 Welcome back to HPE Discover 2021. My name is Dave Vellante. You're watching theCUBE's virtual coverage of Discover and we're super excited to have Jason Newton back in theCUBE. He's part of the HPE Mastermind Alliance behind its messaging and marketing. And he's been instrumental in up-leveling the conversation over the last several years from ports and lones and gigahertz to topics that resonate with business technology executives, which is basically every executive on the planet. Jason, great to see you. Welcome back to the program. Hey, I'm thrilled to be here. Okay, we're going to talk about the future of enterprise tech and the evolution of cloud, hybrid cloud, its expansion to the edge, where we are today, where we're headed and how we're going to get there. And I'm excited to start this off. We're living in an era where value and competition, we talk about this all the time, it's defined by data and the insights that organizations can extract from that data, the products and services that they can build that are data-centric. What do you think this means to HPE and what does it mean for your customers? Well, I think we're at the right moment at the right time. And I think for the customer, it just, what's happening now, what's possible to create value from data is just a tremendous opportunity to accelerate the transformation they were already driving for their business. We're seeing our customers do amazing things with data, not just monetizing data, but like world-changing types of things around in healthcare, in finance, transforming experiences for their customers. And all of this is being driven by data. Well, I'm excited to see how you guys approach that. I mean, you're talking about the cloud-to-edge strategy. And I've been having discussions with various execs at Discover, obviously, remotely, about how far HPE goes and certainly you're going to have compute everywhere. And Aruba seems to me to be a really interesting part of that platform. You're going to go to the deep edge. So you got a lot of assets in the arsenal. How are you thinking about that? Well, it really all needs to come together into one experience. And you mentioned Aruba. I mean, that's where it all starts with secure connectivity. The more that we connect things up in a secure way, the more data that we're going to be able to create, analyze and act upon. So it really plays a critical role. But if you look at HPE, we really have an embarrassment of riches of assets and expertise and partnerships at global scale. And there's not a part of our business that isn't focused on some part of the data challenges that customers have, from edge computing to supercomputing to storage, what we're doing with the Esmeral software, it's all focused on helping customers take in that data and then create insights from it, create new innovations from it. Talk a little bit more about the customer challenges that you're specifically solving at HPE. What do you see there? How are you thinking about that? I think one of the biggest ones where the conversation always starts with is, I have a lot of data, but it's all in silos, even within my organization. Or in some cases, I know there's data out there, but it's in another silo. How do I get access to it? How do I hear that word a lot when we talk to customers? You know, I need to get access for my teams to that data. So first step is just, how do I bring it all together? How do I federate all of that data in one place? That's one area that we're helping customers solve. The second is in order to bring those pieces together, the different data owners have to have a trust, right? To share the data, because often there's not an incentive for them to do that, like I own the data, I don't wanna share it. So we have to establish different parameters or capabilities in order to enable that type of trust and sharing. And there has to be some mutual benefit as part of that. And we see that with inside of companies and we see it with multiple different organizations. Once you can overcome those, those are really hard challenges. Once you overcome those things, everything becomes astronomically more easy to deal with and everything starts to go faster. And that's kind of where we're trying to get people on that modern data maturity curve up to that point where they do have federation, they do have curation, they are able to share, they know what they're going to benefit from it. And then we can get on to the task of enabling the teams to do analytics at speed and scale. Yeah, you talk about federation. And so there's an interesting challenge that you're describing. And you and I have had some good conversations about this because you want to kind of tame that data, if you will, and put it in a place that you can actually get to it, share it, make it discoverable. And of course at the same time, it's all over the place. So you've kind of got these pods that can talk to each other and facilitate that kind of data sharing and then what I call building data products, building data services. And technology is at the point now it's evolving to enable us to do that. Look back at the last 10 years, it's just far too complex. Yeah, we heard Antonio earlier today talk about building not private clouds but private data spaces. It's really that idea of how do I bring an experience to the data, right? That is agile and fast and cloud-like or cloud and in the case of what we're actually doing now, building a cloud platform. If that's exactly where customers are trying to get to, and we look at these data spaces as the advantage by going, bringing that to the data, obviously there's the physics of it, the performance and that kind of thing. But we can pay more attention to data sovereignty laws. You know, we can address things like data ownership within these spaces so that teams can come together and freely collaborate and act on that data together. You know, I've been watching you guys for now several years and you've taken this messaging and marketing thing pretty seriously. But a lot of times, you know, we see it all. A lot of times there's gimmicks and I don't mean that necessarily in a bad way. There are actually some really good gimmicky marketing that gets a lot of attention but your approach is different. It's very thoughtful, it's cultural, I'll say. You're trying to cultivate sort of what you say with what you do. And so I want to ask you, how are you going about, you know, changing the way in which you provide solutions? I sort of alluded to that at the top versus how you've done it in the past and how you're helping customers redefine their business for success. Well, yeah, the way that we're thinking about that is, and I think you heard it very clearly and succinctly from Antonia earlier today, we're transforming into an edge-to-cloud company, okay? We are building an edge-to-cloud platform, that is GreenLake. That platform is the way that will deliver cloud services to our customers, for their workloads, to their data sets, wherever that needs to be. We're committed to a truly hybrid model, right? Edge, on-prem, cloud, together. And so those elements, it starts to crystallize, I think a lot more about who this company is and the type of challenges that we need to solve. Talking about the things is not interesting to customers. They want to know what problems can you help me solve, how fast can you do it, right? What outcome can you help me achieve? And that's the way that we've talked about this a lot, Dave, that we continue to transform and have those more meaningful conversations. And like I said, every time we get to the data challenges, they know the opportunities there. They have a dream and a vision of what they want to go do. They just need a partner like HPE to help them get there. So we talk a lot about GreenLake and as-a-service. You guys, through the gauntlet down first, I got to give you props because you're kind of all in on it. You're not a halfway house. I'll give you that much, but now we've seen, at least I could count, at least four other large competitors follow suit. How should we think about your strategy and specifically your advantage relative to the competitors? Let's talk first in terms of as-a-service and GreenLake and then maybe overall. Yeah, I mean, I think, you know, you see a lot of people following GreenLake's lead. I mean, we've been out in front for a while. We were the first to say the world will be hybrid and it is. We were the first to make the big bet at the edge. We were the first to see that not all the data is gonna go into one unified location. It's gonna continue to be distributed and therefore cloud experience has to travel to that data. We created the GreenLake brand years before anybody else did. And now while they're just now trying to figure out, how do I do hardware as a service or a better way to sell my products? We're moving on. We're focused on the workloads and the workflows and the data sets. GreenLake is much, much more mature. And now that we have everybody on board across the company, we're moving much faster as well, right? And that's more of a statement for the traditional competitors, right? The traditional space is, you know, they're still just stuck on like hardware-as-a-service, infrastructure-as-a-service. We're at the workload level and much higher. And I think what you're seeing from the public cloud players is, wow, data center and on-prem and edge is hard, a lot harder than I think they really anticipated. And, you know, they're reassessing. So I feel like we're in the place where the world is moving to, right? And we're really writing, you know, the first chapter of the new HPE, not the last. Has it changed the way this as a service mentality? Has it changed the way or how has it changed the way in which your product groups are behaving? Quite a bit. You know, it is a mindset shift and, you know, I think we have the culture that will successfully enable that because we've always been so customer-centric. I think as you move to an as-a-service, it becomes much more about how do I ensure customer success, right? How do I put an environment in place and then use that as an opportunity to solve more problems across our customers' environments? I think that aspect is what, you know, really is driving our thinking now, is, you know, what new services can I land on the GreenLake Edge to Cloud platform to solve different data-centric challenges? Yeah, you talked about, you know, lead and where you are in the maturity model. What do you, what was the hardest part about making that change? Was it the leadership? Was it the sales compensation? Was it to get the product guys out of the widgets? What was the hardest thing? Yeah, I think, I think go-to-market is as big a challenge as anything. You know, I think in marketing, it's our job to show the art of the possible in the future, even if it's uncomfortable for the organization. And I think that helps articulate Antonio's vision and give him a true North. And he's a fabulous leader in a culture that they, you know, they believe and trust in him. And so they're following, but, you know, the challenges are not so much, you know, the technology in many cases. It is the people and the skills and, you know, building those new relationships within accounts and those aspects, those intangible things. So, you know, we're doing a lot around enablement, sales enablement and of course with our, and most importantly with our partners who are out there selling for us. It is a new approach, but it's a good approach because it's so customer-centric. It's not product-centric. So, how are the customers and partners reacting? Of course you're gonna say great, but how do you know? Like what kind of metrics do you look at? What kind of things that are important to you to track that give you confidence that you're on the right track? They're buying more stuff. Yeah, okay, that's a good metric. Yeah, yeah, no, I mean, like I think there was some skepticism, you know, at first because we had been doing some of that infrastructure as a service type of thing for a while before we ever had a GreenLake brand. And they're like, well, is this just the same thing? Like, no, we're truly cloudifying this platform. We are building a cloud-native platform. You saw it in the announcements today, right? With cloud-native security, just like you get in the public cloud, but you can deploy and run these workloads in your choice of location. And the more that we can show evidence of our messaging in the experience that we actually deliver, that's when customers start to lean in. So we look at a ton of metrics. I mean, it's not one data point. We listen to Gartner, you know, we have our own internal research that we do. We're constantly getting feedback from our field. In fact, last week, two weeks ago, we had a Board of Advisors meeting brought in some of our top-top customers just to hear from them, you know, what are we doing good? What are we not doing good? So it's a lot of different pieces that go into how are we doing with the customer and how are they into this? But this is, we're only doing what they told us they wanted, bring the cloud to me and my data. I can't move at all, but I don't want different operating models. I want a consistent experience. I want to be able to focus and innovate. I don't want to deal with, you know, the underlying pieces of the infrastructure. Right, and so... Yeah, we're doing what they ask, right? So they tip, okay, but that sounds good, but then it's hard to do that. I mean, you got to put real, that's a lot of elbow grease, a lot of investment, a lot of innovation. Like you say, you got to align the organizations. That's not a trivial task. I mean, I tell you, Jason, I've been hearing this, you know, early days, even 10 years ago, I think we're finally at the point now where the industry is responding to what those customers really want. And of course, you know, it's like Steve Jobs with the iPhone, ask them what they want. They're not going to tell you an iPhone, right? They, maybe they didn't know 10 years ago, but I think it really came into focus in the last several years. And investment is the key there. Yeah, I mean, I think the last decade was, the digital transformation was all about, you know, how do I bring speed to code and take advantage of public cloud? And I think that took us further. But now, okay, the next chapter is a very data center. How do I bring speed and agility to data and data analytics? And especially at the edge and where things need to live, how do I make a consistent experience? That's going to be our focus for the next 10 years. And like I said, I feel like we're at the right moment in history as a company with the right assets, expertise, partnerships to go and help customers take advantage of that. Well, it's interesting. The last decade, we all talked about big data. We don't use that term much anymore. But like many things like, you know, the internet, for example, it's over some of, oh, maybe it's overhyped at the beginning, but it's always underhyped when you actually see the force it can be. I feel like we actually are now entering the true data era. So you're excited about a lot of things, obviously as a service, but I got a sense there's more that you're not sharing with us. So what are you most excited about for HPE in the future? Well, like I said, you know, becoming that edge to cloud company, watching GreenLake blossom as it is. I mean, tremendous innovations that we announced today. And yes, there's things I can't share that I know are coming later this year. I've seen the roadmaps. It's really compelling, very compelling and impressive. The things that we're doing with Esmeral combined that together with GreenLake and that experience, the types of data and analytic platform environments that we can build to unify those data silos, to accelerate the machine learning and analytics teams. It's really all coming together. And those are the things that I'm excited about. Changing that perception of HPE as infrastructure, as a service and hardware as a service and that kind of thing. It's not about, as a service is the experience, right? The value is in the data and watching us be able to help customers solve those data challenges and seize those data opportunities is what I'm most excited about. Well, the other thing too is the world has some big challenges, population and energy. We can just make the huge list. And I feel like tech companies, not only are in a position to help but I think they have a responsibility. And I got to say, I think most tech companies, big large tech companies are stepping up and have great leadership around that. And what are your thoughts on that? Well, yeah, we talked about value from data. It's all about the insights is where the value comes from. But value is not always about profit and monetization. I mean, data truly does have the opportunity to solve some of the world's biggest challenges. I was just reading this morning about CGAIR and the things that they're doing in agriculture with these. They've got a big data set platform that I think could be literally the thing that ends up helping solve world hunger. The thing that everyone sort of jokes about. I'm like, no, seriously, now with the data that could be possible. Yeah, I think you're right. I think we are going to solve world hunger. World nutrition may be a different story, but we'll tackle that next. Last question, you know, what else should we be focused on at Discover? How can folks learn more? Well, you know, this is a three-day event. So today was really about the news and the excitement and clarifying our position as an edge-to-cloud company and that GreenLake is our edge-to-cloud platform, the way that we deliver the cloud to you. Tomorrow is really about how all of that vision strategy manifests itself into the experience and the products and the solutions that you can consume. There'll also be a lot of sharing of the keynote is what I'm looking forward to with Dr. Inglem Goh. He's our head of AI and he's going to be sharing all the lessons and learnings from hundreds of engagements that he's been driving with customers, showing exactly how to overcome the data silo problem, the trust problem, how to bring agility to analytics. And then Thursday is kind of the geek out day, right? We get to talk to Hewlett Packard Labs. We get to go and touch the technology, meet the technologists, interact with them and understand what are those technologies that are going to be crucial for the next 10 years of data-driven transformation. Some really exciting stuff there, Jason. Thank you so much for spending some time on theCUBE again. Really great to see you. I appreciate the invite. Every time is a pleasure. Thank you. All right, and thanks for being with us for our ongoing coverage of HPE Discover 21. This is Dave Vellante. You're watching theCUBE, the leader in digital tech coverage. We'll be right back.