 Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE. Covering Discover 2016 Las Vegas. Brought to you by Hewlett Packard Enterprise. Now, here are your hosts, John Furrier and Dave Vellante. Hey, welcome back everyone. We are here live inside theCUBE at HPE Discover. This is SiliconANGLE Media's flagship program. We go out to the events and extract the signals from noise. I'm John Furrier, my co-host Dave Vellante. Our next guest is Susan Blocker who's the global VP for Hewlett Packard Enterprise's servers, server marketing, welcome to theCUBE. Welcome back. Thank you so much, appreciate it. So we just heard from Scott Welles, Senior Vice President of the Frontlines. Really the stovepipe mentality of the old IT environment is shifting to a composable cloud-like, agile-like, and that's because best of breed shifting to converged and composable software. That's right. So this is changing the game on value proposition. Absolutely. Take a minute and share with the folks before we start on what is the server portfolio look like. It used to be back in these rack and stack servers, boxes, speeds and feeds, not anymore. You're dating yourself. So I know I am. They're just box pushers. So not a box pushing market anymore. It's the right job, right tool for the right job, right compute. Click update on, give us an update on the servers. How they're all laying out. You hit the nail on the head. I think our customers are telling us, one size does not fit all. And so it's kind of a double-edged sword in this perspective. HPE has a breath of the portfolio to really address whether you need specialized workload-optimized compute we've got you covered. But we've also got strong enterprise-standard architecture platforms like Rack and Blade, et cetera. We're innovating around transformational technology like HPE synergy and composable infrastructure. And honestly, even for simple workloads like VM virtualization with VMware or whatever, we are bringing to market now hyper-converged systems that make deploying virtual machines incredibly fast and easy. So with all that breath comes a little bit of the downside of that double-edged sword, which is I've got a nail, I've got a hammer, so everything looks like a nail. Well, in our case, we've got the breath of the portfolio. We have to help our customers really understand which compute is right for them. And so we've got some really structured ways of helping customers ask the right questions so that we can guide them to the right compute, whether that be specialized or general-purpose flexible. So when you guys look at the marketplace and your customers, they want different tools, the right job or no one-size-fits-all, now with IoT in the horizon, you're seeing different outcome-based architectures. So the big challenge with solution architects today is, okay, I got some cloud. Everyone knows that. I'm on-prem or I have some private cloud or whatever, but I have to do different things. I'm driven by the workloads. How do you make the hardware or platform agile enough to be adaptive to the workloads? Yeah, and honestly, our customers' consumption models are changing, I mean, right to your point. It used to be all about data center compute, and obviously that's HPE strength. So we have a great breadth and depth of portfolio in data center compute, but now as customers are looking at cloud, both on-premise and off-premise, public cloud, HPE is innovating to bring compute platforms to service providers so that we can help our customers have a seamless transition between on-premise, private, and public cloud. And we're also innovating completely outside of the data center with IoT, Internet of Things, really focused on industrial Internet of Things like manufacturing, aerospace, automotive industries, and helping them extract analytics and insight without ever having to bring that data back into the data center. And that's- So not moving the data? Not moving the data. So imagine you, you know, where the data originates, back out there at the devices of the things, we can actually aggregate that data, analyze it right then, and there create real-time insight before you even have to move anything back into the data center. So give us a picture of the business. Business is pretty good. You know, we see you watch HPE's results. There's growth, converged infrastructure is exploding. Yes. This portfolio strategy is working. Give us the business update. From a business perspective, look, demand for compute is growing. What's shifting is what our customers are using that compute for. So like I said, we're seeing more and more of a high growth in the service provider market. So this is where they're looking not for so much the high-value compute capabilities, but high-scale compute capabilities. They want open architecture, open stack, very scalable, and we bring them that through our cloud line portfolio. In the enterprise space with our enterprise customers, that's where our sweet spot is really our ProLion platform, HPE synergy, composable infrastructure, our blades platform, and for workload optimized, things like high-performance computing, HPE Apollo really optimized, really targeted, high-density, high-scale HPEC. So the R&D pipeline of, I don't know, last several years, I didn't even say last five years, starting to really hit and kick in on all strides and then combine that with the whole big data theme. That's this whole new workload. Yeah. Yeah, we had data warehouse before, that's nice data, but it's different now, right? It is really different now. I mean, I think that, you know, we knew all along that cloud and big data security and mobility, we're going to be really the transformational topics for our customers and spot on, as we look at cloud computing and big data, that's really where we're seeing, you know, accelerated growth from a compute perspective. Susan, can you talk about the role of the channel in all this transformation? Yeah, absolutely. The sort of workload portfolios. Critical, John was talking earlier about how we're moving from box seller to solution provider. What does that mean for HP? How have you navigated through that? Yeah, so that's a great question. And in fact, HPE just announced that we are divesting and selling our enterprise services business. So actually, the role of the channel is even more critical now, because now we're looking at, you know, the system integrators and how do we increase the investment in helping bring value added services from the system integrators to the technology that we bring to the market. We're reaching into the small and medium business with things like Proline Easy Connect. And I know that you guys talked about that with McLeod Glass at some point. So we need the channel to help us really reach into these spaces, but we need the channel to be enabled around some of these high value workload areas, like high performance computing, object storage, hybrid cloud. These are hot topics and our resellers and channel partners have to bring that value. And so when we talk about generically solutions, right? So you just mentioned a few sort of workload oriented as well, SAP specialists, Oracle specialists, the VMware specialists that you're finding pockets there as well. Yeah, absolutely. I mean, when you look at it from a database workloads perspective, there's the big trifecta, which is SAP HANA, Oracle and Microsoft SQL. A lot of our customers are asking for specialized optimized compute specifically for those platforms. So high performance per dollar impact on those platforms. So we've got things like our integrity, mission critical platforms, Superdome X, some of our converge systems, HC380, which is our VM vending machine kind of converge system. So all of that is really helping our customers to exploit the value of Oracle, SAP HANA and Microsoft SQL. So most of your businesses is through the channel, right? We know that. But is your HPE Salesforce sort of organized by solution as well? We have technical sales expertise around each of these solution and workload areas. That aligns. And then they partner with the channel so that we can actually work the deals with the channel partners and bring in the technical expertise that's maybe required, especially for the first few times in a new solution area. And then, you know, let the partners go and run them on their own. So I got to ask you the question that we always talk about is density. Yeah, data center, cloud solves that problem. But now with IoT, I'm about moving the data center to the edge you said so you were referring. So I got to ask you, HPEs always had good compute. Yes. So great servers, right? But that's changing. Yes. Always had a core competency in like measurement software systems management. And also packaging. Yes. How do those three things come together because the trend is to make a smaller server. That's right. And the edge needs a smaller server. Yeah. And let me just say it slightly differently. I wouldn't say a smaller server. I would say portability of a compute solution, right? So that you can put it anywhere. You can hang it on a wall. You can drop it onto an oil rig in the middle of the ocean. You can, you know, put it on a machine floor, places you would never have put compute before, right? And in order to do that, it's got to be rugged, environmentally hardened. It's got to have a form factor that fits, you know, that need. And so one of the interesting things that we're doing is we're repurposing our moonshot microservers to leverage that technology in our new Internet of Things edge line server platform, which is really that edge computing capability in a form factor that's rugged, small, portable and able to go anywhere. It's interesting. Dave and I talked about the iPhone, how it started with Steve Jobs and it was essentially a computer that can make phone calls. Yeah. Whereas everyone else made phones that could do text messaging and then email. Yeah. If you think about it, what's disruptive is if you have a data center that happened to be an IoT device. Right. So the trend that we see is our data centers on the oil rig. That's right. And so how small can it go? Yeah. So that's the question. How small can it go? How small can a data center truly be in theory if you think that a computer can become a phone. Yes. Versus a phone being a computer. That's right. So then you can flip it around and say, the edge device is a data center. That's right. That happens to run an application. That is right. And the cool thing about your phone is that, you know, actually it's an IoT device. It measures, you know, orientation. It knows when you turn it on its side, it can do, you know, it's got GPS technology. So it has a lot of data. Well, imagine if you're doing on an oil rig, seismic analysis of the ocean floor. And today you've got a, you know, helicopter, tape loads worth of data up and out to your data center. And, you know, three weeks later, you'll know what you actually were looking at down there and then you can make a decision. Well, imagine if you can put that compute technology right out there where you're collecting that data and make real-time instantaneous decisions about where you want to drill or what you need to do and how you need to do it. And that's the power of IoT and edge computing. So it's a new category, Jay. Bring your own data center to work. Bring your own data center. That's right. So that really is a trend, though. That's, you are seeing that. And that's a strategy you guys see with the servers. It's three horizons. And I'll tell you what they are. We have to continue being the best provider of innovative data center solutions bar none. That's number one. Number two is we've got to help our customers transition to cloud, on-premise and public. Number three is the internet of things. Those are the three horizons that all of our customers are talking to us about in one way, shape, or form. And one is table stakes. Table stakes. I mean, you have to be best-of-breed provider of technology. And that's where we've been best-of-breed. But we can't stop there because the market is moving. So the thing that I'll bring up is that the edge is not always pleasant. It's, you know, it's, could be a hostile environment. It's hostile. So you have a threat, surface area attacks, oil rig obviously is going to be the rugged version of the server. But in general, any edge device is a potential security threat. So for a potential hostile, potential energy for hostility is high. That's right. How do you view that? Well, look, security is going to be a critical, and security and management. Because imagine now you get all this compute out there on the edge. How do you manage all that, right? So really, that's the beauty of having the in-depth expertise in the data center technology because we're bringing that security capability and that manageability into these IoT edge line compute solutions and really giving that robust security and manageability right out to the edge. Well, Nerdblurred out there is just commenting that he disagrees with my smartphone analogy. I will disagree with you with that. We'll take that debate on Twitter. He says, there were smartphones before the iPhone had a next-tell smartphone with windows. Oh, boy, yeah. Oh, I forgot. Oh, of course, of course. Push to talk, that was still a thing. Happy to debate that. It ran, you know, what? Phone.com, you know, web browser, I think was it? You really are dating yourself. You should just say, I'm too young to remember that. I'm too old. I'm Irish. I remember all the bad technology. Susan, thank you for coming on. It was a pleasure. I really appreciate it, guys. Thanks so much. We are live. The keynote's coming up next. Meg Whitman and the execs at HP are going to trot out the vision, the update. Here from Meg Whitman, I'm John Furrier with Dave Olotha here on theCUBE, extracting the signal from the noise. We'll be right back after the keynote. So continue watching. You watching theCUBE. Go to CrowdChat.net, HPE Discover for the conversation. We'll be on there for the keynote. We'll see you after the keynote.