 The Cube presents HPE Discover 2022, brought to you by HPE. Okay, we're back to wrap up HPE Discover 2022. The Cube's continuous coverage is day three, John Furrier, Dave Vellante. We had a business friend that we met during the pandemic. A really interesting gentleman, Norm Follett. He's the director of Global Technical Marketing at Hewlett Packard Enterprise, a real innovator. Norm, great to see you. Thanks for making time for coming on The Cube. Gentlemen, thank you, thank you. I appreciate that you're giving me the opportunity to bring it home. Yeah, sure. If I'm only going to get one shot at it, it might as well be the last. We always like to bring the energy in the last segment because, you know, The Cube, we grind it out for three days. I mean, it's just such a great content injection. And so we love to wrap it up, especially with someone like yourself who can really help us convey the themes. But even more so, when we look around here, this entire ecosystem, you and your team built this. And so take us through that. Well, we did, you know, and it takes a village. You know, we have the core team, HPE Global Technical Marketing, which is my team. And then of course we're partnered with other parts of our marketing organizations on different pieces, different aspects. And then we have a tremendous team of vendors that we work with on a regular basis, companies such as, you know, F2B and Ivory and others that, you know, really all kind of pitch in and they're kind of, I call them my flex force. You know, we also have another group called Promote Live. And we bring all these people together. And in addition, all the vendors, we have something like 380 employees that come from all different parts of the organization to land in Las Vegas, to man these booths and staff these exhibits. And so for one week, we get to really work as a team, as a family. You know, there's no organizational borders, so to speak, you know, we're a big company. Everybody has, you know, different objectives and different things that they're focused on, but we get a chance to all get together and work as one team. And so that the people aspect is what's so exciting. I think this week and I think I even saw some of your broadcasts earlier. So I think it kind of came through as well, just the joy of being together, you know, human beings. And HPE's got a new spring in its step, which is so much focus brought to the table from Antonio and the team is the lining. Yeah, we do. And that's, you know, when we start talking about the design and, you know, one of the things that, you know, we work on this months ahead of time, right? And so it's kind of like a spinning top. You know, we keep spinning that thing tightening up and then this week you put it on the table and you just let it go, right? But it's that whole multi-month process of twisting that top around and getting it going. And right at the middle and right at the centerpiece and the core design principle and an ask from Antonio is that we make sure that we major on HPE GreenLake Edge to Cloud Platform. That, you know, it's obviously, you've been talking about it all week. We've been talking about it all week. It's a big focus of our company. And so right at the very center, we have our HPE GreenLake Edge to Cloud Platform demonstration. And then everything in the showcase then radiates from that centerpiece, you know, right at the nexus of all the activities. So the experience starts there and propagates its way. Well, I want to get into some of the themes and the set pieces you have here. You are in technical marketing and this platform is a tech play. So it's not so much just solutions that you're enabling. The theme this year is very much technical marketing. So there's Edge, first of all, Cloud data and Edge is the big themes. Security's baked in throughout the whole set as well in that messaging. But it's technical marketing right now. We had, you know, the platform play. Uli Packard is a platform. Uli Packard Enterprise is a platform. It is, it's a software platform. It really completes a cloud strategy. And when you really think about it, again, I know some of these numbers have been floating around, but you know, 70% of all data is still staying on-prem for good reasons. You know, and then 30% of it can be out there in the public cloud. So what you kind of have is an incomplete cloud strategy, if you will. And what's happened is that organizations have gotten spoiled a little bit by the cloud experience, right? That, you know, your dev team say, go, hey, I just, I want to work in Azure. I want to work in AWS. I love how I go through this process. Why can't I do that with my on-prem stuff? You know, I want that kind of experience. So IT organizations are really being challenged about how to create that kind of service and that experience to their customers because expectations are high. Yeah, because data, it has to be inclusive. It can't be exclusive to just one part of the organization. Yeah, I mean. So how did you, how did that impact? Obviously, because GreenLake was coming together, you know, you got the multiple months in advance planning for this big event. Right. A lot of work goes into it. What was some of the impact to the execution of this event that you can share in terms of the set pieces, some of the displays? Was there, was there, not we'll say radical, because it's not radical. It looks, it turned out great. But what are some of the popular things happening here? What worked? What resonated with customers and what was different from, that GreenLake enabled you to do differently? Well, I mean, first, the first thing is that we kind of had a high touch experience at that center point, right? That nexus, the hub of the activity, the GreenLake Edge to Cloud platform demonstration. And it started with us just kind of, you know, having the strategy about, first of all, if you, if you guys show this, and I think maybe you have, when you enter in, we've got like this big aha moment, right? And that aha moment is that platform, right in the center, surrounded with wonderful visuals above, below, you know, behind, all around it. But we had to think about, okay, now I'm staring at this thing. What am I, how am I going to experience it? So, when I say a high touch experience, we start with what I call a platform generalist that would greet you upfront, engage in the conversation. You know, realize that, you know, Dave is a network operations director. He's got some keen interests. He has some sort of peripheral idea about what the HPE GreenLake Edge Cloud Platform is about. But what can it really do for him? You know, what can he use, how can he use it? So we start at that level of conversation, you know, socialize the core services, the attributes, you know, the technology that is actually enabling it. And then as we've identified in our conversation that you're a network geek, you know, and you want to understand, you've heard about Aruba, you know, how's Aruba Central play into that? How do the networking services play into that? And so for then we take that big leap and go up two steps up onto the platform and we go over to the network specialist, what I'm calling a platform specialist who understands all the things about the platform, but then is peaked in networking and we have that conversation. And you see how the Aruba customer can benefit by this evolution and how the different platform services combine to give a holistic experience across a company. And so when I'm an IT ops director and I'm trying to service my network guys, my storage guys, my compute guys, my external cloud services guys, that this is an environment that I can So you have an experience where they come in, they can easily move to a point quickly in the display on the platform. And it's tailored for that. Exactly, right? That's the... Exactly right. And so if I transition over to you and you're my specialist, you're not saying, hey, Dave, what brings you here today? I mean, you're pre-qualified, it's a pre-qualified conversation, we jump into it. And then that specialist is armed with knowledge as to where, okay, this guy is really interested in switching technology and switches as well. Well, that's demo 512. Let me have one of my colleagues take you over there. So then you're escorted over to demo 512 to go to the next level, or perhaps, and this has happened throughout the week, that people want to take a test drive of the environment. And so we have the HPE GreenLake Living Lab and we have a test drive environment right there. And so we bring you right to that test drive where you can kick the tires yourself, you fire up a live environment. We have a series of exercises that you're taken through. And I think I've just checked with one of my colleagues where like well over, well over 1,100 experiences of people doing that here. And that lab has 25 seats. But also externally, so right off of HPE.com, that same test drive experience that we're doing here, people can launch at home. And so we got in this morning, there were like four guys logged in from New Zealand doing exercises, which is pretty neat. So when you asked me the question, what are the design considerations that HPE GreenLake that we baked in and thought through, it's again that, hey, it's a big thing. Yeah, it's an experience. Let's start with you just digesting the basic concepts. Then let's talk about your persona and how it directly maps to what you can do. And then if you want to get deeper, we have the solutions that we designed behind that, solution demos. And if you want to drive it, buckle up, let's go. Yeah, you get right to a spot, multiple monitors, great experience, high touch. That's awesome. I got to ask you another question because you've been pre-pandemic, you've been doing a lot of this technical marketing and events and then virtual hit. Now we're back face-to-face. It's clear, Dave and I were just talking about on our opening day here on day one, people love to see each other back. Every event we've been through, face-to-face, people are energized to a level we didn't even see. What are you seeing here in terms of performance? So you got salespeople here, you got executives here, you got customers, face-to-face. Belly to belly. Belly to belly, as Dave says. That's a positive. What's it like, explain what it's like. Well, I mean, you never know what you got until it's gone. Right? And so people didn't really realize that, hey, we really needed to have this kind of touch and this kind of activity. And it was funny because people, before the pandemic, there was also a push to do a lot of virtual stuff. Economies of scale, some of that stuff works, teams are making decisions, but then it all goes away and people realize how valuable, just the conversations were, meeting somebody. Relationships. Meeting somebody for a coffee, talking through different, bumping in to colleagues that you haven't seen for years or you worked with somebody and now they're doing this. And then you realize you have some sort of synergy with each other and you can still help each other. And just the discovery of being at Discover and running into these different types of things. Well, you think about it Norm. You know, we've done plenty of stuff virtually, but I think we've talked maybe four times this week. I've seen you here, walking around the hallways. We saw you last night, right? You just, that just wouldn't happen in your little virtual world. Yeah, I mean, not at all. And during that virtual era, and I think we'll look back on that and we're still going to do virtual stuff. And we're learning. I mean, it's got value, but I just want to thank you guys for just being the cube and the whole team, you know, Frank, everybody, just tremendous partners through that because you can still look at that content that we produced together last year and it's still relevant. We're still sharing it. It still has impact. We point, you know, we tell people, hey, here's a call to action. You're leaving this cover. By the way, there's these three or four pieces out on the cube that really go at this topic, right? That GreenLake event we did last year was phenomenal. It was, it was, and it was a partnership with you guys and I, you know, I speak on behalf of many of my colleagues here at HPE. We just want to thank the cube for all the support, creativity and how we got through that all together. Well, back at you because, Norm, you were a real innovator. When John and I first met you, we were like, hey, this guy actually, you're going to push us to some new levels. You know, our team was a little nervous, a lot nervous actually because, you know, you do, you are not only demanding, but you're super creative. Well, thank you. And so you helped us, you know, up our game. Yeah, thanks a lot. Yeah, you know, Frank was getting, hey Frank, Dave, can you guys do this? Yeah, we were on the back. I mean, but we were growing and surviving and thriving together and getting through it. But what's coming out the other side now is a new format. You mentioned virtual. That's not going away. Hybrid is a steady state for all of us, even the cube. So the new protocols and the new standards are emerging. I think the newness of it scares people. Also like, how do you do it? Whose role is it to take the virtual and digital? So this whole new set of experiences still coming out. What's your vision? How do you see this? Because face-to-face clearly is what everyone wants. From school kids to adults, we want face-to-face. How does digital fit in? Well, I mean, that's a really tricky question. I'll give you a kind of back-in of the answer a little bit. You guys can see this, right behind us. We have this whole backdrop here. Greetings from the edge of virtual reality experience. Well, we built that. We built that during the COVID era so we could have experiences with people remotely, right? And we use it for executive summit, last year for the virtual discovery. We shipped those Oculus headsets to everybody. Everybody jumped into it. And so I was sitting there being a host with four CTOs that were scattered all over the world. So we were in cyberspace together, right? And so, of course, being good business people, we realized, hey, this is pretty fun, so let's dust it off and bring it out here for the more general public. So again, it was like a 200-person executive-level experience and all of that, but it had tremendous value, different types of experiences. I recommend you try it if you ever have the opportunity. So that's a way that we started merging virtual reality and digital experiences to try to keep that human connection, but now we're using it again and everybody's in these little pod rooms, six of them together, so they're having this experience in cyberspace and they're having it physically. And so I think some, and everyone's enjoying being together and still in cyberspace together. So I think when we start to build assets and we start to look at different types of things and experiences, we got to think through that now, right? How is this investment or this experience, how's it going to translate outside of these four walls? And how can we use it outside of these four walls and create a more engaging experience? So that's a little bit of a backing into that answer, but I think I'm- It's emerging, it's emerging. Well, I'm saying it more as an example of us thinking through and trying to leverage this. Yeah, I love it though. I mean, you've always been a struck me as a visionary and I loved that answer and I can just see, it's just going to progress by the end of the decade. This is going to become a normal sort of practice and we're going to bring people in from the outside and interacting. I love what you were saying about, even though we're here physically, we're actually creating a virtual world within this physical pod, where can people discover more about that? About the show, about the content that was here? Well, on hpe.com, you can just launch it and discover. We have a tremendous amount of content that's been recorded, keynotes, sponsors, sessions, the cube, they're dialed in, all kinds of different pieces of assets that we've done. I'll plug just another couple of things just again to talk about the connectivity of things that we're doing. So one of the projects that I lead, and very proud to lead it, is HPE Spaceborne and our Spaceborne computer. Spaceborne computer to flying the most powerful machine, computer to ever fly in space. We've been up there for a year, we've done 24 different experiments over the year for the benefit of the entire scientific community. Also doing things for the ISS National Lab and NASA, our partners up there. But what we've got is we've built a scale replica of the Columbus module, right? So this is a 28 by 12 foot module. Hey, we're bringing her home, seriously. They're going to pull the plug on me soon, right? So anyway, so we have that module built, right? And this is, we work with a Hollywood production company. We've had it before, but we've customized it. We have a live link to the ISS station in there. And so we're talking about everything that we're doing there. But also in this virtual reality experience, we have you going on a spacewalk, right? And so we've captured that as well. So we're tying this physical and virtual experience together. And so it's a fun project. So you can check that out. We did exascale together during the pandemic. And that's when I first really got into Spaceborne. It was awesome to see Frontier announced actually breaking through the exascale barrier. We were on the cusp, but we now see it breaking through. So congratulations on that. Thank you very much. And you know, a couple other things that we're doing that's pretty exciting. I don't want to give away all my tricks, but we've organized our demonstrations through the customer lenses. So we have these customer journeys that we see people that are using our technology. So I'm not talking about the storage business unit or the networking business unit, but how are our customers really trying to advance AI and machine learning, for example? How are they actually trying to protect their data? The different things. The business issues. The business issues. And so we've organized our demos through that. We have these pods and then satellites, and you walk through that whole thing and it's addressing different aspects of that. And then another thing that we've done is we have tours here as well, because there's so much content that people can take tours. And you know, 1400 people have taken those tours. You know, and these are guided tours, headsets, curated designated places to go. And we see big traffic the first day or so and by design. And so we hit the highlights and then they decide how to use their valuable time later in the showcase about what they want to deep dive on. And so that's been a tremendous success for us. Well, Norm, thanks for bringing us on the tour of Discover. Yeah, well. And really, you know, sharing that with our audience. And you've been an awesome partner and as I say, a great innovator. I can't wait to see what's next. All right. Well done. Thanks so much. Hey, thanks for letting me on here. Welcome to our pleasure. I'm somebody. I made it. You're a Cube alumni. You're a Cube alumni. I made it. So guys, that's a wrap on day three. Dave Vellante, John Furrier for Lisa Martin. Don't forget to go to siliconango.com where we've got all the news, all the interviews that we've done this week, get written up and posted on siliconango.com, thecube.net. I publish every week my breaking analysis on wikibon.com. It's on a podcast, so check that out. Thanks to everybody. Thanks to the crew, everybody back at the office. Really appreciate it. Great job. And we'll see you next time. All right.