 Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE, covering HPE Discover 2017, brought to you by Hewlett Packard Enterprise. Hey, welcome back everyone. We're here live in Las Vegas for theCUBE's coverage of HPE Discover 2017. I'm John Furrier with SiliconANGLE. My co-host Dave Vellant, Dave with SiliconANGLE, Wookie Bond, our next guest is Xavier Poisson, VP in Indirect Digital Services at HPE and Craig McClellan, founder of ThinkOn. Guys, welcome to theCUBE, welcome back. I know Dave interviewed you in London. I wasn't there, but welcome to theCUBE. Thank you. So Xavier, I got to congratulate you on the prestigious Cloud Leadership Award in 2017. So congratulations on the Data Cloud Europe prestigious award. Yeah, yeah, it was announced yesterday in Monte Carlo. And I believe it is a good recognition from the industry about what we have been doing, but not only me, you know, as a collective work with our partners, with the HPE people, and really to bring the best of the value of Cloud to our customers. So like, Monte Carlo, Vegas, okay, tough choices. I'd like to go to Monte Carlo, it's not a bad place to visit, hang out. Cloud 28 is really expanding, really kind of lightning in a bottle with what you've been doing. So this speaks to the general industry trend, the way that you're riding with Cloud and Enterprise. Talk about why Cloud 28 is doing so well and what's the dynamic, what's the driver? Well, you know, I checked back out of the prize, we believe that the customers deserve to know more, that they need to have the choice and also that our partners are playing a significant role to make it happen because we cannot believe that one single company will do everything. So the digital transformation of our customers is involving that more and more capabilities are put in place in order that we answer the right needs at the right moment in the right geography. And this was, you know, the foundation of Cloud 28 Plus to make it happen like that. We call it, you know, how you can make a global ecosystem in the sense of the sharing economy, putting the resources together, in order really that one single partner can find with another one the way to achieve his goal instead of thinking, I will do it myself and I will lose my customer at the end of the day. And believe me or not, but the customers recognize that. So this is why I believe it's growing, it's growing fast. And the open source community is really expanding as well. And if you look at the technology providers from the global system integrators down to the front lines of channel partners, Cloud is changing the game, customers expect coexistence. Craig, you're in the middle of all this. What is some of the frontline dynamics with customers because they're going to be getting a lot of services from a variety of different vendors and suppliers. No one size fits all anymore. And that's so true, more than ever. I think it falls into three categories. One is all the customers expect partners and their service providers to focus on the integration with others, treat each other as peers. Whether you call it collaboration or co-optition, it's still an issue that the customer more than ever is expecting their providers to facilitate. Secondly, they're very impatient. Everything is about now or five minutes ago and there's very low tolerance for the traditional engagement model. And the third item is technology is changing so fast that customers in many cases have stopped trying to stay on top of it and they're now looking for the service providers to be effectively their proxy with the underlying developers. The patient thing is a good point. I want to drill into that because what we're seeing is a move to Cloud highlights the anti-waterfall concept which was really great for project management back in the days of ERPs and those 18 months to 24 months POCs. Now, people are under a lot of pressure to drive top-line revenue and cost consolidation so Cloud can give you that. So how has that changed the nature of the customer? I'm not sure they're impatient but how has that changed structurally how they engage with partners? So what I experience in our day-to-day is the customers are eager to fail fast. Failure is an acceptable outcome as long as it doesn't take them 12 months, 18 months. They're also expecting service providers to embrace a similar DevOps mentality where they're looking for service providers to be innovating all the time. So there is some forgiveness I think that occurs from the customer base if we're all in this together but they really, back to what I said earlier they just do not tolerate, we'll meet next Thursday and talk about it. They really want to move to the action. They want the action. So Craig, talk a little bit more about ThinkOn sort of why you founded the company. What's your journey been like? I'm really interested in the transformation that has been affected as a result of Cloud28. Well, so we believe very strongly in ecosystems, participating ecosystems. We're a wholesale provider so we enable the traditional vars to go to market faster and we looked at the Cloud28 marketplace as just another example of an ecosystem where traction inside the ecosystem is growing faster than if we were to do everything ourselves. So not only do we embrace the notion of partnerships but we also leverage the channel to help them develop faster go-to-market strategies in their chosen niches. So how did it work? I mean, how did you guys engage? Is every do you find partners like this? Did they come to you? They're already part of you? Oh, I believe it's both sides. Sometimes, yes, we discuss, I believe HPE has a responsibility to discuss with our partners to explain that the world is changing and that there is an opportunity. So we do our job and creating the relationship with Craig has been done by the HPE team in the country and diversity matters. We need to respect also what is happening into the country. The ecosystem on the way business is done into the country. So in this case, it was HPE. Some other cases, and I have a very good example, it was in New York, the account manager of VAR was called by the VAR to say to, I want to join. How I can get in touch with Cloud 20 plus because I see the opportunity to partner with some other vendors, meaning ISVs or SIs, and I want to be there. So it is both sides. We have a lot of calls from ISVs because the software vendors, developing applications, and as you said, Craig, is going very, very fast with cloud native development. So you have more and more startups coming and developing new products and they want to reach the market very, very quickly. And with the exposure that we have because we are worldwide, and we started in Europe, in Eastern Africa, but we are developing Cloud 20 plus now from December onwards in the United States of America, in Canada, Latin America, in Asia Pacific, you would be amazed what is happening in India, for instance, where cloud is just popping up and where all the good ideas are coming. So it is both sides, either from HPE engaging with their partner and say, okay, there is an opportunity. Do you want to join? Or sometimes, as I said, it is the partners reaching on us, they say, we want to be there. We want to accelerate with you. Now give us some metrics on the program. So as of today, so remember, we opened the platform. It was in December 15th and we're together in London, if you remember. Absolutely. As of today, it's 18 months after, 500 members. It's amazing, 500 members. We cover more than 300 data centers of our partners, like the ones of Craig. 300. And we have published nearly 18,000 cloud services on the platform out of 2,000 unique. And we have nearly now 40,000 hits per month on the website. It's really amazing. I can tell you, it's a snowball effect. And it's not only the end user customers, but we have a lot, a lot of traffic inside the platform. Between members, we are building new offering. So for instance, we have been speaking here at this cover of the Ormuko offering that has been announced. We're running on this cover. This is coming out of Cloud 28 bus. Typically, and we see that there, there is another offering that HP Pointnext is proposing now as a service, which is a legal identity by Lekwa, which is a software company in the Nordics, coming out of Cloud 28 bus. So expanding dramatically. So this really highlights the pay-as-you-go cloud business model. And it gives ISVs and VARs and VABs the portfolio approach. So they're kind of organically putting this together versus the old channel model of predefined programs and products being shipped out to partners. You can pop services in here and then your customers can roll their own solutions. That's right. Is that, am I getting that right? Absolutely. I also think that one of the things that is a real value add is a lot of organizations are concerned about vendor lock-in. And when you build a consortium, like what the HPE has done, it forces the service providers to participate in a way that avoids lock-in. Every service provider wants to build a lock-in strategy, but there's subtle ways that you can do it that aren't offensive, and then there are offensive ways. And I think the Cloud 28 consortium is really doing a good job giving customers the comfort that they can adopt services, but they're not locked in. Let's call it sticky. What's the best way for somebody in the channel to create stickiness and loyalty with their customers? In my experience, they have an existing ecosystem that they've been working with for a long time, whether it's HPE or Veeam or another software vendor. And that's an ecosystem that their sales organization understands. It's an ecosystem that their own support organization understands. I think you should always start a nice, simple step within an ecosystem you already know and then take the next step, turn it into a recurring revenue stream without trying to start from scratch. Blank Slate is always exciting to the people that are paid to do it, but unfortunately, the outcome is usually not on time and on budget, but there's lots of little steps you can take with existing ecosystem partners. Kind of familiarity, ease of doing business, track record, all those kinds of things. Customer trust. I mean, we use the term lock-in, but that's really what we're trying to achieve is trust and loyalty. The new lock-in is scale, openness, and trust. Question on some of the tactical things. Channels have always been a beautiful thing in direct to sales. There's a great cost per order of dollars. The numbers are great, but you got to get it going, right? So you got some, the flywheel rolling with Cloud 28. How do you nurture this? I mean, obviously it's organic. There's some community involved. Training and getting out there. I mean, how's it running? I mean, I'm just trying to understand this is really good formula. Is there a magical formula? Is there certain training? Is it done in the community, peer to peer? So it is amazing because it is driven by listening to the people, and I would say educating everybody in the value chain and the sales people at HPE, the pre-sales at HPE, and the people within our partners and the end-user customer that they need to think business outcome. And once you shift from transactional selling to thinking business outcome, all the things are getting together because you think what your customer, on your customer's customer wants to do, on how you will help your customer to achieve these business goals. And you spoke about agility, time to market. These are things you can create with assembling all the, all what is in to Cloud 28 plus. I have a big example of, we use our Cloud 28 plus to answer very large multimillion dollar RFPs. Why? Because multi-cloud is a reality. So large governments, enterprises, wants to deploy clouds in many areas, not always putting everything in the same data center. They want also that you have a good mix of technologies, a good mix of usage, and then you end with RFPs which are giant. And especially when everything is coming to IoT, to the sprawling of data, you need to have data analytics, high performance, it is becoming a nightmare. So we have a very good example with a big RFP in Europe. It was all about collecting all the open data that are produced by the satellites in the sky and to put all this data available for all the SMBs in Europe. I can tell you it was very complicated to do. You will not believe me. In less than three weeks, we were able to discuss with the right partners inside Cloud 28 plus to be the consortium and to be three weeks. It was available. Well, the thing about cloud too, as you get into these scalable, horizontally scalable data opportunities, you also need specialism, you need to have expertise. And that to me really is an application specific, not peddling product, you actually, to your outcome perspective, your solution providing, right? It's based back to listening. So, okay, final thoughts, guys. HP Discover 2017, what's the takeaway? Greg, Xavier, this year, what's the big story out? So we heard Meg Whitman compute is kind of being redefined and scaling. What's the big story here from your perspective? Well, for me, I was excited to hear about the customer having a more open mind about where to put workload. I would say two years ago, there was this mad rush to the cloud without really understanding the cloud. Now there's a more seasoned reality is that workload has a multitude of locations where it can be. And I've been saying this for a long time, but as a small organization in Canada, not everyone's listening. Well, you're nimble, you're in the front line. That's right. So it's nice to hear that it's being seen around the world in the enterprise space. That's my big takeaway. Xavier, thoughts? I believe that Hewlett Packard Enterprise is interest and confidence about the journey we have designed with Meg Whitman. We are to cross different phases of transformation and it is not finished. But more than ever, we put the customer in front of the discussion. You know, when you have been perhaps listening about this new stack that was pre-announced there, I was thrilled with the process. This product has been built just because it was by essence connected. When they were designing the product, two clouton tape plus, that would be a resource provider for the new stack. This is the way we invent product now. So we put the customer and the channel partners and the ecosystems in the center of the design of the products that we are doing. So it's no more a product on sale. It is a product that is ready to be sold because it is fitting customer or channel partner outcomes. This is a big transformation of Hewlett Packard. I would just say one of my observations is, again, education on the cloud is key. And then, you know, this ability of the tailoring solutions, not a one-size-fits-all, you know, here's hyper-converged or here's composability, having the customer mix and match, whatever they need. Guys, great conversation here inside the Cube HP. Discover, HPE Discover 2017, this is theCUBE, I'm John Furrier with Dave Vellada. We'll be back with more live coverage. Stay with us after this short break.