 Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE. Covering VMworld 2017, brought to you by VMware and it's ecosystem partner. Okay, welcome back everyone. Live CUBE coverage here at VMworld 2017. Three days, we're on our third day. VMworld, always a great tradition. Our eighth year, I'm John Furrier with theCUBE. Co-host with me, Dave Vellante of Wikibon and our next guest is Keegan Riley, Vice President and General Manager of North American Storage at HP Enterprise. Welcome to theCUBE. Thank you, thanks for having me. Thanks for coming on. Love the pin, as always, wearing the flair. Love the logo, I always comment on that when I first was skeptical on it, but now I love it. But HPE doing great in storage with the acquisition of SimpliVity and Nimble where you had a good run there. Absolutely. We just had a former HPE entrepreneur now on doing a storage startup. So we're familiar with the HPE storage. Good story. What's the update now? You got Discover in the books. Now you got the Madrid coming up event. Software defined storage. That pony's going to run for a while. What's the update? Yeah, so appreciate the time. Appreciate you having me on. The way that we're thinking about HPE storage, it's interesting. The company is so different. I mentioned to you guys when we were talking before that I actually left HPE to come to Nimble. So in some ways, I'm approaching the gold pin for a 10 year anniversary at HPE. And they retro that too, you get that grandpa out of it. Absolutely, vacation time carries over, it's beautiful. But the HPE storage that I'm now leading is in some ways very different from the HPE storage that I left six years ago. And the vision behind HPE storage is well aligned with the overall vision of Hewlett Packard Enterprise, which is we make hybrid IT simple, we power the intelligent edge, and we deliver the services to empower organizations to do this. And the things that we're thinking about at Nimble, and the things that we're thinking about as kind of a part of HPE are well aligned with this. So our belief is everyone at this conference cares about whether it's software defined, whether it's hyperconverged, whether it's all flashed on and so forth. But in the real world, what clients tend to care about is kind of their experience and we've seen this really fundamental shift in how consumers think about interacting with IT in general. The example that I always give is, I've been in sales my whole career, I've traveled a lot and historically 15 years ago, when I would go to a new city, I would land and I would jump on a airport shuttle to go rent a car, and then I would pull out a Thomas guide and I would go to cell C three and map out my route to the client and things like that. And so I just expected that if I had a meeting at 2 p.m., I needed to land at 10 a.m. to make my way there, that was just my experience. Cut to today, I land and I immediately pull out my iPhone and hail an Uber and reserve an Airbnb when I get there and for a 2 p.m. meeting I can land at 1.15 and I know Waze is going to route me around traffic to get there. So my experience as a consumer has fundamentally changed and that's true of IT organizations and consumers within those organizations. So IT departments have to adapt to that, right? And so kind of powering this hybrid IT experience and servicing clients that expect immediacy is what we're all about. Right? So I love that analogy. In fact, when we were at HP Discover, we kind of had this conversation. So as you hailed that Uber, IT wants self-driving storage. Absolutely. That's good. Bring that, tie that back in, because we talked a lot about that in kind of a colorful, joking way, but that is the automation goal of storage, is to be available. We talk about edge on structured data, moving compute to the edge. It's nuanced now, storage and compute, all this is working together through software. Self-driving storage means something, it's kind of a joke on one hand, but what does it actually mean for an IT guy? No, it's a great question and this is exactly the way we think about it and the self-driving car analogy is a really powerful one, right? And so the way we think about this, we're delivering a predictive cloud platform overall and notice that's not a predictive cloud storage conversation and it's a big part of why it made a ton of sense for Nimble Storage to become a part of HPE. We brought to bear a product called InfoSight that you might be familiar with. The idea behind InfoSight is in a cloud connected world, the client should never know more about what's going on in their infrastructure than we do. So we view every system as being at the edge of our network and for about seven years now, we've been collecting a massive amount of information about infrastructure, about 70 million telemetry points per day, per system that's coming back to us. So we have a massive anonymized data set about infrastructure. So we've been collecting all of this sensor data in the same way that say Uber or Tesla has been collecting sensor data from cars, right? And the next step, kind of the next wave of innovation if you will is, okay, it's great that you've collected this sensor data, now what do you do with it, right? And so we're starting to think about how do you put actuators in place so that you can have an actual self managing data center? How can you apply machine learning and global kind of correlation in a way that actually applies artificial intelligence to the data center and makes it truly touchless and self managing and self healing and so on So that vision alone is when, I'm sure when you pitched that to Meg, she was like, okay, that sounds good, let's buy the company. But as well, there was another factor which was the success that Nimble was having. A major shift in the storage market and you can see it walking around here is that over the last five, seven years there's been a shift from the storage specialist, expert at managing LUNs and deploying and tuning to the sort of generalist because people realize, look, there's no competitive advantage. So talk about that and how the person to whom you've sold in your career has changed. Yeah, no, absolutely, it's a great point and I think it's, in a lot of ways, it goes to, you're right, obviously Meg and Antonio saw a lot of value in Nimble Storage. The value that we saw as Nimble Storage is as a standalone storage company with kind of one product to sell, there's a saying in sales that if you're a hammer, everything looks like a nail and so it's really cool that we could go get on a whiteboard and explain why the castle file system is revolutionary and delivers superior IOPS and so on and so forth, but the conversation is shifting to more of a solutions conversation. It moves to how do I deliver actual value and how do I help organizations drive revenue and help them distinguish themselves from their competitors leveraging digital transformation. So being a part of a company that has a wide portfolio and applying a solution sales approach is, it's game changing, right? Our ability to go in and say, I don't want to tell you about the Nimble OS, I want to hear from you what your challenges are and then I'm going to come back to you with a proposal to help you solve those challenges. It's exciting for our sales teams, frankly, because it changes our conversations that makes us more consultative. All right, talk about this, talk about the sale. Value conversation. Talk about the sales engagement dynamic with the buyer of storage, officially mentioned in the old days, now new days. A new dynamic is emerging, we've identified on theCUBE past couple days and I'll just kind of lay it out for you and I want you to get a reaction. I'm the storage buyer of old. Now I'm the modern guy. I got to know all the ins and outs of speeds and feeds against all the competitors, but now there's a new overlay on top of which is a broader picture across the organization that has compute that has edge. So I feel more, not deluded from storage, but more holistic around other things. So I have to balance both worlds. I got to balance the, I got to know and nail the storage equation. Okay, as well as know the connection points with how it all works, almost as an OS. How do you engage in that conversation? Because it's hard, right? Because storage, you go right into the weeds, speeds and feeds under the hood, CR numbers, we're great, we do all the stuff, but now you got to say, wait a minute, but in a VM environment, it's this, in the cloud, it's like this, and it's a little bit of bigger picture, HCI or whatever that is, how do you deal with that? No, absolutely, and I think that's well said. I mean, I think the storage market, historically has always been sort of, all right, do you want Granny Smith apples or Red Delicious apples, right? It always sort of looked the same, and it was just about, you know, I can deliver X number of IOPS, and it became a speeds and feeds conversation. Today, it's not just not apples to apples, it's like, do you prefer apples, pineapples or vacuum cleaners? Like there's so many different ways to solve these challenges, and so you have to take the conversation to a higher level, right? It has to be a conversation about how do you deliver value to businesses? And I think, I hear this- And it gets confusing to the buyers too, because they're being bombarded with a lot of fud, and then they still got to check the boxes on all the, under the hood stuff, the engine's got to work. And they come to VMworld, and every year there's 92 new companies that they haven't heard of before that are pitching them on, hey, I solved your problems. I think what I'm hearing from clients a lot is, they don't necessarily want to think about the storage, they don't want to think about, do I provision RAID 10 or RAID 5? And do I manage this aggregate in this way or that way? They don't want to think about it, right? So I think this is why you're seeing the success of some of these next generation platforms that are radically simple to implement, right? And in some ways, at Nimble, when we were talking to some of these clients who have sort of a legacy approach to storage, where you've got like a primary LUN administrator, there's nothing wrong with that job, it's a great job, and I have friends who do that job, but a lot of companies are now shifting to more of a generalist, I manage applications and I manage, you know. You manage a dashboard console. Exactly, yeah, so you have to make it simple and you have to make it, you don't have to think about those things anymore. So in thinking about your relationship over the years with VMware, as HP, you were part of the cartel, I call it, the inner circle. You got all the APIs early, all the CDKs or SDKs early, you were one of the few, you, of course, EMC, NetApp, all the big storage players, a couple of IBM, a couple others, okay, and then you go to Nimble, you're a little guy, and it's like, come on, hey, let's partner, okay, and so much has changed now that you're back at HPE, how has that, how has VMware evolved and from an ecosystem partner standpoint, and then specifically, where are you at today with HPE? That's a great question, and I remember the early days at Nimble when we were knocking on the door and they're like, who are you again, Nimble, who? And we're really proud of the reputation that we earned inside of VMware, they're a great partner, and they've built such a massive ecosystem, and this show is incredible, right? They're such a core part of our business. At Nimble, I feel like we earned a seat at that table in some ways through technology differentiation and just grit and hustle, right? We kind of edged our way into those conversations and performance, and we started to get interesting to them from a strategic perspective as just Nimble Storage. Now as a part of HPE, HPE was, and in some ways as a part of HPE, you're like, oh, that was cute, we thought we were strategic to VMware, now we actually are very strategic to VMware, and the things that we're doing with them from an innovation perspective, it's like just throwing fuel on the fire, right? So we're doubling down on some of the things we're doing around like VM vision and InfoSight, our partnership with VSAN on ProLiant servers, things like that, it's a great partnership, and I think the things that VMware's announced this week are really exciting. I think it- Thank you, great to see you, great to have you on theCUBE. Thank you so much. I'll give you the last word. What's coming up for you guys in HPE Storage as the Vice President General Manager? You're out there pounding the pavement. What should customers look for from you guys? No, I appreciate that. There's a couple things. So first and foremost, our R&D budget just got a lot bigger, specifically around InfoSight. So you'll see InfoSight come to other HPE products, 3PAR, ProLiant servers, so on and so forth, and InfoSight will become a much more interesting cloud-based management tool for proactive wellness in the infrastructure. Second, you'll see us double down on our channel, right? So the channel, Nimble was always 100% channel, SimpliVity was 100% channel, HPE Storage is going to get very serious about embracing the channel. And third, we're going to ensure that the client experience remains top-notch. The NPS score of 85 that Nimble delivered, we're really proud of that, and we're going to make sure we don't mess that up for our clients. You know, it's so funny, just an observation. I worked at HPE for nine years in the late 80s, really 90s, and then I've been covering theCUBE for over seven years now. Storage is always like the power engine of HPE. And no matter what's happening, it comes back down to storage. I mean, the earnings, the results, the client engagements, storage has moved from this corner kind of function to really strategic, and it continues that way. Congratulations. Thank you so much, appreciate the time. All right, it's theCUBE. Coming up, Pat Gelsinger on theCUBE at one o'clock, stay with us, got all the great guests and alumni, and also executives from VMware coming on theCUBE. I'm John Furrier, Dave Vellante. We'll be right back with more live coverage after this short break.