times and I don't know how many folks have really gone through something like that, but just for lessons learned and just to give everybody some background, we found out, you know, I will never forget the day. I was joined into a Zoom room with a bunch of my staff on there and they were showing me every single virtual machine was turning red one by one. So what we did is we turned everything off. Found out that we had a cyber incident indeed and not only did obviously all of our services were hit, but our backups were as well. So we lost all the indexing on our backups. We still had backups, but it took a long time to find the data. So long and short of it, we lost everything. All we had left was Zoom. So now, from that incident, you're looking at Hybrid Cloud, it sounds like, and that's really one of the approaches that you're taking and I would assume partnering with HPE on that. Absolutely. We have really focused on that resilience aspect and making sure that we have redundant systems, highly available systems and making sure that our services, we can have them up and running if there's anything like that ever again. And it's not just cyber incidents. I mean, there's other things that could potentially happen, but we are really focused on our DR plans and our BCP plans right now. And it's hard, right? Because you don't want an incident like that to ever happen to anyone, but I think it's like, she's a great example. The Saskapali is a great example. Like, hey, everybody's got to be thinking about this and being prepared and we've got some great solutions to help customers when they're faced with those incidents. Which ones are you deploying or where are you at in your journey to being, I guess, more resilient would be the way to put it? So right now we are working to get a lot of our systems onto GreenLake. I'm very hyper focused on those DR plans and making sure that we have highly available systems. So what I will talk about, for example, is our virtual desktop infrastructure. So that system actually is our student labs. So when student labs go down, I mean, our folks aren't learning and we really want to provide that experience for students that, well, modern for one, but make sure that they have access to their labs all the time. So currently right now it is on a system that we are moving over. It started failing. Unfortunately, the vendor couldn't figure out what the issue was, but we've made a backup plan, plan B, DR plan, with the HPE GreenLake. So we're ready to go when it fails again. And we've had huge success with that. Yeah, I think it's interesting you went down and I used to work for a Canadian company, Manulife Financial, and I actually ran DR in the North America for them for a little bit of time. And I think exactly what you're saying, you have to really plan for the inevitable and really look at how you're going to have failures. And is that where GreenLake is helping you? Are they really helping you have the assets deployed, pre-deployed, and where you can go and leverage and kind of move up into that? 100%, and the thing is in the past, when I would buy capital, it would sit and it would not be used. And we would use it when we needed it. We had to make estimates to make sure that we had everything available, but with GreenLake, it's just in time. So I'm not paying for the equipment to be sitting there, but yes. I think there's a couple aspects of that. Decades ago, a friend of mine named Fred Moore, who's retired now, but he was a backup guru, said backup is one thing, recovery is everything. And this is where you need, you guys talk about, and others do too, hybrid by design. Exactly. You have to have a system that is capable of recovering, not just sort of throwing stuff somewhere and say, oh, I backed it up. You've got to be able to recover quickly and accurately. So that's a critical piece of it. And then to your other point, Gwen, to be able to do so without having to throw a bunch of infrastructure that sits around doing nothing is key because that money can be spent elsewhere on innovation, so that's two great points that you just made. What about AI? Where does that fit? You guys are probably teaching it, I'm sure, but how are you consuming it? You know, we are teaching it. The thing with AI and what I love is all of the predictable analytics, and when we see workloads that are starting to fail, they just automatically move. So we've got that automation orchestration starting. You know, we are new, but it's working well. So again, the services are totally available to students. You know, you just said something, I just want to reiterate, having a landing zone after a cyber incident, we didn't have that. And so this is another place where HPE GreenLake is very, very important, and that's why we've been working on those ER plans and our ERP and BDI right now, and there's more to come. Yeah, architecture matters, and the business impact when you have that type of architecture, sometimes initially you might get pushed back from finance, it says, well, you know, can't you cut here, cut there, and then when an incident like that happens, then all of a sudden everybody's on board. You just less than learn from me, director of IT operations at that time. But what we are seeing with our customers, with HPE GreenLake customers, is we start with maybe the first workload being a VDI solution or a backup and recovery solution, and then you're having the foundation there, and it's easy to drive that expansion based on your needs, so the next workload, and being able to move quickly to have that pre-provisioning or being able to move fast to meet your business requirement. So I want to double down on that, because what you just said, Alexi, is really important. When people talk about, you hear this bromide all the time, well, you got to design insecurity, you got to design in data protection, but that's what you mean. I mean, this is an example. You start with that foundation, and it's there, and you build on top of that, as opposed to you put it in the whole way, you have an idea for an app, you get a server, you spin up a database, whatever, you get these stuff working, and they say, oh, we got to back this up, and you sort of bolt it on. And that doesn't work, or you think about a DR strategy after the fact. And then when you do that, it oftentimes doesn't serve your business needs. And what we're seeing is that, part of the, with HP GreenLake, is we're meeting with our customers to really understand what's next for them. What's the next workload? What's going on in their business? So for her, as an IT leader, she's meeting with her different constituents and learning and understanding, what's the next thing that they're trying to do to try to achieve the business outcomes that they need to do? And so we're meeting with them, we're understanding what their plans are, so that we're helping them in preparing those next solutions to grow. So what is next? Well, we have a solution architect team that is working on that, but our strat plan, in our particular division, we're focusing on all of our top 10 type items within the Institute. Right now, we're actually working through our ERP system, which is Banner, and we should have that finalized soon. I can tell you that we were looking at a couple different options, so we had two quotes. One quote is with the current vendor that houses, it's in a different data center right now. I said, if I wanted this back up in two days, how much would that cost me? $200,000. And then I said, okay, well let's look at GreenLake now, it's a quarter of the price. So we're going to continue working through those top 10 services. I mean, it takes time, it takes money, but in higher ed, obviously we don't have a ton of money, not like healthcare or anything like that, but that is why GreenLake is so important to us. Well, you're able to align your consumption with the value to the organization. And even if over the long term, you might perhaps spend more if it's driving value to the organization, it's easier to justify, it drives student satisfaction, employee satisfaction, it just makes for a better organization that's more productive and more efficient. Yeah, it's about the experience. And then the other key value prop is, you're not over provisioning. So we're metering and monitoring and understanding, what do you need now? What's coming down for the future and being able to prepare and making sure that we're not, as she said, leaving idle equipment there that's not being utilized. Well, let's say, Gwen, thanks so much for coming to theCUBE and sharing your story. It was great to see you guys. Thanks so much for having us. Thank you. Yeah, it was so nice to be here. You're welcome. All right, Dave Vellante for Rob Stretch A. In a moment, we'll come back and we're going to talk about open source. It's a topic, a hot topic. We haven't talked a ton about open source this week. And so we're going to dig into it with SUSE and HPE. Keep it right there. You're watching theCUBE, HPE Discover 2023.