 The Cube presents HPE Discover 2022, brought to you by HPE. Good morning, everyone. It's theCUBE live in Las Vegas, day two of our coverage of HPE Discover 2022 from the Venetian Expo Center. Lisa Martin and Dave Vellante, what a day we had yesterday and today, unbelievable. Good warm up for today, big, big day today. Big day today, we've got a lot, we've got some big happy haters on talking with HPE, customers, partners, leadership. We have a couple of guests up with us next, going to be talking more about the ecosystem. Please welcome Corey Dyer, the Chief Revenue Officer at Digital Realty, and Cliff Evans, Senior Director, HPE GreenLake Partner Ecosystem. Guys, great to have you on the program. Thank you, great to be here. Thank you for having us, excited to be here with you. So let's harness that excitement, Corey. Talk to us about the partnership, the announcement, what's going on there with Digital Realty and GreenLake. Yeah, we're crazy excited about it. We've got customers dealing with data gravity and the opportunity around that and how they can make use of it. And then they're thinking through digital transformation, how you do a multi-cloud, and they need a partnership to do that. And this partnership with GreenLake and Digital is perfect solution for them. So I'm crazy excited to be here with Cliff, and with all of you to talk about it and hopefully build out a great partnership and relationship with HPE. Talk to us, share your crazy excitement, Cliff. Yeah, no, absolutely. No, I think it is an absolutely fantastic partnership. I think the two of us coming together as organizations, bringing the two platforms together is an amazing thing that we have for customers. Customers we know, they want a cloud experience, but really they want to do that without really the DC footprint that they've had previously. So how do they do that in a way that really works for them in a secure, sustainable way, but with a cloud experience? So really the combination of the two pieces coming together really makes that happen and that is what's exciting. So could we dig into the two things that you mentioned, Corey, digital transformation and multi-cloud? When I go back to the sort of early days of cloud, it was like, oh, nobody's going to do anything ever again in the data center. Charles Phillips, the CEO of Infor famously said, friends don't let friends build data centers, right? Everything's going to the cloud. So a lot of people predicted guys like you were going to be in trouble. The exact opposite happened, the market took off. So you mentioned digital transformation and multi-cloud. Can we peel the onion on that? What is it about those two items and are there other trends that are driving your business? I know you tied right on to where it started. All enterprises started going to the cloud and then they got to the cloud and there was more that they needed to make that real. I talk about multi-cloud, you're going to use different cloud providers for different opportunities and different applications. And so you have to start thinking about how does this work in a world where you're going to go to multiple clouds, multiple locations and what it really drove is the need for co-location to make this because you've got a distributed architecture in order to enable all of this. And then you end up having to have us help you out with it and partners like HPE. And so that's part of where it comes from. But if you think through going to the cloud, can you stay there, is that the full solution? You need a secure, sustainable solution for that. One of the opportunities for us around that is that if you're building data centers for yourself on-prem, you don't have all the cloud access we do. We've got more cloud access points than anybody, so that helps in this digital transformation, right? Go ahead. How much, sorry, let me interrupt you. How much homogeneity is there? Are clients or customers saying, hey, I kind of want the same experience and the same infrastructure, same, same? Or are they saying, hey, I want to do stuff in digital realty that I can't get from a cloud provider, Oracle Rack, something like that. I would tell you that they come to us from all the partners. So we are a partner community. We're not going up the stack anywhere on that. We do our part. We're really good at doing the data centers. Really good at building data centers that's sustainable. Our position in the market is sustainability around it. We were the first to sign up on the science-based initiatives for zero kind of carbon neutrality in the future in 2030. And so, yeah, so I think there's the partner aspect that they need help with on it to drive that. Yeah, and I think from the HP GreenLake perspective, I think customers, they very much want that cloud experience. But yeah, they want to do it on their own terms. The partnership allows that to happen and happen simply. The cloud experience with the GreenLake cloud platform to really go and deliver that genuine cloud experience and then building cloud services on top of that, they get all the benefits that they would have from a public cloud experience, but done in the way that they would prefer to do it. So it's bringing those pieces together. And I think the other side of it, you asked if it was the same across the board and ubiquitous. It's very bespoke solutions that we can do. Every customer we have has a different footprint. Most of them are multi-nationals. So we think through where their data is, where it needs to be accessed, where their customers are, where their employees are, and what makes the most sense. And then the partnership we have with HPE can do a whole lot for making a very bespoke solution for that customer and help them be successful on that cloud journey. I'm sorry, yeah, so on that. Yeah, so what we've done at HPE with digital reality is we have a specific offer around how we go to market with this to really go and help customers. So we call it GreenLake with co-location. And it's all about really positioning an offer to customers that says, look, we can go and do this with you and do it simply and really make it happen very quickly and efficiently. So the customer ends up with a single contract and a single invoice for GreenLake, cloud services and the co-location piece all in one single contract. So it just makes it a lot, lot easier in terms of organizing. And a really big part of that as well is that our involvement is also spans right from the design to the implementation to support. So we do the whole thing to really help organizations go off and do this. So that's the big, for me, the big differentiator. So rather than just having GreenLake and cloud services, we're saying, look, we can now do the co-locate piece and they can really take the whole thing to a whole new level in terms of that public cloud experience. What's that? And the, sorry, and that invoice comes from HPE and digital realty is bundled into that. Correct, yeah, so we direct, we do it through the channel, we can sell that in a number of different ways, yeah? Customers get that single invoice. And a big part of that as well, just going a little bit deeper on that. So what we do is we use a part of the company called Data Center Technology Services, which are a great kind of consulting organization with tremendous experience, done something like 3,000 projects across 40 countries from the very smallest to the very largest of data center implementation. So all of that really makes the whole thing a lot easier from a customer's perspective in terms of designing, implementing, and then supporting. So you pull all of that together and it's fantastic. And I think it's really changed to add onto that partnering perspective. So customers now are thinking about it differently and data centers differently and they see us as a strategic partner along with HPE to go after this. It used to be space, power, and cooling. Now it's how much connectivity do you have? What's your sustainability profile and what's your security profile and how do you secure this data? Your data's the life-brought of all these companies and you have to have a really secure, sustainable solution for them. Right, that's absolutely critical for every industry. Talk about the specific value prop that a bespoke co-location solution delivers to customers. Maybe you've got a favorite customer example that you think really articulates the value of this partnership. Yeah, so I think there's a combination. So I think we've touched on a lot of it actually. So there's obviously the data center aspect itself in terms of, so with the footprint, the digital reality have across the world, you can pick and choose the data center and the class of data center that you want in terms of your latency and connectivity that you want. And then really it's the GreenLake piece in terms of the flexibility that you get with that really is that value. And as I touched on the GreenLake with Colo, I think for me is, from our perspective, I think the biggest piece of value that we provide there to really go make it happen, yeah? There's about 70 applications right now that are part of GreenLake Colo that you can bespoke for what you need to. You can think around your specific solutions that you need and we've got it all right there with HPE, GreenLake and Colo for us. And because we have a 290 data center footprint across 50 markets, it gives us the opportunity to really be the data center provider and the partner for HPE pretty much anywhere, but with connectivity everywhere. When you say 70 applications, are these the 70 services or are you talking about? That's what I'm talking about. Yeah, yeah, yeah. 18 categories, 70 services. There's a lot of stuff there. And Corey, when you've talked about sustainability a couple of times as a really important ingredient of the customer decision, why is it because they're indirectly paying the power bill or is it because it's the right thing to do and there's an increased, people care about it more? Because you go back a while ago and people, you know, we always talked about green IT but it was all lip service. Is that changing or is there an economic reason? It's changing in a real big way. Almost every conversation I have with customers is how are we doing sustainability? So if they're doing it on-prem, that's not their core capabilities. They don't know how to do that. On our end, I mentioned our science-based initiatives that we signed up for, right? But how do we enable that? We enable it for how do we build and design our data centers? How do we actually work them and operate them? And then how do we go after all the green sources of sustainable energy, right? Including, I think since 2015, we've issued six billion in green bonds around that same support of it. So yeah. And your customer can then, I presume, report that on their sustainability reports It's a good way to think about it is you no longer have your data center at its sometimes less efficient way than we are. We're really good at building sustainable data centers and then you can actually get some credits back and forth. Got it. And just from a GreenLake perspective, so GreenLake, so there's a specific forest impact report that looks at GreenLake and how it performs from a sustainability perspective. And GreenLake really is giving you that 30% reduction in your energy consumption. So there's a big kind of wind there as well, I think, which is then, yeah, it's very important. Why? Where does that come from? So it's in part the kind of the avoidance of over-provisioning, yeah? So that you go and right size things and then you have a certain amount of reserve capacity that you're using and then just using the extra consumption piece when you need it. So rather than having everything running at full speed, it really is kind of throttling as to how that works. So you get a combination of effects. With the consulting and the thoughtfulness around this bespoke solution that you have, you end up needing fewer servers, fewer technology. That drives less power than consumption and therefore you get a lot of this savings up. You really base it down. You talked about the savings, you talked about the simplification and from a delivery perspective. Talk about the implementation. What's the time to value that organizations can glean from this partnership? Yeah, it's super fast. So yeah, this does accelerate the whole process, yeah? From initial kind of opportunity, if you like, and customer inquiry through to actual implementation. So previously this would take considerable amount of time in terms of doing and throwing between multiple organizations. And now what we do is coordinate that to do it efficiently and effectively. So our DCTS, Data Sensor and Technology Services team, work very closely with digital reality, have those connections to go off and do those things incredibly quickly. And it does accelerate the whole timeline. And they're tied in with our team as well around where's the latency? Where are the solutions? Because we're really thinking about what does your stack look like from an HPE perspective. But then where do you need to deploy it so that you have access to the clouds? You have the right proper latency across your environment and you really have a distributed architecture that works the best for you and your company. So this is probably an answer to this question. It's probably both, but I'm asking it anyway. I've always been a repatriation skeptic, but I'm happy to be proven wrong if you guys have other data. And maybe this is part of one of my blind spots. Question is, what's driving your business in terms of the use case? Is it organizations saying, hey, we want to get out of the data center business and we don't want to put everything into the cloud, but we're going to go to digital realty and HPE and HPE GreenLake and we're going to move into that colo. Or is it people saying, oh wow, we over-rotated into the cloud and now we're going to come back? So it's both. It's both. I knew, yeah, yeah, yeah. But in the blame pie or the credit pie. I think there were a lot of customers with good intentions on going to the cloud, right? And then there's some cost with it that maybe they didn't fully factor in at that time. And now you've got the ability around these bespoke solutions to really right size every bit of this. And when they originally did it, they didn't think through a distributed architecture. They thought, my on-prem, and then I'm just going to burst everything into the cloud. That's no longer the case and it's not really the most efficient way to your point about repatriation. They start pulling their storage back in. Well, where do you want your data? Where do you want your storage? You want it as close as you can to the clouds for that capability and in a solution that's wrapped around, it makes it very simple for you. Yeah, I think that the repatriation is very real and is increasing. So we're seeing a lot of it in terms of activity and customers really trying to understand the cost that they're incurring now from a public cloud perspective and how can they do that differently? And in fact, with the combined offer that we have, it makes it a lot easier to compare. So yeah, that really is accelerating right now. Because you don't see it in the macro numbers. I mean, just to be honest with you, you see the cloud guys combined growing 35%. And is that because your business is in transition from a traditional on-prem model to an as-a-service model and so you've got that imbalance and it gets hidden in all that. Yeah, and I think it's a new wave of things that are happening. I mean, there's a lot of things obviously that make complete sense to be in public cloud. But I do think there's been an over rotation towards it. So I think there's now that realization and it's going to take time to kind of unpick that. But it's absolutely happening. There are a lot of opportunities that we've gotten, some very big ones I'd love to talk about, but can't quite talk about them just yet. But really where there's big, big savings in terms of what they're paying from a public cloud perspective. And really what they want is that full management cloud service to go make it happen. So the combination of the data center piece, the GreenLake piece, and then some management services, whether they're from ourselves or from our partner community from managed service providers that we also work with, that gives them the complete package. So I have another premise. I mean, a lot of IT of course has traditionally been focused on internal and I feel like there's a new era coming and it talks to the ecosystem. Are you seeing customers not only running their IT in digital realty and connecting to the cloud in a hybrid fashion, but also actually building new value and building businesses that are customer facing on that, that are monetizable. Are you seeing that? Is that happening? And I don't know if you have any examples, even generic. Real basic from our perspective, our partner community, that's what they do. We have a ton of enterprise customers that all need to connect and integrate. The data that you have doesn't do anything for you if it's on its own and it's not interacting with other data points and it's not interacting with other customers, other solutions and whatnot. So yeah, it does help build out a partner community, a solution community for our customers in our data centers and across the board. Are there industry patterns emerging? In other words, is it sort of data ecosystems emerging by industry or is it sort of more horizontal? There's a mix. So I think there's a lot of financial sector stuff. Yeah, certainly. Yeah, and then certainly manufacturing, yeah. So I think it's interesting that you're getting a bit of a combination, but yeah, a lot of financial sector. Which of course, the big banks early on thought they could build their own cloud. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And now they're probably rethinking that. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, maybe we should. But they're also service providers when you're that large as a bank on their end. They're doing a lot of work. They're doing a lot of work. I would also say the other part that a lot of people see as an opportunity is around all the HPC and AI applications as well in addition to manufacturing, distribution. So there's a lot of use cases and a lot of reasons why customers ought to be doing this. Wrap us up with the value prop. So you're talking to a large financial services organization or a manufacturing company. What is that 30 second elevator pitch value prop of why they should go HPE GreenLake and digital realty together? So I would say GreenLake with co-location gives you a single contract, singly in voice, easy to go and design, implement, support and go make happen. Sorry, that's a very simple way of saying it. It just makes it easy. And I would just say thank you on that. It's been great to speak with you guys. And yeah, when you think through that part of it, it also is a bespoke opportunity to put your data where it needs to be closest to your customers, closest to the action. You were thinking through the repatriation of it. A lot of it's being built out there on phones and whatnot. So you've got to think through where your data is and how you manage it. It makes sense. Right, and enable every company in every industry to be a data company because that's what of course the demanding consumers demand and that demand is not going to turn down, right? No, absolutely. No, it's just accelerating. Guys, thanks so much for joining Dave. Thank you very much. Thanks for talking about what you're doing together in the ecosystem. Cheers, buddy. Good job, guys. For our guests and Dave Vellante, I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching theCUBE live from the Venetian Expo Center in Vegas, baby. Dave and I will be back with our next guest in a minute.