 TheCube presents HPE Discover 2022, brought to you by HPE. We're back. You're watching TheCube's coverage, HPE Discover 2022. This is day three, Dave Vellante with John Furrier. Ricky Cooper is here, he's the vice president slash it. Newly minted SVP, we're going to talk about that of global and transformational partners at VMware and Rocco Levista, who's the vice president of worldwide GreenLake cloud services at the transformational partner at Hewlett Packard Enterprise. Guys, welcome to the program. Thanks for coming on. Thank you very much, thank you. So a really interesting title and you've got a new role. Yeah. Explain that. Well, I'm the interim SVP for the channel and for the commercial business at VMware. I also have the global, my existing role is global and transformational partners. So that's our largest OEMs and also the transformational partners, which is more the reseller stroke services element of our business. I remember and John and I started TheCube in 2010. And the second show we did, third show actually was VMworld, 2010. And we had... Omoritz was the CEO at the time. Huge booth, it was amazing and HP at the time was all over, TheCube and of course VMworld and you guys have been partners for a long, long time Rocco. So maybe give us a little bit of the history. Absolutely. So for 20 years, HPHPE has been partnered with VMware and delivering virtualization technology and solutions to our customer base. And while that partnership is strong and I remember some of the market share numbers were like 45% of VMware software stack is running on HPE servers and technology. I think about how that's evolved, right? Like strong history, strong partnership. And when I say strong, I'm not talking about marketing fluff. I'm not talking about the slideware. I'm talking about at a ground level that the account teams get together and talk about what those customers that they're working with, they get together and figure out what outcome they're trying to solve for and we bring that technology together. Now, layer in GreenLake. GreenLake is taking at the heart of what VMware does with their software stack, combining it with our infrastructure solutions and providing IaaS, PAS and CAS capabilities to our customers. At the edge, in their core, whether it's a data center or Colo, as well as providing the common operating model into public cloud. And so we embrace and the partnership is only getting stronger because of what VMware does with us now with GreenLake, which is everything what HPE is about. That is well said. I got to say, I got to say that was crisp, please. That was really crisp. And not to kind of go back and look at the history of the queue, but we've been covering both of you guys deeply, I mean, watching the transformation of both companies. It's so clear that VMware is so deep in the operational side of IT. It's been one of the hallmarks of VMware. vSphere, all that technology. You guys have been powering with the hardware. Now, GreenLake, we had a demo yesterday with the storage team. They're provisioning storage, Amazon storage and on-premise and edge. So we see VMware as a massive service layer in this new model, very key. How deep is it going now with the GreenLake? Can you share what's different with the relationship? I get the account partner sharing, but now that GreenLake's out there, you have an ecosystem. VMware has an ecosystem. A big one, you know, so take it through. And this is really where we're looking to improve things. So let me start by saying, we've just been voted the 2020 partner of the year. Here with HPE this week, and that news is out there and was issued a couple of days ago, which is fantastic for the two companies and shows the direction where we are now and where we're looking to go forward. I think there's a lot of work to be done behind the scenes. As we emerge as an independent company, there's a lot of work to be done behind the scenes on how we look at our broader ecosystem and certainly our largest OEMs, of which, you know, HPE, as Rocco said, 20 years of great partnership there. The next stage is, how do we really get the teams equipped and plug into GreenLake? You know, we've had a relationship very well known with Dell for the last, you know, for the last five years. We've grown that business at an amazing rate. We've got a whole bunch of personnel still working on those areas. We're in a position now where we can sort of redeploy some of the headcount to really drive our mission here with our other partners and certainly with HPE. Well, the integration piece that you guys have code, you do a co-engineering on, that's well documented. But with the ecosystem specifically, this is a net new thing for GreenLake. And frankly, us analysts and we had IDC on this today, we're looking at that as a benchmark. We're going to be measuring GreenLake's success by how well the ecosystem is. So welcome to the party, VMware and HPE. You didn't have to have a big ecosystem because you had the channel, your HPE has a strong channel, but now it's an ecosystem game. Talk about that. Customers have that expectation, right? And if you think about what we've built, we've got an ecosystem, we announced the marketplace for GreenLake. Now, VMware has their own marketplace, but by standardizing on their technology in our private cloud enterprise, which was also announced here at Discover, which is deeply rooted with VMware technology in it, we now are able to take advantage of their marketplace plus all the others that we're bringing into GreenLake and effectively solve for the customer's most complex business problems because if you want to be successful, you have to think that the world is open and hybrid. And that means partnerships with everybody. You can't think, I won't partner because they're a competitor or they may have a product that competes with me. It starts and ends with what the customer wants and needs and solving for that business objective. That means partnering well. You guys have, you know, they own the operator, IT ops, let's say ops side, clearly. And with the cloud native momentum that VMware has and what you guys have been doing, I just see a nice fit there. What are some of the customers saying? I mean, what's the market telling you with GreenLake and VMware? What's the number one thing people love? Well, just look at GreenLake at its core and that very simplistic pays to grow model, right? The hardware doesn't grow without software. You don't scale the hardware or scale it back without software. And so what are we doing within GreenLake? We're taking the VMware stack and we're scaling it with the hardware up and down for customers. They no longer have to worry about the balancing act between how much infrastructure I have to buy, how much software do I have to marry up to it? Are they out of sync, right? We're solving that together for our customers. That's what they want at a very simplistic view, right? Then they say, hey, give me the lifecycle management. Of this platform, right? I don't want to have to spend IT cost operations, have employees dealing with very rudimentary lifecycle management and the toil that it comes with. That's a big cost element. When customers are creating snowflakes in their IT operations, they're adding cost. And what we're doing through this partnership, what we're doing with private cloud enterprise is eliminating that toil and helping optimize that operating model. You're simplifying. Oh, absolutely. So I want to standardizing there a little bit as well, right? So that's a great point, and Brock has made several there. But the next stage for us, and what we've been talking about a lot this week is how do we sort of standardize? What are the three or four things that customers are going to recognize this partnership for? Be that anywhere workspace, be that multi-cloud. What are the three or four things that we can say, hey, these two companies together are fantastic, and how do you then get up and ready? Yeah, security. How do you then get that up and running in a green lake environment, but also on the back end, ensure that your operations are seamless and it's a great customer experience. So Ricky, and Rocco, I want to rewind two clicks back. In the context of standards and the partner conversation, the ecosystem conversation, are you at a point where you can, because you're basically saying you can cross-pollinate the ecosystems and the partnerships. But you've got different business practices, different legal contracts and so forth. Are you able to create standardization at that layer within the partners beyond just you two, within your respective ecosystems? Is that, it sounds like that really difficult challenge, but it could deliver customer benefit in terms of reducing friction. Absolutely, it does. And that's what we've got to work towards. So right now, operation-wise, contract-wise, that's exactly what we're here working through. It's not easy, but the teams are all fully behind it, and that's the nirvana for us to be in that position. Well, and what I really like, where we are in this partnership at a point in time, VMware has spun off from Dell. If there's any confusion by our customer base, that VMware is going to not only work with us as they've done traditionally, but maybe get closer and not worry about this standardization, this approach, this ecosystem of players. I mean, you know, Ricky and I talked about this, this only gets better because of that. Yeah, the market dynamics are your friend right now, I think. That's definitely the case, and the history's key, but the technical trends that we had in an earlier panel on here, with the technologists coming together, there's big changes happening. The edge is exploding, rapidly accelerating with machine learning. You're seeing IT ops turn into ML ops, you're starting to see the industrial edge explode, even into space. So like, we have technology shifts, and IDC pointed out that the B2B growth trends, even IT spend, you want to even call it IT spend, or cloud spend, or cloud ops, is still up into the right, even during recession. And that is where all the opportunity is. So, you know, not just focusing on what we do today, let's think outside the box. We're doing some great things together, you know, in the AI space, and with NVIDIA, and between the two teams. Some amazing things are happening, and we've just got to continue that, but focus is going to be essential in the early stages to make sure you've got two or three things to build out very well, and then the rest of the business that's already happening out there, between the two companies, is a bit more programmatic. Yeah, it's interesting. The VMware relationship with the hyperscale, I don't know, we've covered the AWS announcement like six years ago, I forget when it was, Dave, four, six years, Ragu was there with Andy Jast, Pat Gelsinger, and all the top dogs there. But that's just Amazon. It's still the VMware instances on the cloud there. The customers we're hearing here at GreenLake is that they want the single pane of cloud. I hate to use that term, it's kind of an old term, but that's kind of what we're seeing. They still want it because nobody's giving it to them. And then Outpost, which was launched four years ago, kind of not working well for Amazon because EKS and Open Standards and other hardware platforms, which is essentially hardware, which is not Amazon's game, and although they do great hardware in the cloud, but they're not hardware people. Wait, so you're talking about the public cloud guys trying to get into the edge, but look, the world is hybrid. In no point in instance in time, do I ever believe that Azure would be able to control AWS, nor GCP, very space versa, right? And then this idea that you can go from the outside in is interesting, but where data is created, where the applications are, where the digital and the analog world meet is at the edge, and for our customers, they're creating transactions and data at the edge. That's where the control plane should start, not in the public. And so given that, and working with VMware, we're able to say where the data lives, where the application is sitting, where the digital transformation is happening, it's from the inside out that you provide a standard operating model across all your clouds, right? They're never going to be able to give that to you unless you're 100% in their cloud, including what they do at the edge. What we're doing with GreenLake is saying, we're giving you that edge to colo, to core data center to public cloud, operating model that you're not having multiple snowflakes of an operating model for each one of those clouds, and VMware is at the core of that. And it's a global model, and Ricky, I'm guessing from your, what I would call an accent, that you weren't born in America, I know we're this Yankee fan. Yeah, that's a fan, don't pin me Yankee fan on me. Oh, that's a fan? Yeah. Okay, so despite 1986, we'll, let's go on. I wanted to ask if, how you're able to take these standards overseas? And because of course, you know, you know well, John, as do I, you know, different countries of different, different. Governance issues. Are you able to take this to make this a global? Absolutely, and the work I was talking about with NVIDIA and HP is a great example because we've gone the other way. It's coming from Asia, where we've set up some best practice in the work that they're doing there, and it's coming across into Europe and coming across into the US. So it's all about finding, you know, finding the right solutions that we were talking about earlier, what's going to work, building out investing. That's something I think that we've missed a trick on, you know, through the past sort of four or five years. VMware really leaning in and really holding the hand here of HPE. The team, a huge team turned up to this event from all over the world. They're here demonstrating exactly what you're talking about. The standards with NVIDIA, that message, and then you take that and make sure that it's not a snowflake just happening in Asia. You're bringing it across the world and you're getting the impetus and the push behind that. You say snowflake, I think it's snowflake. We just covered their event too. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Not snowflake, no place. But a final question as we wrap up, we got VMworld converted to now called VMware Explorer. So we're going to be there again on the floor, two sets with the cube, lots changing. What can we expect to see from the relationship? What's the score card going to look like? What's the metrics you guys are measuring yourselves on? And what can customers expect from the HPE VMware next level relationship partnership? For me, it's very simple. We measure our success based on the customer response. Are we solving for what they want us to be solving for? And that will prove itself out in how we're solutioning for them, the feedback that they give us, and this discover event in terms of what we've released, the announcements between private cloud enterprise, the marketplace, what we're doing with this relationship since the Dell spinoff, the feedback has been amazing, amazing. And I am thankful, thankful for the partnership. Awesome wrap. Way to bring us home, Rocco. Thank you for that. And thank you, Ricky, for coming on theCUBE. Great to have you. You guys have been great. Thank you. Thank you very much. All right, and thank you for watching. This is Dave Vellante for John Furrier, day three of HPE Discover 2022. You're watching theCUBE, the leader in live enterprise and emerging tech coverage. We'll be right back.