 The Cube presents HPE Discover 2022, brought to you by HPE. Hello everybody, welcome to day three of the Cube's coverage of HPE Discover 2022. We're live from Las Vegas in the Venetian Convention Center. This is, I have counted them up. I think this is the 14th HPE, HPE slash HPE Discover that we've done, really excited to welcome in Alexia Clements. She's the vice president of GoToMarket for HPE GreenLake Cloud Services. That's all the rage. Everybody's talking about green, all the wood behind the arrow as the saying goes. Welcome to the Cube. Good to see you. Thank you so much for having me, thrilled to be here. You're welcome, Janet Jackson last night. Epic, she killed it, she was awesome. I thought the band was super tight, but the other thing was the place was packed. It was nice. You know what happens is a lot of time they put the band in the getaway day, you know, and nobody stays. But wow, the hall was jammed. It was great. You could feel the momentum and the excitement and it was just a great way to kind of end the HPE Discover, so it was great. Yeah, I mean, I mentioned that we've been to a lot of HPE slash HPE Discover's and this one was different in the sense that I think, first of all, 8,000 people, people are excited to get back together. But I think, you know, HPE has a spring in its step and the customers are kind of interested. It's much more focused than some of the past HPE Discover's, which was kind of hard to get my hands around sometimes. The business was sort of, and Antonio's pulled that together. So what's changed since the last time we were face to face? We're transforming and hope you all saw that on the floor here. So we're absolutely going through a transformation and I think we're shifting to an edge to cloud platform company. And with that, it's how we approach our customers differently and our partners and we're hoping that we showed this week that we're different and we're transforming. So how do you spend your time? Mostly in front of customers, having conversations about what their needs are and aligning, is that right? Yeah, so I lead the go-to-market for Green Lakes. So that's everything around how we're driving our as-a-service go-to-market strategy, how we're driving programs, enablement, how we're really in the end, how we're executing on that as-a-service strategy from a sales perspective. So what do you hear? Of course a lot of that involves partners, right? I mean, that's kind of the route to market. Absolutely. The HPE prefers for obvious reasons, although others don't necessarily share that. But so what are you hearing from the partner ecosystem and the customers that their biggest challenges are now that we're entering the, let's call it the post-isolation economy? Yeah, I mean, the reality is is digital transformations are hard and I think some customers who haven't necessarily move forward on it or maybe they move forward and they're realizing, hey, I'm stuck and I'm not getting to where I wanna be and really driving that end state. So I mean, I would just say overall, I think customers are struggling if they didn't, they're falling behind a little bit. And I think through the conversations that we're having and through HPE Green, it gives customers choice. And so really, I mean, what I spend my time with and when we're talking to customers and partners, it's about helping customers on that digital transformation journey and understanding what are they trying to drive? What business outcomes are they trying to drive and how we can help them get there? So I often call it the force march to digital with the pandemic and I was looking at a survey recently, I think it was put on by Couchbase and it was probably a thousand respondents and it was a CIO survey. And they asked, who's responsible for the digital transformation at the organization? And overwhelmingly it was the IT organization and I said, uh-oh, that's the problem. Now, but it made sense to me because when the economy shut down, everybody went to IT and said, help, make this work somehow. But that doesn't seem to me to be the right prescription for a successful digital transformation. Do you agree with that? And what do you see as a successful template for DX? Well, I think what we see is that really the lines of business are desperate to move fast and they're really looking for their IT partners to help them in that journey and drive, whether it be drive orders, they need IT to help them in that journey. And so really it's got to be a partnership between the two organizations and what we're trying to do with HP GreenLake is kind of abstract that almost. So hey, we're gonna give it to you and as a service and you're gonna get all of these components and all you have to think about is where do I need to grow and what are the outcomes that I'm looking for? So that's what it's got to be, there's got to be tight alignment I think between the lines of business and IT and sometimes those two don't know how to talk to each other. So that's another way of really trying to speak to the business leaders and say, what are you trying to do? Where do you need to go? And a lot of times they don't even know that they need to get there. So that's where we need to have those different conversations with our customers to, and that's where we look for our partners to help us in that. So really having those different conversations to progress what customers are really looking to drive. How does GreenLake specifically accelerate that transformation? Where does it fit? Maybe you can kind of take us through a generic example of how that works. Yeah, I mean a great example is, especially with the pandemic, is desktop. Hey, you now need to, everybody's working from different locations. So desktop as a service, VDI as a service and you're putting it in a per whatever, per whatever variable pricing you want. But think about it, you have that one pay as you go and so the IT organization, all they have to think about is that's my per unit price there. So that's a great example of how we saw, like especially during the pandemic, that was something that was, a huge area of focus for organizations. What's the spectrum that you see in terms of, the maturity model, if you will, a digital transformation? I mean, if you weren't a digital business during the pandemic, you were pretty much out of business and with very few exceptions. And so, okay, so on the one end, you have folks that sort of were forced into it, my forced march scenario. Others were actually moving quite a bit along before the pandemic. Others were kind of given a lip service and maybe doing a few projects. What do you see as that spectrum? I think if you're not transforming, you're falling behind. And so everybody needs to be looking to the future and understanding, really trying to get aggressive on that. And that's what we're seeing. We're seeing companies who aren't moving fast on that are falling behind. Do you see bifurcation, I'm sure you do, those that say, yeah, I want as a service and others to say, look, I'm really well capitalized. I'm going to give me the CapEx. I'm going to put it in and run it myself. And is there a relationship between that approach and their digital transformation maturity or is it kind of just really their preference? I mean, for us, we're meeting customers where they're at on their journey and their multi-cloud journey. So some, and what I'm seeing is that every customer today has multiple clouds, whether that be their kind of multi-gen IT, the legacy stuff that they've got to deal with, they've got stuff in public clouds, and they're trying to really transform and figure out, how do I work all of that in, like how do I move forward with that new operating model? And so what I'm seeing is, we're going to meet customers where they're at on their journey. So some are going to continue to go down that path in how they've always purchased their IT and others are really, more often than not, we're seeing they want that as a service cloud-like to have all the benefits of cloud, but yet still have it on their prem or in a colo or at the edge. So I do see some of those customers who are thinking differently, right? And they're the ones that are more apt to be a little bit more aggressive on their digital transformation. They're open to the possibility, if that makes sense. No, it does, it makes total sense. I think, on the one hand, a lot of customers are trying to build their own cloud. So you mentioned multi-cloud. I'm not going to go to Amazon to help me with my multi-cloud strategy. That's not going to be my preferred. Yeah, I might talk to Microsoft about it a little bit. Google's got Anthos and that's kind of interesting, but Google's not enterprise. They got good data, but there are other choices out there. Why HPE for my cloud hybrid multi-cloud strategy? Give us the bumper sticker. It's the best of both worlds for customers. So it enables them to have the security. It enables them to grow, to be in their data centers or in colos at the edge. It allows them to not over provision. It allows them to pay as they go and pay as they grow. There's, and then it also really is that ease factor. So it's that thinking about it as I have, I already, I know what my pricing is. I know what that predictability is from a pricing perspective and what my costs are going to be. So all of those things really, all those messages resonate with customers. Lexia, thanks so much for coming on. We got the trains are backing up, super tight schedule today. This is wall to wall coverage of HPE Discover. Thank you. Thank you so much for having me. Appreciate it. You're very welcome. All right, keep it right there. Dave Vellante is here. John Furrier, HPE Discover 2022 from Las Vegas. We're live. We'll be right back.