 From around the globe, it's theCUBE. Covering HPE Discover Virtual Experience. Brought to you by HPE. Welcome back to theCUBE's coverage of HPE Discover Virtual Experience. I'm John Furrier, host of theCUBE. I'm here in the Palo Alto studios for the remote interviews. We're all sheltering in place. And we have two amazing guests on a great topic, women leaders in technology strategy for growth, Rashmi Kumar, Senior Vice President, Chief Information Officer at HPE, and Marissa Freeman, Chief Brand Officer of HPE. Welcome to theCUBE and looking forward to this great conversation. Thanks for joining. Thank you, John. Before we jump into it, can you guys explain your roles at HPE? I'll see the Chief Information Officer roles pretty well defined, but it's changing these days, Rashmi, and as a brand officer with the remote workforce, Marissa, these are changing times. Can you guys take a minute to explain your role? Rashmi, we'll start with you. Yeah, so my organization and my role is in the middle of digital transformation, which has become even more critical in these days of landscape level. My team is involved in end-to-end process transformation for HPE, as well as a key part of the pivot for as a service, and running the operations smoothly, as well as making all 60,000 employee, 20,000 partner move to work from home. We are engaged in this from later part of January, so to say, when it first started in China. So the organization is super critical for the success of HPE to keep our operations running as well as all the employees engaged in their work. Marissa, your role. I am the Chief Brand Officer of Hewlett-Packett Enterprise, and my responsibility is to help tell our story to customers, prospects, analysts and press, and beat the drum for our employees. So as we pivot our company and our strategy, we work with Antonio to ensure that everyone understands why HPE and how we can be your best transformation partner. You know, one of the exciting things that's coming out of this new reality is that the workforce, the role of work is changing. Obviously, workforce, workplace, workloads, workflows, variety of topics, but one of them is the personnel piece, and you guys have women leaders in technology program. This is really phenomenal. Can you talk about the mission and vision, and what are the goals? You know, women in technology, something that's important, and leadership as well. Could you guys explain the mission and vision of women leaders in technology? Yeah, sure. So the women leaders in technology established by Hewlett-Packett Enterprise to connect with our customers at our annual conference who share our common belief in inclusion and diversity, specifically advancing gender equality and empowering women with the support of the men at the workforce as well. The event is a collaborative for women and men allies who are committed to drive, learn, and leverage best practices in technology innovations to make a difference in their businesses and communities. Our goal is to unite influential leaders from around the world with a charter to increase, attract, and retain diverse talent by showcasing great contributions made by women while their careers in STEM plus C, science, technology, engineering, mathematics, and computing. And I see that all our leaderships are very passionate about making sure that we get the right level of engagement, both from women and men allies to be able to advance this cause at the company and with our customers as well. Marissa, on the leadership side, we've talked about this in the past, you and I, and you're passionate about the women leadership piece. What's your take on this? Well, we know that when women leaders are at a company, the company is more financially successful. We know that women lead differently and bring a unique point of view to the table. And so diversity and inclusion, generally speaking, is so very important to the success of a company, to the happiness and retention of their employees. So yes, we focus a lot on that. And I think, importantly, we think about reward, recruit, and report. So it's not just something, diversity and inclusion is not something that we wish for at HP. It's something that we action and we work towards. And it's a journey. We aren't there yet, but we are on a path and it's something that we report on internally to each other. We understand exactly where we are. We recruit with purpose and intention of widening the aperture and bringing in people who are different from each other to add to the fabric of our company. And then we also reward our leaders for doing the right thing and being inclusive and hiring diverse talents. So it is very much part of our culture and our performance. I always ask the question because I'm male and I wanted to, approximately brought it up as well. How are the HPE male leaders impacting, enhancing and participating in this strategy? Because it takes everyone's involvement to make women in leadership successful and beyond. So this is super important. Can you share your thoughts on how that's going? So as we form our teams as well as these specific and employee resource group to be able to focus on younger women or women technologists, we do it alongside our men allies. At some point, technology is so critical. Digitalization is such in hyper growth mode. If we need to be successful with our product and services in the marketplace, we need to have equal participation from talent from across the bodies of men and women and irrespective if I'm a women leader or a man leader, I need to be able to tap to that talent to be able to kind of bring our product and services to our markets or run our operations well in the company. So we really, when we strive to fulfill the cause as Marisa mentioned from growth perspective, we have a partner, we are equal partner in making this a priority for the company to ensure we get women and both men and smartest when men and women from across technology areas to come and work with us. Marisa, I want to ask you before I go back to, Reshmi, about the whole workforce and workplace and technology. From a customer perspective, how are you guys seeing their workplace changing from a business perspective? Because you and I, again, talk about experiences and that's something that you really believe in. Obviously having great experiences at the physical events, now you're doing the virtual event, but your customers are also living a changing workforce and they need to equip themselves with this. How do you see the big picture there? Because that's a big part of you guys aligning with the customers. And I won't say change the experience, align with the new expectations. These are new things that are happening in real time. Part of running the brand is also understanding culture and what's around the corner. And I think that our company does that by nature anyway because we are a technology company and we have to think about where our customers are going, where they're heading, skate to where the puck is going and meet them there. So trends like approximately 50% of workers will probably not go back to the office full-time. So we have a whole suite of products and services that we have been talking about very much in weeks and times that help customers, that help everyone work from home. So many of the offerings that we have, for example, during COVID, many of our customers couldn't or wouldn't send their employees into the data centers or into their offices to work on their technology. We had our service people able to help them remotely. And in some cases actually show up, 25,000 people around the globe there to help. In fact, that was our campaign and it still is and it's the theme of HPE Discover. HPE is here to help. So as your workplace changes, as you go through the recovery, as you return to work, as you continue your digital transformation, HPE is here to help with very actionable, instantaneous solutions to help with COVID and beyond. You know, we've been following HPE, you know I've been following HPE for many, many years and decades. And I know for the folks watching that you guys have a really robust internal intranet and system that you guys have built out. And you're on the leading edge as well of your own HPE equipment and technology and software. I've always been resilient from my perspective. So Rashmi, I got to ask you, you know this disruption we're seeing hasn't been forecasted. It's not like disaster and recovery scenarios. A hurricane, it's not a flood or a hurricane sandy like we saw in the past. This was a new kind of disruption vector, not seen on cybersecurity radars. This is new. So at the end of the day, it's still a disruption. It's a challenging time, but there was an opportunity for CXOs out there to look at the projects and saying, where are we exposed? Where are the gaps? And I think we're seeing new app development, we're seeing new kinds of technology projects kind of being tweaked a little bit. Some kind of being sunsetted. It's an opportunity for CXOs to really double down on this. I want to get your take on how you see the challenge being met by the customers and the tech opportunities that they can lead through this. Absolutely. So anything this pandemic has taught us that digitalization are way forward. We have been engaged in the transformation for HPE on a journey for the last couple of years of entire code to cash process as well as our supply chain and fulfillment process. Entire experience for our customers has been changing as well as for our employees. So as our customers look at this pandemic and think about what they need to invest in is for the employees work from anywhere, anytime and be available to work for. And we have technologies which enables that. At the same time, we are right in the middle of providing the best ERP solutions, best code to cash type solutions and our infrastructure and capabilities power that. If you take our Edge Aruba solution, we were in the middle of powering up all the makeshift hospitals as well as the cruise ships which were transitioned as hospital to be able to provide them internet for connectivity. If you look at the initiatives we had here in the South Bay area and on providing Wi-Fi in the parking lot for schools so the students could complete their course. So HPE has this kind of end to end solutions around these technologies which could create resiliency in our customers and provide them product and solution to be able to continue their operations seamlessly even during these times. You know, it's interesting. I've always loved the future of work kind of scenario and discussions, but they all kind of felt a little bit too fuzzy around just collaboration. You know, future of work, which is cool. I'm not against that. But when you look at what we're living now and what you were just talking about is it's workplace, workforce, workloads, workflows. It's not just collaboration. That's just one aspect of it. I think we're seeing now this new reality is that it's going to impact the entire end to end, as you point out. Are there areas that you see are opportunities for customers? Because, you know, we've heard DevOps has always been on the fringe of kind of the tech community always leading edge on the cloud for the past 10 years. But now you got operations, IT operations, network operations, all these other systems that were kind of on a nice path before disrupted. This is not just work collaboration. It's everything. What's your thought? Yeah, great point. So if you look at collaboration, collaboration is kind of the facade versus everything that happens behind the scenes. So if you look at a TV show, what you're seeing is the end result but there was a huge production effort behind it to be able to get you that content. And if you look at a particular transaction today from ERP perspective or a customer buying a product from you, this is the facade. There is a lot of stuff that goes behind it for providing our employees the right tools, keeping our networks connected so that employees can use those tools successfully as well as securely. So this time has taught us to quickly pivot and bring in some new capabilities from technology and digital capability perspective in every area of the business. Starting from the facade, which is the collaboration tool, at the same time ability to run your business through these technology capabilities and do it very securely, providing connectivity from our data center to a manufacturing factories location to now employees home to our partners and as well as cloud. And that has created a very complex ecosystem of connected universe for every company. I feel we are a global company. So we were a little lucky in getting early warnings in January and preparing to come to where we were coming. And I'm so proud of the IT team here. We did a major release of our transformation program which we call NDIT on 13th, 14th, 15th March right before we started shelter in place. And there were thousands of people working globally to bring this capability for our ERP systems. And it went flawlessly. And since then we have done four or five releases and the organization had been able to carry through it. Preparedness and resiliency, great features. Marissa, you know, back to this brand experience that you're in your role in the facade or collaboration or the user experience is the front end of the back end. So you have a real hyper digital or hyper virtual is my word for it. Environment where people's businesses and the business impact is going to be severely impacted because people can leave a brand. So if I'm a customer of yours, I'm like, look I need to get busy reinventing and getting my apps meeting the expectations of the customers. So, you know, you got to bring the experience piece of it as well as that enablement. This is a new expectation radically more accelerated than it was in the past. What's your thoughts? Well, you know, Antonio a couple of years ago said the action is at the edge and the cloud is an experience not a destination. So in order to create those very meaningful and differentiated experiences for their customers our customers need to have one single platform that's open and secure so that they can innovate from end to end every workflow from beginning to end so that their experiences they deliver their customers are intuitive, intelligent, differentiated. So that is what we have been working for this these entire last few years is to provide that cloud experience to our customers wherever their apps and data live so that they can have the freedom to innovate across the entire state and do it securely. That is the only way you're going to really provide these truly differentiated and insightful experiences at the edge, which is where the action is. Yeah, you guys are really putting out some really insight there and I would just say that this highlights what I've always believed as making the innovation strategy concept not just a cliche but if you don't have an innovative strategy with tech and people it's going to be exposed and the table stakes are there because of the marketplace. If you don't deliver, the stakes are really high and this brings back to the women leaders in IT you guys are doing. How do people get involved? I mean, what's the take on this? You guys are doing a great job. What's the process? Is it you joined, you guys recruit? I mean, how does someone who's watching or participating in HPE Discover virtual get involved? Let me do a quick commercial because it is HPE Discover and the best way to get involved with women's leaders in technology is to join up, register for HPE Discover and join us on July 1st managing the workplace in a new normal. July 8th, navigating change, the mindset for success in turbulent times and the first one leading through recovery with Rashmi right here. And I believe that's on the first Friday so coming up next week. Those are three ways in to at least be able to get involved with what we're doing but we also do throughout the year events with our customers in multiple offices around the globe where we get together as leaders, we talk about leadership, we recruit. Then there's all of the other things that we support and Rashmi maybe you wanna talk about that from Grace Hopper and all the way through some of the other wonderful organizations that our women leaders in technology are supportive of and engaged in. Rashmi? Yes, absolutely. So first of all our global women leader ERG as well as there are a couple other ERGs within business unit which works diligently to create engagement for men allies and women employees. So my last travel before this pandemic hit and shelter in place came in was for international women day celebration in Sofia, Bulgaria. And what we did as women leaders of the company is created a competition for the location to host that event. There was enormous amount of energy when I was in Sofia with guest speakers, with executive speakers and our men allies who were speaking at the event as well. And it was webcasted across the globe for all HPE employees to experience. There were watch parties. There was enormous amount of energy going into the event. Similarly, when we participate in Grace Hopper it's like a carnival for us. We have our boots, we do interviews. Marisa hosted a great event at Disney for our college students who were attending Grace Hopper to come experience what HPE is all about and how dedicated we are to the cause of women and STEM and young women to showcase our leaders there and what you could be once you are at HPE. So a lot of such events also happen at various locations and as being women we create everything fun, everything more engaging and everybody wants to participate in these events. Well, certainly now you gotta do it virtually. And I don't want to overlook the allyship. The men at HPE are very, very much a part of this and very supportive of everything that we do. It's not just all women. It is a lot of women, but our men are definitely part of the whole fabric of it, including at Grace Hopper. And it's always great talent coming out of schools and seeing a lot of jobs out there right now. There's new jobs. This brings up the shift. You look at cybersecurity and all across the, in tech, it's the aperture of computer science has changed. You don't have to be a coder. You can do a lot of different things. This brings up the culture question. I really love to get you guys personal opinions on this. For folks watching wants to see the new kind of Instagram picture of HPE if they want to look inside. What, how would you describe the culture of HPE these days? Obviously the innovation you guys are super impressive. What's it like inside? What's it like to work there? How would you describe the culture of HPE? Well, it's, it's a wonderful place to work. And our culture is the primary reason why it is so. It started with Bill and Dave. They were about community. They were not about building a conglomerate. They were built about building a community. And, and that has just stayed with us throughout. Innovation is critical to us being bold, being inclusive. These are our values, but they're not just words on a page. They are actually our values. And we live them in our belief system. And then they were put down on a page so that we can all look at them, recognize them, celebrate them. And it starts at the very top. Antonio has been with the company 26 years now. I think it is. He is a true HPE, died in the wall, engineer himself. And we all feel really good about being here and being with each other. We have a mission and a purpose, and that is to advance the way people live and work. That is why every HPE teammate gets up in the morning. That is what we do for a living. And it comes through in everything that we do. Rashbi, you're on. Yeah, I would like to, I would like to add there is what Bill and Dave created for us and the good things that has retained by HPE as well as our ability to change and pivot. So as you talked about, John, we are a innovation company. We are a huge product and research-based company. Now with as a service though, we are also looking at how do we understand more outside in what our customers are looking for, what kind of experiences when they interact with our products and how do we really understand it and drive alignment early on with our customers to be able to put these as a service products out to them and as well as quickly learn and pivot again as needed. So the points that Marisa mentioned about take risk, be bold, don't be afraid to fail as well as customer focus. Relentless journey to ensure our customers are getting what they need. Has been kind of a new HPE culture manifesto which is really embodied by Antonio and the leadership team which is then taken by our employees. So while we are keeping what's good from Bill and Dave time, we are also augmenting it based on the changing needs of our customers and the industry that we are in where we cannot be stagnant forever. I think carrying that mission and spirit of Bill and Dave is great. In fact, John Chamberlain notices on the keynote here at Virtual Experience. He said to me privately that he has mad respect for HPE going back. He was hiring all the executives that from Bill and Dave's cloth there and brought him into Cisco. Now he's out helping companies. And I think that is really about the community and the respect for the individual citizenship. Those are values that I think stand the test of time. I think that's great that you guys are keeping that going and that's awesome. And we appreciate the community support with theCUBE and Collaboration. So thank you very much for that. And don't forget the innovation. I mean, Marisa, go back to 2013. You guys first coin hybrid cloud. I think that was like happening now. Like, I mean, innovation is still there. You got to be tech leaders. That's the get to come. Green Lake, we love our green lake. Great stuff. Thank you guys so much for this conversation. I really was, it was awesome. Great insight there. I'll congratulate you on the women leaders in technology. Final question for you both. Complete the sentence. Women leaders in technology is a competitive advantage to your clients because blank. Because it's one more way that they can partner with HPE to improve the way their customers live and work. Rashmi, complete the sentence. Women leaders in technology is a competitive advantage to your customers and clients because. We can collaborate to bring better product and services for their customers together. Awesome. Thank you so much and congratulations on the women leaders technology. We'll be following it. We'll be, if you got to do the virtual events, let us know. We got the remote studio. We always love collaborating. And of course, we got women Wednesdays on theCUBE every week on our site. And thanks for, again, all your support and this is a great experience. Thanks for spending the time. Appreciate it, Rashmi. Thank you. Stay well. Stay well. Okay, HPE virtual experience. This is theCUBE. HPE Discover Virtual Experience bringing you coverage and great interviews from thought leaders, experts, community practitioners and customers. I'm John Furrier with theCUBE. Thanks for watching.