 theCUBE presents HPE Discover 2022, brought to you by HPE. Good morning, live from the Venetian Expo Center, Lisa Martin, Dave Vellante, day two of theCUBE's coverage of HPE Discover 22. We've had some great conversations yesterday, today, full day of content coming your way. We've got one of our alumni back with us. Neil McDonald joins us. The executive vice president and general manager of compute at HPE. Neil, great to have you back on theCUBE. It's great to be back. And how cool is it to be able to do this face to face again instead of on Zoom, right? Oh, so great, so great. The keynote yesterday absolutely packs so refreshing to see that many people eager to hear what HPE has been doing. It's been three years since we've all gotten together in person. It is, and we've been busy, we've been busy. We got to share some great news yesterday about some of the work that we're doing with the HPE GreenLake Cloud Platform and really bringing together all the capabilities across the company in a very unified, cohesive way to enable our customers to embrace that as a service experience we committed to. Antonio, three years ago said we were going to deliver everything we do as a company as a service through GreenLake, and we've done it. And it's fantastic to see the momentum that that's really building and how it's breaking down the silos from different types of infrastructure and offer to really create integrated solutions for our customers. So that's been a lot of fun. Give us the scope of your role, your areas of responsibility, and then I'd love to hear some feedback. You've been a couple of days here around customers. What's some of the feedback? Help us understand that. So at HPE, I lead the compute business, which is our largest business, and that includes our hardware and software and services in the compute space, both what flows through the GreenLake model, but also what flows through our traditional purchase model. So that's about a $13 billion business for the company and the core of so much of what we do. And it's a real honor to be leading a business that's such a legacy and a franchise with 30 years of innovation for our customers and an ocean of followers. And it's great to be able to start to share some of the next chapters of that with our customers this week. Well, it's almost half the business in HPE, and as we've talked about, it's an awesome time to be in the compute business. What are you seeing in terms of the trends? Obviously, you're all in on as a service, but some customers say, tell me, I got a lot of capital. You know, I don't need OPEX, I'm fine with OPEX. What are you hearing from customers in that regard and presumably you're happy to sell them in a capex model? No, absolutely. In the current environment in particular with some of the economic headwinds that we're starting to stir down here, it's really important for organizations to continue to transform digitally, but to be able to match their investments with the revenues as they're building new services and new capabilities. And for some organizations, the challenge of investing all the capex up front is a big lift and there's quite a delay before they can really monetize all of that. So the power of HPE GreenLake is enabling them to match their investment in the infrastructure on a pay-as-you-go basis with the actual revenue they're gonna generate from their new capability. So for lots of people, that works, but for many other customers, it's much more palatable to continue in a capex purchase model and we're delighted to do that. A lot of my business still is in that mode. What's changing though, or what are the needs, whether you're in the GreenLake environment or in the capex environment, increasingly the edge has become a bigger and bigger part of all of our worlds, right? The edge is where we all live and work. We've all seen over the last couple of years enormous change in how that work experience and how the shape of businesses has changed and that creates some challenges for infrastructure. So one of the things that we've announced and we shared some more details of this week is HPE GreenLake for Compute Ops Management, which is a location-agnostic cloud-based management setup that enables you to automate and lifecycle manage your physical compute infrastructure wherever it lies. So that might be in a distributed environment in hotel locations or out at the edge where so much more data is now being gathered and has to be computed on. So we're really excited about that and the great thing is because it's fully integrated with HPE GreenLake cloud platform, it's in there alongside the storage, alongside the connectivity, alongside all the other capabilities and we can bring those together in a very cohesive infrastructure view for our customers and then build workloads and services on top. So that's really exciting. How have your customer conversations evolved, especially over the last couple of years as the edge has exploded that we've been living in such uncertain times? Are you seeing a change there in the stakeholders rising up the C-suite stack in terms of how do we really fine-tune this because we've got to be competitive, we've got to be a data company? Well, that's so true because everybody has to seem data as a currency and is desperately innovating and modernizing their business model and with the underlying infrastructure and how they think about development. And nowhere is that truer than in enterprises that are really becoming digital first organizations. More and more companies are doing their own in-house full-stack cloud native development and pivoting hard from a more traditional view of in-house enterprise IT. And in that regard, that starts to look a lot like a SaaS company or a service provider in terms of the needs of the infrastructure. You want linear performance scaling. You want to be very sensitive, not just to the cost as you call it, but also to the environmental cost and the power efficiency. And so yesterday we were really thrilled to announce the HP Proline RL 300 Gen11, which is the first of our Gen11 platforms. And that's in partnership with Ampere as the first of several things that we're going to go do together. We're looking forward to building out the rest of our Gen11 portfolio broadly with all of our industry partners in the coming quarters. But we're thrilled about the feedback that we're starting to get from some of our customers about the gains in power efficiency that they're getting from using this new server line that we've developed with Ampere. So, you know, this is an area that I'm very interested in. I write about this a lot. So tell us the critical aspects of Gen11. Where Ampere fits? Is it being used for primarily offloads and is it core, can you share with us? So if you look at the opportunity here is really as a core compute tool for organizations that are doing that in-house full-stack cloud native development. And in that environment, being able to do it with great power efficiency at a great cost point is the great combination. The maturity of the ecosystem is really, really improving to the point where it's much, much more accessible for those loads. And if you consider how the infrastructure evolves underneath it, the gains that you get from power efficiency multiply. It's a TCO benefit. It's obviously an environmental benefit. And we all have much, much more to do as an industry on that journey, but every little helps. And we're really excited about being able to bring that to market. The other thing that we've done is recognizing the value that we bring in the ProLiant experience. Everything with our integrated lights out management, all of the security, the hardware root of trust, the secure boot chains, all of that ProLiant family values. We brought to that platform just as we do with our others. But we've also recognized that for some of our service provider customers, there's a lot of interest in leveraging OpenBMC and being able to integrate in the management plane and control that in-house and tie it to whatever orchestration is being done on the service provider. So we have full support for OpenBMC out the box, out the gate with Jenna Living. And that's one of the ways that we're evolving our offering to meet our customers where they are, including not just the SaaS and service providers, but the enterprises who are starting to adopt more and more of those practices as they build our digital version. So tell us more about the architecture, if you would, Neil. I mean, so where does ampere and that partnership add value that's incremental to what you might think is a traditional sort of architecture? How's that evolving? Well, it's another alternative for certain workloads. In that full-stack in-house pro-native development model, it's another choice, it's another option. And some of our customers are very excited about it. That's the right course for the course, is that full-stack internal development, because it's just more efficient, it's lower power, more sustainable, all those things. Exactly, and the wonderful thing for us in this juncture in the market is there is so much architectural innovation. There are so many innovators out there in the industry creating different optimizations in technology, whether that's in Silicon or other aspects of the system, and that gives us a much broader palette to paint from as we meet our customers' needs as their businesses are evolving and the requirements are evolving, we can be much more creative as we bring this all together. And it's a real thrill to be able to bring some of these technologies into the HP-proliant space, because we've always felt that compute matters. We've always known that hardware matters, and we've been leading and innovating and meeting these needs as they've evolved over the decades, and it's really fun to be able to continue to do that. Hardware still matters. It does still matter, we know that here on theCUBE. Talk about the influence of the customer. With so much architectural innovation, there's a lot of choice for customers in every industry. When you're in customer conversations, how are you helping them make decisions? What are the key differentiators that you articulate that's going to really help them achieve outcomes that they have to achieve? Well, I think that's exactly it, as you say. It's about the outcome. Too often, I think the conversation can get down into the lower level details of componentry and technology, and our philosophy at HP has always been focused on what it is that the customer's trying to achieve. How are they trying to serve their customers? What are their needs? And then we can bring an opinionated point of view on the best way to solve that problem, whether that's recommendations on the particular CAPEX infrastructure and architecture to build, or increasingly, the opportunity to serve that through HPE GreenLake, either as hardware as a service, or as HPE GreenLake services further up the stack. Because when you start talking about what is the outcome you're trying to achieve, you have a much, much better opportunity to focus the technology to serve the business and not get wrapped up in managing the infrastructure. And that's what we love to do. So give us the telescope vision, maybe not the telescope, but ocular vision, as to where compute is going. We're clearly seeing more diversity in silicon. It's not just the x86 CPU world anymore. There's all these other supporting components, new workloads coming in. You mentioned Edge, whole new ballgame, AI inferencing, and those kind of new workloads, offloads and things of that. Where do you see it all going in the next three to five years? I think it's going to be a really, really exciting time because more and more of our data is getting captured at the Edge. And because of the experiences that companies are trying to deliver and organizations are trying to deliver, that requires more and more storage and more and more compute at the Edge. The Edge is not just about connectivity. And again, that's why with the HPE GreenLake Cloud Platform, the power of bringing together the connectivity with the compute, with the storage, with the other capabilities in that integrated way, gives us the ability to serve that combined need at the Edge in a very, very compelling way. The room moves a lot of friction and a lot of work for our customers. But as you see that happen, you're going to see more and more combining of functionalities. The silos are going to start to break down between different classes of building block in the data center. And you've already seen shifts with more and more software defined and more and more hybrid offerings running across a computing substrate, but perhaps delivering storage services or analytic services or other workloads. And you're going to see that continue to evolve. So it's going to be very fun over the next few years to see that diversification and a much more opinionated set of offers for particular use cases and workloads. And our job and value is going to be simplifying that complexity. Because choice is great, right up to the point where you're paralyzed by too many choices. So the wonderful thing about the world that's been done here is that we're able to bring that opinionated point of view and help guide. And again, it's all about starting with what are you trying to achieve? What are the outcomes you're trying to deliver? And if you start there, we're having a great time helping our customers find the right path forward. Wow, sounds like a fun job. It is. Talk to me about maybe one of your favorite examples that you really think articulates the value of the choice and the opportunities that HPE can deliver to customers. Maybe favorite customer example where you think we really nailed it here and they're achieving some incredible outcomes. Well, one of the ones that we're really excited about this week is I was chatting with the CEO of Cloud Sigma, which is a global IaaS and PAS provider who's actually been using our new HP Proline RL 300 Gen11, our new Ampere-based server line. And their CEO was reporting to me yesterday that based on his benchmarking, they're seeing a significant improvement in power efficiency. And that's cool to an engineer, but what's even better is the next thing he said. That's enabling them to deliver better cost to the right customers and advance their sustainability goals, which is such a core part of what we as an industry and we as society are going to have to continue to make stepwise progress against over the next decade in order to confront those challenges in the environment. So that's really fulfilling, not just to see the tech, which is always interesting to an engineer, but actually see the impact that it's having in enabling that outcome for Cloud Sigma. So many customers, including Cloud Sigma and customers in every industry, ESG, is an incredibly important initiative. And so it's vital for companies that have a core focus on ESG to partner with companies like HPE who will help them facilitate that and actually demonstrate outcomes to their end users. It's such an important journey and it's going to be a journey of many steps together, but I think it's one of the most critical partnerships that as an industry and as an ecosystem, we still have a lot of work to do and we have to stay focused on it every day, continuing moving the bar. You know, to your point about ESG, you see these ESG reports now, they're unbelievable. The data that is in them and the responsibility that organizations, mid and large organizations have to actually publish that and be held accountable. Yes. It's actually kind of daunting, but there are a lot of investments going on there. You're absolutely right. Well, the accountability is key and it's necessary to have an accountability partner and an ecosystem that can facilitate that. Exactly, and we just published last week our own living progress report this year, talking about some of the steps that we're making and the commitments that we pulled in in time and we're looking forward to continue to work on that with our customers and with the industry because it's so critical that we make faster progress together on that. Last question, Neil, what's your favorite comment that you've heard the last couple of days being back in person with about 8,000 customers, partners and execs? It's not the comment. It's the sparkles in the eyes. It's the energy. It is so great to be back together face to face. I think we've soldiered through a couple of tough years. We've done a lot of things remotely together, but there's no substitute for being back together and the energy is just palpable and it's fantastic to be able to share some of what we've been up to in the interim and see the excitement about that getting adopted by our customers and partners. I agree, the energy has been fantastic. We were talking about that yesterday. You brought it today, Neil. Thank you so much for joining us. We're excited. We've got Antonio coming up next and we're going to unpack all the announcements and really get that customer's perspective from the top of HPE. For Neil and Dave Vellante, I'm Lisa Martin. Join us in just a few minutes as the CEO of HPE, Antonio Neary joins us next.