 Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE. Covering Discover 2016 Las Vegas. Brought to you by Hewlett Packard Enterprise. Now here's your host, Dave Vellante. Welcome back to HPE Discover 2016. This is theCUBE, theCUBE goes out to the events. We extract the signal from the noise. We've got a great segment. We're going to talk about service providers as a channel and a partnership going on with HPE and that service provider community. Kyle Green is here. He's the director of Enterprise Storage Solutions at HPE and Steve Brothers is here. He's the CEO of Ajubio, a cloud service provider out of Colorado. Gentlemen, welcome to theCUBE. It's good to see you. Thank you. Steve, I want to start with you. Former CIO, why did you start Ajubio? So we saw an opportunity in the marketplace when the founders were running around looking at data centers as potential targets and began to understand what data center providers actually had in terms of cloud. What were they really delivering? And since we were technologists, the conversation that we had was, yeah, we don't quite have cloud. We have something that looks like cloud and sort of smells like cloud, but it isn't quite cloud. So a market opportunity was identified that wasn't being filled, which is really to provide that utility type compute, the Gartner definition of cloud and Ajubio was born. When was this? So that was late 2011. Fairly recently then and you're focused on infrastructure as a service, you said, right? That's correct. That's right. We're what we would consider to be born of cloud, so we don't do co-location and we don't do managed services. So we're managing the hypervisor down and the network out. Cloud. Cloud. Real cloud. I mean, some people take offense to that, but it's true, we're a true cloud. All right, Kyle, talk about your role at HPE and what you're doing in terms of this service provider initiative. Sure, so when we look at HPE, right, we're looking at our customer base and we're trying to help them find ways, obviously to buy more from Hewlett-Packett Enterprise, but really we're looking to solve problems and part of the problem that we have with our customers today is the traditional infrastructure by is cumbersome. It doesn't go fast enough in terms of a deployment or an implementation for the time to value, right, that customers or businesses are expecting. So the only way to get there is to sell more of what we have available is to do it through a service provider model. So it's a go-to-market method for us that we use with partners like a GVO to take to our customers to give them another consumption model with a great level of service, a white glove treatment as a GVO delivers in the market and give them a chance to get that time to value in days or close to a 30-day timeframe versus a six-month or a nine-month window to acquire and deploy and get their services up and running. So it's really a go-to-market method for us that solves customer problems and gets us and our partners in a position to deliver customer value much faster in places that they have not been selling before. So HP and now HPE, obviously a big channel company, most of your business goes through the channel. The channel is transforming quite dramatically and there's, of course, a land grab for the channel. Everybody wants a solution by us. So you got the, you know, I call them, you know, okay, box sellers, you know, tin benders, whatever. Those guys, I don't know when it's going to happen but they're going to largely, you know, either transform or die. Okay, we love them, they move a lot of boxes but the world is moving to solutions. Okay, so you got solution providers, whether it's SAP or Oracle or VMware, big data, et cetera. And then you've got the cloud service provider which has become this new channel, right? So, but when you guys started the company, you weren't thinking about being a channel. I mean, you are, but you were thinking about solving customer problems but you evolved into this massive channel. Is that a fair premise? Yes and no, our intent was to be channel focused in terms of what our core competency is and what we do really, really well. There's a piece of the business that we don't do. So we're not a managed service provider. I'm not managing operating system and above. So I need partners in that space to be able to provide service against the cloud that I'm delivering. As a result, that reseller channel then spawned other opportunities in the marketplace for other potential resellers. Virgo, the channel that HPE already has which is your vars, who have traditionally been box sellers in the delivery of those services. So that's where we saw the opportunity to engage that channel along with HPE so that we could help them get up that curve to be able to sell cloud in addition to what it is they're already selling with an easy entry point. So Stephen, 2011 you started an infrastructure as a service company to be a true cloud. And obvious question is how the heck do you compete with the likes of Amazon and Azure? Because it's a different model. Talk about that. We had a conversation with the folks at Gardner early on and they asked the question of us, what the heck are you doing? You're going to invest all this money in the architecture. You're going to build something that's concurrently maintainable, which means we can do maintenance on the thing without taking it down. You're not going to build a built to fail architecture. Why are you doing that? All the big guys, the 800 pound gorillas, they're building a built to fail architecture. We said, well our target markets are different. We're not going after a developer that wants to spin up a VM that says, oh a VM, pretty much the same thing as a machine, a physical machine, that's the way they think about it. We said, you really have the IT ops folks that say, what are the things I need in the cloud? Well it's the same thing that I need on-prem but I can't afford to buy it, right? Give me a Ferrari, give me a key to the Ferrari, let me drive it, give me the tools so I can manage it. But you watch the blinking lights and I'll go play with all the toys. So we have a non commodity based architecture that delivers the performance and the uptime and the scalability and the flexibility and the reliability that any right thinking CIO wants to have in their environment but probably can't afford to buy. So you differentiate really on the SLAs and the service levels that you provide to the customer relative to some of the others that I mentioned, is that fair? That's fair and we're a platform that's built by CIOs for CIOs. So as an example, we have a flat billing model. I never wanted to go down the hall to my CFO's office and say look, here's the money we spent last month, spent past tense, it's on the AmEx, right? Instead we built a model that's a flat billing model so we're essentially giving control over the spend tied to the resource pools that they have in the environment that they've contracted for to be able to manage to a budget and they can control it up and they can control it down which is also an exception in the marketplace. A lot of providers don't let you reduce your footprint and pay less, we do. Really, business model differentiation. It is and if you think back to some of the things you've heard it discover so far with Manish Gold from a storage strategy level, it's about the workload and what this allows is we can provide that infrastructure behind the scenes to a Jubeo that lets a customer move their workload from the cloud, private cloud, public cloud, mix into their environment at those service levels and give them an opportunity to deliver that service where the hardware itself, the name of the product takes a little bit of a backseat to the service and the business outcome that they're delivering. How important is the CIO, how important are standards? I have a CIO that's always talking about why don't we want to standardize? How important are standards and homogeneity to you as a cloud service provider? Well, what we're delivering are the tools that come from the providers. So, we're a VMware shop and a good chunk of the market right now is running VMware so the transitional skills be able to take my internal folks that understand and operate VMware well to come to a platform that's a higher performing, more reliable, all of those things and essentially they have the same tool set that they're using to manage the resource pools in the cloud that they're managing back in their home office. So, yes, the homogeneity that you described very, very valuable because they're familiar tools. So, why pay to retool your folks when they can, you can essentially get a better product with a better resource base that's better supported so that your folks can work on the, go work on the higher level stuff, right? Stop watching blinking lights. We're tight on time, we got a wrap but Kyle, give you a little last word. So, talk about this initiative, sort of where it is today, where you see it going in the future. We see customers driving us that they're interested in a faster consumption model and service providers with their expertise and in a variety of different capabilities, right? All of them, not all of them are infrastructure providers, some of them do application support but at the end of the day, our initiatives are to get to more customers and enable that time to market, enable the consumption of all the things HPE brings together from an infrastructure and from a product level and a management level but customers want to consume that in a myriad of ways and the service provider market is the fastest consuming path to that model. People just don't have the infrastructure of people to do that on their own anymore. It's growing fast, business is good. Yes. All right, gentlemen, Kyle, Steve, thanks very much for coming on theCUBE. Awesome, thank you very much. Appreciate it, guys. All right, keep right there, we'll be back with our next guest. 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