 Live from New Orleans, it's theCUBE. Covering Veeam On 2017, brought to you by Veeam. We're back, this is theCUBE, the leader in live tech coverage. We're here at Veeam On 2017, day two. Bill Philbin is here as the senior vice president at Hewlett Packard Enterprise and runs the storage business for HPE. Great to see you again, my friend. Hey, Dave, it's always good to see you. You always look so fantastic. Thank you, where's the tie? I was saying, you guys, those of you who didn't see it, Bill nailed the keynote this morning. It was great. It was funny, self-deprecating and genuine. And essentially, you know, you resonated with me because I got four kids and you were talking about how you call your kids. You either get voicemail or they're voicemails full. That's right. You text them, at least your kids text you back. I got to Snapchat my kids to get ahold of them. So you got to get into Snapchat. They haven't told me that texting and Facebook is so, you know, 20th century, Dave. You email them? Or you get some important email? You send it to them? Like email? No, email's not it. We're just, our lives are challenged. But nonetheless, you got some of your challenges of your own. You're running a big business now at HPE. You guys are making some serious moves in the marketplace. Give us the update on the HPE storage business. Yeah, so thanks, Dave. And you know, every squirrel finds a nut in the forest eventually. So I just had a pretty good day today, but that was because we have a great story, frankly, to tell. And I think, you know, as I was saying before, the storage business is changing rather dramatically. Now is it self-inflicted or is it, you know, just a course correction? I actually believe it's self-inflicted in a sense that we've taken many of the capabilities that were previously on high-end systems and we brought them to the mid-range. We've thinned it, we've dedupt it, we've compressed it, we've got it on SSDs. And so the whole business model is now is different than it was five years ago before he sold so many of an appliance, he had shocked a full of spinning media. They ran out of IOPS, he had sold another appliance, he had shocked a full. It was a pretty good business model. That's how I kept Mrs. Philwood in the lifestyle, she's grown accustomed, right? Well, now you don't shock a full of spinning media, we shock full SSDs. IOPS are almost unguarantee. And then you take all that compaction technology and that is actually forced a fundamental change, I think, in the storage landscape that we, including Hewlett-Packard, have inflicted upon ourselves. I think if you take a look at that and then you take a look at the storage landscape and the number of vendors that are out there, I think that is changing as well, which is part of the reason why we decided to get into acquiring companies like SimpliVity and Nimble. And you got a knife fight going on in all flash. I mean, I got to say, what HPE did with 3PAR surprised me and probably a lot of people. Most people didn't think you could kind of quote on, quote, bolt on flash into that architecture. Obviously, it wasn't a bolt on. You guys have been very successful when you talk to your competitors. We certainly, when you talk to customers, they love it when you talk to competitors, they say, yeah, we can compete with company A, B, and C. It's 3PAR that we have trouble with because it's simple and it works. And sometimes enduring technologies actually extend beyond single generations, right? And so we certainly have heard the story about the new versus the old and being old. Maybe this is my perspective, but enduring technologies actually can transition across architectural and technology boundaries. And that's exactly what we've done exactly what we've done with 3PAR. Now, having said that, you guys have been, I mean, you saw 3PAR initially with spinning and hybrid, took off, justified the acquisition, made the transition to all flash. I've called it many times three parts, the gift that keeps on giving. So how many times can you go to that well, right? So you guys have made some moves here, not the least of which was nimble, want to talk about that and SimpliVity. So even though SimpliVity is not under your organization, it's, you know, you have an affinity there, talk about those two moves and where they fit in the portfolio. So let's just start with the 3PAR, just the 3PAR comment just for a quick second. I mean, you know, the pure plays versus sort of the, what they call the stayed plays. I'm sort of imagine that 3PAR is a state play technology, right? I don't agree with that statement. But that, you know, the way, the reason I don't agree with it is that we're actually growing faster than the pure plays in the all flash market. We have more revenue than they do. So I think it's comfortable for people to sort of set one technology up over another, but the fact of the matter is that we're growing faster. The other thing about the market is it generally gravitates towards technologies that are unique in purpose, regardless of what they cost, because the customer demands it. And all flash started with, you know, guys like Fusion IO and violin memory and all those guys, right? Eventually what happens is those customers tire of those additional assets in their data center, right? One more thing they don't want in the data center is one more thing in the data center. And that's when the big guys eventually sort of overtake the position. So I think what you're going to, you're starting to see in the storage landscape is compression at a company level, right? You're seeing the Newtonics and Pures, you know, out there, you're seeing then the next tier of companies trying to sort of, you know, make the big break. And the last time a company made a big break in the storage business, okay? That's still independent today. That's a billion dollars of revenue or more. Was. Net app, net app. Because storage looks like it's easy going in, but it's not easy when you think about bare metal and databases and transactional systems and highly available. It's not that easy. And so that's why a company like a Nimble who has great technology, InfoSight, CASL file system, great, great people to scale that business profitably and have the go to market reach needs to align themselves with a company like Hewlett Packard. So we're really, really excited about Nimble joining the family for sure. And now Eliebel says to sort of take this, the flash portfolio further across the landscape. On simplicity, I think the way that you should think about our strategy at Hewlett Packard is it's all about choice. So you're a customer who wants to sort of, you know, put assets in your data center and have assets in Microsoft Azure Cloud. We should enable that. If you're a, you think software defines the right way to go. We should enable that. You have an appliance customer. We should enable that. If you want to co-locate applications in a simple, easy use interface with storage, we have that, that's impolivity. But that choice shouldn't come with operational complexity. So one of the things that we have to do, and I was talking about this at the keynote, is we have to somewhat hide ourselves behind the application and make it easy for customers to consume, because that is what the web offers them. We ought to be able to federate the data so that you can actually move your data around when your requirements change, or you've got a burst, and the administration ought to be really, really simple. So our strategy around technologies like SimpliVity, or Enable, or 3PAR, or, you know, MSA, XP, is all around giving customers choice out the operational complexity of having lots of things to manage. Bill, I guess I'm trying to sit for our audience, try to maybe compare and contrast a little bit. It was formerly EMC, now Dell EMC, which the knock on them for many years has been, they've got so many products, they overlap. We've covered for many years how, if I have 3PAR and some of the other HP, HPE storage products, right, I can move between them. Is that the differentiator you're saying? Well, so I think two is less than... Even though if you have Nimble plus, SimpliVity plus, you know, 3PAR. So three is less than seven. So let's just start with that answer. And maybe it's not seven anymore, and I've lost track. Second, I think if you're really talking about provisioning storage and networking compute from an application layer, really what you're doing is you want to have a conversation about the service level underneath that the storage provides. Maybe for certain applications, you're okay with thinly provisions or not thinly provision, et cetera. So one answer is a lot of those applications, a lot of those capabilities are actually hidden by the application layer. However, we know that the thing that doesn't move all that well is data, and data has gravity. So being able to move data in addition to moving your compute is one of the reasons that the differentiation for us over the other guys. But you know, and let me just stay on that for a second. Stu, we're all storage guys or quasi-storage guys. Is only a quasi-storage guy? He's really a networking guy. I've worked at a storage company for 10 years, but yeah, I'm in that one. You're a newbie then. Yeah. But if you look at history, it is shown that you actually have to have multiple architectures to increase the size of your TAM and penetrate the marketplace. I mean, NetApp is the exception that proves the rule. I mean, they could only go so far with Waffle. I mean, you were there and you know. And so even now NetApp makes a move for SolidFire. Obviously EMC has been very successful with, you know, I think it's 17, not seven. But it actually works. And so that dogma of, well, we have to have one architecture is never proven to really be a winning strategy. And frankly, it is really hard to actually stretch an architecture from top to bottom, right? And so I don't disagree with the comedy I made, but that is effectively of however, the same problem with the storage startups today is if they do a single thing, only support virtualized environments, only whatever it is, right? Only support VDI. The breadth is what customers are looking for. And if you don't have the breadth or you're forced to go get the breadth by adding bolt-ons to try and get the breadth, it's going to make it very, very difficult for them to survive in the new world order. So, and both acquisitions, SimpliVity and Nimble were great for the company, really great. Bill, can you tie together for us HPE and Veeam how those fit together? And one of the big things we've been covering is the extension of Veeam started very, very much virtualized. Now they're physical, they're talking about all the cloud solutions. Expect there's a lot of fit between your strategies. Yeah, there is. For years we've had a very, very strong technical partnership between the Veeam engineering team and the StoreOnce engineering team. And I think that is at the basis of trust, I think is the best way you can think about it. We've both sort of got competing roadmaps on occasion, but at the end of the day, it's all about sort of what's best for the customer. So that number one is the technical people. Second is we have the same view of the market. And I talked about this this morning, which is this highly available, always on sort of environment is the same story that we tell. So the messages are aligned. The third is that it's complimentary. We have our own sort of data protection technology with data protector. We have our own sort of snapshot management capability with RMC. And the question is, how do we sort of protect the entire environment and Veeam is a critical asset in that. So it's a great business partnership, great technology partnership. And the fact that our folks can not resell Veeam has just launched the business forward. Well, and the move to sell the software business to micro focus has just opened up new partnership opportunities. Yeah, and in regards to that, we still have a very, very strong partnership with the software guys. You know, there's a, you know, the largest connect that we have on a backup product today is data protector. So I don't expect that to change. But there are people who prefer, you know, to use Veeam and we have to support that. Yeah, but still, I mean, if you got the, you know, your colleagues in data protector and you're out aggressively partnering with Veeam that's part of HPE, you know, maybe you get an email or you get a, hey, come on, Bill, you know, give me a break here. I mean, and now I feel like, you know, the gloves are off. You can do, you know, independent of all that, you know, internal stuff, plumbing is, you know, what's right for the customer. And I don't know Veeam overstating that. Perhaps a bit because we'll still have, you know, equity ownership in the new company. Again, with all the sort of connect I have, I think that regardless of where they, where the paychecks come from, if you will, we have to have a really strong partnership with them. And it's no different than, you know, we also have a partnership with ManTech. I mean, we have other partnerships that customers just have made a preference around that we're not going to convince them, you know, to do something different. We try, yeah. Therefore, we've got to have a strong partnership. All right, so we're going to be at Discover, the cube will be there for, I mean, we've been there many years now. I think this is our seventh Discover. So, I think you've been there. Seventh U.S. Discover. Yeah. You've been there as many years as I have. What are we looking forward to there? So, I think there's a bunch of announcements. We've highlighted one of them today around the Secretary Flash array for Nimble. There's some new three-part announcements that are certainly coming. The Synergy guys are going to certainly have a thing or two to say I'm thinking based on the strength of that platform, that platform is really starting to take off. And so, I think you're going to see that. I think this will probably be really the first Discover where, you know, you'll start to see, maybe the Madrid Discover will be different, but you'll start to see the new Hewlett Packard Enterprise. We keep focusing on things that we've been merged out, but the thing I think we need to focus on is the fact that we're, this is like a Phoenix of a new company, right? Solely focused on enterprise infrastructure and the customer needs. We rebranded the TS business and Pointnext, which is all around transformation and technology services. So, it's almost like, you know, we're starting the clock over again, right? And for the HP employees, we're not going to, we're not changing your service levels, but for almost everything else, we're rebuilding a brand new company. And that is what Megan and the board are doing is really exciting. Well, it's true. The last couple of Discover's, there was a distraction with the split, there was a distraction with two-spin merges, but you've now seen the M&A activity focus on areas like storage, areas like converged, hyper-converged, so. Yeah, but I always tell this story because you guys like my analogies, which is, you know, when you've got lots of kids in your family, in my family, my oldest, I've got lots of pictures of, and when he's in the middle kid, you know, some pictures of the third one, virtually no pictures of, right? Because you go from man-to-man defense to zone difference. Same is true with a CEO. When you've got seven or eight different things to manage, you're focused, it needs to be spread over seven or eight different things. Now, Meg is actually got fewer children to manage if you want to roll the analogy out a little bit, and we got a lot of our attention and a lot of focus, and that I think is really, really important. And now all the pictures are digital, they're in the cloud, they're protected. Yeah. Bill, great to see you. Great to see you guys. Thanks very much for coming on theCUBE. Thanks, dude, thanks. Yeah, my pleasure. We'll see you in Vegas. Yeah, you bet. All right, keep it right there, buddy. Bye, buddy. We'll be back with our next guest right after this short break.