 Hey everyone, welcome back to theCUBE, the leader in live tech coverage, covering a day two HPE Discover live from the Venetian Expo Center, Lisa Martin with Dave Vellante, going to have a great conversation about digital real-time HPE's relationship what they've seen in the last year, Dave, and we might even touch on one of your topics, repatriation. Yeah, well, so data center's hot, right? I mean, it's been sort of booming for the last decade and it's heating up thanks to generative AI, which as we know, don't touch the AI, it's- Too hot. Yeah. Please welcome back one of our guests, Xavier Poisson, Global Vice President, Service Providers Business at HPE, and Colin McLean joins us as well, the Chief Revenue Officer at Digital Realty. Guys, it's great to have you on theCUBE. Thank you. Hi, you guys, good to see you. So a year since the relationship was announced, can't believe it's been already 12 months, 300 plus data centers, 50 plus metros, 27 countries, a global partnership delivering a consistent experience across customers. What are some of the market changes, Xavier, you've seen in the last year and are some of the things that you discussed last year still relevant? And then Colin will ask you the same question. So I believe that in most of the countries on the planet, we have seen new factors coming, which are the development of new kind of applications at the edge in different segments, in different industry verticals that are driving to even more consumption at the edge. The second point that I have seen dramatically and this is because of the uncertainty, the political uncertainty and everything around the consequences of the COVID is all about bringing back the digital asset in countries. Meaning I don't like to use the term sovereignty. And at the same time, people want to consume local services in every single country. And if you combine that with the edge and we could discuss on sovereignty for years, but if you combine that with the edge, this is creating an opportunity for digital reality plus you let back an enterprise which is absolutely unique on the market. What are your thoughts, Colin, in terms of the market changes in the last year? Do you agree with Xavier? Obviously a great partnership here and some of the things that were discussed last year, I know you weren't here, but the relevance today as the market is so different. Yeah, well, we're ecstatic with the HPE partnership for one. We've seen some already some great wins on the docket in the books and the growing pipeline overall. We feel like we complement what HPE is doing in Green Lake in a significant way. I mean, certainly the fact that we've all adopted this kind of hybrid IT, hybrid cloud strategies, multi-cloud world in which we're living in and the simplistic ability to deliver a single bill, a single platform strategy that HPE can deliver. We completely support that ubiquitously, really, because clients are seeing more and more needs to go global across our larger footprints. So just like HPE, we have a large footprint across, as you mentioned, 300 plus data centers, 50 plus metros across the globe. So we talked quite a bit last year about that hybrid IT trend. We've seen it. I think that's complemented with what we're seeing in cloud, which cloud continues to grow, both public and private, as well as this emergence of AI, which you mentioned, which is a really interesting proposition. So we think that there's huge inroads of partnership. We're just getting started and we're excited to see where things go. And if I may, just to complement on the trends with what you said on what I say, there is a new conscience everywhere in the world or on sustainability. Because what I would say that in the past, people were speaking about that. Now they have rules they need to adapt to. And this is valid not only in Europe, where you know that EU Commission is putting very strict rules for data centers and cloud. And likewise, in the US now, we see that coming also. And when you combine the two forces of the company in this direction to offer this HP GreenLake Power solution, one single bill, something really for the customer, with these two companies who have done a fantastic job, HPE on one side, to show reality on the other side, on this sustainable effect. I believe that there is a road to go. Okay, so everybody has some cloud, but not everything's in the cloud. And so I'm inferring that you consider a digital realty colo as an edge to the cloud potentially. And then maybe it connects to your data center, maybe not. And then there's all kinds of other edges out there. So how do you think about edge? So this is always the conversation we had already some years ago. Cloud is everywhere. What we offer is a cloud that comes to you. We need to stop thinking of cloud as a public cloud. Stop. The cloud may be in public cloud. It may be on-prem. It may be just within a colo. It may be through a service provider. And when you look at the expansion of the power of the local service providers everywhere on the planet, this is exploding, man. It's not only the public cloud. Cloud is a delivery model. And what we are building together, and for end-user customers, and for service providers, why not? Because what we do applies also to service providers. Is the cloud that comes to you with two big partners, HP and digital realty, to have one single cloud that is fitting with your requirements? Sometimes out of that, people may go to the public cloud. Sometimes they will only keep private cloud. We don't care at one point of time about that because we bring the platform that enables them to do everything they want to do. And you know that when we bring systems into digital realty collocation, we use their power. We use all the efficiency they bring on that, and we put on top the HP green cloud platform. And from there, you can do what you want. So for me, I remain on that. I told you that a few years ago. This is it. Okay, but you're very passionate about this, and I appreciate that passion. I see the figures, man. I see the figures. But I will say this, while it's true, we talked about this a couple of years ago. You weren't in the position to be as forceful as you are today. Exactly. Because of where GreenLake is and how it has matured. Before, it was, you know, you had some services, and you could cobble together today. It's a true cloud operating model. And that's different. I think so. And also the point I was trying to make to you about it being a hybrid world is it's very much use case driven in terms of where a particular workload's going to live. And so whether that is to get specific apologies, public or private where it's going to live, whether you might have access requirements in a collocation data center to a cloud, one of the big three, that we feel like collocation is an abler for that workload to actually support its requirements wherever it may be. And so most often we feel like that's probably best placed in collocation in some ways because the varying density requirements that are associated with workload today. I mean, we're not just talking about the AI that's running at high density now to the rack. You're seeing much more standard enterprise compute that can be 8, 10, 12, 15, 20 KW per rack, which is in much ways enabled by what you can do within collocation. Yeah, I mean, everybody talks about data and gravity. We've talked about it for years, but the numbers don't lie. Only 14%, and I apologize, I'm going to use public cloud, but only 14% of customers will tell you they're all in on the public cloud. And if you ask them how that's going to change over the next two or three years, flat. So the vast majority of customers are hybrid. You guys have been saying that for a while and there's no debate anymore. Exactly, and when you see the rhythm of data creation at the edge with SunSource, with all the new digitization process in vertical industries, all the data needs to be there also for latency purpose. And this is where it is very interesting what we are doing because we bring the global solution near the customer. And this, as I believe, has a fantastic effect. Not speaking about the security aspect of that, because security is now a topic which is in the mind of every single customer. This customer may be a user, they may be service providers, and they care about that. And the reliability of what we get together combining the assets of HP on the stack with HP GreenLake and so on. And what digital reality has done to enhance security everywhere is absolutely unique. You can speak about the security aspect of what you do. It's really amazing. I'd love to hear more about that. I'd love you to. Yeah, well, I mean, certainly we have a high standard of resiliency, both physical and logical security within the framework of our co-location data centers. And so clients oftentimes have a particular expectation to make sure a workload is within whether I can touch or feel or see it within co-location versus it living an ubiquity in the cloud. I mean, one thing we've been consistent about is we're a big fan of the clouds. We do, we consider them partners. We consider us a core part of the supply chain. Cloud has been great for your business. Cloud's been great for us, so we're a big fan of cloud. But we also recognize that there is some private workload that needs to sit in co-location data centers because of security requirements that certain clients have. And we feel like that's justifiable. And in fact, we'll help our businesses grow. How have you seen things change, Colin? Particularly as we've seen the last few years of obviously major macroeconomic changes, but the security and the risk landscape has changed so much. In the last year alone, in the last couple of years, we've been talking a lot about cyber resiliency and how customers are on that journey. How is digital realty with HPE and GreenLake helping customers on that journey to cyber resilience? And what does it look like? Get there, if you can. So I think certainly one of the things we've been consistent about is that we're really good at what we do. We're kind of core layers here to the overall ecosystem. But we partner with key folks like HPE to really help deliver that security at a robust level. So we don't go up the stack in terms of delivering additional services. So we have a key resiliency in terms of cybersecurity, have robust standards, both physical and logical. Because remember, we actually have a physical asset layer that we have to protect. But there is a keen sense of making sure that customers want their data protected. Again, one of the values of co-location. So we put a keen value on that. So if I have HPE inside of a digital realty facility, and I'm a customer, staying on security, what's my responsibility? What's your responsibility? What's that dividing line look like? So we can speak about security from all the layers of the security stack. What I can tell you is that from the HPE GreenLake cloud platform, you will be able to monitor everything that is happening on your infrastructure from end to end. So this is something that is granting. I just want to call back the fact that everything that we do is based on the signal root of trust with attestation agents that are conveyed by HPE GreenLake in order that all your workloads are secured. Now, beyond simply the VMs, HPE has done a lot of investment through how we can manage distributed identity in a secure way. And this is what we did when we acquired a Spiffian Spire, for instance, to go up to getting microservices being really discussing together, not with the notion of a secret, but really discussing together with attestation that everything is coming together. So we come from the hardware layer with the zero trust and we move up the layers up to the application layer. So we are there on that. And for the physical security, for the telecommunication security, for the links, this is there. And so we bring to the customer an end to end contract and end to end capability, an end to end value proposition and SLA service level agreements that they can get and this is the beauty of joining the forces. What about repatriation? Are you guys repatriates? Or do you see, what does the data tell you? You're seeing the cloud growth come down. Actually, the on-prem growth has ticked up in many cases and there seems to be a little bit of an equilibrium possibly. But what are you seeing on the ground with customers? So I think I'll get back to what I was making. It's really workload centric in terms of what we're seeing. There are certainly use cases and we're seeing it today where repatriation makes sense, whether it's for cost or performance reasons and we're in the middle of several deals now that I can tell you that are emphatically repatriation oriented in terms of their approach. There's a lot of reason in some cases to keep data in the cloud, in the public cloud with the CSPs or whoever it may be, for a number of reasons, flexibility, cost. Spensive as hell to get out. You know, in some ways it is a challenge to go the other direction. What it's proven over time is there are particular use cases that the cost proves out significantly that going- To business cases is what you're saying. It very much is. So it's not a one-size-fits-all conversation. I personally don't see many organizations going completely out of cloud. I think they're always going to have a cloud presence. It's a matter of what particular workload lends itself best in co-location. So we talk a lot about right customer, right location, right workload. It's really understanding what they're trying to accomplish and achieve and then make the best recommendation. I would add something because it's not only about I choose where I go for certain industries and for some government data, you have new regulations coming. So if you know in Europe the EUCS template, this will enforce that certain class of data will be in cloud managed by European people and owned by European people. But this is expanding also. It's the same case in India. So if you look at the planet, you have movements coming regarding where the new workloads of sensitive data needs to stay. And it may be on-prem within the data center of a customer or it may be with a service provider would be using our stack into a national data center the data center in the country where they want to operate. So it's not only workload, it's not only cost, it's also regulation. This is the point I want to make because we often forget it and there is a big movement on the planet coming out of the geopolitical uncertainties and so on. Why don't you like the term sovereignty? Can you explain that? Well, because it has been used in so many different ways. What I like to use as a word is trust and trust and compliance to prerequisites that have been done regarding certain class of data because sovereignty, everybody use this word for everything. But we see that, you know, and there are very big new opportunities across the world of new ecosystems in vertical industries, crossing data together between themselves to create value out of the data. This is what is called the data economy. And for that you need also to play with trust and it's not only in the public cloud because when you have a comprehensive value chain that nobody wants anybody else to look after, you need to do it in certain cloud. This cloud may be your cloud as an end user or a group of end user, or it may be you decide as a group of companies to host it with a service provider. And this is where we come into the game because we can offer the right solution in all the countries that show realty discovery. Then you must have some great customer story examples of successes that you want to share with us. It really show the power of the partnership, the capabilities, and also the sustainability angle. I would love to hear. Absolutely, you have a fantastic one on FSI, yeah? Yeah, we do. We have a global FSI partner that we were able to secure a right story with. I think the security perspective really on that private cloud was one that really heightened their interest. Another one that comes to mind is we had another global customer who had a multi-site requirement, fit our footprint really, really well. We aligned with the sales teams. I mean, one of the things that we've really valued is HPE brings a tremendous expertise, frankly, that we don't bring to bear, that we can add to our own customer set. So we compliment each other really well. Our sales teams have worked, I think, tremendously, and we're seeing great inroads in the future because as we talked about, this is very much a hybrid world, but it's a global world. And so clients, particularly the global 2000s, are seeing a robust requirement to say, I need requirements where my folks are. And oftentimes they're in Frankfurt, or they're in Amsterdam, or they're in Austin, or they're in Africa. And so we're able to deliver that with HPE really effectively. Excellent, guys, thank you so much for joining Dave and me on the program. Really sharing what's transpired in the last year for Digital Realty, HPE, and where you're going in the future. We appreciate your insights and your time. Thank you so much. Great to see you here. It's been our pleasure. For our guests, and Dave Vellante, I'm Lisa Martin. Up next, HPE experts are going to join us to talk about HPE Asimorel Software and HPE GreenLake for Private Cloud Enterprise, how they're both hybrid by design and working in tandem to extract actionable insights from data. We'll see you in just a few minutes.