 Live from Madrid, Spain, it's theCUBE. Covering HPE Discover Madrid 2017, brought to you by Hewlett Packard Enterprise. We're back. This is theCUBE that you're watching, the leader in live tech coverage. We're here at HPE Discover 2017 in Madrid. My name is Dave Vellante, I'm here with my co-host for the week, Peter Burris. Peter, it's been great working with you. We're winding down, and we're really excited to have Rick Lewis, Senior Vice President and General Manager of the Software Defined Cloud Group, many-time CUBE guests with HPE, and Jeff White of DreamWorks, CTO, thanks for coming on. Thank you, thanks for having me. You're welcome. Been a good week. It's been fantastic. Things are coming into focus. They are. Killed it on the keynote, how you feeling? Feeling really good, feeling really good. I mean, the momentum in the software defined cloud arena is just fantastic. There were times when I used to visit with you guys and we were only talking about what's coming in the future. Now we're talking a lot about what we have, what customers are buying, where we have momentum, and still introducing new things. So it's just a whole lot of fun. And Jeff, Senior Vice President, CTO, maybe talk a little bit about your role. Sure. Where your scope is. So DreamWorks Animation, you may have heard of it. You have. You make it. Good friend Kate Swanberg's been on a number of times. Kate loved her. You know, we make animated films. We do a lot more than that. We're a digital content creation company. So we were the largest TV animation studio in the world. We're doing a theme park ride work because we're now under NBC Universal. So we're doing a lot of projects. It's a very busy time for us. So Synergy, we talked about Synergy a lot. There's nothing like Synergy we've heard. Fluid pools of infrastructure. It just gets better. Wait and see and so, what can you tell us? Yeah, let's talk a little bit about that. So Momentum on Synergy is fantastic. We started shipping in volume at this conference last year, basically December of last year. And the response has been fantastic. We've looked at Momentum for new infrastructure plays. You know, if you look back at our history, whether it was the C7000 or whether it was UCS from Cisco or whether it was VCEs built on UCS, Nutanix. If you kind of look at first year of a new infrastructure play, Synergy looks like it's the fastest growing thing ever. It's just fantastic, really growing for us. We have over 1,100 customers on Synergy now. You know, and that's in 11 months of shipping. And you know, the business is, it just continues to grow quarter by quarter. Just really thrilled with the progress. They're so happy. And you guys are customers? Oh, we're big customers. If we're not the biggest customer, we're certainly the biggest fan. One of the biggest, one of the biggest customers. Certainly the biggest fan, yeah. Okay, so Jeff, tell us, take us back to sort of pre-synergy. What was life before and after? And what has it done for your business in particular? Well, one of the things that we face going forward is we developed in our infrastructure and in our data center, we do a lot of rendering to make a movie. That's our largest high-performance compute. You know, it's 80 million render hours. You see few hours to make one of these films. And we're making a lot of them at the same time. And we really defined that workflow and how we optimize the data center and hardware to be able to go through that workflow and be able to be as efficient as possible. The issue came with, we have a lot of other projects that are coming in. And since we are now in our NBC Universal, there's a lot of other work that's happening there. And also different types of media that's coming around the corner and we'll be able to prepare for that. What we would have done traditionally would be to buy to peak because it is rather cyclical and that's what we would do that on-prem peak. But if we had a special project we might buy or segment a portion of that and say, okay, this is for this purpose, this is for that purpose, but that's very inefficient. So with Synergy, the beauty of it is we can purchase that hardware, but then if we want to be able to use it for another project, we can do that and we can do that very, very quickly. So you repurpose that across your application portfolio or your project portfolio? Yeah, yeah, and it gives us, I like to say it future-proofs us because now, no matter what the parent company or our own creative ambitions are, we can handle that. We can't say no, well, we never say no. We usually say not right now or wait a couple of weeks or a couple of months to be able to provision that and now it's instantaneous. And I know what Rick's answer would be to this, but I want to hear from the customers. Is this really different than other products that you've experienced? It's totally unique. We haven't experienced it before. I'll give you a little example. We just got our order, we got about 200 servers of Synergy that arrived a couple of months ago and within seven working days, we were using it in production. And I just want to say, we took, I don't know if I told you the story, but we were able to provision all of that from the time we mounted in the racks within five hours, which is incredible. It would have taken us easily three weeks before. In fact, it took us longer to take it out of the cartons than it did to provision. Well, sorry, let me see. So you're talking about maybe 200 servers, you're probably talking about 8,000 individual tasks to configure to get it done in five hours. I mean, you're probably what? Perform 40, 50 tasks administrative steps? By the way, first time doing it. So our engineers are saying, we could have used more parallelism, we could have done it faster. You know, it's almost a challenge to see just how easy we can do. But am I got that right? Is it really like 98% reduction in the administrative tasks? Absolutely. Really? Incredible. It is. All right. And that's before, that's before you start flexing resources against different workloads and dynamically reprovisioning. This is just provisioning the first time, but if you think about it, if you're going to do it dynamically, it can't take forever. So you got to make it the first time, it's got to be super fast. Yeah. Okay, but still, that's, I have to admit I'm a little stunned. I didn't know that. So, and as you said, the whole point is that you can reprovision over and over, which means that the, there's something in economics and technology that's known as an asset specificity. And an asset has high specificity when you buy it and can appropriate it to a specific purpose. And about the only thing in tech that makes something an asset specificity is the administrative tasks of changing it to prepare it to do something else. And you just told me that I can remove nearly 100% of the transaction costs associated with taking an asset from this and applying it to that. That's right. If you're going to destroy silos in the data center, that's what you have to do. Right? The silo is this asset specificity. If you can repurpose it immediately. Sorry, I'm getting excited. That's my second question. How did your people respond to this? Because I talked to a lot of other CIOs and say, you know, one of the biggest challenges I'm having, or CTOs, one of the biggest challenges I'm having is, I'm able to converge hardware, I'm able to converge system software, I'm able to converge administrative tasks, but my people don't like converge. What they don't like to converge. How are you walking your people through some of these changes to liberate these opportunities? Well, we've been moving toward, you know, from more traditional, we'll call it IT for now, but traditional IT to DevOps environment. And you know what, it's change. So we've been bringing people along in that, you know, to, and some people adapt to it. They say, wow, this is going to be great for my career. And engineers want to always use the new stuff. So it, from that aspect of, I know how I work and I know what I do to, you know, here's a better way of doing it to be more automated. It's been a good experience for people. And you know what, the chance of human error in configuring things, if I look to my long history, I dream we're 21 years, I look at any downtime we've had or any problems, 90% of that has been from misconfiguration. And it's usually from somebody fat fingering, you know, a parameter in the setup of the servers. And now that's virtually eliminated. Did you have to go through some kind of organizational, internal sort of discussion, transformation, whatever you want to call it, to actually get to the point where you could buy this way, buy a sort of single skew of synergy because maybe previously you were buying bespoke, you know, kind of roll your own components, a little server here, maybe some storage over there, maybe some networking here. Now maybe it's all HP that made it simpler, but you probably had specialists in each of those areas. Did you not? And we did. How did you deal with that organizational friction? You know, that was an issue as, and by the way, there's so many, there's so much technology that's being developed, you know, some of it open source, some of it in this partner ecosystem that you have. And trying to stay abreast of that has been a real challenge. And one of the things that we always dreamed of is wouldn't it be nice if there was one way that you could control that, the single pane of glass, which is, you know, to be able to have an API layer that everybody could hook into. And I think you get a company that, like Hewlett Packard Enterprise, that has that dominance in the marketplace to be able to dictate, I'm using that word, maybe dictate is the right word. Offer. Offer. That's the word we use. Enable. Enable, you know, those APIs, and all of those are being developed almost in parallel. So this stuff is really coming in. Now we have our own worst snowflake, like everybody else's to your point. And what we've done is we brought in the point next team to go in and write those northbound APIs so that we can hook into OneView, to be able to manage all of our legacy, I'll call legacy, our previous infrastructure, along with the new tech that we're buying so that it makes it easy to manage. They made it match the composable API that we put into Synergy. It's natively integrated. All the ecosystem partners are adapting to it. And they said, we'll just use that as our standard to even manage our legacy infrastructure. Plus, since OneView runs on legacy infrastructure, all of the HPE stuff, it just adapts like that. So it's been a very good project. So you've got a lot of experience with this now. Can you share with us, maybe you can quantify it, maybe you can't, but even subjectively, the developer impact or the animator impact or the business impact to DreamWorks? There's, so the biggest impact, well, I have three things that are my, actually I got this from Meg Whitman. I had a list of 12 objectives for the studio for technology and she said at one of the CIO summits, you've got to have three, you know. So I said, okay, I'm going to pair it down to three. And one of those is provide the technology, the software and infrastructure to meet the creative needs. The second one was innovate for competitive advantage. And the third one was drive efficiency and the operations. And if you look at what Synergy provides, it hits every single one of those. So we've actually, you know, over the past year or two, we've actually reduced the number of people that we have maintaining our infrastructure, which is amazing if you consider the fact that this year we doubled the size of our infrastructure. So in what other business and what other area can you actually reduce the amount of people that are maintaining something while you're doubling the amount that you're maintaining? That never happens. And I think it's because of this software defined infrastructure and the fact that you can write these recipes or profiles or whatever you want to call them, personalities, you know, to be able to and test them and harden them. And by the way, that reminds me, one of the things I really like about this is, you know, is our ability to do proofs of concept, to try different workflows and all that without having to take away resources from the main thing that we're doing, which is the artistic community. So we can actually say, you know what, we're going to go in, re-image these servers, we're going to do that at night to run this test in the morning, they're back. They're back in the pool. And that's an amazing thing to do. That's dynamic provisioning. No one else can dynamically provision. All the converge systems, all the hyperconverged, they're provisioned a certain way, they run VMs a certain way, they stay that way for their lifetime. This stuff dynamically reprovisioned. And you guys, you're not even talking about kind of doing containers with VMs and containers with your bare metal. You can dynamically reprovision across that as well. What he said. Well, listen, we're just getting started, so just relax, okay? These guys are telling me we got to wrap, we're not going to wrap, we haven't got to one sphere yet. We have other topics, exactly. So let's get to one sphere. Yeah, I want to talk about one sphere, but I do want to say one more thing. So you talked about artists, but the other part of it is for developers. So one of the things we don't want the engineering teams to be, you know, a hindrance to the developers, because they want to be able to move quickly, they want to be able to do these testing. And I think one of the things that's not just an impact on our artists to be able to do these new projects, but also it makes our developers more efficient. They don't have to wait. Yeah, yeah. Okay, great. Now, so let's talk multi-cloud, a lot of complexity, the more things, you know, get simple, the more complex they seem to get. So one sphere, you guys announced yesterday. Yeah, so a core pillar of the HP strategy, make hybrid IT simple, right? And you can see from this conversation, we're making hybrid IT simple on-prem. Not only do we have synergy, but we have a fantastic offering in our SimpliVity space. And that platforms over 2,000 customers and growing like crazy as well. But after we did that, we said, look, we've got fantastically simple virtualization clusters in SimpliVity. We've got great dynamic, reprovisioning and composable infrastructure, but customers are not, that's part of their hybrid IT problem. That's the on-prem part. They're also wrestling with, I've got multiple cloud instances, I need to get insights into where I'm spending my money, where workloads are deployed and all that. So we started this program HPE One Sphere. We've had it going for almost three years. We had a small team on it early on. We ramped up the staffing a couple years ago. And what it really does, it's pretty simple. It allows you to build clouds, deploy apps and gain insights extremely fast. So it's designed for IT ops to be able to build and deploy a private cloud as fast as they can and assemble that with their public cloud assets and provide one place to look at all of those. For developers, it provides a common multi-tenant environment that has all the services and tools they need to be able to deploy an application, whether it's on-prem or off-prem, and you can choose and you can build applications that have some of both inside that developer environment. And then for the business, it shows insights into where's the money being spent? Where are those workloads running and what's it costing me? So think of it almost as composable at that next level where it's not just resources within chassis, now it's resources across the hybrid IT estate. It actually is public cloud assets from any of the public clouds, whether it's AWS, Azure, Google, Cloud28+, as well as your private cloud assets. And it automates the life cycle stuff that we were just talking about through this application into one view. It's a SaaS environment, so actually one sphere is software as a service. It lives in the cloud. It's a subscription that our customers buy and it does all of this capability to simplify their hybrid environment and taps into the capabilities we just talked about. It's fantastic, nobody has anything like it. Okay, well, we've heard that before, but now you're putting me in a money way about this. Exactly, so I was right on that one. But it's early days for one sphere, but in your private cloud is what we call a true private cloud. Which you said on stage yesterday. I did. It's evidenced by your ability to reduce staff that needs to manage infrastructure. It's a caught experience wherever the data requires. We want the simplicity of management and the availability of apps that you get in public cloud. And the pricing. Well, yeah, you can't beat the, no, because it's actually more expensive to go to public cloud. I mean, the pricing model. Oh, yes, sir. Thank you. The consumption is what you're basically talking about, yeah. So you, Jeff, you guys are one sphere, are one sphere of betas. You bet. So what were you trying to learn? What were you kicking the tires on and testing? I mean, what did you focus? We, you know, if we look at the future, we're not going to be on-prem forever. And I certainly don't want to be on-prem forever. I want to take advantage of, you know, flexing to public cloud. But again, for our films, you know, we want to be able to provide the producers of those movies. What is that going to cost me? You know, what is that, you know, how can I tell you what that costs? And where can we move as we start to do more, more different types of projects? Which one should go to the public cloud? Which one should stay inside and be able to understand that? The other thing that made us nervous about public cloud was what they call the zombie cloud instances. You know, where you went in, you provision something, and then you forget about it. And you, but you're paying, you know? And that's, that's, that's a lot of money is made. Kind of like app subscriptions. Yeah, exactly. I'm still paying for that. Exactly, but this gives you $4,000 or $15,000 a month. Yeah, that's for sure. Yeah, that visibility is something that all, we talk about it, CFOs hate this thing. Some of the, the consumption model is shifting from CAPEX to OPEX, but CFOs hate surprise OPEX. And that's where they're actually surprised by, oh my gosh, look at that bill. This provides visibility into all of those assets, whether they're on-prem or off-prem and what they're costing you. And it's always up to date and it's always consistent across your entire farm. So you can choose and say, that's costing me too much. I want to move those apps over here and immediately do it. For a lot of our customers, they're over-provisioned. So they have spare capacity on-prem. They're not taking advantage of. Why not use some of that? And it's instantly provisioned. And that's where you initially, anyway, see the business value of, of one sphere. Well, well, it's, it, look, it's one sphere to rule them all, you know? And I, I believe whether it's private, public, you know, we really want to have, what is my total resource availability? So we, in the future, we never say no anymore. Really, we can tell, we can tell them how much. Yeah. But, but you don't have to say no. And the other thing is we can do this stuff instantly. So we don't even say when we just go now, here's what you have to pay if you want to do it. We can provide those options. It's a new world. I love the demo out down if you guys saw it. There's a demo with Pong, you know, it's like the IT guy in the past, and then they made it vertical. It's the IT guy of the future. So saying, all right, my last question. What cool movies can we anticipate? What's coming? Well, you know what? How to train, how to drain your dragon. I was going to say this. How to train your dragon three is our next film out. And it's going to be unbelievable. I'll bet. So my last question, am I going to have to continue to sit through 15 minutes of IT credits at the end of future dreamers as a consequence of synergy? There's less, because there's less resources required to manage your synergy hardware. So it's less people. I know you don't sit through the credits. I do. I love credits. All right, guys. Thanks very much for coming on. It's a pleasure. Always fun. All right, keep it there, everybody. Peter and I will be back to wrap up HPE Discover 2017 from Madrid. You're watching theCUBE.