 Hey, everyone. Welcome back to our conversation with Hitachi Vantara, Lisa Martin here with Russell Skillingsley, the CTO and Global VP of Technical Sales at Hitachi Vantara. Russell, welcome to the program. Hi, Lisa. Nice to be here. Yeah, great to have you. So here we are the end of calendar year 2022. What are some of the things that you're hearing out in the field in terms of customers' priorities for 2023? Yeah, good one. Just to set the scene here, we tend to deal with enterprises that have mission-critical IT environments. And this has been our heritage and continues to be our major strength. So just to set the scene here, that's the type of customers predominantly I'd be hearing from. And so that's what you're going to hear about here. Now, in terms of 2023, one of the macro concerns that's hitting almost all of our customers right now, as you can probably appreciate, is power consumption. And closely related to that is the whole area of ESG and decarbonisation and all that sort of thing. And I'm not going to spend a lot of time on that one because that would be a whole session in itself, really. But sufficient to say it is a priority for us and we're very active in that area. So aside from that one, that big one, there's also a couple that are pretty much in common for most of our customers and in areas that we can help. One of those is in an exponential growth of the amount of data. It's predicted that the world's data is going to triple by 2025 as opposed to where it was in 2020. And I think everyone's contributing to that, including a lot of our customers. So just the act of managing that amount of data is a challenge in itself. And I think closely related to that, a desire to use that data better, to be able to gain more business insights and potentially create new business outcomes and business ideas is another one of those big challenges. In that sense, I think a lot of our customers are in what I would kind of call, I affectionately call the post-Facebook awakening era. And what I mean by that is our traditional businesses, when Facebook came along, they kind of illustrated, hey, I can actually make some use out of what is seemingly an enormous amount of useless data, which is exactly what Facebook did. They took a whole lot of people's minutiae of people's lives and turned it into advertising revenue by gaining insights from those seemingly useless bits of data. I think this actually gave rise to a lot of digital business at that time. This whole idea of what all you really need to be successful and disrupt the business is a great idea, an app and a whole bunch of data to power it. I think that a lot of our traditional customers are looking at this and wondering, how do they get into the act? Because they've been collecting data for decades and an enormous amount of data. Every company these days has to be a data company, but to your point, they've got to be able to extract those insights, monetize it and create real value new opportunities for the business at record speed. Yes, that's exactly right. Being able to wield that data somehow, it turns our customers' attentions to the type of infrastructure they've got as well. If you think about those companies that have been really successful in leveraging that data, a lot of them have, especially in the early days, leveraged the cloud to be able to build out their capabilities. The reason why the cloud became such a pivotal part of that is because it offered self-service IT and easy development platforms to those people that had these great ideas. All they needed was access to the provider's website and a credit card. Now, all of a sudden, they could start to build a business from that. I think a lot of our traditional IT customers are looking at this and thinking, how do I build a similar infrastructure? How do I provide that kind of self-service capability to the owners of business inside my company, rather than the IT company being a gatekeeper to a selected set of software packages? How now do I provide this development platform for those internal users? I think this is why hybrid cloud has become the de facto IT architectural standard, even for quite traditional IT companies. When it comes to hybrid cloud, what are some of the challenges the customers are facing? I know Hitachi has a great partner ecosystem. How are partners helping Hitachi, Ventara and its customers to eliminate or solve some of those hybrid cloud challenges? It's a great question. It's not 1975 anymore. It's not like you're going to get all of your IT needs from one vendor. Hybrid by definition is going to involve multiple pieces. There basically is no hybrid at all without a partner ecosystem. You really can't get everything at a one-stop shop like you used to. But even if you think about the biggest public cloud provider on the planet, AWS, even it has a marketplace for partner solutions. Even for customers that might consider themselves to be all in on public cloud, they are still going to need other pieces, which is where their marketplace comes in. For us, we're a company that we've been in the IT business for over 60 years, one of the few that could claim that sort of heritage. We've seen a lot of this type of change ourselves, this change of attitude from being able to provide everything yourself to being someone who contributes to an overall ecosystem. Partners are absolutely essential. Now we have a partner-first philosophy when it comes to our routes to market on not just our own products in terms of a resale channel or whatever, but also making sure that we're working with some of the biggest players in hybrid infrastructure and determining where we can add value to that in our own solutions. When it comes to those partner ecosystems, we're always looking for the spaces where we can best add our own capability to those prevailing IT architectures that are successful in the marketplace. I think that it's probably fair to say, for us, first and foremost, we have a reputation for having the biggest, most reliable storage infrastructure available on the planet. We make no apologies for the fact that we tout our speeds and feeds and uptime supremacy. A lot of our competitors would suggest that, hey, speeds and feeds don't matter, but that's kind of what you say when you're not the fastest or not the most reliable. Of course they matter. For us, the way that we look at this is we say, let's look at who's providing the best possible hybrid solutions and let's partner with them to make those solutions even better. That's the way we look at it. Can you peel the onion a little bit on the technology, underpinning the solutions? Give me a glimpse into that and then maybe add some color in terms of how partners are enhancing that. Let me do that with a few examples here. Maybe what I can do is I can sort of share some insight about the way we think with partnering with particular people and why it's a good blend or why we see that technologically it's a good blend. For example, the work we do with VMware, which we consider to be one of our most important hybrid cloud partners. In fact, it's my belief they have one of the strongest hybrid cloud stories in the industry. It resonates really strongly with our customers as well. We think it's made so much better with the robust underpinnings that we provide. We're one of the few storage vendors that provides a 100% data availability guarantee. We take that sort of level of reliability and we add other aspects like life cycle management of the underpinning infrastructure. We combine that with what VMware is doing. Then when you look at our converged or hyperconverged solutions with them, it's a better together story where you now have what is one of the best hybrid cloud stories in the industry with VMware. Now, for the on-premise part especially, you've now added 100% data availability guarantee and you've made managing the underlying infrastructure so much easier through the tools that we provide that go down to that level underneath where VMware are. That's VMware. I've got a couple more examples just to sort of fill that out a bit. Cisco is another very strong partner of ours, a key partner. You look at Cisco, they're a $50 billion IT provider and they don't have a dedicated storage infrastructure of their own. They're going to partner with someone. From our perspective, we look at Cisco's customers and we look at them and think they're very similar to our own in terms of they're known to appreciate performance and reliability and a bit of premium in quality and we think we match them quite well. They're already buying what we believe are the best converged platforms in the industry from Cisco. It makes sense that those customers would want to complement that investment with the best storage arrays they can get. We think we're helping Cisco's customers make the most of their decision to be UCS customers. Final one for you, Lisa, by way of example, we have a relationship with Equinex and Equinex is the world's leading co-load provider and the way I think they like to think of themselves and I too tend to agree with them is that they're one of the most compelling high-speed interconnect networks in the world. They're connected to all of the significant cloud providers in most of the locations around the world. We have a relationship with them where we find we have customers in common who really love the idea of compute from the cloud. Compute from the cloud is great because compute is something that you're doing for a set period of time and then it's over. You have a task, you do some compute, it's done. Cloud is beautiful for that. Storage on the other hand is very long-lived. Storage doesn't tend to operate in that same sort of way. It just becomes a bigger and bigger blob over time. The cost model around public cloud and storage is not as compelling as it is for compute. With our relationship with Equinex, we help our customers to be able to create a data anchor point where they put our arrays into an Equinex location and then they utilize Equinex's high-speed interconnects to the cloud providers to take the compute from them. They take the compute from the cloud providers and they own their own storage. In this way, they feel like we've now got the best of all worlds. What I hope that illustrates, Lisa, with those three examples is we are always looking for ways to find our key advantages with any given alliance partner's advantages. When you're in customer conversations in our final few minutes here, I want to get what are some of the key differentiators that you talk about when you're in customer conversations and then how does the partner ecosystem fit into Hitachi Ventara's as a service business? We'll start with differentiators and then let's move into the as-service business we can round up with that. Okay, let's start with the differentiators. Firstly, and hopefully I've hit this point hard enough, we do believe that we have the fastest and most reliable storage infrastructure on the planet. This is what we're known for. Customers that are working with us already have an appreciation for that. They're looking for, okay, you've got that. Now, how can you make my hybrid cloud aspirations better? We do have that as a fundamental, but secondly, I'd say I think it's also because we go beyond just storage management and into the areas of data management. We've got solutions that are not just about storing the bits. We do think that we do that very well, but we also have solutions that move into the areas of enrichment of the data, cataloging of the data, classification of the data, and most importantly, analytics. We think it's some of our competitors just stop at storing stuff and some of our competitors are in the analytics space, but we feel that we can bridge that and we think that that's a competitive advantage for us. One of the other areas that I think is key for us as well is, as I said, we're one of the few vendors who've been in the marketplace for 60 years. We think this gives us a more nuanced perspective about things. There are many things in the industry trends that have happened over time where we feel we've seen this kind of thing before and I think we will see it again, but you only really get that perspective if you're long lived in the industry. We believe that our conversations with our customers bear a little bit more sophistication. It's not just about what's the latest and greatest trends. Right. We've got about one minute left. Can you round us out with how the partner ecosystem is playing a role in the as-a-service business? They're absolutely pivotal in that. We ourselves don't own data centers. We don't provide our own cloud services out, so we're 100% partner focused when it comes to that aspect. Our formula is to help partners build their cloud services with our solutions and then on-sell them to their customers as a service. By quick way of example, VMware, for example, they've got nearly 5,000 partners selling VMware cloud services. 5,000 blows me away. Many of them are our partners, too. We see this as a virtuous cycle. We've got product. We've got an alliance with VMware, and we work together with partners in common for the delivery of an as-a-service business. Got it. So, as you said, the partner ecosystem is absolutely pivotal. Russell, it's been a pleasure having you on the program talking about all things hybrid cloud challenges, how Hitachi Ventura is working with its partner ecosystems to really help customers across industries solve those big problems. We really appreciate your insights and your time. Thank you very much, Lisa. Thanks, Russell. You're watching theCUBE, the leader in live tech coverage.