 Hey everyone, welcome back to theCUBE. The leader in live tech coverage is live at the Venation Expo. For day one of our coverage of HPE Discover 23, Lisa Martin here with Rob Stetrae, our newest analyst on theCUBE. Rob, it's great to have you. We've been a bit co-hosted together. This is going to be great. This is fun. Great, great getting to do this with you now. And I think it's very exciting. So you got to come in yesterday for kind of an analyst pre-brief. And you've got pre-brief. We've got two CUBE OGs alumni up here next. We talked with us about VMware and HPE. But you got a little bit of a teaser yesterday. Oh yeah. Yeah, it's very exciting. I think it's really good to see how these companies that have worked together for decades now. And I mean, again, really tight partnership over the years. Even when VMware was owned by other people, it was definitely still a really good relationship. And I think this is going to be a lot of fun. And these are two guys that I've known for a little bit of time. So this will be a lot of fun for them. They're talking about OGs. They all go back. So I'm sure there's going to be some inside jokes. I'm hoping during this segment. Please welcome back Paul Turner, VP Product Management and V-Sphere at VMware. Great to have you back with us, Paul. And Chris Eidler joins us as well. VP Cloud Module is a green-like HPE. Guys, welcome back. All right. Thank you so much. Great to be here. So talking about OGs, HPE, VMware, OG partners. Talk a little bit about the status of the partnership. Paul, we'll start with you. And then Chris will go to you. Well, I think it is, as Rob has said, a foundational partnership that has been now for the whole 20 years of our existence as VMware. And Rob, just as you mentioned, VMware has been like an independent company for all of about three years during that 20 years. So just as an aside. But the partnership with HPE is really built on strength. It's strength because we focus on our top customers and what is our customer problems, pain points, and we solve them for our customers. And we do that jointly. And great software needs great hardware. It needs great infrastructure and great cloud infrastructure. What you're going to hear about us today is we never sit still. We're always innovating. And one of the areas that we're innovating next is, how do we actually deliver you that full cloud experience while still being able to run in the data center of your choice on premises that if you want to? Anywhere in your choice. Chris, your perspective on the partnership. Well, I agree with everything Paul said, but also it's easier to be partners over 20 years when your customers expect you to be partners. They totally expect us to be friends, to work together, to collaborate on their behalf. And so as long as we continue to take our leads from our joint customers, which are basically all of our customers, you know, makes it a lot easier to partner. Plus, you know, the work that VMware is doing is always innovative. I've happened to believe the work we're doing is also innovative. So the opportunity to sort of put them together, you know, and create sort of many, many greatest hits packages for our customers. It's really, really fun. Well, and it's so important to follow the voice of the customer, right? And follow where they are, where they need to be. You talked about anywhere. We talked about scale anywhere a couple of hours ago. Chris, as there's been so much evolution in the last few years alone, organizations go into modern apps. What are some of the forcing functions that you're seeing organizations coming to HPE and VMware to guys help us solve these challenges so we can be competitive? You know, it's a super interesting question. And even though cloud has been around for a long time now, right? And modern applications have been around for over a decade. It's moved on from, you know, are there just two-tier apps or are there just three-tier apps? There's a whole range of patterns in applications, in modern applications. You know, they expect reliability. They expect availability. They expect scalability. They expect security. But I think what we're seeing is that mostly what they're starting to expect now is that they run on a cloud, right? And that they have the ability to interact with the infrastructure on which they're hosted in a somewhat common factor. So I think those are driving the industry, the IT enterprise to say, holy cow, I really do need to become a legit operator of an instance of multi-cloud. Yeah, and I think that really is the challenge for a lot of the IT organizations. There's skill gap issues and things like that. And so I think that really has them come back to the core set of technologies that they really get used to. And I think when you start to look at, you know, how these transformations are taking shape, really, you know, there are challenges with multi-cloud and there are challenges with infrastructure as a service. And I think that, you know, really, how is that changing things from an on-prem perspective? Maybe Paul, if you- Well, I think there's a couple of things that are kind of different. You mentioned first the app side of things. Infrastructure, we've been building infrastructure for a while, but it has to be different now because it has to be responsive to the application. The application is driving the demands. The application, that's how you're going to accelerate your business. You're going to be building applications. You're going to look at edge applications. You're going to AI so that you're going to innovate for your business. And that means that the infrastructure needs to be dynamic. It needs to be agile. It needs to be secure and trusted at all time because this is your building your entire business and your success of your business is based on that infrastructure. So really you need to have an infrastructure that is dynamic, that is agile. It is secure. It is operationally simple because you expect cloud operations should look just like you're running up on AWS. It shouldn't be more difficult. It shouldn't be very difficult to do life cycle on operations and upgrade. All of that should be much simpler, should be done for you. And so that entire change, that paradigm change from the application to the way we expect operations to be run because we're expecting a cloud experience already the things that are changing. One of the things Antonio said this morning, and I've heard this from other of his peers and leadership in infrastructure is, he said, you know, for hybrid cloud to be successful, successful integration with public cloud providers need to be there. They talked about AWS this morning. They talked about VMware. Raghu was on stage this morning with Antonio. Talk a little bit about, for customers that are in multi-cloud and so many are by default and they need to make it much more strategic. How, and I want to start with you, Chris. I want to get GreenLake's perspective. GreenLake for VMware. How are you helping customers address those multi-cloud challenges so that they can extract the most value but also make the best, most efficient decisions on where data and workloads should be based on their value that they deliver to the organization? So that, there's a lot to unpack in that question. Sorry. You know, just in case, you know, one of the things that HP does, first of all, and then I'll narrow it down to talk about the HP GreenLake for VMware VCF offering, is customers want choice, right? So they will have choice. They have choices of offerings from HPE, you know, ranging from private cloud enterprise to our strong, you know, suite of offerings with VMware and we're even partnered there. So first thing is continue to offer choice. But now what do we do with HPE GreenLake to enable cloud? And especially in the case of this offering, enabling physical infrastructure and the entire stack up to, and it's not all physical, but you can still think of it as having physical aspects to it. We've been pioneering in the industry the whole GreenLake model of how do you consume on a usage basis, on a cost basis, on a pay per go basis, your infrastructure. And so enabling the entire offering, because that then inherits into the GreenLake for VMware offering as well. So making the entire offering consumable on a pay-as-you-go, pay-per-drink kind of way is critical. You know, now we've done multi-cloud integrations in some of our other offerings as well, but in this case, this offering is really targeting the VMware centric user, right? So I think Paul, maybe if you want to talk a little bit more about what you enable for... Well, I think if you've got now an infrastructure that you're able to deploy anywhere and you're able to deploy into your data center, HPE managed infrastructure, what you're layering on top of that now is our full VMware cloud foundation, which is a full software-defined IaaS stack. And it is the same software-defined IaaS stack that you can get running up on AWS. You can get it running up on Azure. You can get it running on Google. You can get it running in your data center now with HPE and with other partners that we have. It operationally looks the same. The way you deploy applications to it looks the same, whether they're VM applications, whether they're container-based applications, whether you're trying to do a DevOps kind of pipeline and integrate and push your application directly onto infrastructure. It all looks exactly the same. So that's a really important aspect, is by putting the common infrastructure. And VMware cloud foundation is our common infrastructure element that we push into every one of these clouds. We make multi-cloud possible, because multi-cloud is a bit of a misnomer. People are talking about in multi-cloud for most companies, means they have multiple independent clouds. It's not a common operational kind of experience. It's not a common deployment experience. That needs to change. I like to say, and everybody hates me saying it, but I like to say we virtualize the cloud. It is the next level of virtualization that we've had to do. We have to go from servers to data centers. We actually have to virtualize the cloud operations so that you can have that ability to move applications, have common service, common experience, unable to deploy any of your applications of choice. Yeah, that consistency of experience must be a huge advantage for organizations in any industry as there's been, to your point, multi-cloud, independent clouds. Lack of consistency. So being able to enable true multi-cloud is to deliver that consistent experience, which everyone is going to have. Absolutely, deliver that consistent experience and also an IT kind of trust model because you're now deploying into that infrastructure and you know that I'm deploying on a secure infrastructure. I know that it implements my best practices and my policies as an IT organization. That's really important because the data center, the bounds of the data center have moved. They're not just around physical walls anymore. They include all these other data centers. Your policies need to span those data centers and that's why software-defined infrastructure is so important. Now, Rob, you had mentioned earlier about the idea of a skill gap in some companies. I get tied all the way back to what we were talking about at the beginning, but it's interesting because what Paul's talking about is actually a very complex integration of software functionality from both companies as well as ultimately some laws of physics, infrastructure that sits and hosts everything underneath it. Even our most accomplished joint customers have a lot of work ahead of them when it comes to making this into something that's super easy and that's one of the things that we've partnered with so strongly here is to make sure that the building blocks that are used to host this entire offering are common building blocks that they might be used to working. I'm talking about the infrastructure building blocks right now that they would be used to working with on maybe some of their other solutions and then as they move and choose between their operating environments, they have one less thing to worry about which is the operation of it and that's I think becoming a cloud operator is one of the challenges that we try to jointly help them not have to spend all of their time on. So from a cloud operational perspective, I'm curious where are customer conversations these days? Has that gone up the stack because everyone's trying to figure out digital transformation, cloud transformation, multi-cloud. Where are those customers? I remember there's different groups within most of our enterprise customers. We deal mostly with enterprise customers. The application teams are of course just trying to build applications as fast. They can, they just want to service experience from their software and from their deployment and their infrastructure. But the infrastructure team, the team that has to deploy it, they have a difficult time getting the resources that they need to skilled resources, managing the life cycle of the platform, being able to grow their platform on demand based on their own needs and so that needs to change. That needs to become cloud-like. What we're doing here with the work with HPE is you're getting it as a service experience. You're getting life cycle and operations managed for you. It is of course the same consistent stack that you manage but you're getting a lot of the pain taken away from you. And you then get it as a service. So it's pay as you go and as you grow the service, you can grow, you can reduce the service over time. I also imagine it's enabling those two teams to work better together because you're meeting both of their needs on the application side, on the infrastructure side. I would hope so. All the application team cares about is, is that service up and running? Is it giving me a consistent experience and is it operationally there? But by doing this, because you've got, we've got the best experts out there to help you life cycle manage and operate and run this infrastructure. We're taking away a lot of those pain points that could lead to infrastructure outages and downtime, which you don't want. You want best practices, best practice deployment, best infrastructure. It is, and it needs to be durable, right? And it needs, so one of the things that we've made sure to include in this offering is that it's a fully managed offering across its entire life cycle. So not only is it quick time to cloud, I guess, maybe I don't know if that's a real term. Quick time to cloud. Time to cloud. I like it. But it's also an opportunity for us to use modern cloud techniques to have a pipeline of updates going into your stack that you don't even notice are happening as a user of your private cloud, but it's keeping it current, keeping it's healthy, keeping it secure. I mean, that's where the ROI comes from, from investing in this type of deployment. And I think that those IT organizations have gotten used to this. They're buying from the clouds. I mean, they are, and to your point, sometimes they've gone to cloud and now they're coming back and they're looking at to go to other clouds. And also pieces of the application are stretched, and to your point, about multi-cloud. It's not that applications live in multi-clouds. It's the fact that maybe a piece of an application, maybe it's load balancers in the web server to your multi-tier thing. It is, that what you're seeing is that they're looking to this to map to the models that they're used to with the other clouds and get that ROI and same people instead of having different teams. I think it depends which they you're talking about. So if it's the app developer, they, just give me a cloud experience, give me a cloud interaction, dang it, okay? If you're talking to the IT department, they, I think it's bring me an ability to offer that to my developers, but understand the rules we have in the enterprise that are different than what the rules are for the public cloud. I don't know what stats to believe, Paul. I don't know what you get over there, but whether it's 60% or 75% of apps remain on-prem. And it's not because they didn't have the same pressure on them to move. There's just a whole variety of reasons why, and typically governance and regulatory, and reasons like that that are keeping them on-prem. And so they'd rather have an alternative that's a little bit more understanding of that environment than having to be forced into a different model. I don't know if that makes sense from your angle, Paul. No, it definitely does. I think the IT organization, as they look at kind of, the cloud experience is a little too abstract, extracted away from an IT organization because they have to enforce the policies, governance, and controls of their organization. And so what we give them is we take away the pain point of the lifecycle, the software management, the hardware management, the firmware management, right? So those things that are just pain-worth. You can still do your management of what are my templates? What's my level of over-provisioning I want to accept? What's my security policies and firewall settings and all of that? So you get to do all of the governance that you need to as an IT organization, but you remove the pain point of, honestly, managing our stuff. Because managing our stuff, we should take away that pain point from you. Yeah. So you guys talked about two decades of partnership between VMware and HPE News Today. What are some of the things that are exciting, both of you? We'll start with you, Chris, and then Paul, go to you. In terms of additional pain points down the road that you're going to be able to abstract from customers. This is it. I don't think there's any more pain points. That's it? Drop the mic? Hi, Anthony. Wow. Pain solved, gone, done. Retirement time. You know, what are the next pain points? I think that, I mean, that's a good question. You see, continuing to make sure that that 70% of those applications really do land where they need to land, which is on the portion of the cloud best suited for those apps, which is on-prem. I think the challenge in the near term is following through on the promise of what we're offering now, which is making sure that we get that operating, get it integrating with the different hyperscaler cloud environments, continuing to make it easier and easier to use. So, certain, I know it's not really what you were looking for, which is the next big bombshell, what's around the corner, but it takes a lot of work. Look at the public cloud. Some of us still think of it as new, but really it's 20 plus years old, right? They've innovated a year at a time. So, my answer would be, get our joint offerings to the point where we can innovate at a speed that is unrivaled in the enterprise in the past. Oh, there's the drop the mic moment. Yeah. Paul, what would you add on to that? I'm an infrastructure person. I love infrastructure. There's an awful lot more we can do to build much more dynamic infrastructure. If you think that the application needs, whatever infrastructure needs, it's doing an AI application and you're doing a large language model, right? It's all the buzz of the moment. I need to be able at any point in time get the GPU resources that I need, provision for me automatically, dynamically. We need to build virtual server infrastructures or infrastructure effectively that dynamically responds to those applications, aggregates and effectively pulls resources dynamically for you based on that application need. And then when you're done, freeze it all up and brings it back into the pool and re-manages it. You're going to see us redesign the way virtual infrastructure can run because that's the way cloud operation should be. That's how AWS manages. We think we can do it better than they can. But we need to build more agile infrastructure and it needs to be responsive to applications. Sorry, Chris, sounds like you're not retiring anytime soon. There's a lot to be done. Ha ha ha ha. Retiring, you know. No, you're far from it anyway. Well, you guys will have to come back next year and share with us more of the innovations that HPE and VMware are doing together. 20 years of great partnership. We thank you so much for coming on and sharing with us some of the innovations and what you're enabling customers to really remove from a challenges perspective. Guys, thank you. Thank you so much. Thanks for having us. Our pleasure. For our guest and for Rob Stochet, I'm Lisa Martin. Don't go away. Two more CUBE alumni join us next. We're going to be talking about what's new at emphasis. They were featured on main stage this morning, talking about how they're working with HPE to enable customers hybrid multi-cloud strategy. You're watching theCUBE, the leader in live tech coverage.