 Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE. Covering VMworld 2017, brought to you by VMware and its ecosystem partner. Welcome back to VMworld. We are live on theCUBE day two of our continuing coverage here. We've had a great day and a half so far. I'm Lisa Martin with my co-host Keith Townsend. We're excited to be joined by two guests from HPE who are new to theCUBE. We have Leslie Mahur, the VP of North American Enterprise Server and Converged Systems. Welcome to theCUBE. Thank you. And Satya Bhartharajan, Senior Director of Strategic Alliances from HPE. Welcome to you as well. Well, thank you, Lisa. Thanks for being inviting us here. Absolutely. So guys, let's talk to each of you. Leslie, we'll start with you. Tell us about your role in, especially on the Converged side for HPE and what you're doing with VMware. Great. So my role at HPE is I'm responsible for our Enterprise Servers and Converged Systems. And what that means is really our value products. So couple of my key responsibilities. One is our HPE Synergy Composable Infrastructure that I'm sure you've probably heard people talk about here at the event. And then we also have Converged products around offerings like SAP HANA and some of the more mission critical servers. So here a lot of the focus has been on Synergy and our relationship once with VMware but also solutions around VSAN and Navi Cloud Foundation, where Synergy provides some really unique capabilities. Yes. And so Tia, tell us about your role in alliances and your kind of GTM strategy with VMware. Sure. So I manage the VMware Alliance globally at Hewlett Packard Enterprise. And this is a very strategic relationship for HPE. We have a long history with VMware over 15 years. We've had a great run with VMware and we continue to innovate every day. So my role at HPE is to make sure that we keep the customer trends in our radar as we co-partner and innovate together with VMware. And at VMworld 2017, we've got lots of great exciting announcements and we're more than happy to share with them as we get through the discussion today. Fantastic. So a big question around Converged systems. You know, hyperconverged, you guys will have the hyperconverged guys on shortly. Sure. Converged systems has kind of gotten the bad rap over the past couple of years. Like, oh, that's the legacy. But as you mentioned, SAP HANA systems, what's the relationship between Converged systems and VMware? Well, so to your point, about seven years ago, the industry tried to simplify IT operations by doing Converged systems. And that was just putting together servers, storage and networking fabric and putting it all together for our customers. Where the industries move to now as more software-defined capabilities. We're not just putting those hardware pieces together but enabling them through software. And so hyperconverged is one flavor of that and we're hearing a lot about that here in the conference. And then at HPE, what we did is we innovated around the best of Converged and hyperconverged and put them together into a new category of infrastructure called Composable. So fully software-defined, it does compute, storage and fabric. And the essential idea here is that you can have any combination of these elements through a software-defined capability and so it really extends the ability of hyperconverged to multiple workloads. So we use this term Composable infrastructure in addition to supporting, through other products we have, hyperconverged. So that's where we're seeing the market trend. So Leslie, that's a unique concept, this Composable concept. It sounds a lot like virtualization. How does the two relate to it? Can I run virtualization on top of these synergy systems? Great question. So absolutely, in fact, one of the key things with hyperconverged or Composable is the ability to really have virtualized workloads. But in addition to that, with our Composable infrastructure, we let you also run bare metal as well as containerized workloads. So you have a real range of workloads you can run in one set of infrastructure and so we can support lots of workloads, different kinds of storage in the environment and fabric so you have a real range of opportunity. So let's talk a little bit about Composable and your target market. What is the key message? A lot of, it sounds like flexibility and agility within the technology. What's the key message to your VMware, customers that are using VMware software? So with customers that are using VMware software, it is, it's a flexibility. So for example, with Visan, we've talked a lot about here at the conference, our relationship with VMware. And Visan is the ability to have software-defined storage and what our HPE offerings allow you to do is to have the ability to scale, compute and storage independently. So giving you this very flexible environment to grow your capacity and then you manage it with this virtualized Visan software-defined storage from VMware and so very simple for our customers to really have, you know, simple operations and really flexible scale is what these new applications are requiring. So as you guys have been talking to both from a VMware and HPE perspective to customers, how have they been receiving this message? Look, from a customer standpoint, it's very clear. They need to move to the hybrid IT model and that's their, that's kind of the mandate that's coming and they see it on the horizon. But they also want to do it in a very cost-effective manner. They want to do it in a very scalable, efficient and automated manner. And that's when customers look to HPE and VMware to solve the problem for them. And that's where our, you know, flagship composable platform synergy comes into play. Marrying the benefits of synergy with VMware's cloud foundation software which is again a very seamless and automated way of consuming a software-defined stack. You bring those two together. What you get is industry's first composable platform that lets you set up your private cloud in less than minutes but also gives you the ability to allocate and reallocate again, compute, storage and networking resources independent of each other at well, creating this very flexible platform for traditional workloads, cloud-native workloads, private cloud workloads. So that's what we're hearing from the customers. They want us to step in, solve this problem but also give them the visibility on top. We were at a partner panel earlier today and one of the partners got up and said, look, this is all fantastic. Look, you're making the right moves, you're building the right solutions for us but help us understand how are you going to build that Uber layer of visibility and more detailed predictive analytics to help us get the whole picture because I don't want to use third-party tools. And those are the frontiers that HP and VMware will continue to work on together and create new solutions for our customers. So one of the things this morning that Michael Dell mentioned when he was on stage with Pat Gelsinger was that Dell EMC and VMware, like peanut butter and chocolate, such a good combination. That's lovely. So one year post combination, right? How has that strengthened the HP VMware partnership with this now umbrella under Dell Technologies in the last minute or so talk to us about how that's helped you maybe differentiate? Yeah, absolutely. Look, right from the beginning, as soon as the acquisition was announced, there was a lot of skepticism and that was industry-wide. Everybody said, hey, how is this going to impact the rest of the ecosystem? VMware made it a point, and Michael as well made it a point to come out outright and say, look, we don't want to mess with the ecosystem. The neutrality is very important to us to make and VMware not only thrive, survive all of the above, right? So we've seen that in the market. We don't see any material change in the relationship with VMware. Just a few proof points I want to throw out there. We are still the largest OEM for VMware from a product perspective. We have over 500,000 customers together who make demands on running workloads. Our channel overlap is over 80%. And all of this continues to be recognized. We won a lot of awards in the past, but the last two years, we won the OEM Innovation Award of the Year, Partner of the Year Award from VMware. I saw that, I think I may have seen a photo with you. Yeah. To talk about synergy pun intended, it sounds like it's only strengthening. Yeah, so it is strengthening because we took it upon ourselves at HP as a challenge to say, hey, look, I know there's a new owner, but this shouldn't have materially changed your business because there's so much business at stake. And we cannot ignore the customers. The demand for our products is joined products is stronger than ever. Absolutely. Great, you guys. Thank you so much for coming on and sharing what's new, what's going on, and the commitment to customers outstanding. Leslie, Satya, thank you so much. You're now in the category of CUBE alumni. All right, thank you so much. Thanks for having us here. Thank you for having me back. Thank you. And for my co-host, Keith Townsend, I'm Lisa Martin. You've been watching live continuing coverage by the CUBE of VMworld. 2017 day two, stick around, we'll be right back.