 Hola, Cube viewers, and welcome back to day two of our coverage of HPE Discover Barcelona. I'm Rebecca Knight, your host, along with my co-host and analyst Rob Streche. This is day two, an incredible conference. We just had Antonio Neary on the main stage. He really struck an optimistic tone with so many announcements, so many new products and services, talking about AI as the most transformative technology of our lifetime. Definitely, and I think what was a lot of fun in how he weaved it together with a very positive attitude, the right amount of hey, you do have to have some caution and do it properly, have some regulation around it, they had some guests on stage, some customers on stage, and really talked about how it also needs to be sustainable. And I think that that's a huge message. We're running into COP 28, I think is next week in, we're kicking off next week in Dubai. So it's, I think, a really meaningful message that we're all coming together on this. I also, getting an award for one of the top 10 most sustainable cloud companies, I think that's speaking to the cloud operating model and how really HPE is leaning in and has been on hybrid cloud. And I think that really plays well into our guests this morning. Well, exactly, it's a terrific segue, a terrific segue. I want to welcome Hang Tan, he is the Chief Operating Officer, Hybrid Cloud, Hewlett Packard Enterprise, welcome Hang. Thank you for having me. And Jason Newton, he is a CUBE alum, Vice President, Hybrid Cloud Marketing, Hewlett Packard Enterprises. Thank you so much for returning to us, Jason. Yes. Stay away. I want to start with you, Hang, because it is your first time, introduce yourselves to our viewers, tell us a little bit about what you do. Yeah, so as you said, my name is Hong Tan, I'm the Chief Operating Officer for Hybrid Cloud, which is a new BU we stood up in a month ago. And then prior to that, I was the Chief Strategy Officer for HPE, so helping to orchestrate a lot of what you're seeing today. Yeah, I think what's really key to this, and Hybrid Cloud, I mean, Antonio was very early into hybrid. I worked for a previous hyperscaler who I wasn't even allowed to use the word hybrid, even though I thought the world would be hybrid. And we actually have data that's backing this up now that 50% of companies are having and deploying applications on-premise or at the edge. And I think these are net new applications. So what we're seeing is a lot of how people are bringing it together. So really, what was the reasons behind forming the business unit, I guess you could say? Yeah, and in many ways, this was multiple years in the making, right? As you called, as you said, we called it the world as hybrid five, six years ago. And I think it's really now is the right time because in many ways we were, with GreenLake, we were a large incubation business. But finally, we said now it checks all the boxes. Have we checked the box of scale? We now have a multi-billion dollar franchise, $1.2 billion AR check. Have we transformed our go-to-market? Can our sales reps now, instead of selling boxes, selling solutions and outcomes and talk to CIOs and developers, check, right? Do we have the right capabilities now, right? It's not just consumption, but are we actually truly delivering a true hybrid cloud operating model check? And couple that with the massive opportunity that's coming to us with the massive hybrid cloud adoption and AI, which is the ultimate hybrid workload, we felt like now is the right time. And the beauty of creating a business unit is that now you have a leadership team that all they think about day and night is how do you develop the product roadmap? How do you innovate? How do you increase the value prop to the customers? And to the extent that we're successful in doing that, we get to reinvest into the business and we further accelerate the innovation cycle. So we get on this virtual cycle. So that was the thinking behind creating the hybrid cloud business unit. Jason, I want to ask you, one of the things that we keep hearing, one of your colleagues Valerie Defonseca was here on theCUBE yesterday and Antonio Neary said this too. So many companies are hybrid by accident. And really what HPE is trying to do is have them understand it needs to be intentional, it needs to be deliberate, they need to be hybrid by design. Can you tell us a little bit about what you're hearing from customers here at HPE? Yeah, it's like what Rob said. I mean, the original intent was everything was just supposed to end up in a centralized place in a public cloud. There wasn't going to be a detour. And the realities are that, so many of these workloads are entangled with each other, there's a lot of complications. And then we talk a lot and have for years about the idea that data has gravity, right? And it tends to attract other data sets and other workloads to it. And so clearly that ended up, people are like, well, let's just push this over to the side and we'll move what we can. And so now they're left with a bunch of disparate operating models, a lot of different issues with security, different ways of driving connectivity. And so we recognize that really the only way to solve this is we need to give a platform environment that can deal with all these data sets and workloads in these various locations, but provide a consistent experience. And then ultimately a set of consistent services underpinning them so that I can provide that connectivity, that backup and recovery, that observability across that entire environment. Yeah, I think that's the critical, is having those services that can go across the entire environment so I have one operating model. And what are the pieces that you're bringing together? I assume it's like ops ramp and Zerto, Esmeral and some of the other stuff. Yeah. I think the biggest thing for me is really ops ramp. I think that is maybe under appreciated right now outside of HP, certainly with inside of HPE we see enormous potential there. I've been here for a really long time and the biggest question I could never answer was, that sounds like a great solution, but what about all the rest of the stuff that I have? What about my multi-vendor, multi-cloud environment? Now for the first time, by integrating this into the HP GreenLake platform, we can say, yes, of course we can manage that. We don't, whether that workload's running on Dell or on a Cisco network or part of that's in AWS, we can now start to bring that together and unify that. And it's like any problem, if you can't measure it, you can't solve it, right? You can't see it, how do you know what to do? Well, ops ramp with all the integrations that we're doing across the modern cloud native tool set opens a world of visibility and we're starting to show our customers, did you know that this is what your hybrid by accident environment looks like? And they're like, I had no idea. Can you help me with that? Absolutely. So Han, can you walk us through some of the announcements that you've made at HPE Discover? Yeah, and I think it really comes back to this idea that AI is a game changer and it's the ultimate hybrid workload. And when we talk to customers, we realize that they're faced with an additional set of requirements that's burdening an existing infrastructure that's already very complicated to manage. And so our announcements are really centered around, hey customer, we understand you. And not only that, but we understand what it takes to drive AI end to end from model development to tuning to inference. And what is it like to implement that in the enterprise environment? Not in an academic sense. And so this is where you see all the announcements, right? So you have the full stack of offerings from high-end training to enterprise grade tuning and inference that's all underpinned by the platform that's underpinned by a AI development platform. And then that's further underpinned by cloud-optimized infrastructure and a data plane that is highly tuned for AI workloads because AI is very data-intensive, orders of magnitude more data-intensive. So we're really offering an end-to-end solution that is also a full stack solution that is multi-vendor and hybrid by design. Yeah, I think what's really interesting, and I think you kind of hit on it a little bit there, is really what's going on with the customers and how they're actually using it. And Sensei was on stage with Antonio earlier today. And I thought what was interesting was that they do, the self-checkout type stuff, and hey, it goes into the basket, it comes out of the basket, goes back on the shelf, gets put somewhere else, whatever, I take it and you go with your virtual card out the door here in Europe. And I thought what was interesting is that back my head, I'm like that's definitely, and then Antonio actually said it, it's an edge use case where they're definitely hybrid in how they're doing, because they're doing inference down at that level in that store and applying the models there to really be quick and be able to make those decisions. But they're not training those models in the store. And it's got to be hybrid, it's got to be more than one place. Is that what you're seeing with customers or what other examples do you have that you've? Yeah, I mean we built our whole strategy right now around the idea that you need the ingredients of, the edge and the connectivity and the security, that's where it all starts. And all of those use cases today had that, but they also had a cloud element to it and a hybrid element to it, right? That's where a lot of the data is. And then as you heard, now they're starting to look at the AI workload and saying, okay, how does that help me deliver the end outcome that I'm wanting? Whether it's a seamless experience for travelers to the Red Sea Global, it's a seamless supply chain for SPAR, or it's inventing these new shopping experiences with Sensei. So what we're trying to impress upon the customers are that making this magical experience, things that are magical, often underneath the covers is a lot of technology and complexity and pieces that have to come together. So that's what we're hearing from the customers that are now coming to us. And there's so many more, all of them here, are just like the ones that were on stage saying, I need to answer all of these questions, I have to integrate them all together and then I've got to deliver that outcome and that business transformation piece that I'm looking for. One of the things we heard from Antonio is that so many companies are data-rich and insight-poor. How do you move the needle? How do you help them take all of that data and actually understand what the data is telling them and then what to do next? Yeah, and that's been true for a long time and I think the first part is actually data discovery and aggregating the data. And so, especially when you talk about AI, it's not structured data, right? It's not sitting in a Oracle or SAP database. These are, you're pulling data many times years of backed up data because AI is data hungry. So that's really the first step is really organizing and aggregating that data and then prepping it for AI. And so this is where our new AI optimized file solutions really help provide that platform for companies to build a data warehouse or data lake on top of as the first stage for making sense of your data. And then we have offerings such as our Esmeral data fabric and our unified analytics portfolio that really makes it a turnkey end-to-end platform for data scientists and AI developers to be able to feed the model to make sense of the data. And so that's the second layer. And then the third layer is obviously our AI training tools and our AI training infrastructure which then is the ultimate step which is turning the data into actionable insights, into actionable models. And so we actually have that all three tiers of capabilities and that's kind of what Antonio talked about today as well. I call that the dirty job of AI. There's a lot of dirty jobs. It's the glamorous thing to be the data scientist but the hard heavy lifting is with the data. And the tagging and the cleaning and the making it available and protecting it and backing it up and securing it. And that's where most of the customers are coming to us saying help us solve that problem. And if we can solve that, we'll take the next step. So Esmeral has been a huge part of solving that as well as our new file store today. So that's where we'll be focused. But lots of dirty jobs in AI to make that magic happen. A lot of heavy lifting behind the scenes. We're trying to make that easier. I think that's a big piece of it is the fact that it is the data engineers and you have the platform engineering people who is really the new name for IT in most respects. That's right. They're all coming about this and trying to get their hands wrapped around how do I, data scientist calls? Where's the data for blah, blah, blah? How do I go find it? How do I get it to them? I don't know, is it backed up? Is it in long term retention? Is it in an object store file? Where have you? And I think that to me is one of the big pieces. Also, I mean, again, we'd be remiss if we didn't talk about the fact that you're hybrid, which means you also do run in the cloud. So it's not just in on premise. So kind of give a little pitch for that because there's a lot of cloud news going on this week over on the other side of the pond. We talked about OpsRAMP as a great example of hybrid, right? And what you'll see, and you'll see in future announcements as well, is that we have a very deliberate strategy. Anything that's in our portfolio is hybrid by design. So what does that mean? It'll be multi-vendor, multi-cloud. It'll not only run our own GreenLake offers, but it'll also run on public cloud. So we're providing the customer with a unified control plane, unified data plane so that it's really seamless for them and we're abstracting all that complexity of the infrastructure from the IT operators. And that's the way that how we orchestrate our roadmap and how we think about innovation going forward. Jason, I wonder if you can tease a little bit about what we're going to hear tomorrow on the main stage from Fidelma. And then even if you dare talk about Discover Las Vegas next year. Oh, well, let's start with Fidelma tomorrow. I mean, Fidelma has come in, she's taking control obviously of this new hybrid cloud business that we just started. And she's really been the driving force behind advancing that platform and that hybrid strategy. And she's really going to focus on bringing that to life. And not only where we're going with HB GreenLake as a hybrid cloud platform play, but then as Hong was saying, how do we start to bring in the hybrid SaaS capabilities into that? How do we have ransomware, backup recovery, those whole environments? And then most importantly, how do we start to build our storage environments? You heard today, all these different vector databases and file and unstructured stuff that that's the stuff underneath that's really going to be running and that those data sources are going to be need to be connected across edge to cloud. So she's really going to unpack that vision and make the case for why HB GreenLake enables you to be hybrid by design. It's teasing for next year. No, I can't, Rebecca, no. We have some really exciting things. One thing that I can tell you is that for the first time, we're going to bring together HB Discover and Aruba Atmosphere into one combined event. So we're significantly growing that event in Las Vegas. In order to do that, we're going to have to do some special fun things that all just leave for there and we'll talk more next year. All right. I like that. I think again, and I went to the Atmosphere keynote yesterday and it was good to see the progress because I think networking is another one of those things that everybody thinks it's all figured out, but then you talk to the people in platform engineering and they're like, yeah, this is the hardest part is the networking and making hybrid actually talk to each other, the two different pieces. That's a significant part of it as well. But I think when we start to look at hybrid, what is the one thing you want to leave people with? So they understand, hey, we're in this game. It's, we're not just a server company. We're out here really providing cross-cloud and cloud is an operating model in a hybrid manner. Yeah, and what I want to leave is that we want to be the number one hybrid cloud provider. We think we are the best position to address customers' pain points. When we show up to customers, we're looking to solve three problems. One is really to transform their business through the power of data and AI. Two is to help modernize their multi-generational IT estates and three is really to dramatically simplify their hybrid multi-cloud IT operations. And I would say that there's no single company out there that can solve all those three problems for the customers. And we're going to be leaning 100% into that. And, you know, just keep watch because we're going to be gunning after number one. Excellent. Well, Hong and Jason, thank you both so much for coming on theCUBE. Our first guest of the day, terrific. Thank you so much. Thank you. It was a pleasure. And thank you for watching the Cube's live coverage of HPE Discover Barcelona. I'm Rebecca Knight for Robstretch A. Stay tuned, we've got so much more to come. You're watching theCUBE, the leader in high-tech enterprise coverage.