 TheCube presents HPE Discover 2022, brought to you by HPE. Hey everyone, welcome to Las Vegas. It's theCUBE live on the show floor at HPE Discover 2022. The first in-person discover in three years. There are about 8,000 people here. The keynote was standing room only. Lisa Martin here, I got a powerhouse group joining me for this keynote analysis. Dave Vellante joins us. Keith Townsend, John Furrier. Guys, a lot of news. It's all about HPE GreenLake. What were some of the things, Dave, that stuck out to you? Well, I'll tell you right now, I got to just quote Antonio Neary. Said, four years ago, I declared that the enterprise of the future would be edge-centric, cloud-enabled and data-driven. As a result, we launched HPE GreenLake. It kind of declared victory. Now, I would say that what they're talking about and what they announced, I would consider table stakes. You know, I wish it started in 2014. I wish Antonio took over in 2015 instead of 2018. But I have to give credit. He's brought a focus and I think he's amped it up, John. I mean, he's really prioritizing the as-of-service. They're going all in. They're burning the boats. And it's good. They got a lot of work to do. They got a lot of work to do. Three years ago, John, Antonio stood on this very stage saying, by 2022, we're going to be delivering our entire portfolio as a service. Here we are with GreenLake. I want to get your thoughts on Keith's as well. Well, first of all, I think that the crowded house was a sign of people wanting to come back together. So it's, to me, that was the first good news I saw, which was the HPE community, their customer base, they're all here. They're glad to be back in person. It shows that they had their customer base. It's resonating their value proposition of annual recurring revenue as a service, plus the contract values with GreenLake are up. So this resonance with the customers, Dave, on that new operating model. That's a great check the box there. I would say that I don't think HPE's as far along as Antonio had hoped he'd be. The pandemic was a setback, but GreenLake is a real shining star. It's producing some green, if you will, money for them in terms of contracts. But they've still got a lot more work to do because they're in a really interesting zone, Dave, because edge to cloud, although relevant and accurate where the shift is going, are they really there with the goods? And to me, I'm looking forward to seeing this discover if they have it or not. Certainly the messaging's good, but we're going to unpeel that onion back and look at it. But Keith, they're on the curve, right? At least they're on the cloud curve. They're absolutely on the curve. They have APIs. They have consistent developer experience. They announced the developer portal. They're developer centric. You can now consume your three-part storage array services via a Terraform provider. They speak the language of cloud practitioners. You might struggle a little bit. If I'm a small startup, why would I look towards HPE? They kind of answered that a little bit. They had Evil Genius as a customer. One stage, not a huge organization. A lot of the pushback they've been given is that if I made startup, I can simply go to an AWS portal, launch a free trial service and run it. HPE kind of buried the lead. They now have at least a pre-announce, the capability to trial GreenLake. So they're moving in the right direction, but it's table state. Well, here's the dynamic data that's going on. This is something that we've been covering HPE for now 11 years at theCUBE. And look at Amazon's success. And look at where Amazon's struggling, if you can say that. They're having crossed over to the enterprise, because the enterprises are now just getting up to speed. You're seeing the rise of lack of talent. IT's certainly changing. Cyber security, you can't find talent. Kubernetes, good luck with that. Try to find someone. So you're seeing the enterprise aren't really geared up or staffed up for doing what I call high-end cloud. So the rise of managed services is what we're seeing out there right now. You want Kubernetes clusters, there's a great set of managed services. You want other services. So that's the tail sign that the enterprises, HPE's customers are now walking before they can run. They're crawling, now they're walking. So they have time to get into Amazon lane, in my opinion. Well, you think about the hallmarks of cloud. Obviously there's as a service, there's consumption-based pricing. There's a developer friendliness. There's ecosystem, which is really, really important. I think today a lot of the ecosystem is partners, resellers and managed service providers. And to your point, Keith, table stakes are things like single sign-on, being able to have a console, being able to do it from a URL. To your point about startups is really interesting because that's one of the other hallmarks of cloud is you attract startups. And Lisa, we were at the Snowflake Summit and I asked the same question. Can Snowflake attract startups with their own super cloud? And what you saw was ecosystem partners developing in the Snowflake cloud and monetizing. And that's something that we're waiting to see here. And I think that, you know, there are ways away. You're suggesting that HPE is going to attract startups? Well, I think that's a sign if they can do that, that's a sign. And right now, I mean, you heard the example that Keith gave, but not many. Yeah, I'm hoping that HPE, I don't think HPE is going to ever attract startups. But I think the opportunity GreenLake affords the ecosystem is build clouds or purpose-driven clouds around GreenLake. Whether it's the agreement with Equinix or all the Colos and semi-clouds, I think GreenLake gets most small CSPs, a leg up or 80% of the way there where they can add that 20% of the IP and build services around GreenLake. And then that can attract the startup. Or entrepreneurs. So the big question is, okay, where are these developers going to come from? They could come from incumbents inside of companies. You know, the DevOps crowd from the enterprise, the really ops dev crowd, right? Don't you see that as a sort of a form of innovation startup, even though it's not a true startup? Yeah, even though it's not, so it's making faces over there. Look, if they can't do that. Their focus is not startups. I agree with Keith on this one. They have to take care of business. Home Depot, they have big customers, and they have a lot of SMBs as well. They've got a great channel. HPE's got amazing infrastructure and client action going on. They got to get the operating model right. Job one, as a service, ARR, and then contract value and nail that with GreenLake. Who's their ideal customer profile? Their ideal is their install base. Look at Microsoft, they were 365. They were going down, their stock price was 26 at one point. Go to the, they went to the cloud, 365, moved everything to the cloud and look at the success they're having. HPE has the same kind of install base. They got to bring them along. They got to get the operating model right. And the developers that they're targeting are the ones inside the company and or manage services that they're going to go to the ecosystem for. That's where the cloud native comes in. That's where everything kind of comes together. So to me, I'm bullish on the operating model, but I'm skeptical that HPE can get that cloud native developer. I haven't seen it yet. I'm looking for it. We're going to look for it here. A key to that is going to be consistently. The one of the things I'm looking for on the tech side, I hate to compare what HPE is doing to what VMware did with VCloud air years ago, but VCloud air on the outside looked wonderful. Yes, it did. Once you try to use it, it was just flaky underneath. And that's the part I'm looking to see. Customers pounding on it and saying, you know what, API call after API call, can I provision 10,000 pods a day? Does it scale? Does it scale? And is it consistent? Is it fragile? For Del La Rosa, she's a seasoned veteran. She was at VMware Cloud. She saw that movie. She gets a mulligan, Dave. So I think her leadership is impressive. And I think she could bring a lot to the table to your point about don't make that same mistake and they got to get this architecture right. If they get the operating model right with GreenLake, they can double down on that and enable the developers that are driving the digital transformation. That to me is the key positions that they have to nail. And they do that. The rest is just fringe work in my opinion. The reason why Fidelma was brought in, sorry, Lisa, it was, and then you got to chime in here, was to really build out that platform so that internal people at HPE can actually build value on top of it and the ecosystem. That's her priority. We're going to hear a lot from the ecosystem in the next couple of days. But I want to get your perspective on, you've been following HPE a long time, all three of you. What are some of the things that you're hearing right now that are differentiators? We were just at Dell Technologies, we were all talking about Apex. You saw the big announcement they had with Snowflake. We were at Snowflake two weeks ago. I want to get all three of your opinions on what are you seeing, where is HPE leading? I mean, HPE and Dell will both with it, Dell with Apex are good. They're both going to differentiate with their strengths. And for Dell, that's their breadth and their portfolio. And for HPE, that's their sort of open posture. I mean, John, you know this well. That's their ecosystem, which I know has to evolve. And to me, their focus. Antonio laid out some of the key differentiators. I think some of them were kind of pushing the envelope a little bit, but I think their focus on as a service, burning the boats, telling Wall Street, this is our business. I think that's their differentiator, is that they're all in. Yeah, I think they try to highlight it by re-announcing their private cloud service. I don't even know why they needed to announce that they have a private cloud. GreenLake is a cloud, it's a private cloud. With BlockStorage, with disaster recovery, it's like, okay. Like everything you get. But I think the key is that all of that is available today. And you can get it in all kinds of frame, of formats and frames. Specifically, if I'm a customer and I want to get out of the data center, and you know, Dave, we go back and forth about this all the time. And I want to repatriate some workloads to Kubernetes on-prem. I don't need to spin up another data center. I can go to Equinix, get GreenLake, MenIO, ObjectStorage on the backend, HPE, Lighthouse, all those services that I need for Kubernetes and repatriate my workloads without buying a new data center. And I get it as a service. I can get that today from HPE GreenLake. Dell Apex is on the way. The other thing they're differentiating with? Aruba. That's something that Dell doesn't have. And that is, their edge play, I think, is stronger than some of the others. To me, the differentiator for HP is their history, their channel's amazing, they've got great sales force, and they have serious customers. And they have serious customers that have serious problems. Cyber security, infrastructure, the security paradigm's changed, the deployment has changed how they deploy applications in their customer base. So they got to step up to that challenge. And I think their differentiator is going to be their size, their field, and their ability to bring that operating model. And the hybrid model is a steady state. That's clear. Multi-cloud is just hybrid stitched together, but hybrid cloud, which is basically on-premises and cloud to edge operating model is the number one thing that they need to nail. And if they nail that right, they will have a pole position that they could accelerate on. And again, I'm really going to be watching how well they could enable cloud native developers, okay? To build modern agile applications while solving those serious problems with those serious customers. So again, I think hybrids spun in their direction. I'm not going to say they got lucky because they've always been on the hybrid bandwagon since we've been covering them, but I thought they'd be through the long day, but they're lucky to have hybrid. That's good for them. And I think do what Microsoft did, convert their customers over, and they do that right. I think the key to that is going to be ecosystem again. The developers need to see, especially the data piece. They talk about the cloud operating model. I think they're really moving that direction. So the data piece to me is the weakest. Like they'll make claims that we can do anything that the cloud can do. You can't run Snowflake, can't run Databricks, can't run Mongo Atlas. So they got to figure out that data layer. And that's my optionality of data stores, and they don't have that today. Yeah, they have an announcement coming, and I can't pre-announce it, but they've deemed them against it. They have the vision. Esmeral data services, their data fabric, multi-protocol access is a great start. They need the data network behind it. They need the ability to build a super cloud across multiple cloud providers, bringing some Google Anthos love inside of right next to your data. They have the hardware. They have the infrastructure, but they don't have the services. That's the key thing. I think one of you just brought up great point keys, and that is that at the end of the day, Dave, we're in a market now where agility and speed can be accomplished by startups or any company. And HP's customers, okay, can move fast too. Okay, and so whoever can extend that value, if HP can enable value creation for their customers, that's going to be truly their task at hand. They got the channel. They can leverage, but at the end of the day, the customers have alternatives now, and they can move faster to get the value that they need to solve their serious problems, like cyber, like scalable infrastructure, like infrastructure as code, like data ops, like AI ops, it's all here, and it's all coming really fast. Can GreenLake carry the day? And by the way, everything we just said about GreenLake in terms of table stakes and everything else, it applies for Dell. Yeah, absolutely. No question. It does, guys. We have a jam-packed three days. We're going to be talking with the ecosystem. We're going to be talking with HPE leaders, with customers. You're going to hear all of this information unpacked over the next three days. We'll be right back with our first guest for Dave Vellante, Keith Townsend, and John Furrier. I'm Lisa Martin. Our first guest joins us momentarily.