 Welcome back everyone. Live coverage here at HPE Discover 2023. I'm John Furrier, host of theCUBE with Dave Vellante. Dave, our 12th year covering Discover, HPE, now HPE. And multiple discovers overseas, right, Frankfurt. We did Barcelona, right? We've done Madrid, so London. We've been covering the cultural evolution of HPE. And I got to say, there's great keynote. The accomplishments are there. Just great performance from the team. They're humble, sometimes they don't brag enough. They did showcase today, so a lot of great stuff. Our next guest, Pradeep Kumar, a CUBE alumni. Senior Vice President, General Manager, HPE Services. Pradeep, great to see you. Last year we had a great chat. Thanks for coming on. Yeah, thank you, John. Thanks for having me. The keynote was amazing. Antonio, they made a bunch of bets six years ago. He said everything he was going to do, he did it. And he did more. He made some bets, they paid off. Things are flowering in their blossoming. It's time to harvest. Absolutely, absolutely. You guys got some news rebranding. Let's get into it. Yeah, no, so everything that you heard is driven by services organization. If you look at the big announcement of AI for HPC, it is, you saw the big words. It requires training, tuning, and inference. That's all driven by services, right? So that's where we really help customers to get into that mode. And what we did a month ago is really rebrand. We had point next services. That was at a time of we were diversity out of PCs, outsourcing business. So Meg Whitman at that time decided we'll bring in a brand name called point next services. And we realized after seven years, it had served its purpose. So we really moved away from that and simplified the whole brand for services as HPE services. So we have in their advisory, we have operational services, we have managed services. Everything is now into one HPC services. And it's notable, we talked last year about the success of GreenLake, the momentum and traction and momentum it had and the impact on services. Now you have the rebranding, the focus. GreenLake clearly taking off the runway, looking good, as they say, that's going to change the makeup of services. So the question comes up, if everything's as a service, what services does HP services do? Couldn't... Yeah, we power that everything as services. As you know, it just doesn't happen. It needs to be done. So from a customer point of view, customers really are on a transformation journey, right? So services make sure we understand what is that transformation journey? How can we help you strategize transformation? We are like the coach coming behind and saying, hey, let's strategize your transformation. This is the path for the transformation. How do we help in making that happen? And how do we, after it's done, how do we make sure the customer continues to get the outcomes it wants to? So that's making GreenLake alive is our job, right? And we started that, we want to make sure it just continues on. Ever since I've been in the industry, services have been in big trouble because it used to be, when I started, services was fixing broken disk drives and the disk drives got more reliable so people say, whoa, you don't need break fix services anymore. And then, you know, fast forward to the cloud. Oh, the cloud's going to kill the need for any services because everything's going to be as a service. Now, of course, automation is going to put you out of business. So explain the conversations you're having with customers and the types of services and help that you can bring to help them on their automation and AI journey. Yeah, so naturally, as I said, before the advisory is a big one, right? So we come in, especially in this market environment, where people are looking for optimizing things, right? Where the market is. They want to know how they can set up their infrastructure differently. How can they achieve outcomes very differently, right? Therefore, we provide a huge advisory and professional services upfront, right? To paint the picture of what it should be. Then we discuss about what is the transformation path that they need to take. In that transformation path, there could be infrastructure involved. So what you called as break-fix services is exist, but to a very small amount, right? Majority of it is self-remediation through automation, right? So that happens automatically in a way. And once it's all implemented, you want two things. How are you going to operate it? Because what you had, the traditional model that we all know doesn't work anymore. You need new skills. You need new processes. You need new technology, because it's all digital. And in the back end, you want to do that monitoring and making sure it's continuously optimized your environment. Pradeep, I got to ask you on June 5th, you guys announced HPE services for Standable IT. On the keynote we heard, and we analyzed it during our keynote analysis section, that LLMs and sustainability were kind of in the data insights part of the keynote. Okay, interesting position, because he had so much to cover. But we're hearing that even with LLMs, it's a carbon footprint issue. AWS also on stage has a very aggressive goal to be net zero by, I think 2022. You guys want to be net zero, carbon zero, net zero by a day two, aggressive goals. This is a real big deal IT for sustainability, because you got LLMs, you got sustainability goals. These are new things that need service. They need playbooks, they need implementation. Is it new? Is it emerging? What is this all about? Why is it so important? Why are customers interested in it? Really good question, John. I think let me talk about sustainability, right? What other competition does this a little bit of here and there? They say, hey, if you use this machine, it'll reduce, it'll consumption is reduced by 15%. That's not the path we take. With through services, we take a completely comprehensive approach. Number one, what you'll see tomorrow, Fidelma, Rousseau, CTO announcing, we have a sustainability dashboard. Number one, customers need to know where they stand. How much carbon do they use? Before you talk about getting to net zero, you need to know what you're using currently. So the dashboard will give you where you are today. And then what we do with them is discuss about how do you actually become sustainable in the sense not about just using a particular hardware, but saying, hey, how many applications do you use? What are the applications you really need? And where should those workloads rely? So internally, even within HPE, we had 5,000 applications last year. We have gone to 1,500 applications now. And that shows the power of reduction of what we are doing. And then we decided, where do you put those workloads? We went into co-locations. You saw Equinix, which uses green energy, where to put them on, right? And in the back end, how do we remediate things? And the traditional things, okay, what equipment do you use? What consumes the lowest amount of energy? So you see the whole comprehensive package, right? In the back end, the value of HPE is HPE Financial Services, because they reuse those products, right? They upscale all the products and use it in many ways. So you have an end-to-end comprehensive, sustainable product compared to our competitors. Yeah, I think I just, I know Dave wants to jump in. I want to say though, it's gone from, I don't want to say checkbox, but it's legit issue now. I mean, I want to say it's never been legit, but it's been kind of like, oh yeah, we got sustainability goals. It's hardcore now. There's a much different environment than it was just five years ago. Yeah, yeah. We want to be, I mean, who do you come to your mind when you talk about sustainability? It's Patagonia, right? Basically, I would say Patagonia, the company which is sustained, we want to be the Patagonia for the IT industry. Can I get a nice vest for the... You can have one of those, yeah. I saw that you have some merchandise there for HPE. Absolutely, yeah. I want to ask about Opsrimp. I really like that acquisition. It's another area where people might say, well, it's going to obviate the needs for services, but the whole AI Ops is really exciting. I think you guys maybe even are underselling the importance of it's new, right? It's just closed. I think you announced the acquisition in March. Yeah. It's closed, but maybe closed, yeah. So yes, and so how do you see that fitting in? What is going to be the impact for customers and in particular your partners? How do you see that? Yeah, so it is a great acquisition, right? What it does is, as we know, Opsrimp brings that AI Ops to a hybrid environment or a multi-cloud environment, not just for HPE gear, but for all multi-variety of competitive gear, right? So we know from starting from discovery and dashboarding where things are, what they're doing, even in the sustainability, we know what they're consuming all the way to monitoring and remediation, all done in a very automated fashion. That is fantastic, right? So you continuously keep on improving your environment the way you want it, and you know what's happening through exception, so that automation piece for a managed services is phenomenal. And this is the point, is that environment, I didn't say environments, it is environments, but you see it as one. Absolutely. So on-prem, on-cloud, on-prem, out to the edge, that's what we call super-cloud. I mean, we saw the Opsrimp acquisition as a really, as you're, again, what we call super-cloud play, i.e. a layer that sits on top of whatever cloud it is, on-premises, edge, et cetera, and that's the unification message. Is that the right way to think about it? Absolutely, I would more describe it as one pane of glass to monitor everything. So you saw AWS in the back end doing things, but if a customer is using AWS, we am where us, everything, you can see through one pane of glass what's going on where, and that's a huge, huge win. And I think one of the things we've been reporting on is, we're starting to report on this multi-cloud by design, which looks like super-cloud, because right now, you guys have a great tagline. Hybrid by design, not by accident. That's legit, because you have to do that, be successful. Public cloud, clearly with GreenLake, you guys nailed it. The challenge right now is, people have multi-cloud by accident. Acquisition, I got this company, someone's got Teams on the Microsoft, they got this over here, but the app devs are on, say, AWS, cranking away, scaling up. So you have to kind of work across and design that cloud experience upfront. That's what people are working on right now. Still early innings, it's not even yet clear, but we're framing it. We think it's a scale platform on a cloud, public cloud, with an on-premise and edge operating layer. That could be security, that could be data, this threaded fabric, if you will, or whatever you want to call it, overlay, abstraction layer. Yeah, we call it the platform, but that's what it is, right? Everything is on the platform, that's what we call it. And that would have, as you said, access to the multi-cloud, access to lots of our customers still have a lot of on-prem real estate that day. And so you want, on board, to see a cloud-like management service, right? So that's what they have. You know, I used to work at HP back in the 80s and 90s, and I remember, it's always been in the DNA of the company, multi-vendor, that was an old term. How do you apply multi-vendor to cloud? Because that's, we're starting to get into, it's not, the products are different, but it's multiple environments, multiple applications, we're seeing workloads, and applications deciding which database to use. There's no one database to rule the world anymore. You've got cloud-native, right on the doorstep, that's your strategy. What does multi-vendor translate to into this new partner ecosystem? You've got VMware on stage, you've got Amazon, you've got Equinox, GreenLake. It's like the Wild West, yeah. How do you talk to customers and say, you can't say multi-vendor, because what is a vendor? Yeah, so when we talk to customers, John, I think the way we talk about it and how we advise people is, what is the outcome you want to achieve? So it's not an accident, this is the outcome you want to achieve, this is the digital transformation path you want to take, and that path will involve the hyperscalers, involve HPE, the solution will involve multi-players, we involve on-prem, off-prem, and everything in that, right? But I think we get customers to focus on the outcome, rather than how you're getting that done. Cloud is a service model, it's a platform model, maybe multi-platform, I mean, this is kind of Dave, this is what we've been working on. I want to ask about the winds of change now, so as we went from everything's got to be remote work, and you got to be a digital business, and then all of a sudden, we're worried about recession and rising interest rates, and so it's like tap the brakes, and then all of a sudden chat GPT comes out, and it's like, we got to figure this out, and so that's what I love about this industry, right? And you see, it's interesting to watch the venture money flow into AI, just making bets. What are the customers' conversations like? Are they, I mean, the ones I've talked to really, they're going to use AI, and they have been, to automate their business, but have they changed their thinking at all in terms of where the business value is, how hard are they leaning into generative AI, and what are they looking for HPE to bring? Yeah, so there are a few things, they're a really good question. One of the things, so what has not changed is the outcome they want to achieve. How do they achieve their outcome is the question, right? That is critical, and they want to work with a trusted partner. Really, with so much change going in technology, they're worried about themselves, what to believe, what not to believe. I mean, it's what we go through. We get a chat, GPT, do we believe in it or not? And this is where a trust, I think Antonio kept on emphasizing this, trust becomes really, really important to have that conversation about, hey, this is where you are, because every customer is in a different place in the journey. With different data. With different data, different data strategies. So they all are in very unique positions in that life cycle of where they want to make the change. So this is why the advisory becomes very, very important. You want to have somebody trusted who makes sense of these things, and also the biggest thing is it's not just technology. Just because you got technology, it's never going to work. You need the people, you need the process, and the technology, all three in a new way. If you had basic IT ops when we were there, that doesn't work in the cloud ops model. So you need to evolve your people skills, you need to change your processes to work. This is what's interesting about LLMs as a service that you've announced, is I want to do experimentation. I don't want to eat the capex. I definitely don't, so don't make me go back there. Cloud, you know, is the good, the bad, and the ugly of cloud, and so I'm really interested to see how experimentation occurs in your service model. That's going to be fascinating. Absolutely, that's what I started out with. That training of what it is, taking the data, tuning out to that particular environment, the unique opportunity. I mean, pharma has different operators, life sciences have different, weather has different. We need to make, tune that to that model and then use the inference to get the outcomes they want. So this is where services play a huge role to make that happen. The vision was there, we have to make it. And I think the LLM and the sustainability piece are direct areas where you got to navigate through, I won't say tripwires or landmines, it's just IP rights, security. These are big issues, so congratulations. In the, in the, go ahead, go please, please. No, I just want to say to give a plug in, we have done some modeling work taking the LLM, our data, our services data, predicting what is going to fail, how to fix it, combining with AR and VR. So somebody can work out what's going to fail but also immediately know how to fix it on a, on a simple iPhone. And the edge is this whole new opportunity. I mean, it's, it's ugly. You remember we were sitting in the bar here, having dinner a couple of weeks ago with one of the engineers and we won't name the company. And he's like, what do you guys think about the edge? It's really ugly and messy. I'm like, uh-huh, so the services loves complicated. And, and because that's what you do, you simplify the complex. Yeah, simplifying the mess makes good sense for the customer and makes good sense for HPE. Let chaos reign and reign in the chaos. We always stay on the cube. Exactly. Great, great to have you on the cube. Great to see you, congratulations. Got to know you, a lot of work ahead of you, a lot of great opportunities. Tailwind for HPE, congratulations on all the success. And we'll see you in 20, 20, 20, 20, 20. Thank you, great to see you today. Okay, next up, we've got Monica Bachelder, Chief Sustainability Officer and John Frey, Chief Technologist for Sustainable Transformation at HPE, you're watching theCUBE. Extracting the signal from the noise here in Las Vegas. We'll be right back.