 From London, England, it's theCUBE. Covering Discover 2016 London. Brought to you by Hewlett Packard Enterprise. Now, here's your host, Dave Vellante and Paul Gillis. The banks of the River Thames here at London Excel, Excel London, it's 27 degrees here, sunny, beautiful. I thought I was going to snow this morning. Just by short walk over, it felt like I was in, back in Massachusetts. But nonetheless, Bharath Vasudevan is here. He's the director of product management at Hewlett Packard Enterprise. Within the software-defined group. Welcome to theCUBE, thanks for coming on. Oh, thanks for having me. So how's Discover going for you? Discover is going fantastic. It's great with all the anticipation for all the things that we announced yesterday, watching the excitement with customers, watching the excitement with partners, being able to help curate the experience for them has just been fantastic. What are the customers talking about? So they're really excited about Synergy. We were here a year ago and we announced it, but you know, since this isn't version 10 or version three of the same product, we've spent the last year really crafting our message, having beta customers, test Synergy, all in the hopes of bringing it out when we go from hundreds of customers to thousands of customers, so they can experience what a lot of our beta customers have had. So really, being able to deliver that for them has been, they're waiting for it and we're ready to give it to them. So help us understand sort of, first of all, the organization. So the organization's been sort of retooled. The cloud piece has been folded into the software-defined piece and then there's the bespoke server storage and networking components. Sure. Under Alan and then Rick Lewis is your sort of, you know, the guru of software-defined, if you will. So that all kind of makes sense. Software-defined is kind of the future. Help us understand both the organization and then let's get into the portfolio. Well, sure. We'll start with every customer is on their own journey. Every customer is on a journey from a world where it's traditional infrastructure, buying servers, storage, networking, to solve workloads. And we have an entire suite of products dedicated to solve for workloads. But what we've run into is that many of our customers are saying, look, this new public cloud thing has gotten in the way of things. RIT is not fast enough and it's not agile enough to start delivering against our consumers' needs. So what we've found is, they're just running out to the public cloud because they're faster. Now, when I talk to customers, I ask them all the time, this is one of my stock questions. What is your service level to deliver a bare metal VM? And what we get is different answers ranging from three hours to three days. Now, what I can assure you is that no developer is waiting three days to get a bare metal VM. They're going to turn around and they're going to go straight out to the public cloud and they're going to have their operating environment up in 30 seconds. Now, with the software-defined computing group, what we're trying to do is we're trying to address why customers and constituents are going out to the public cloud in the first place and trying to deliver against that. We're trying to deliver against it in the form of hyperconverged and incomposable. They solve many of the same problems but they solve it for a different sets of customers. And that's really where we're putting a lot of our emphasis and focus on trying to make hybrid IT simple. And that can start with private cloud, all the way through to public cloud. So is your bigger competitor the traditional infrastructure companies or is it Amazon? So I would say both in a certain sense. Really, what we want to be is that advisor to customers. We know one size doesn't fit all. That's why we have traditional infrastructure and converged infrastructure. And that's what Elan's team is going to continue to deliver. But what we've also got is we've got focuses on things being more software defined both from a hyperconverged and composable space. So as customers are ready to make that transition we're going to be their partner and give them the right destination all within the HPE portfolio. I want to better understand the portfolio and just lay that out. And I want to explore the channel and how that's changing. Because this portends a significant change for the way in which you get to market. But let's start with the portfolio. How should we think about the portfolio? So within the software defined group we've got things like hyperconverged. And hyperconverged today solves everything from a customer's perspective when they have virtualization prevalent. They're within a two socket workload. They're on a moderate amount of scale. Really what we've seen the biggest opportunities that we've had have been from large enterprise customers but their proximity deployments. Right, things at the edge of their network where they may not have the SAN expertise. Generalists. Yeah, where we want to give them a user environment that drives simplicity. What we've even found out is a lot of times the more expensive higher end virtualization admins can now be tasked with more things that are befitting of their role. And some of the more tasks, things that we've described as VM vending can now get managed by more junior people or more people that can just service requests without tying up the more experienced resource. The other place. So the simplicity making virtualization invisible? Well, it's taking the complexity out of virtualization. What does that mean? So today, I need to go spin up a VM and here's a classic case. This developer needs a VM, goes into the trouble ticket tool, hits I want a request. It sends out four requests, depending on how these things get serviced. Could take three days, could take three hours, but this person's waiting and not being productive. What we're trying to do with things like hyperconverged and even things like composable is speed that up. Self provisioning them? Self service. So none of this is self provisioning. But when we talked about yesterday with the hyperconverged operating environment 2.0, it's this whole concept of workspaces. We're going to provide the right access for the right role for the users who are going to be interfacing with the system. You've got the main admin that can do things like carve out workspaces. You've got the workspace owners that understand their users. And lastly, you've got the users that can just come in self service unencumbered from a lot of the IT service request stuff. Okay, so coming back to the portfolio, the HCI 380, sort of the flagship. The hyperconverged 380. And then, right now, so then continue on the spectrum. So fully virtual today, limited to things that scale up to two sockets. Really, it's the rack form factor. I moved to composable. Now composable delivers a lot of the same things, but with much fewer constraints. Now I can do physical. I can do virtual workloads. I can do container-based workloads. I can do two socket workloads. I can do four socket workloads. I can do four socket large memory workloads. I can start moving at a data center scale instead of a rack scale. So from a scaling perspective, there's also limitations and benefits of one architecture over another. Now, the cool part is, when we talk about the ideal scenario for customers that are needing to move down a software-defined path, we have hyperconverged for them at their remote office and we've got composable in their central IT. And together with technologies that are HPEs, intellectual property, things like OneView and things like VSA, we're able to start tying a lot of those things together. How about their legacy investments? Can you make that part of the composable infrastructure? So what we have done is specifically with the introduction and the proliferation of OneView, we're allowing our customers a pathway to composable. They can start experiencing attributes of composability by adopting OneView, and we've got many programs in place today to start driving that adoption, incenting customers to go do that, so they can start experiencing composability. Okay, so I've got a hyperconverged 380 is my flagship hyperconverged product. I got composable, what am I buying when I buy composable? How do I engage with you? So right now, our customers can order it. We're going to start delivering early January. It being synergy product. There's a synergy 12,000 frame. There's a synergy 480, 620, 660, and 680 are the four different compute modules. We've got the D3940, which is the storage module, and an array of fabric choices that go in the back of the frame. All of that is ready to order today and ready to fulfill in early January. So that's integrated. It means composable, meaning I can, through OneView, choose a fluid set of resources. So it's called HPE Composer. It's an embedded instance of OneView and that's exactly what you can do. So when we talk about attributes or benefits of composability, we talk about this concept of fluid pools of resources. Really what that means is, as I start adding more capacity, I'm effectively going to have a catalog that's going to get populated with all of the new parts that I've added into this environment. Then I've got software to find intelligence that's now allowing me to create templates that are repeatable to do hardware provisioning. So every time I need to spin up another X, I can go invoke my template, find out what's available for my fluid pool, and then be up and running. And you talked about moving from workload to workflow. You're in the workflow business. So talk about what that means and then I'm really interested in how the channel is adopting that. So let's be clear, workload is the table stakes. If I can't solve for workload, I'm not in business. So for many customers, solving for workload is what they need right now. But for a different set of customers, not only do I need to solve for workload, but I need to solve for workflow. And that's where we're stepping in. It's not what do I need to solve 10,000 mailboxes or 5,000 VDI seats, but how do I run a workload during the day in a different workload at night? That's what the power of composable. How do I handle seasonality? So define what workflow, I mean, what do you mean by workflow in this context? You're talking about getting jobs done and the time that you have? From the time I open the box, how fast till I'm up and running? Once I'm up and running, what if I need to make some changes? What if I'm a developer and I need something for a day? The way we've spent, the way we've sold with traditional IT in the past, I'm buying my exchange system, I'm standing it up, and it's going to run for three years. Somewhere along the way, I might have a Microsoft service patch update, I might have hot fixes, things like that, but by and large, it's a static system. The way you have apps to get released every two weeks now, the way they're hitting compute is very different than standing up exchange for three years. The way they need to spin up, tear down, spin up, tear down, traditional IT is not really set up to accommodate that. What we're trying to get to is optimizing for workflow. Again, now with this unified API, it makes it easy for a lot of our partners to interface into our equipment. Okay, so let's line up the horses on the track and talk about HPE and its differentiators. You're competing against Nutanix obviously in the hyper-converged space, you've got VCE, to an extent you've got Exadata or engineered systems, whatever Oracle calls it, that's within Oracle. You're supporting SAP in a big way and there's some others out there, but why HPE, how do you stack up to the competition? So let's start with, do we all agree that one size does not fit all? Sure, because that's actually what I run into the most, specifically with Nutanix, they will go into a customer and tell them everything can run on hyper-converged. And in most things in life, I don't tend to agree when someone's like always or never or this is the only way to do it, I don't buy that. So if we agree that there is not one size fits all. Well, when you're under a billion, that might work. Well, and if you have one product in the bag, it's real easy to say one size fits all, but we want to have the answer for all of our customers, wherever they are on the journey. We have a comprehensive portfolio. Now, if I look at some of the challenges with our friends in Austin, depending on which sales guy you talk to, you're going to get a different answer on hyper-converged. Is it a vSAN ready node? Is it Nutanix on PowerEdge? Is it VxRail? There's a lot of choices that their customers are going to have. For us, it's pretty straightforward. It's all of our own IP that we've invested in that we continue to deliver against and that's our answer. Whether it's composable, whether it's hyper-converged, we're going to listen to our customers, understand their needs, and then get to the right infrastructure. So you're arguing a much simpler portfolio, but you cover the spectrum. That's right. Okay, and what about VMware? Where do they fit in all this? So we are a huge partner of VMware and they are a huge partner of ours. Today, we do what our customers ask. We've got an offer, our HC-380 today is built on vSphere. They continue to be a great partner of ours. Does OneView supersede vSphere? Well, so OneView, in fact, we have OneView for vCenter. It's a plugin that we've built. So customers who use the VMware set of tools can seamlessly integrate with OneView. We've built that. It's been in market for a couple of years now. It's a fabulous product and it's how many customers who are standardized in the VMware tools interface with our equipment. Okay, good. Channel, things are changing in the channel. We're moving from box seller to solutions and solutions are no longer just SAP and Oracle and Microsoft and VMware. You know, there's a whole new set of solutions that are coming out. Talk about the channel in that transformation. So I've spent the last year plus doing channel partner outreach programs. And you know, usually the way you kick this off with channel partners, they look, you guys have done a phenomenal job selling rack and blade. And that was really the answer for the last five years. Do you want rack or do you want blade? But now there's a proliferation of form factors. There's a whole different set of players in the game. So now as we go educate our field, educate our customers, we have to educate our channel partners and we're doing the same thing. Let's enable you to have a discussion to go move, transform your business from workloads to workflows. In fact, our four transformational areas are one of the easiest ways to frame that discussion. We're assisting our channel partners in up leveling their discussions and frankly moving beyond procurement. Because if you're selling to procurement, procurement does not care about workflow. You got to penetrate into the line of business, move to the C-suite, start showing comparisons from a financial perspective. We've got tremendous programs like flexible capacity around different ways to finance, lease versus buy, OPEX versus CAPEX. These are more of the buying decisions, not just what's going to satisfy 5,000 mailboxes. So when you bring all of that to bear, you start hitting on things like workflow, you start hitting on things like financing options. But again, workload is your table stakes. If I don't have that, I have nothing. And all of our product has been around and time tested and our customers believe our products work and we believe it too. Degree education process. Excellent, so it feels like you guys are really now hitting your groove swing when it comes to, whatever you want to call it, converged and composable, that whole space that emerged, you guys were there early on. I've said, some people at HPE disagree with me, but I've said you kind of got there early and then it took a while for you to really get the product set to where you wanted it. It feels like you're there now. You know, another great point to talk with channel partners, let us invest ahead of the curve. And that's really to your point. We were there because we knew that's where the market was headed. So we've learned what we've needed to learn and we're ready to go execute. And you're exactly right. We knew where we were going. We've stuck to the strategy for some time now. And now we're ready to execute and start deliver. Will you be number one in this market? I believe we defined composable. Everyone else is playing catch up right now. Farah, thank you very much. Great job unpacking the portfolio and helping us better understand where you fit relative to the competition. Appreciate that. Thank you very much for having me. You're welcome. All right, keep right there. Paul and I will be back to Excel London. This is HPE Discover 2016. This is theCUBE. Right back.