 Live from Madrid, Spain. It's theCUBE, covering HPE Discover Madrid 2017. Brought to you by Hewlett Packard Enterprise. Welcome back to HPE Discover 2017 in Madrid. This is theCUBE, the leader in live tech coverage. My name is Dave Vellante. I'm here to wrap with my co-host Peter Burris. Hey Dave. Good couple of days. Hey, you know what I just discovered? I discovered theCUBE is the antidote to jet lag. Yeah. That's right, when you get interesting people on. Oh man. It pumps you up. Totally, just unbelievable, exciting. And it's all framed by, well, let's start where we talked about yesterday. We proposed that, increasing what we're seeing in the industry is the new model of computing being established by Amazon and then the other pole, where it was known, we know that it's not all going to be one cloud, it's not all going to be a central cloud model or a centralized cloud model. There's going to be other places where data is going to need to be processed. Well, that's what we believe. That's what we believe. And there's physics behind that statement. There's legal regulations about data residency behind that statement. But we didn't know who was going to step up and lead that other side. And it's nice to see this conference indicate that HPE is in a position to help demonstrate or help show the industry how cloud truly can go from centralized down to the edge. Yeah, and I think, as I said a number of times, the strategy's coming into focus. You can debate it. You can say, well, splitting it up was the wrong thing to do. They lost their supply chain, but Meg's argument and Antonio's argument always was, look, we're going to be more focused. It's going to allow us to do better job for our customers. Yes, we're going to be services led. They didn't say this, our margins are going to be lower. We don't have software anymore, but that's okay. We can learn how to make money at that. And you know, the old HPE went through a similar transition and kind of got out of the HPEX business and got out of building its own OS and relying more on Microsoft and Intel. And it made a lot of money in those days. Did well. Did very well. It didn't invest under the herd regime the way it could ever, should have. And that hurt. And then it spun out and made a lot of missteps. But Meg, to her credit, didn't make a lot of missteps. You know, there was the initial entrance into the public cloud. They pulled back fast. They failed fast on that. Good. Yeah, maybe there were some organizational issues early on. But in general, the acquisitions have been solid. The strategy. And well integrated. And well integrated. Absolutely. We've gotten value out of them. The strategy has been, you know, I think clear internally. It wasn't always clear externally, but they stayed calm about that. They didn't freak out about that. Helped that the stock price was going up a little bit. You know, because it was pretty depressed for a while. And shareholders weren't in constant revolt like they were for many years. That's right. And so that gave them a little bit of time to bring it all together. Look, it's finally here. And I think Meg is stepping down at absolutely the right time. Or at a, she's stepping down at a good time. She's leaving a company that is much stronger than it was when she took it over. And that's what you want. You know, look, one of the most things I'm personally proud of when I left IDC was a really good shape when I left. It wasn't a mess that I handed to somebody else. I had a lot of messes at IDC that I turned around as you well know. And so I think I feel as though the company's in good shape and good hands. And again, I think the, you know, I don't know if you're a stock analyst or if you're pounding a table saying buy this stock because it is a relatively low margin business and there's a lot of competition. There's knife fights out there. It's not a high growth business. But on the flip side, it's clean. It throws off a lot of cash. They got a decent balance sheet and the customers love them. And that's the most important thing. It's the customers. Look, disclosure, I actually, I actually did a significant consulting stint here at HPE right around the time of the compact acquisition and I saw what happened. And for many years, the senior management team of HP behaved as though they presumed that scale was its own reward. If we get bigger, we'll find efficiencies. We'll find opportunities. Just being big is the objective. And I think that they have wandered in the desert trying to find those opportunities that were the consequence of just being big and they never materialized. They weren't there. They never, it was like, it was like, you know, mirages on the horizon. They never materialized. And I think if there's anything to your point that Meg has successfully done that she's gotten the company to say, don't chase the mirages, chase the customer. Let's come back to what made HP great for so long. And the idea that if we stay focusing the customer and focus on technology, we can put them together in unique and interesting ways that will bind us to what customers are doing. And if you take a look at this event and the new messaging and the things that they're focusing on, it feels like to me that HP is no longer wandering in the desert. You and I are smart guys. We are, typically we can look at a company and we can see whether or not they know what they're doing. And when you said, well, you know what? Maybe they had it all figured out inside and the rest of us couldn't see it. No, that's not the case. It was not figured out inside and that's what we saw. But under Meg, it has become increasingly more figured out. And the consequence of that, and it's been very, very planful. She, you know, first it was figured out and then she told Wall Street and Wall Street was happy with the numbers and then she figured out and she started talking to customers and customers were there and now she's figuring it out and she's telling the broader marketplace. Well, and when she stopped by- And Antonio's got a big, great story to tell. And both of those guys stopped by to see us. Meg spent 10 minutes with us. Just we were chatting here on the open mics and she was very good. Meg, one-on-one situation and a small crowd is phenomenal. I've always said that about Meg. Not the greatest presence, you know, on stage, you know, not a super dynamic, you know, speaker. She's not a Steve Jobs, obviously nobody is. But man, is she credible in a one-on-one situation? One of the things she said to us was, you know, we kind of got lucky, in my words, with Aruba. We bought him because we thought we could compete with Cisco better. We bought him obviously because it was a great business, a growth business and boom, all of a sudden this intelligent edge thing hit. You know, you sprinkle in a little Dr. Tom Bradichich and boom, off you go. And you've got a, not only a great business, you've got something that is becoming increasingly strategic for organizations. Great example, I mean the Nimble acquisition. You know, we heard yesterday Bill Philbin talking about, well, you know, when we got Nimble, was it Bill Philbin? No, it was somebody else today. It was Alan, Andrea Lee. He said, we picked up Nimble because it was a great, you know, flash company, but then we saw this insight thing. We said, wow, we can spread this thing across our entire portfolio. That's where- And the example he gave was, in six months, it's now running on- On three par. And then, you know, it's going to run, his goal is, he said, I'm not committing to this, but my goal is by the end of next year it's going to be running across the entire- Portfolio. Server and storage and networking line. That would be a major accomplishment. You know, if in fact, I mean, we'll see how much of this stuff is actually impactful to the business, how much it can actually save money, how, you know, anticipate failures. I don't know. You know, we'll see. I mean, it's AI. It's a perfect application. You guys have written a lot on the Wikibon team about AI for ITOM. Oh yeah, we look- And this is a good example. I'm not the kind of guy, as you know, that gets all excited about technology for technology's sake. I like thinking about technology and how it's going to be applied and what problems it's going to be solved. And so, as we in Wikibon started running around and getting all excited about AI, my challenge to the guys was, we'll show me the two concrete cases where it's going to have a material business impact. And one of the most important cases is, it's going to have a material business impact in how IT runs itself. Because you cannot, IT cannot reduce the number of people that it's got and take on these increasingly complex application problems and portfolios unless they get a lot of help. And the best, most likely source of that help is by bringing a lot of these new AI technologies that are capable of taking concrete, real-time action in response to what's happening within the infrastructure and the applications at any given time. Yeah, now a couple other things, just observations. Anna Pinsirk came on, great leader, woman in tech, big proponent of advancing women's causes, especially in tech. She had mixed feelings about Meg stepping down. Obviously you have a woman leader. I thought her comments there were quite interesting. But she said, but I am up for the challenge to continue the mission, which leads me to Antonio. Antonio is outwardly a humble guy. I mean, he may have a big ego. I don't know, he's been on theCUBE a number of times, but he certainly doesn't come across as a guy who's looking to get credit. He's a quiet, but very competent leader. He knows the business very well. You know, interesting to see what is the relationship. Homegrown, which is key 22 years at HPE, technology background, not a U.S. Born individual, now living in the U.S., obviously. But somebody with international experience, which has always been an attribute that's valued at HPE. It's going to be interesting to see what his relationship is with Wall Street. Will he be sort of a quiet leader that lets the CFO take front and center, which would be fine? Or will he slowly sort of advance? He's not been sitting on the earnings calls. I'm interested to see how he handles it. Or he may just say, you know what? I'm going to go execute in the business and let the results speak for themselves. So I'm kind of curious as to how that all plays out. It's a big job. It's a big role, as you pointed out, you know, with me the other day. Big role for him, big job for him, you know, serious opportunities to make a mark in the industry. So again, and you raise a really great point. Look, Meg had a very good reputation on Wall Street. The knock on her when she came on was she didn't know customers. Antonio's got a great reputation with customers. You're asking the question, is he going to get to know Wall Street? A great CEO has to be able to take care of customers and owners. He seems, look, this is a, this whole simplification of how they're going to bring cloud technologies to where their data is going to require is apparently, based on what we heard, in large part of Antonio's brainchild. He conceived it, he invested in it, he nurtured it, he took risks for it, you know, he put some skin in the game, and now it's coming to fruition, that's great. And he's got customers lining up behind it. We'll see, this is another place we'll see, but I don't think that there's no reason to suspect, just looking at Antonio and his track record, why Wall Street would abandon him. On the contrary, there's reasons to suspect that he will also be able to, you know, develop that set of skills that Wall Street needs to do their job. But clearly, this is a guy that's going to turn on a lot of customers. Yeah, and as I say, it's going to be interesting to see what his relationship, maybe look at a guy like Frank Slutman, who had a great relationship with Wall Street, I mean, everybody loved him because he just performed, but he's a hard driving, in-your-face kind of guy who developed close relationships, you know, with the street. And, you know, it's going to be, as I say, I'm going to watch that to see how Antonio interacts with them. I think it's important to have a relationship with the street. With your ownership, yeah, he usually is. So, and I think that's the one big question mark here is where has his presence been there, but so we'll watch, and I'm confident he'll step up to that. Okay, let's see, the Cube, next week? CubeCon? Yeah. Next week in Austin, right? So develop it, you'll see the Cube is expanding, you know, way beyond its original infrastructure roots. I mean, obviously HPE Discover, big infrastructure show, but we're at Amazon re-invent this week, you know, it's a big cloud show. You know, we obviously, all the IBM shows are being consolidated into one show called Think, this year, the Cube will be there. But CES is going to be January, you know, we were there last year, likely to be there. Cisco Live is on the radar. We're going to be at Cisco Live, I think both in Barcelona, and most likely in the States this year. So that's another big thing. A lot of developer shows, DockerCon, CubeCon, are working with the Linux Foundation. Developers are really the linchpin. Developers in cloud, really big, big areas of growth. IoT, some IoT conferences that we're going to be doing this year, you know, obviously our big data heritage, we still do a lot of work there. So it's been an unbelievable year. I think 125 shows for the Cube, thecube.net, new website, our new Clipper tool, you see the clips that come out. So a lot of innovation coming out of SiliconANGLE Media. Check out siliconangle.com. Peter, the work that your team is doing on the Wikibon side, wikibon.com, unbelievable amounts of research that you guys are cranking out. Digital business, AI, AI for ITOM stuff that we talked about. Yeah, we still do some stuff in infrastructure, true private cloud, a lot of the cloud work. New computing architectures, memory-based computing architectures. So, fantastic work there. And yeah, so we're looking forward to another great year. Thanks, everybody, for these last two days. Thanks to the crew. Great job, everybody at home. We're out, Dave Vellante for Peter Burris from Madrid. Thanks for watching.