 from London, England, extracting the signal from the noise. It's theCUBE, Covered, Discover 2015. Brought to you by Hewlett Packard Enterprise. Now your hosts, John Furrier and Dave Vellante. Hello everyone, welcome back to theCUBE here at HPE Discover, this is SiliconANGLE's flagship program theCUBE where we go out to the events and extract the signal from the noise. I'm John Furrier, the founder of SiliconANGLE, with my co-host Dave Vellante, founder of Wikibon.com Research, and we are here with Paul Miller, Vice President of Marketing, Converged Data Center, Infrastructure at HPE Enterprise, and Patrick Moorhead, Principal Analyst at Moor, Insights and Strategies, always on TV talking about the converge and HPE and competition. Great to have you guys on theCUBE, thanks for joining us today. So day one's in the books, so we see the news, all the messaging out there, the new logo, the new branding, big news on obviously the Microsoft Cloud partnership ecosystem play, and that move of getting out of the public cloud. And on the product technology side, I'll see synergy, composable, a lot of DevOps, a lot of technology kind of coming together, kind of a teaser of the memster, the machine, synergy coming together, as well as the existing stuff. So that's out now, a lot of good press coming out of it. Feedback from you guys, customers, are they like standing ovation, golf clap, or you know, what's the feedback? No, the feedback has been phenomenal. The booth area has been just jam-packed with customers because they want to hear the story, they want to understand how they can actually deliver at cloud speed, how they can actually work and take their traditional apps, their new cloud apps, their DevOps environments on one platform and marry them all together and really get that acceleration and simplicity to the business. We've all been working on areas of converge systems, hyper-converged systems, and what they really needed to do was take it to the next plateau and that's what really Synergy does. There's been a little bit of skepticism, is it real? But then when we come down and show them the demos across the board in the center here, how you compose clouds, containers, et cetera, they're really seeing that this is real. Patrick, I want to ask you as an analyst, you covered the marketplace, so you know, HB obviously was converged, you know, right out of the box, good leadership on that, they've had good product leadership, but some are saying, you know, maybe a little bit late to the game, may not understanding, squinting through some of the details of Synergy, ah, you know, Nutanix has been out there, other vendors, what is that all about from your perspective? It's not about the Nutanix or the virtualization and the combined, it's really an extension, it's kind of a new architecture as they're saying. What's your take on it? I mean, is HP a fast follower here? Are they breaking new ground? Are they continuing the innovation on top of converge? What's your take? Yeah, so first and foremost, it really helps to understand why customers are actually wanting to do this and whether it's simplicity in terms of even deploying apps or going all the way to composability, people are on a different journey and a different level. But what they're trying to do is get technology out of the way to be able to serve the business. I do think that HP has been early with a lot of different things, whether it's things like the machine, whether it's things like Moonshot, hyper-converged. I actually thought initially that HP may have been a little bit behind the boat, but when I fully looked at the comprehensiveness, server storage networking, DevOps, virtualization, and hybrid cloud, I'm thinking that at least right now, they're very, very the most comprehensive composable solution out there. And the converge was a good call. I mean, look at this mainstream now. People don't even blink at bat anymore. It's kind of like it's not a sideline conversation. It's front and center. Now with this new opportunity, the management piece seems to be the battleground. We're talking about that on our opening today. Paul, what's your take and then talk about, Patrick, the market realities of management. You can't have this, that, you can't have one of the three pieces of the pie. You need to have APIs. You need to have elastic pools. What's the deal here? I mean, share with us. Yeah, so we've been actually laying tracks for composability over the last three years. And with the launch of OneView, we started to lay the tracks of how you can manage servers and storage and fabric together. And then also bring out the API, which we announced at Discover last year is this open API that people like Chef, Doc, or Puppet can integrate with, as well as traditional vendors. In addition to that, hardware vendors like Arista can plug into this management plane so it becomes an open architecture for people in the data center. So we began to lay that foundation and that is in our current converged systems as well as the underpinnings of our composable. So yeah, it's all about getting that management plane and then that simple API, not layers of APIs and management that customers as well as vendors and partners can tie into in a simple way. How should we, Paul, look at the portfolio now with that you've announced synergy? Where does it fit? How do you describe your offerings to customers? So when you think about the migration and transition, we don't believe that everyone's going to jump on composable day one. There's still a big consumption model for the delivery models of converged, as well as hyper-converged. So we believe that it's going to be a couple-year transition as people move off of, hey, I get converged and the value of converged. And then I start to look at the tools of composable and understand what they are, et cetera. So just yesterday also, in addition to synergy, we announced our hyper-converged platform with Azure. So for some customer use cases like Robo, where composable is probably a little bit too big, you just want a hyper-converged Azure gateway to run your apps and then maybe do backup to the Azure Cloud. So it all depends on where a customer is in the maturity models. So, Patrick, what are you guys seeing? On the one hand, we talk about simplicity, bringing the parts together, eliminate all that heavy lifting. On the other hand, a lot of people still want choice. You've got the broad portfolio for that. Are those two factors, simplicity and choice, counter-poised? Are they complementary? Can they be complementary? What's your take on all that? Well, as in life, there are no free lunches out there. To get something, you have to give up something. And in a way, if you're writing to a specific API, in a way, that could be construed as a lock-in. Now, the benefits, though, could greatly outweigh. I mean, if we were looking for simplicity in the hardware, we'd all be doing rack and stack. And then we can have hundreds of management people and deployment people out there to add to our OPEX. So I really think it comes down to this CAPEX versus OPEX. With an overriding theme of, what can I actually do differently in my business? How many applications could I deploy in this scenario? How much flexibility do I have in this scenario? You have to put in your ROI a benefit to having all of this flexibility and automation. Otherwise, it's never going to make sense. And in a way, what we're finding is the most future forward type of CIOs, it almost becomes a religious discussion. Because it's hard to take a spreadsheet approach to this. You have to either believe in this or you don't. And you go from there. But you're painting that sort of black and white scenario, but then there's sort of this halfway house, particularly when the channel gets involved. Halfway house. So take, sorry. That's my line. We said that to Pat Gelsinger, he didn't like that, did he? But so, when you think about the channel, and particularly take, for instance, what EMC did with VSpecs, it was a way to sort of placate the channels. I want Dell servers this week, instead of Cisco UCS or whatever it is. How do you, Paul, approach the channel? Is it, look, you got to be all in on HP, or you guys are all about choice. Are you looking for channel partners that are going to sort of drink the HP Kool-Aid and drive that because you're going to drive value? Or how do you accommodate those guys that want that greater flexibility? And maybe not as much value. So the good thing about Synergy is it provides great value if you're going to hook up to third-party storage as well. Because you still can get some of the automation. There's nothing preventing third-party storage from writing to the API, just like Arista did on the Netflix and Switch. So there's nothing preventing that. Where we see channel partners really excited about Synergy is now they can go have a different conversation with the customer. Because Synergy allows them to build workload-specific templates, they can go build a template specific to a customer and then offer that as value add. In addition to the template, the boot volume. So they can now offer greater levels of service in a nature that's in their wheelhouse. Some of the cloud stuff is not always in people's wheelhouse, but standing up infrastructure and infrastructure-based templates, that's core to their wheelhouse. It's a foundation for wrapping more services around more profit for them. I mean, for a channel partner, it's a home run because now I have some standardization if you will in a reference architecture to wrap services around. Sure, but most channel partners are still selling tin. But I love the message because it's a higher-gross profit. They all have to transition. I mean, I'm sure you're seeing this too. It's a more of a mini SI, if you will, up the stack. That's really the message that you're sending to the channel. Exactly, it's not too far of a stretch, right? This is core to what they do already and it helps simplify them. They all have to stand up and load the image, load the boot, do all that stuff. We can give them an automated way of capturing an image, storing it, and then reusing it with the customer over and over again, or reusing it with other customers. That's huge value to them. And again, it plays to what they understand and how they understand how they sell. Patrick, let's talk about the customer conversation because at the end of the day, composability, DevOps, all it is is about getting to that final destination where it's a halfway house, way station. There's a lot of engineering involved in hybrid cloud. We know public cloud is out there, HP's announced are getting out of that, but it's still building private clouds. So you have on-prem and public, and everything in between is essentially hybrid or an engineering opportunity for the customer. And every company has its own little version of what that is. And that's kind of what we see in the market. That's really the conversation here, right? Isn't it really about getting to hybrid and figuring out how to leverage? I mean, this whole synergy thing is about making it easier to build hybrid cloud, isn't it? Yeah, the conversations that we're having, and I just met with some of the largest financials in New York City a few weeks ago, is the reality is they might have 5,000 different applications, okay? That they've created over the last 30 years in some languages that they don't even have the skill set to update. And so what you're doing is they're prioritizing which ones should be turned over. All the new ones are going to be cloud-based, okay? Unless it's tied into a proprietary type of mainframe. And the ultimate goal is to get to a self-service model, more of a cloud model. I think the struggle that they're trying to figure out right now is, what kind of platform should that be? Should this be a classic rack and stack and then I'll throw a ton of resources at it, like the hyperscale guys? Now, maybe the top 1,000 might even consider something like that. But for everybody else, I think that this whole composability conversation is being accepted, it's being discussed, and I think they're just trying to figure it out at this point. So let me just kind of play devil's advocate. I'm a customer of CXO or CIO, here's my reaction. Whoa, single architecture? I'm not like, I don't jam that down my throat. So it's kind of, there might be a reaction where it's like when they hear single architecture in a world where agile and versatility is the norm. There's a nuance here. In single architecture, it's foundation. I want you guys to break that out and explain that because I think that is, I'm seeing some confusion on what that is. You know what I'm saying? So clarify that, guys. Yeah, maybe just a little bit of other context. While they're hearing, while they're saying, oh, single architecture, that maybe all HP, again, we're going to support other people's devices, the bigger pressure on them is from the lines of business, saying I need more applications faster. I need you to respond at cloud speed. But they want to keep control of many of those applications for the reasons that Patrick talked about. So there's- But it's not proprietary, it's not. It's an HP architecture, but it's not an HP lock-in. It's not an HP lock-in. Again, we will support third-party devices. Stocker. Pardon? Stocker. Yeah, and it's the management plane that is actually where they want more flexibility. They want flexibility to have whatever hypervisor they want, whatever DevOps tools they want, because that's what's going to speed their ability to deliver these applications that the lines of business are demanding. So you're saying that you could pretty much choose any piece part you want, but you're going to be giving up that value of that integration. Yes. So to picking up on John's point, that single architecture, there's the other dimension here is the sort of horizontal platform to build applications on top of, which is really your play. And then you got sort of a red stack Oracle play as like all Oracle all the time. How do you compete with that? How do you, I mean, I think I just laid it out, but I'd love to hear it in your words as to what you're seeing in the marketplace or do you have solutions specific to, let's say SAP or Oracle or virtualization solutions? What if we could talk about that a little bit? Yeah, so what you'll see us do is our converge systems where we've built these workload-specific solutions that are really, the converge was all about a workload-optimized solution. It was pretty static. What you'll see us do is take that and templatize it and build images around it so that customers instead of saying I want to buy this specific converged system, they'll go to our website or an SAP website or like to get into Docker GitHub, download the integration, download the template onto the converged system and be ready to go. So it takes out this whole weird procurement thing that convergence was all about. Half the convergence was about a procurement model making it more efficient by building it in a factory and then shipping it to a customer. Now suddenly you can have a compute and storage pool that you go to a website and download a template and image. You've solved a lot of problems. But it sounds similar to what IBM tried to do three years ago with so-called patterns and they've seemed to, they really struggled with it and have kind of pulled back out of the hardware piece of that and they've still got some vertical solutions like Oracle but why do you think IBM's example was struggled and what gives you confidence that you won't sort of repeat some of those challenges? Because they approached it just at the cloud automation layer and the application automation layer and didn't address and simplify the infrastructure. The infrastructure's still difficult to set up and so they solved a part of the problem which we solved with our cloud system automation layer but now we've taken it deeper and solved it at the infrastructure layer so think about we're giving customers two catalogs one for their applications with CSA and a second for their infrastructure and we glue those together that's where you get this extreme speed and efficiency. Guys, thanks so much for coming on theCUBE, really appreciate it. Patrick, give you the final word on the segment. What do you explain to your customers about this announcement and where does this .2 for HP in the future? Where is this leading? What's your advice to your clients? Yeah. And where's this .2? So my recommendation is find somebody who supports different operating models all the way from rack and stack to converged, hyper converged and ultimately to composable because you're going to be on a different journey even inside of a type of application or a department. Find somebody who can support all three. You don't have to have a full marriage with all of them. You can actually partially be wedded to three different environments here and find that I'm actually really excited more excited about synergy today than maybe I was a few weeks ago. I'm excited in that I feel like it's real where it's not just talk. So I do think this is a big day, a big opportunity for HP out there but HP needs to be patient with this because like a lot of people have seen this doesn't happen overnight. Customers aren't rolling their infrastructure over to cloud native but this is a road to cloud native. Yeah. It's a great opportunity. Congratulations Paul, appreciate it. Thanks theCUBE. Bringing you the converged points of view here with Dave Vellante, Patrick Morehead, two industry analysts in convergent infrastructure. This is theCUBE, of course I'm John Furrier, the founder of SiliconANGLE, we'll be back after this short break.