 Live from London, England, it's theCUBE. Covering Discover 2016 London. Brought to you by Hewlett Packard Enterprise. Now, here's your host, Dave Vellante and Paul Gillis. Welcome back to the London Doc Lens, everybody. This is HPE Discover 2016, and this is theCUBE, the worldwide leader in live tech coverage. Susan Blockers here, she's a CUBE alum, and she's now the Vice President of Data Center Infrastructure Group at Hewlett Packard Enterprise. Another CUBE alum, Kate Swanberg is here. She's the head of technology, communications, and strategy at DreamWorks Animation. Ladies, great to see you again. Thank you. Thanks for coming back in theCUBE. Another great HPE Discover. We're rockin' and rollin'. Good to be in London, so. So, Susan, let's start with you. You've been at this now for a couple of years at HPE. That's right. You guys are hittin' the groove swing as we like to say sometimes. Give us the quick update on what's going on in your group, the Data Center Infrastructure Group. Well, one of the things that's going on is that the group is actually somewhat new. We've taken our infrastructure from across the entire company, server storage, networking, and brought it together in one organization with a shared engineering infrastructure so that we can speed and accelerate our own innovation, and get it out to our customers faster, so that they have differentiated value from HPE across the entire Data Center Infrastructure stack. Excellent, and Kate, last time we talked, you took us through some of the things that you were doing at DreamWorks. Give us the update on your side. What's happened in the last, let's see, it was six months ago, maybe? Well, one of the most fun things that's happened is that we've released a new movie called Trolls that's out in theaters right now, and of course, our partnership with Hewlett Packard Enterprise brought that movie to life. It's always so much fun when we've got a new movie in the theater, and this one is so joyous, and so happy, and such good music. I mean, kids' faces just light up when they see it, and honestly. A few adults, too. Yeah, it's one of the things that makes it so fun to work at DreamWorks Animation is bringing products like that to market. And honestly, the partnership that we have with Hewlett Packard Enterprise, it allows us to focus on that creativity. One thing, you've made my twin five-year-old daughters very happy. They've seen the movie twice. They play all the characters around the house. It's wonderful. We were talking earlier, you were saying that you think, I said your data center infrastructure must be somewhat unusual because of the volumes of the type of work you do. You said you don't think that's really the case so much anymore. Can you explain that to me? One of the interesting things about feature animation is that we're such a computationally complex industry. I mean, making a feature animated movie has more components and parts than a Boeing 747. So 10 years ago, I think our manufacturing process, the process of creating a film was unique and it put us in a high performance compute, almost a super computing environment. However, what we're seeing in today's business world across all the other verticals, whether it's oil and gas or retail, is the desire to have on demand image generation for fast decision making. Almost every business on the planet wants that and that requires tremendous compute, tremendous delivery through network and storage. And quite frankly, the data explosion is affecting everybody. So while I think that we're on usually the cutting edge because of our product and what it takes, I think that most other companies around the world are facing the same sort of technological challenges we are. The movie business has always been pretty technologically advanced, but now the intersection of computing in movies has just exploded in the last really decade plus. Maybe you could talk about that a little bit in terms of your adoption level of technology. Well, one of the things about the films that we make is the amount of compute required for them. So on any given film, we will typically require 80 million computing hours to render all of the images across a couple of years of processing. And what we use exclusively for that are the ProLiant Blade servers in our environment and we have for over a decade. It's one of the areas that HP continues to innovate in. We partner with HP because they're so dedicated to engineering and R&D and clearly that exists in the labs group, but what a lot of people may not know is how deep that engineering goes in the business units as well. So every time that we get a new generation of those ProLiant Blade servers, they're more energy efficient, they're more performant and artists are getting more iterations. This isn't, much of the innovation that's happened in data center infrastructure has actually come from the web scale companies. Where do you look to them for inspiration, I guess, in the innovations that you bring to your own products, the open source tools and such? Yeah, so while we're looking just in general to bring innovation organically first of all and some of that innovation is coming from the result of the machine research project that we've been embarking on over the last couple of years that's looking at things like memory, centric compute and photonics as ways to really break through Moore's law and accelerate running these really data intensive workloads. Another area is really building a set of strategic partners with folks like Docker and Mesosphere and Arista and networking and things like that so that we're really covering innovation not only from within HPE but through our partner ecosystem. And last but not least, we've made a recent acquisition in this area of supercomputing with the acquisition of SGI. And so that is giving us 140 of the top 500 biggest, fastest supercomputers in the world. And with that capability, what we're able to do is really bring that innovation to a whole new set of enterprise customers and that's been really exciting in areas, not just in an area like DreamWorks Animation but in more traditional industries as well. To follow up on that, maybe you can position the SGI acquisition a little more clearly because it was not a very expensive acquisition but this is a company that was well known for its technology innovation. They're just kind of under-resourced and never really able to break out. What potential do you see there for your enterprise customers? Well, we see potential in two areas. First of all, they had literally more than 100 patents in areas that we think are going to dramatically extend and expand our high performance computing capabilities, especially on the high end. So where our Hewlett-Packard Enterprise Apollo platform was bringing HPC to sort of mid-range kind of enterprise customers with the aggregation of SGI, we now have that high end and it's really enabling us to talk to everybody from three-letter agencies in government and countries all the way through to enterprises. And then some of that technology we're actually integrating into our mission critical platform, our Superdome X technology, which is the most robust, reliable, available, scalable, never go down type of infrastructure. And so we see both of those areas as where we're going to take advantage of the innovation from SGI. Is DreamWorks an SGI customer today or? We're not today. We actually started as an SGI customer when we opened our doors. And so we understand some of the historic engineering that HPE is now taking on and we're really impressed by these choices. Now, you guys, go ahead, Paul. You're in such a performance demanding business, what are the choke points still? I mean, where do you still need to see the innovation to drive up the performance that you need? Well, it's interesting because when you say choke points, one of the first things we all think about is sort of speeds and feeds. And frankly in that space, we're pretty highly optimized. There's always areas that we can do better, but really the places that we're focused right now are in spaces that we haven't focused on before and we must do it. Things like security and data-driven analytics. Security's become such a critical element of our business in the last few years. And so what we're looking for from our partner Hewlett Packard Enterprise is a multi-level security plan. We want security within the infrastructure components. We want it across the infrastructure components. One of the reasons that we're moving to the software defined networking is because that software actually connects with the software within the blades and the storage devices to make sure it's secure across the board. That type of work is work we need a partner for. The other is, of course, data-driven analytics. On any given film, we're producing half a billion digital files. Half a billion digital files, it's difficult to know what the components and the graphs that make up each one of those are made of. The more information that we get about that, the more resilient we can make our render farm and our scheduling, which means that render jobs finish faster, artists see them sooner and decisions are made better. Big data problem. Big data problem and a fast data problem. You guys had a Q and A spotlight, I think this morning, right? What was that all about? Maybe take us through some of the questions that you got. Well, it was really about the data center of the future. Where are we going? I mean, Kate just talked about security as an aspect of the data center of the future. We see that as critical. It's about building a secure hybrid IT platform. As we look beyond our current horizon, we're kind of coining a phrase called the cognitive data center. And the cognitive data center is one that enables our customers to really seamlessly move between a multi-cloud environment, both on-premise and off-premise. It provides deep learning and AI kind of analytics that are real time to give the insights that our customers are going to need. And the third area is really around enabling our customers to really focus on where they want to go from a business outcome and having the data center dynamically aggregate itself through that composable infrastructure kind of story. So we're bringing those ideas together in this cognitive data center. So is that the roadmap for the future data center? Is that how you would describe it? And one of the interesting things that I think we're all seeing, DreamWorks has been around for 22 years now. In the earliest days, we were doing hand-drawn animation. We were producing one movie every three years. And we've gone through multiple transformations in our business. We've moved from hand-drawn animation to CG. We've moved from one movie every three years to be able to produce two or three movies every single year. One of the things that we're seeing though is that those transformations are happening faster and faster. It used to be you had a three, four, five year outlook and to be able to transform and get ready for the future and be future-proof. You don't have that luxury any longer. What we're looking at now is a data center that is more future-proofed, that allows us to be scalable but agile as well. We want to access artists from all over the world. We want that data to be on demand. We want the data to come to us and we want it to be secure. And so what that means is a hybrid situation where we've certainly got on-prem because we still have a studio and that's where a lot of the artists are. But the off-prem and the hybrid nature of that means that we can become more agile and access creativity wherever it is. We heard a lot of talk, talk at the keynote about composable infrastructure, drum that HV is beating hard these days. What does that mean to you? What it means to me is that the infrastructure is actually architected to understand each other. I love the concept of the Cognitive Data Center because quite frankly, that is our expectation. Our expectation is that each one of these components, each one of these elements is actually aware of how it's going to interact with the other elements within the data center and because of that it's actually going to provide us the business with a optimized awareness of everything that's happening and an optimized performance for the end user. All right, let's talk about women in tech. One of our favorite topics on theCUBE. So, you know, there are some notable examples. Obviously Meg, we heard her up on stage today. Ginny Rometti is another one. Jay Sri Ulal, the CEO of Arista, one of my business heroes. The CEO of General Motors is becoming a tech company. I mean, every company is a tech company. So there are some notable examples, but it's half the workforce, women are half the workforce, probably 10, maybe 15% of the cube guests we get. Are women still a long way to go? Right? What's your perspective, Susan? Well, look, it takes work. And I think that my personal perspective is that we've invested a lot of energy into bringing women together to talk about how to make ourselves more visible and more known and things like that. But at some point we have to stop being introspective about it and start asking the way that companies operate to change. And one of the examples that I'm trying to drive is really looking at the processes that we use to put talented folks in front of senior executives so that they have, you know, earlier visibility and people know them. And so that when those jobs come up, these women, these top talent, high potential women are top of mind. And I think that's something that, you know, still needs to be worked on, but I see the opportunity really makes some positive changes at HPE there. Do you have a perspective on this, Kate? I mean, the research suggests, shows pretty clearly that both diversity in people of color, also women, helps companies succeed, drives KPIs and business metrics. What's the perspective maybe from DreamWorks? Well, I can actually say that I completely agree because at DreamWorks Animation, we actually have a tremendous amount of diversity, particularly with women in the workplace. But across the board, we are a highly diverse company, even compared to others in the media and entertainment space, had a lot of women leaders. I think what it comes down to is a lot of our women leaders are on the creative side and on the business side and on the finance side. And I think that what we want to see now is in the same area of technology, we want to see that same level of growth. DreamWorks has embraced it in all of the other areas and where I think we need to focus as a country and as a world is in the education system. I think the STEM programs, and for me personally, the STEAM programs that add the A in there for art, that those are the ones that we have to assure ourselves that young women can avail themselves of that they're easy and that they're encouraged at a very young age. And once we do that, nothing's going to hold them back. Yeah, and it's actually striking the number of people actually, women who participate in computer science degrees that actually don't go into the technology field. We've been doing some work on that and research and there's a ways to go, but I think transparency's a big part of it. I'm encouraged by what a lot of firms are doing in terms of opening up and doing their own analysis. Meg Whitman has set a great example with our board and so she really focused on diversity and when she helped build the board for Hewlett-Packard Enterprise and so I think that's a shining example of what can be done when you put your mind to it. Okay, we got a wrap, but Kate, we'll give you the final word on Discover 2016 in London, what's your takeaway? I am so excited about this show. I really feel like now we're a year into Hewlett-Packard Enterprise and boy, are they hitting their stride. Everything about where they're going is where we need a partner to head so that we can focus on our movies and they can help us get there. Awesome, got to see trolls, I haven't seen it, but isn't John Cleese, was any of the voice of one of the trolls? We've got, no, Justin Timberlake, do it all. Justin Timberlake, yeah. John Cleese of Kubella. Come on, yeah. You're dating yourself, though. Yeah. That doesn't take much. One look and I'm dated. All right, thanks very much for coming to Kube. Thank you so much. See you guys. All right, keep right there, buddy. We'll be back with our next guest, we're live from Discover 2016 in London. Right back.