 We are back, and with us now is Alan Weckel from the 650 Group. 650 is a market research company, and their specialty focus areas are cloud and IoT. They look at growth markets. They also look at the broader communications and information technology industries. Alan has been a leading data center researcher for over a decade, and an enterprise class switch designer. So he's got the chops in that sense. Alan, welcome to theCUBE. Great to see you. Great, no, thanks so much for having me, looking forward to discussing this with you. Okay, so let's get right into it. I mean, what is your initial reaction to this announcement, the news? What do we need to know about it? I think this is an amazing product. We're heading into a whole new class of product here, something that can address future designs. So if we look at kind of data center switching in the market, we've been looking at a market where we created a new class of category about 15 years ago in data center switching. And we're at a point where we need to start looking forward in the market to address new use cases and sort of customer pain points out there. So how should we think about this new category? What's your take on why this is necessary? Why now? Well, I think again, if we go back in time about 15 years ago, we created data center switching as a category. And the reason for that was we had purpose built products to address the unique use case. When we look at now, we have a new use case forming, whether it's sort of multi-cloud or how we're deploying applications and security, things are different. And we need a new class of product in order to address that. And if we look at kind of the opportunity here, we're talking about a market and a class of product that's going to do north of $10 billion in just a couple of years. So we have a magnitude and sort of a market category that makes sense to kind of be differentiated and unique from the way we've been looking at the markets in the past. How should we think about sort of a follow up on this? If I may, how should we think about, you know, the history of whether it's FPGA or ASEX, you're seeing a lot of more programmability built into system on chip these days. How do you see that trend fitting in? And is that an important trend that you'd note? Yeah, absolutely. So if we look at kind of the way the servers evolved, we have FPGAs, ASEX, SmartNIC, now we call them DPUs. And it's really been to address these pain points via hardware and software out there. And to a certain extent, the server's been a little bit ahead with that SmartNIC and now DPU category. And this creates a great opportunity for the network to embrace the same sort of technology and accelerate how we're deploying workloads and really sort of solve those customer pain points, right? The human just can't scale relative to what we've been doing in the past. Got it. So how do you think customers are going to react to this? You used to be a designer of this type of equipment. How and why might a customer adopt this type of solution? And maybe what are some of the barriers that they'll need to consider when moving to this approach? Yeah, I think customers are going to be excited, right? If you look at it again, they can't scale, they have application creep, they have security creep, they have data creep out there. And this class of product allows them to kind of look at the network a little bit differently and maybe build the network kind of on a go forward 10 year basis and sort of in the past out there. And that's why they're going to look at it in terms of deployments, hurdles. I'd say not so much out there, right? The hybrid cloud and enterprise is moving so fast these days, whether it's because we're working from home or just sort of the agility factor that I think there'd be quick to embrace this because it will enable them to move faster and be more agile or just say more cloud like. So is that really the use case here? It's kind of cloud slash hybrid cloud on-prem cloud and then ultimately connecting to the edge? It is, yeah, absolutely. So everyone uses a different term for a hybrid cloud or co-location or things like that. But ultimately this is the part of the market that's growing very rapidly for enterprises as they try to move their applications, their workflows and their data to a more hybrid environment out there. And some of that is as simple as just moving the data and some of that is kind of going into security and sort of questioning how you move that data around and secure it on a forward basis. A lot of customers we talked to will tell us, look, the security in the cloud is fine. It's just maybe somewhat different and we want to have greater flexibility. So we either want to do this on-prem or the other big trend that we see and I wonder if you could talk about this is we see people putting infrastructure into a colo to allow themselves to maybe not get locked into a single cloud provider, expand their optionality, building their own sort of infrastructure layer, their own sort of internal cloud, if you will. Can you comment on that? Yeah, co-location is a very big trend out there. As you said, it enables you to not be locked into your particular cloud provider. It also gives you proximity to all cloud providers, all SaaS providers out there. So deploying in colo makes a lot of sense out there and that creates another pool of data or pool of information that the IT managers need to think about in terms of managing out there. So what's the sweet spot for this and thinking in terms of a business case is it consolidating sort of legacy infrastructure, simplification, enabling people to transfer skills up the stack, if you will, to support their digital transformation? How do you see the business case evolving here, Alan? Yeah, it really is simplification and that digitization journey that all enterprises are on. The human just simply can't scale with the number of applications or the complexity of those applications and as you get more complex, your costs go up. So this is really about simplification, reducing costs and again, kind of building and taking that journey forward for the next 10 years versus doing things the same way you've been doing it there which allows you to move up stack. How do you see this partnership, HP, Aruba, Pensando? Do you see it as unique in the business? Are they ahead of the game in your opinion? How do you sort of handicap that? Yeah, it is unique and it is ahead of the game. So there is a first mover advantage going on here but I think this partnership shows how the data center is going to be different five, 10 years in the future and we're starting to create purpose-built products to address that change. We simply can't build the way we've been building in the past. Again, whether it's the device not scaling or the human not scaling, we need to look at this differently for many, many reasons. Awesome, okay Alan, we got to leave it there early. Thanks for bringing the analyst perspective to give you a last word if there's any kind of research you've got that's worth noting or any kind of last thoughts, please bring it home. Yeah, we've been tracking this space for over, you know, 15 years personally and there's a lot of new research we have in this area whether it's this class of product, data center switching, location types out there, verticals. So we're really excited to kind of be at the forefront of our position on the future. Well thanks for that, I appreciate it. Look, we've been covering this announcement and the initiatives around disrupting the traditional space. And we thank everybody for watching. Remember all this content is available on demand. If you want more information, just hit up your HPE Aruba rep. You know, I'm sure they'll be eager to help you out. So again, on demand, we will be available immediately, appreciate you watching the cubes coverage of the HPE Aruba Pensando announcements, appreciate it.