 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. I'm here with my co-host, Peter Burris. And this is day one of HPE Discover Madrid. Susan Blocker is here. She's the vice president of portfolio marketing at Hewlett Packard Enterprise. And Bruce Trevarthin joins her. He's the CEO and founder, I believe, of BlairX. Welcome back, both of you to theCUBE. Thank you, Dave. Thanks for coming on. All right, so Susan, big show for you guys. We have these six months cadence of big messages and customer shows. So what are we going to hear this afternoon at the keynote? Wow, I'll tell you, we've got a lot of exciting news to talk about. First of all, the way customers are consuming IT is really changing. Cloud is changing the game. We got some amazing announcements to talk about around how we're going to help customers in the hybrid IT space consume IT differently. We're going to talk about how we're helping them manage across multi-cloud environments. We're going to talk about bringing artificial intelligence and machine learning to the data center, which is really transformational. So lots of exciting news here. Good, okay. So yeah, we'll be covering the keynotes here just actually in about a half hour or so. We kick off Meg, Antonio, a new leader. So we're going to hear from him. We've been hearing from him for some time now. And so, looking forward to hearing from him as well. Okay, Bruce, it's been a while since we talked about BlairX. Tell us what's transpired in the last couple of years. Set up BlairX, what you guys are all about and what's new. Sure, so Cloud Service Provider based out of New Zealand. Multiple platforms giving us that resilience. You know, the sort of general cloud, everyone knows what cloud is these days. But really for us, the journey, it just continues. You know, we keep, from a strategy point of view, we keep looking at where is cloud adoption at? Where is cloud going? You know, are these hyperscale providers going to enter every country and every market and really sort of make us sort of in-country boutique operators less relevant? So you're always asking that question and then you sort of hit with this new wave of expectation down from the clients. And hybrid IT has been the big push in the last 12 months. And what's really encouraging for us when we get hit with this new sort of level of interest and a slight tangent on this managed services delivery is that HP are already thinking the same way and they've already come up with a product line that's going to plug that gap. So we work very closely with HP with their edge line and their OEM team globally to deliver HP hardware on customer side or on premise. And then we put our own software on that and we link it back into the core V-Grid environment. And that really, for a customer, they keep those workloads on site where they need to be. And then you've got that public cloud environment for the disaster recovery and the workloads that don't need to be on site. So let's unpack that a little bit. Tagline, Hewlett Packard Enterprise uses, we make hybrid IT simple. That's the objective. That's right. IT is complicated, hybrid IT is complicated. What's the starting point to make it simple, Bruce, from your perspective? Is it make the infrastructure as invisible as possible? Is it bringing a cloud operating model? Maybe you talk about those steps. I mean, one of the first things we try to do to make it simple is we don't mention cloud. And we talk ultimately about what workloads are the customer consuming and where they belong. And so we're invariably seeing more and more workloads that really shouldn't go centralized in a data center. They should be on site. So GPU-accelerated desktops for oil and gas research or some of our clients doing 3D engineering in a CAD design work. You can put that in a data center and we have, but then you're at the mercy of the fiber connection, the speed of the fiber connection, the resilience of the fiber connection and the cost, absolutely. And so keeping some of those workloads on site just makes sense. But how can you then leverage the benefit of that centralized IT in the event of a disaster if all of your workloads are actually on site? And that's where it's got to be hybrid. That's where you can have those workloads on site. But all your files and all that capability are still mirrored in the cloud environment. So if you have a fiber cut, then you can use a cellular network to get there or if you have an onsite disaster, then you can spin up the equivalent resource in the data center, but on demand rather than dedicated to you. So we like to say that customers want or the way that we summarize it, Wikibon is customers want the cloud experience where the data demands. Because we do talk about cloud. Because we do talk about cloud periodically. So what do you, well, but you have to because at the end of the day, it's driving a new way of thinking, not just about the technology, but how you solve business problems. And it comes back to how do you think about the business problem differently? I love New Zealand. I've been there a couple of times, worked with a lot of customers in a minute that you said New Zealand was like, right. How do the clouds, the cloud experience, how are you solving problems differently than you did a few years ago because of not only the HPE partnership, but thinking differently about these problems. Thinking differently is definitely something you have to do to stay relevant, right, and to keep up with the market. Almost 10 years ago, we thought what we felt was a little differently when we adopted HPE3PA. And that really was a technology that gave us the ability to change our mind regarding storage. Spin forward now to 2017. In April this year, we put in our first HPE Synergy Platform. This month, we're just putting in our second HPE Synergy Platform. And Synergy gives us for compute what HPE3PA gave us for storage. The ability to change our mind to be programmatic or autonomous with the deployment of resources for a customer need. And so for our public cloud environment, that's basically spinning up compute nodes as required for the demand within the clusters. But it also introduces, by way of the technology capability, a new channel or a new revenue opportunity. Because now we can actually programatically spin up compute nodes of any flavor for a customer in a private cloud environment. So this is physical tend to the customer opposed to virtual cloud. And so that's, we can do that just as easily as we can at VM because of Synergy. For sure. And that's really exciting. I think what Bruce is really representing here is that he can focus on business outcomes for his customers. And you know, you, I think, you know, Dave, you said, you know, it makes the infrastructure transparent. It's transparent, but underneath that is really differentiated capability and value like the ability to spin up and spin down composable infrastructure on demand. Like the ability to bring world-class security to that infrastructure. So all of those things are underpinning, you know, the services that Layer X is able to deliver. So I would think part of making hybrid IT simple is not just throwing a bunch of products at your customers. Right. We heard in the last financial call that HPE is changing the way it reports. It's going to report hybrid IT, which is essentially your portfolio. Exactly. So server storage, networking, and relevant services around that. And software. And software that powers all that. So talk about how you're going to market and how that, if that aligns with, are you guys want to borrow? Yeah, well think about it from the Layer, let's talk about it from the Layer X perspective. When you look at Synergy, that is not a piece of hardware. That is truly software defined intelligence built into innovative hardware based on our Gen 10 server platform, which in and of itself is the world's most secure industry standard server platform because we have built in silicon root of trust and things like that. So what you get is all of that put together, all of that integrated. That software defined intelligence, the technology innovation, the infrastructure innovation, and wrapper with the services that both support the Layer X company and their customers. Maybe talk about your customers a bit more. What are they really pushing you hard to do? What are the big challenges they face and how are you addressing those? One of the most common conversations with cloud is obviously cost. Everyone's trying to commoditize this resource to the end of the degree every day. But the VGrid, which is our brand for our cloud platform, the VGrid position really is around performance and reliability, and we back that up through HPE hardware platforms and the software stack that enables that. But our customers are really driving us to make sure that we stay relevant not only with that performance and reliability, but still on cost. Even though we are giving them enterprise and beyond capabilities as an SMB, cost is still a major factor for an SMB. And so for us to keep those overheads low, we need automation. We're not going to go and put in no disrespect to the product line, but we're not going to go and put in maybe an Apollo or a cloud line solution. We're going to stick with Synergy and previously ProLiant because of the added value wrapped around that that actually gives us the peace of mind and the operational efficiency with our engineering team to get the work done far more effectively. Now with Synergy, it takes it out to a whole new level because this is all composable now. My CTO mentioned to me the other day they just put in a new 8450 three-part and he said all I had to do was create the CPGs in the three-part and one of you did the rest. It was like I didn't have to go in and all these other steps they used to have to do. So it saves time and time is expensive. Not only from a human resource point of view but go to market speed. Well, converged hardware was about having a common set of support technologies. The whole motion of hyperconverged is starting to converge the actual administrative tasks. But when I remember the last time that I was in New Zealand talking with large users, was a real emphasis on analytics because of New Zealand being an island with great resources in some respects and less resources than others, energy, telecommunications. How is the modern economy of New Zealand with some of the constraints that it faces driving the use of digital technology to lift up industry services and the quality of life in New Zealand? So we're seeing that in very far-reaching kind of industry verticals and more so now with obviously IOT has become a pretty hot topic. But IOT backed by all of the smart and on-demand composable architecture is really making a difference to primary industries, making them more productive, more effective, more efficient. But really the customers in New Zealand we're a nation of early adopters. We have 96% of our companies are six or less people. And so we're dealing with SMBs that have to box above their weight, they have to adapt, they have to do more with less, you know all these cliches that really encumber the average small company and we have a lot of them. So the demands from an IT perspective are give me what my enterprise counterparts have but at a per user or per resource unit per month kind of model. So Cloud just makes so much sense for that. Susan, a big takeaways from Madrid. What do you want the world to walk away with? Well I think first of all when we say we're going to help make hybrid IT simple what we're talking about and really exemplified with the Layer X is we're talking about from the edge to the core to the cloud. So really end to end. The other really exciting thing that we're here talking about is AI, artificial intelligence, deep learning, machine learning. And you talked about it in the context of edge computing and IoT which is obviously super hot but we are also bringing AI to the data center. So as we look at- In other words making data center operations IT operations better. Making the data center autonomous, self healing, self managing and so this is the new as we look at the automobile industry, autonomous cars, right? We'll think about how that's going to be applied to autonomous data centers. That's what we're going to be talking about. Shoes for the cobbler's children. You got it. Well and think about the impact that has on the business where you're allowing people not to spend money on whatever, loan provisioning, server management but really focusing on some other more strategic aspects of their business. Whether it's digital transformation, AI, other data oriented activities. Exactly. Sometimes the data has to be here and you want to make sure that when the data's there it has the same, that the same services are available to the business. Yes. To take advantage of that asset where it is. Real time analytics for the data that matters to our customers at the edge and in the cloud as well as applying that same AI to the telemetry of the data center and using that to make the data center more efficient, more effective, more autonomous and self healing. Awesome. So key notes are coming up very shortly. We'll be running those on our Twitch channel. Twitch.com slash Silicon Angle. You can check those out at obviously at HPE as well, HPE.com. Susan and Bruce, thanks very much for coming on theCUBE. Thank you so much. I appreciate it. I really appreciate your time. No problem. All right, keep it right there, buddy. We'll be back after the key notes. This is theCUBE. We're live from HPE Discover, Madrid.