 The Cube presents HPE Discover 2022, brought to you by HPE. We're back at the formerly the Sands Convention Center, it's called the Venetian Convention Center now, Dave Vellante and John Furrier here, covering day three, HPE Discover 2022. It's hot outside, it's cool in here, and we're going to heat it up with Rashmi Kumar, who's the Senior Vice President and CIO of Hewlett Packard Enterprise. Great to see you face to face, it's been a while. Same here, last couple of years we were all virtual. Yeah, that's right, so we've talked before about sort of your internal as-a-service transformation, you know, we do call it dog-fooding, everybody likes the course correct, and say, no, no, it's drinking your own champagne. Is it really that pretty? It is, and the way I put it is, no pressure to my product teams, it's being customer zero. Yeah, right, yeah. Take us through the acceleration on how everything's been going with you guys. Obviously, the pandemic was an impact to certainly the CIO role in your team, but now you've got GreenLake coming in, and Antonio's big statement before the pandemic, by 2022, everything will be as a service, and then everything went remote. VPNs and all this new stuff, how's it going? Yes, it's from business perspective, that's a great point to start at, right? Antonio promised in 2019 that HPE will be everything as a service company, and he had no view of what's going to happen with COVID, but guess what? So many businesses became digital and as a service during those two years, right? And now we came back this year, it was so exciting to be part of Discover when now we are everything as a service. So great from business perspective, but when I look at our own transformation behind the scene, what IT has been busy with, and we haven't caught a breath because of pandemic, we have taken care of all that change, but at the same time have driven our transformation to make HPE edge-to-cloud platform as a service company. You know, I saw a survey, I've referenced it earlier today, it was a survey, I think it was done by Couchbase, and they asked, it was a CIO survey, so they asked who was responsible of the organization for the digital transformation, and overwhelmingly like 75% said CIO, which surprised me, because you know, you're lining with the business and so forth, but in fact I thought, well maybe because of the force march to digital, that's what was top of their mind. So who is responsible for, and I know it's not just one person, for the digital transformation, describe that dynamic. Yeah, so definitely it's not one person, but you do need that whole accountable, responsible, informed, right, in the context of digital transformation. And you call them CIO, you call them CDIO or CDO and whatnot, but end of the day, technology is becoming an imperative for a business to be successful. And COVID alone has accelerated it, I'm repeating this maybe millions of time, if you Google it, but CIOs are best positioned because they connect the dots across organization. In my organization at HPE, we embarked upon this large transformation where we were consolidating 10 different ERPs, multiple master data system into one, and it wasn't about doing digital, which is e-commerce website or one technology, it was creating that digital foundation for the company then to transform that entire organization to be a physical product company to a digital product company. And we needed that foundation for us to get that code to cash experience, not only in our traditional business, but in our as a service. So maybe that wasn't confirmation bias, I want to ask you about, we've been talking a lot about sustainability, and I've made the comment that if you go back 10, 12 years, and you were CIO IT at that time, CIO really didn't care about the energy bill that was paid for by facilities, they really didn't talk to each other much, and that's completely changed. Why has it changed? How should a CIO, how do your peers think about energy costs today? Yeah, so at some point, look ESG is the biggest agenda for companies, regulators, even kind of the watchers of ISS and Glass Lewis type thing and boats are becoming aware of it. If you look at two to 4% of percent of greenhouse emission comes from infrastructure, specifically technology infrastructure. As part of this transformation within HPE, I also did what I call private cloud transformation. Remember, it's not data center transformation, it's private cloud transformation. And if you can take your traditional workload and cloudify it, which runs on a green lake type platform, it's currently 30% more efficient than traditional way of handling the workload and the infrastructure. But we recently published our green living progress report and we talk about efficiency. By 2020, we have achieved three times. The plan is to get to 30 times by 2050 where infrastructure will not contribute to energy bill in turn the greenhouse emission as well. I think CIOs are responsible multi-fold on the sustainability piece. One is how they run their data center, make it efficient with green lake type implementations, demand from your hyperskiller to provide that what Fidelma just launched, sustainability scorecard of the infrastructure. Second piece is we are the data gods in the company, right? We have access to all kinds of data. Provide that to the product teams and have them, if we cannot measure, we cannot improve. So if you work with your product team, work with your BU leader, provide them data around greenhouse gas and how they're impacting emission through their products and how can they make it better going forward? And that can be done through technology, right? All the measurements come from technology. So what technology we need to provide to our manufacturing lines so that they can monitor and improve on the sustainability front as well. You mentioned data, I wanted to bring that up so I was going to bring that up and another top track here. Data as an asset now is at play. So I get the data on the sustainability, feed that in. But as companies go to the cloud operating model, they go, hey, I got the hyperscalers, you call them hyperscalers, Amazon, for instance, and you got on-premises data centers, which is a large edge and you got the edge, the data control plane and then the control plane and the data plane are always seemed to be like these, the battleground, I want to control the data plane. Will customers own the data plane or will the infrastructure providers control that data plane? And how do you see that? Because we want to power the machine learning. Yeah. So data plane, control plane, it seems to be like the new middleware. What's your view on that? How do you look at that holistically? Yeah, so I'll start based on the hyperscaler conversation, right? And I had this conversation with one of the very big ones recently or even our partner SAP when they talk about drives. Data center and how I host my application, infrastructure, that's the lowest common denominator of our job. When I talk about CIOs being responsible for digital transformation, that means how do I make my business process more innovative? How do I make my data more accessible, right? So if you look at data as an asset for the company, it's again, they're responsible, accountable. As CIO, I'm responsible to have it managed, have it on a technology platform, which makes it accessible by it. And our business leader accountable to define the right metrics, right kind of KPIs, drive outcome from that data. IT organization, we are also too busy driving a lot of activities. And today's world is going to bad business outcome. So with the data that I'm collecting, how do I enable my business leader to be able to drive business outcome through the use of the data? That's extremely important. And at HPE, we have achieved it. There are two ways, right? Now I have one single ERP. So all the data that I need for what I call operational reporting, get hindsight and insight is available at one place. And they can drive their day-to-day business with that. But longer term, what's going to happen based on what happened, which I call insight to foresight, comes from a integrated data platform which I have control of. And you know, we are fragmenting it because companies now have Databricks, Snowflake, AWS data analytics tool, Azure data analytics tool, I call it data torture. CIOs should get control of common set of data and enable their businesses to define better measurements and KPIs to be able to drive business outcome. So data is a crown jewel then. It's a crown jewel, not low. Can we double click on that? Because okay, so you take your ERP system, the consumers of data in the ERP system, they have the context we kind of operationalized those systems. We haven't operationalized our analytics systems in the same way, which is kind of a weird dynamic. And so, you're right, I think correctly noted, Roshmi, that we are creating all these stovepipes. Now, I think I heard from you, you're gaining control of those stovepipes, but then how do you put data back in the hands of those line of business users without having to go through a hyper-specialized analytics team? And that's a real challenge, I think, for data. It is, it is challenge. And I'll tell you, it's messy even in my world, but I have dealt with data long enough. The value lies in how do I take control of all stovepipes, bring it all together, but don't make it a data lake which is built out of multiple puddles. The data lake promise hasn't delivered, right? So the value lies in the conformed layer, which then it's easier for businesses to access and run their analytics from. Because they need a playground because all the answers, they don't have. On the operation side, as you mentioned, we got it, right, it'll happen. But on the fore side side and deeper inside side, based on driving the key metrics, two challenges. Understanding was the key metrics in KPI, but the second is how to drive visibility and understanding of it. So we need to get technology out of the conversation, bring in understanding of the data into the conversation, and we need to drive towards that. As a business, you know, line of business person, putting that hat on, I would love to have this conversation with my CIO because I would say, I just want self-service infrastructure, and I want to know that I want to have access to the data that I need. I know what metrics I need to run my business, so I want the technology to be just a technical detail. You take care of that, and then somebody in the organization, probably not the line of business person, wants to make sure that that data is governed and secure. So there's somebody else, and that maybe is your responsibility. So how do you handle that real problem? So I think you're well on the track with GreenLake for self-serve infrastructure, right? How do you handle the sort of automated governance piece of it, make that computational? Yeah, so one thing is technology is important because that's bringing all the data together at one place with single version of truth. And then that's why I say, my sons are data scientists by the way. I tell them that the magic happens at the intersection of technology, knowledge, data knowledge, and business knowledge. And that's where the talent, which is very hard to find, who can connect dots across these three kind of circles and focus on that middle where the value lies. And pushing businesses to, because you know, business is messy. I have worked on pharma companies, utilities, now technology, order does not mean revenue, right? There's a lot more that happen. Pricing or charge back rebates, all that things. If somebody can kind of make sense out of it through incremental innovation, it's not like a big bang, I know it all. But finding those areas and applying what you said, I call it the G word governance, to make sure your source is right. And then creating that conform layer that then makes into the dashboard the right information about those types of metrics and then bringing that to the ecosystem. Now I just made it 10 times more complicated. This is a great conversation. We on a CUBE interview one time, we were talking about the old software days where shrink wrap software be on the shelf. You wouldn't know if it was successful until you looked at the sales data. Well after the fact, now everything's instrumented. SaaS companies, you know exactly what the adoption is. Either people like it or they don't. The data doesn't lie. So now companies are realizing, okay, I got data, I can instrument everything. Your customers are now saying, I can get to the value fast now. So knowing what that value is, is what everyone's talking about. How do you see that changing the data equation? Yeah, that's so true even for our business, right? If you talk to Fidelma today, who is our CTO, she's bringing together the platform and multiple platforms that we had so far to go to as a service business, right? InfoSight, Aruba Central, GLCP, or now we call it, it's all HPE GreenLake. But now this gives us the opportunity to really be a long side customer. It's no more, I sold the box, I'll come back to you three years later for a refresh. Now we are in touch with our customer real time through telemetry data that's coming from our products. And really understanding how our customers are reacting with that, right? And that's where we instantiated what we call is a federated data lake where marketing, product, sales, all teams can come together and look at what's going on. Customer 360, right? Data is logged in Salesforce from Opportunity Leads quotes perspective and then real time orders are logged in S4. The challenge is, how do we bring both together so that our sales people have on their fingertip was the install base looked like, how much business that we did in the traditional side and the GreenLake side and what are the opportunities here to support our customers? Real quick, I know we don't have a lot of time left but I want to touch on machine learning which basically feeds AI, it is AI, machine learning AI go together. It's only as good as the data you can provide to it. So to your point about exposing the data while having the stove pipes for compliance and governance, how do you architect that properly? You mentioned federated data lake and early you said the data lake promise hasn't come back. Is it data meshes, what is the architecture to have as much available data to be addressed by applications while preserving the protection? Yeah, so I'll add machine learning and AI. I will also add chatbots and conversational AI, right? Because that becomes the front end of it. And that's kind of the automation process promise in the data space, right? So the point is that if we talk about federated data lake around one capability, which I'm talking about GreenLake consumption, right? So one piece is around how do I get data cleanly? How do I relate it across various products? How do I create metrics out of it? But how do I make it more accessible for our users? And that's where the conversational AI and chatbot comes in. And then the opportunity comes in is around not only real time, but analytics. I believe Salesforce had a pitch called customer insight few years ago. Where they said, we have so many of you on our platform, now I can combine all the data that I can access and want to give you a view of how every company is interacting with their customer and how you can improve it. That's where we want to go. And I completely agree. It ends up being clean data, governed data, secure data, but having that understanding of what we want to project out and how do I make it accessible for our users very seamlessly? Last question. What's your number one challenge right now in this post-isolation world? Talent. We haven't talked about that, right? Had to get that out there. All these promises, right? The entire end-to-end foundational transformation as a service transformation, talking about the promise of data analytics. We talked about governance and security. All that is possible because of the talent we have or we will have and our ability to attract and retain them. So at CIO, I personally spend a lot of time, COO, John Schultz, Antonio, very, very focused on creating that employee experience in what we call everything is edge for us, edge-to-office initiative, where we are giving them hybrid work capabilities. People are very passionate about purpose, so sustainability, quality, all these are big deal for them, making sure that senior leadership is focused on the right thing. So hybrid working capability, hiding the right set of people with the right skill set and keeping them excited about the work we are doing, having a purpose and being honest about it. I haven't seen a more authentic leader than Antonio who opens up his keynote for this type of convention with the purpose that he's very passionate about in current environment. Awesome, Ashmi, always great to have you on, wonderful to have you face-to-face, such a clear thinker and bringing your experience to our audience, really appreciate it. Thank you, I'm a big consumer of CUBE and look forward to having some great questions, thank you. All right, and keep it right there, John and I will be back to wrap up with Norm Follett from HPE Discover 2022, you're watching theCUBE.