 now at VMworld. Yogesh Agrawal is here. He's vice president of strategy, solutions, and alliances at Hewlett Packard. Yogesh, welcome to theCUBE, first time on. Thank you. So, and you're new to HP, just inside of one quarter. Yeah, yeah, I've just been there three months. So you came over from another big company, just where you were at EMC as well, in the background at Symantec. Why did you come to HP? What's the, what was the allure? Yeah, so I would say three things. First of all, if you look at our industry in general, there is so much convergence across compute, network, storage, right? And if you think of one company that has all the assets to pull it all together, it's HP. You look at Cisco, it's primarily a networking company and partners for many other areas. IBM is pretty much out of the systems business, right? So that's number one. Number two, when you look at kind of the strength of the storage portfolio itself, I know HP has a lot of storage assets, but when you look at the strength of the three-part portfolio, that was very appealing to me, right? I could see the architectural benefits of that. And the third area I would call out is the leadership team. As you may know, Manish Koyle recently joined HP and he had subbed the storage division and Manish was a rock star at NetApp. He's very well respected in the valley. So for me, the opportunity to work with somebody close like Manish Koyle was pretty appealing. Yeah, and you have strategy is, you know, the first part of your title. And Manish is a great respect for strategies. Wonderful strategists, a really good thinker, clear thinker. So that's an exciting part, but talk a little bit more about the role. Okay, so my role has three pieces. The biggest part of my role is strategy. So as you know, at HP, we have a portfolio between three-part and store ones, and store virtual, and entire storage business. So I am responsible for driving strategy for that entire portfolio. I also have a solutions team, which works closely with our Alliance partners and drive solutions there. And the third area is field enablement. I have a technical marketing team which works closely with the field and drives enablement activities. Okay, so let's talk about strategy. Sure. Let me look, let me roll back to 2010. I said, well, this is our sixth year here. So 2010, three-part was a public company, independent. HP had a storage portfolio that was, had a big, big giant hole in it. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And three-part filled that. Yeah. And the strategy was, okay, bring in three-part and, you know, cover that top tier. Yeah. You know, competes very effectively with VMAX, give HP an opportunity there, even though it has the, you know, it's actually based on XP, I guess you call it. But also bring it down market. Yeah. Right? And so three-part became sort of the tip of the storage spear. Yeah. And then the strategy essentially was to use that architecture as the sort of ice breaker for all opportunity storage. And you had other parts of the portfolio too, clearly. But it was really the three-part, I called it, the gift that keeps on giving. Yeah. And then it was to utilize that platform to create the all-flash array and then go hard after that market. And the strategy was, okay, fill out the portfolio, do a better job of going on platform, because HP was, you know, losing share within its own platform, and then, you know, bring the software defined in, the converge piece. So that's not really the strategy, you know, per se, but those are parts of the strategy. So how would you tie that up and summarize HP's storage strategy? Yeah. So I'm going to give you different perspectives to it. First and foremost, if I take just a product view of the world, and I'll come back to the market view of the world soon, right? We have two design centers. There is a system-defined design center, which is what you talked about from a three-power perspective, right? And so we have a, like, from a storage perspective, there is a lot of strength there which actually feeds our converged infrastructure, like our CS700 series as well. Then there is a software-defined element to our design center, which is where our current store virtual technology fits in, but there is more that we could do there. So these are the two design centers for us, but to answer your strategy question, I'm actually going to step back and look at the market a little bit, right? So let's, if you look at the big chunks of the market, there is traditional sand, many, many billions of dollars, but if you look at the growth there, it's really flat to declining. You look at the NAS market, right, where NetApp had its foothold, that's flat to declining. So, but you also know at VMworld, there are a lot of storage companies there, so there is a ton of disruption going on in storage. So where are the dollars flowing to? Data is not flat. Data is not flat, yeah, yeah. So the dollars are actually flowing to several areas. One is converged infrastructure for sure, which I would say workload-optimized converged infrastructure. Then there is hyperconvergence. Then there is software-defined storage, and what software-defined storage is doing is actually in this declining external storage market, it's shifting the dollars towards internal storage, right? And I'll talk about the implications of that because HP is big into servers and we want to take advantage of that shift. But software-defined storage, in turn, you can break it into three parts. There is virtualized workloads, which can sit on block on file. There is software-defined file and software-defined object. So if I were to bring it all together, and then there is secondary storage, where there is changes happening as well. So our strategy, if I were to net it out, it's very simple. We have great strength in three parts, and it's a tremendous share-gain opportunity for us in the context of a flash discussion. So we want to go after share in the market number one, and we want to continue to extend our leadership in flash, right? So that's number one part of our strategy. The second aspect of our strategy is very much around hyperconvergence, right? I talked about the growth in internal storage, the fact that we have server assets. So in the area of virtualized workloads, customers want hypervisor flexibility, for example, and as you know, store virtual is multi-hypervisor. So taking those assets, taking our one-view assets, and going and winning in hyperconvergence is a big part of our strategy. If I shift attention to the secondary storage side, what customers want is complete solutions, right? So yes, you have three parts, you have store virtual, you have store ones, but you really want to manage the snapshots and the copies around all these entities in a very seamless manner and have data federation, right? So that's a big part of our strategy, right? That when it comes to the HP solutions, customers should be able to get the complete capability. Those are the big ones that stand out for me. And application centricity is the final point I want to touch on. Storage has very much been about bits and bytes, but as you know, in this new world, it's all about the application and it's all about what the application wants from the storage system, not how the storage system accomplishes it. And so that feeds into our strategic direction as well as we move up on the stack. So application centricity historically is met, I'm going to build a purpose-built infrastructure to support whatever application and workload necessary. And there's still a ton of that going on. I mean, look what HDFS has brought, right? HDFS is okay, so we got a bunch of DAS, okay? But then you're starting to see, what I would call more of big data purpose-built infrastructures emerging, maybe as a service or maybe as an appliance. But if I had to summarize your strategy and say, HP continues to want to lead with 3PAR. I mean, it's a centerpiece of the strategy, but also identify growth opportunities in other areas like hyper-converged and have a large portfolio to extend from the latency storage all the way to the capacity storage to even into archiving. Absolutely, if you take capacity storage as an example, and that's where you have to shift your thinking from storage to the broader HP. So there is a ton of growth in object storage right now. In the world of file, there is ton of unstructured data growth. Now people talk about object storage growth and data repositories and content depower, a big deal. The truth is it can be addressed by either file or object. Having said that, we at HP, from our server business perspective, benefit no matter what the move is. We resell Cleversafe today. We resell Scality. We want to play in the big data space. So whether it's cloud era or Hortonworks or Mapper, these are all of interest to us because in all these contexts, we sell a lot more servers, right? So our strategy, as you think about it forward, is not limited to a storage context only. As you think from that application down, is very much about the whole of HP. And as HP splits into HP Enterprise, you will see us kind of making bigger moves in that area, right? What about cloud? Where's cloud fit? I mean, HP has had starts and stops in its cloud business and we've documented it, we followed it, we've had the cloud executives on it. I think it's finally now, it has a steady state and it's moving forward. So obviously Helion is a solid platform, cloud system. What does that all mean to storage? Yeah, so again, I'm going to step back and answer this question, right? So what do you really want? What you want is the mobility of your applications, right? And that application can move from your on-premise infrastructure, that can be a three-part type environment. If your business objectives change, you may want to move that data to a store virtual type context. And if you want to really offload to the cloud, you want to be able to do that, right? So a big part of our strategy is what we refer to as federation, right? And that can happen by us. Or it can happen through partners. So the first thing is federation between three-part systems themselves, right? So if you look at today, we have 15 petabyte usable in a single system that you can get on three-part and you can federate them across four systems. That's 60 petabytes of flash that is available to you on a single federated architecture. From there, we want to enable the mobility to our hyper-converse system, right? So that's the second thing. And then when you bring in the secondary storage element and things like object storage into the picture, right? There's nothing that prevents you from taking our store once VSA, putting it in the cloud, and then having the data federation to the cloud as well, right? So that's how we think about cloud from... It's very, very important to us from an application mobility standpoint. You've mentioned object a couple of times. What is the object? What's the strategy around object? Is it to partner or is it to invent? Yeah, so we currently partner with Cleversave and Scality from the server side of the business. My view on the object market is, as I shared earlier, if you look at the overall market, people will say it's a multi-billion dollar market, but a lot of that is designed yourself type things in the cloud, right? So if you look at the commercial distribution of object storage, that's about 800 million. And the top two use cases are data preservation and content depot. The truth is both those use cases can also be addressed by a scale out file. So if you were to then step back and say, what are the real use case for object? It's applications that have a native object interface to them, right? And that market is still small. So if I were then to bring it back to you, we think of the object market as something that has a very close adjacency to file. And it would probably evolve into two design centers. On one side is the Icelon type players, right? Who are one to enable big data and analytics on top of scale out file. But then there is very cheap, like 10 cents per gig type petabytes of storage, but we don't see the success in the object market yet, right? I think the market is still evolving. There are a few companies that are doing well, but a lot of companies have had full starts, including EMC. Yeah, right. And Amazon's doing well, there's three, okay, great. But that doesn't really fit to your business. I would tend to agree, I've always struggled with the hype around object, you know, I get it. But like you say, you can deal with that with just mass products, but okay, so that's good. I wanted to talk a little bit more, come back if I can, to secondary storage. So the strategy there, so you've got the BitBucket with cheap and deep spinning disk, but you also sell tape. So what is the strategy, HP strategy, and also the backup software is actually a separate division. I've always complained about that with HP, but I understand it's a big company, and I know you're working together more closely, but, and you came from a company, EMC, that does a very good job of selling hardware and software together. So talk about the backup, or the secondary storage strategy, it's not just backup. And you mentioned snapshots before as well. So one of the biggest business objectives that we have is to attach more of our target deduplication devices onto 3Power, right? Now, as you know, 3Power already has great snapshot capabilities. Now, how do you drive that attach? So let's look at the game, the use cases from a secondary storage perspective. You want to do backup, you want to do business continuity, you want to do DR, and then increasingly people want to reuse the data for analytics purposes or for DevTest or DevOps environment. You want to be able to enable all these use cases, and the core of it is great snapshot management across 3Power, StoreVirtual, or StoreOnce, but it's driven by an SLA, right? In your SLA, you specify what your RP or RTO is and what do you want to use it for, and then you can place the snapshot on the right thing and provide the right software interface. So we are investing in software capabilities today to actually enable that movement. Like that's really the core of our strategy. The second element I would say is the application centricity. A lot of players in the backup space, I would say you can do a great job at data, but you want to make sure whether it is VMware or SQL or Oracle, right? That application centricity is there. And the third area is the speed of backup itself. So being able to take that application centric view and send the data directly from a 3Power, say on to StoreOnce, is something that's important. EMC does that with its protect point, for example, within VM. Yeah, but that's a very narrow market. That's a very narrow market. What we're describing is a much broader metadata management, Uber metadata management system with a high-speed data mover. A catalog has got to be in there. Is this stuff that HP is sort of inventing? Yes, so everything that I just described, that's all organic investment. Having said that, we have great partners. Veeam is a very strong partner of ours, right? And Veeam has seen tremendous growth. So our focus is on making sure that the HP assets, we federate really well. As soon as you step out of that into a context that's more heterogeneous, we'll bring somebody like Veeam into the picture. But as you know, you guessed, this is a big opportunity for the industry and the vendor community has never really attacked it because it was happy for years selling into silos and it was happy everybody making copies. EMC made a lot of money from that. Everybody did, IBM, HP, Oracle, et cetera. But with data growth, the way it is, this is a great opportunity for, I've always said HP's got to get back to what's in roots and invent. And this is a great opportunity for invention. Yeah, I know the deduplication technology came out of HP last, but this is a bigger challenge, isn't it? Yeah, I actually agree. And if you look at some of the other players in the market, their challenge is, if they're doing copy management, they have to go and have an independent discussion about that and how it disrupts the backup space, why you don't need agents and servers and whatnot. Our discussion is very simple. You're already in a three-power context. You're thinking about what should happen to the life cycle of data. And in that context, you're just saying, hey, you're buying burgers anyway. Do you want fries with that? And let's talk about the overall solutions. Good upsell. Okay, now you mentioned solutions as well. It's in your title. What does that mean, solutions? Are we talking about solutions for, for instance, SAP or Oracle or is it different types of solutions? So I'm going to give you the HP Enterprise level view first, right? So a lot of companies, they focus on point products and all that, but one of the biggest priorities for us, not just from a solution, but from a broader strategy standpoint, is to anchor HP Enterprise into four solution areas. They are number one, transform to a hybrid infrastructure. Number two is to protect your digital assets. Number three is to empower the data-driven economy. And number four is to enable workplace productivity. So let's take each one as an example, right? Hybrid infrastructure may mean that you want the simplicity in your infrastructure, which comes from hyperconvergence and flash. You want to then automate that with one view. You may want to give the business agility to the application that they need. Our security and backup portfolio feeds the protection of digital assets. If you look at our Aruba acquisition, that's very much into workplace productivity and taking the power of mobile and wireless driving that. And then in our server business, like getting into the big data space and then driving the analytics around that, that's all about that big data economy side. So that's one big broad view of solutions. And we don't want each silo to be telling their own story. It needs to fit into these broader solution buckets. Now, from there, if you go to the granular view, of course, what you want is workload-optimized reference architectures, right? Whether they are for VDI or VMware or Oracle or SQL, that's a huge priority for us. And those reference architectures can be at an infrastructure level where we just say, here is a generic infrastructure that you can take and run. And there are places where we will fully test the entire workload and drive that as well. So that's my general view on the solution. So the slide that Meg showed at HP Discover with the four areas is not just the architecture, it's something that's being driven. When I first saw that site, I said, okay, how is like, for instance, the storage group actually going to tie into that? But that's an agenda item for you guys. The concrete examples I gave is, how do you have a hybrid infrastructure without the simplicity and consolidation that flash and hyperconvergence gives you? That's great. I mean, I think it's an awesome opportunity if HP can align the entire, what the HP Enterprise is, align the entire organization around those four pillars and start to develop products and solutions. That's powerful. We're almost out of time, but what's next? Let's talk about things that we should be looking for, whether it's out of hyperconverse, out of flash, three-par. So first of all, I talked about a lot of strategy topics so you can fully expect us to be making moves in that area. That's at a very high level. If I speak specifically for three-par, we of course are number one in mid-range now. We are number two in the flash space. With pure S1, we figured out we are number two. But extending that leadership to entry is something that's important to us, right? So you will see us drive that beating fully. Hyperconvergence is very much top of mind for us and you will see more coming from HP and the storage division on that front. Awesome, yo, Gesh, great to meet you. I'm really excited about this new role. Smart guy and another clear thinker. I think you and Manish and the team can do some serious damage. If you can take that strategy and turn it into action, we're going to see some real progress in the marketplace. So good luck and congratulations on the new role. Thank you. Keep right there, buddy. We'll be back with our next guest right after this. This is theCUBE. We're live from VMworld 2015 and we'll be right back.