 Live from Madrid, Spain. It's theCUBE, covering HPE Discover Madrid 2017. Brought to you by Hewlett Packard Enterprise. Welcome back to Madrid, everybody. This is theCUBE, the leader in live tech coverage. My name is Dave Vellante, and I'm here with my co-host for the week, Peter Burris, otherwise known as Mr. Universe. And this is HPE Discover Madrid 2017. Flynn Malloy is here as the vice president of marketing at HPE Point Next. And John Treadway is here as the senior vice president of strategy and portfolio at Cloud Technology Partners and HPE Company. Gentlemen, good to see you again. Welcome to theCUBE. Good to see you. Good to see you guys. So it's been a good week. We were just talking about the clarity that's coming to light with HPE, the portfolio, some of the cool acquisitions. You and I, Flynn, were at this event last year in London. Then you had the Cheshire cat smile in your face. She said, something big is coming. I can't really tell you about it, partly because I can't tell you about it. The other part is we're still shaping it, and then Point Next came out of it. So how you feeling? Give us the update. It's been a really exciting year for services. We, at this time last year, we knew that, as Antonio announced, we're going to be bringing our services together after we announced that we're spinning out our outsourcing business. And so we're bringing technology services at the time forward. We had a new brand coming. We purchased Cloud Cruiser in February. So we're investing in the business. We also invested in services, back in the engine room all year long, to really build up to our announcement this week with GreenLake, which takes our consumption services to the next level. And then of course, in September, we continued to invest and acquired Cloud Technology partners. So, and by the way, brought on an all new leadership team with Anna Pinzuck and Parvesh Sati. So for us here in HPE, it's really been a banner here for services. It's really been transformative for the company and we're excited to continue to lead going into FY18. So John, Cloud Technology partners is specializing deep technology expertise. You got an affinity for AWS. You got a bunch of guys that reinvent this week in close partnership with them. Interesting acquisition from your perspective, coming into HPE. What's it been like? What has HPE brought you and what have you brought HPE? That's a fantastic question. We have really found that everything about this experience has exceeded our expectations across the board. When you go into these things, you're kind of hoping for the best outcome, right? Which is, we're here because we want to be able to grow our business and scale it and HPE gives us that scale. We also think that we have a lot of value to add to the credibility around public cloud and the capabilities we bring. You hope that those things turn out to be true. The level of engagement we're getting across the business with the sellers, with the customers, with the partners is way beyond expectations. I'd like to say that we're really about six months ahead of where we thought we'd be in terms of integration, in terms of capability and expertise. And really bringing that public cloud expertise, not just AWS, we do a lot of Azure work, we do a lot of Google work as well, really does allow the HPE teams to be able to go into their clients and have a new conversation that they couldn't have a year ago. What is that new conversation? Well, that new conversation is really about, and we like to use the term the right mix, right? So IT is not just one mode. You're going to have internal IT, you're going to have private clouds. Public cloud is a reality. AWS is the fastest growing company in tech history ever, right? And so if you think about that, it's a reality for our clients, HPE's clients, that public cloud is there. That new capability that we could bring, that credibility is that we have done this the last seven years with large enterprises across all sorts of industries and domains, telco, healthcare, financial services in particular. So we bring that to the table, combine that with the scale and operational capability of HPE, and now we have something that's actually pretty special. Well, and just to add, it is about the customers at the end of the day. It's about where do those workloads want to land. Public cloud, private cloud, traditional, those are all tools in your toolbox. And what customers want to know is what is the right mix? There are workloads that are ideal for going to the public cloud. There are workloads that are ideal for staying on-prem and finding that right mix, especially by bringing in the capabilities of what needs to go to public cloud, that really rounds out our portfolio for hybrid IT. So I'm starting to buy the story. So the upstarts, the fastest growing company in the world would say, old guard, trying to hang on to the past. I like the way you framed it is, look, we know our customers want to go to the cloud. They want certain workloads to be on-prem. We want them to succeed. We're open, we're giving them choice. It's, you know, maybe two years ago it sounded like bromide, but you're actually putting it into action, acquiring a company like CTP. And it's interesting what you were saying, John, about, well, no, not just AWS, it's Google, it's Azure, you've got independent perspective on what should go where or on-prem. And we always have, right? So even as a company that derived most of our revenue from public cloud over the last few years, we've never ever been the company that said, everything should go to public cloud. Toss it all, go to Amazon, toss it all, go to Azure. Never been our perspective. We've had methodology for looking through the application portfolio and helping determine where things should go. And, you know, very often, a large percentage of the portfolio, we say it's good where it is, don't move it, right? Don't move it right away. So, but in the past, that's where it ended. You say, okay, hey, go figure out something, go talk to HPE. Yeah, that's actually a funny thing because we've had this conversation when, literally when we would say, okay, we'll take care of this part for the public cloud, but you're on your own for the private cloud stuff. In the past, HPE would do the reverse. We'll help you with the private cloud stuff, but, and we think this could go to public cloud, but you're kind of on your own with that. Not that there wasn't any capability, but it wasn't really well-developed. Now we can say this should go to private cloud, this should go to public cloud, and guess what? We can do both. So now you've got to lean in strategy. Absolutely right. Good question. As John said, the funnels and the response from our customers have been outstanding. As you can imagine, like all of our top customers are saying, fantastic, come talk to us, come talk to us. They're having to prioritize where they go over the last few months, and we're well ahead of where we were. Well, we've strongly believed over the years that the goal is not to bring your business to the cloud, it's to bring the cloud to your business. And that ultimately means that public cloud will be a subset of the total, although Amazon's done a wonderful job of putting forward the new mental model for the future of computing. Can you guys reliably through things like GreenLake and other, can you present yourselves as a cloud company that just doesn't have a public cloud component? Well, let me approach the response to that question in a slightly different way. When you look at our strategy around making hybrid IT simply, it's not necessarily which cloud is the right cloud. It's not really about that. It's about where should the workloads land. And we do believe that the pragmatic answer is, you need to be a little bit above all of those choices. They're all in the toolbox. And if you look at, for example, our announcement with OneSphere this week, that's a perfect example of what customers are asking the industry to do, which is to look across all of it. I mean, the reality is it's hybrid, it's multi-cloud, and speaking at that length. But you're saying it's a superset of tools that each are chosen based on the characteristics of workloads, data, whatever it might be. That's right. So John, look, as human beings, we all get good at stuff and we say, oh, look, I know that person. I can stereotype them and I can stereotype that. And what's the heuristic that your team is using to very quickly look at a workload? Give our audience, our clients a clue here, so that they can walk away a little bit and say, well, that workload naturally probably is going to go here and that workload is naturally going to go there. What's it like 30 second where you're able to generally get it right 80% of the time? Yeah, it really comes down to a set of factors. One factor is just technical fit. Will it work at all? So we can knock out a lot of workloads because they're on old Unix, or just kind of generally the technical fit isn't there. Second thing is from a business case, does it make sense? Is there going to be any operational saving against the cost of doing the migration? Because migrating something isn't free, right? It's never free. Third is what is the security and governance constraint within which I'm living? So if I have a data residency requirement in a country and there's no hyperscale public cloud presence in that country, then that workload needs to stay in that country, right? So it's those types of high level factors we can very quickly go from the list of, here's your entire list down to, all right, these are candidates for further evaluation. Then we start to get into kind of deeper analysis, but the top level screen can happen very, very quickly. So you do that across the app, you take an application view, obviously, a workload view. And then how do you avoid sort of boiling the ocean? Or do you boil the ocean? You have tools to help do that, right? Yeah, we do. We've invested a lot in IP, both service IP and software IP, and both point next also comes with some strong IP in this as well, that we've been able to merge in with. So our application assessment methodology is backed by a tool called Aura, right? And Aura is a tool for taking that data, collecting it, and help providing the visualization and reporting and decisioning at the high level on these items, right? Then every application that looks like a great candidate for something that I'm going to invest in a migration, we need to do a deeper analysis because it isn't lifting and shifting, doesn't work for 90% of the applications or 80% or 70, it's certainly not anywhere near 50% of the applications. They require a little bit of work. Sometimes a lot of work to be able to have operational scale in a public cloud environment because they're expecting a certain performance and operational characteristic of their internal infrastructure, and it's not there. It's a different model in the public cloud. Yeah, a lot of organizations like yours would have a challenge presenting that to a customer because they can't get the attention of the senior leaders. How is it that you guys are able to do that? You were talking, I think off camera, talking about 20 plus years of experience on average for each of your professionals. Is that one of the sort of secrets to how you've succeeded? Well, this is a big thing and why this integration is working so well, right? Is that the people that, the early team all the way through today of CTP are all seasoned IT professionals. We're not kids straight out of school that have only known how to do IT in an Amazon way. We have CIOs of banks that are in our executive team, that are in our architecture team that have that empathy and understanding of what it means to be in the shoes. And not having this arrogant approach of everything must be a certain way because that's what we believe, that doesn't work. And the clients are all different. Every application is a snowflake and needs to be treated as such. It needs to be treated like an individual. Like a human, you want to be treated like an individual, not like somebody. You want to be a stalker. What? Gesundheit. Gesundheit. Gesundheit. Okay, so now the challenge is how you scale that. How you replicate that globally and scale it and get the word out. Well, and talk about that. That's right. One of the big things that we're really excited to see is to the merger of the IP that comes from CTP along with everything that we have inside of Pointnext and then rolling that out to the 5,000 plus consultants that we've got inside of HB and our partners. And that's really where we're expecting a lot of the magic to come from is once we really expose the integrated set of what those capabilities are, we think, and Anna has said it on stage, we had heard from a couple of analysts that we believe that together, we have the largest cloud advisory in the industry today. That was interesting. We actually had, we've had challenges in the past, where we've gone into clients and we're starting to get into some fairly serious a level of work. And we were a younger company, didn't have the scale and scope and capability of HPE. Now we're being brought in to these opportunities and the clients are saying, yeah, oh, HPE, you're right here, we can do that. We have the scale to now start doing the larger transformation programs and projects with these clients that we didn't have before. And so now we're being invited back in, right? In addition to them being invited in because now we have the cloud competency that we can bring to the table. And I kind of want to go back to what you made earlier about how it's all cloud and that resonates with me. I think it is all cloud, depending on where you want to land the various pieces. And if that's what you want to call that umbrella, I think it makes a ton of sense. A lot of what we've announced this week with GreenLake is about trying to bridge the benefits gap with public cloud as the benchmark for the experience today for what needs to stay on-prem. When you sit down and for all those reasons you outlined, whether it's ready, whether it isn't ready, whether the data has to sit or whether or not, there's going to be X workloads that need to stay on-prem and we've been working hard in the engine room to really build out an experience that can feel to the customer a lot like what you get from the public cloud. And that's going to continue to be an investment area for us. If the goal is success for the business, then you don't measure success by whether you got to Amazon. That's correct. The goal of success is the business. You measure success by whether or not the business successfully adopts the technology where the data requires. So this is, what's interesting about the change that we're experiencing is, in many respects, for the first time, the way of thinking about problems in this industry is going through a radical transformation. And let's credit AWS for catalyzing a lot of that change. Absolutely, setting that benchmark. I mean, it really is a catalyst. But you look at this show, HP has adopted the thought process. It's adopted it. It's no longer in opposition to it. It's saying, fine, you want to think this way? We'll help. Well, imagine this. So, as one sphere comes up, and as we really can manage multi-clouds, and as we're eventually be able to move workloads between the various clouds, manage the whole estate, view the whole estate, and everything under it, whether it's off-prem or on-prem, is all consumption. I mean, how does that change central IT? I mean, that central IT radically changes. If everything's consumed, wherever it is, and you've got a visibility to the whole estate, and you can move stuff depending on what the right mix is, that's a fundamental change. And we're not there yet as an industry, but that's a fundamental change to the role of central IT. But your CIOs are thinking along those lines. We can verify. They are thinking along those lines. But again, the strategy's coming into focus for me personally, and I think us generally. We talked to Anna about services-led, outcome-led. You know, and if it's big, chewy outcome, like kind of IBM talks, well, you've got partners to help you do that. You know, Deloitte, we had PWC on. I mean, they're big world-class organizations with deep expertise in retail and manufacturing and oil and gas. You're happy to work with those guys. If it is services-led or outcome-led, you can make money whether you're going to Amazon, whether you're staying on-prem, you know, whether you're doing some kind of hybrid in between, and you're happy to do that as an agnostic, independent player. Now yeah, of course you'd like to sell HP hardware. And software, why not? Well, you know, I think that's really an important point. You know, when it comes to the infrastructure itself, we do believe we have the best infrastructure in the industry. But, you know, we play well with others, and we've always said HPE plays well with others, and you know, when it comes to the app layer, we are apagnostic. You know, a lot of our biggest competitors are not. And you know, when you go out and talk to CIOs today, that's really, this is my app. This is my baby. This is the one that I want. And you know, they don't really, they're not really looking for alternatives for that in many cases. So when you're thinking agnostic, that's really where we think. Partner being agnostic, you know, working with all the app vendors, working with all the SIs, you know, we think that's where the future. Yeah, and it's a key thing. I mean, you guys are younger, but you remember, UNIX is snake oil. Yeah, yeah. Right? I mean, you know, Ken Olson has hit you. As exciting as a Russian truck. Saying, UNIX is snake oil. And then, you know, two years later it's like, here's our UNIX. It's the best thing ever. Right. So you now are in a position to say, great, wherever you want to go, we'll take you there. That's powerful because it can be genuine and you can be lucrative. And what's unlocking here is the ability to actually execute a digital transformation program within the enterprise, right? One of the big things that the public cloud provider has brought to us, and that HPE is now bringing in through the internal infrastructure, is that agility and speed of innovation of the users. Their ability to actually get things done very quickly and reduce the cycle time of innovation. That, frankly, has always been the core benefit of the public cloud model. That pay as you go, start with what you need, use the platform services and grow, right? That model has been there since the beginning. And it's over 11 years of AWS at this point, right? So now with enterprise technology, adopting similar models of, pay for it when you consume it, we'll provision it in advance, we'll get things going for you. We're giving that model. It's about unlocking the ability for the enterprise to do innovation at scale. I want to end if I can on, met Jonathan Boomer last night. Yeah, JP. JP. JP, sorry, you're JT. It's confusing. But one of the things I learned, a small organization, 200, 250 people, roughly when you got acquired. But you've got this thing called Doppler. All right, is that what's called Doppler? Explain that, explain the thought leadership angles that you guys have. So actually, from the very beginning, I mean, the marketing team loves this. It's fantastic. And I want to follow up with it. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So the, from day one, there's a few things that we said were core principles the way that we were going to grow and run the business. And I'll talk about one other thing first, which was that we were going to be technology-enabled, a technology-enabled services company that we were going to invest in IP both at the service level, but at the technology level to accelerate the delivery of what we do. The second thing, as a core principle, is that we were going to lead through thought leadership. And so we have been the most prolific producers of independent cloud content as a services firm, bar none, right? Yeah, there's newspapers, magazines, analyst firms like yourself producing a lot of content. The stuff that we're producing is based on direct experience of implementing these solutions in the cloud with our clients. So we can bring best practices. We're not talking about our services. We're talking about what is the best practice for any enterprise that wants to get to the cloud. How do you do security? How do you do organizational change? And that has a very large following, Doppler, both the online where we have an email newsletter, but we also do printed publication of our quarterly Dopplers that goes out to a lot of our clients and CIOs and key partners. That kind of thought leadership has really set us apart from all of the rest of the, even the born in cloud consultancies who never put that investment in. And Flynn, you're a content guy. Absolutely. So you got to really appreciate this. It's a dream. It's an absolute dream. And one of the things, another proof point in, is a way to end, services first strategy is what we're doing in the marketing community at HP, more money, energy, content time is going into how we're talking thought leadership and services than anything else in the company. So we've got, not just branding for Pointnext and GreenLake, but bringing Doppler forward, bringing those great case studies forward, putting that kind of content at the tip of the HPE spear. It's not something you've seen from our company in the past. And I think, keep your eyes out over the next year. We'll have this conversation in six months and you'll see a lot more from us on that topic. Great stuff. Congratulations on the progress, the exit, the future. Thank you. Look, exciting. Really appreciate it. Keep it right there, everybody. We'll be back right after this short break. Dave Vellante from Peter Burris from HPE Discover Madrid. This is theCUBE.