 From around the globe, it's theCUBE with digital coverage of Workplace Next, made possible by Hewlett Packard Enterprise. Hello everyone, we're here covering Workplace Next on theCUBE. For years, you know, we've talked about new ways to work and it was a great thought exercise and then overnight the pandemic heightened the challenges of creating an effective workforce. Most of the executives that we talked to in our survey say that productivity actually has improved since the work from home mandate was initiative, but you know, we're talking not just about productivity, but the well-being of our associates and managing the unknown, and we're gonna shift gears a little bit now. We've heard some interesting real-world examples of how organizations are dealing with the rapid change in workplace, and we've heard about some lessons to take into the future, but now we're gonna get more practical and look at some of the tools that are available to help you navigate the changes that we've been discussing and with me to talk about these trends related to the future of work are Arwar Kedora, who's the Vice President of Worldwide Sales and go to market for Green Lake at HPE. Sadat Malik is the VP of IoT and Intelligent Edge at HPE and Satish Yadavalli is the Global Cloud and Infrastructure Practice Head at Wipro. Guys, welcome, it's good to see you. Thanks for coming on. Thanks for having us. You're very welcome. Let me start with Sadat. You're coming from Austin, Texas here, so thank you. Stay crazy, as they say in Austin. For the uninitiated, maybe you could talk a little bit about HPE Pointnext. It's a strategic component of HPE and maybe tell us a little bit about those services. Dave, thank you so much for taking the time today. Appreciate everybody's participation here. So absolutely, so Pointnext is HPE Services Arm. This is a 23,000 strong organization globally spread out and we have a very strong ecosystem of partners that we leverage to deliver services to our customers. Our organization differentiates itself in the market by focusing on digital transformation journeys for our customers. If a customer is looking to move to a different way of engaging with its customers, transforming the way its employees work, figuring out a different way of producing the products that it sells to its customers, or changing the way it operationalizes things. For example, moving to the cloud, moving to a hybrid model, we help them achieve any of these four transformation outcomes. So Pointnext's job is to point to what is next in this digital transformation journey and then partner with our customers to make that happen. So that's what we do. Thank you for that. I mean, obviously you're going to be seeing a lot of activity around workplace with the shift from work from home, changes in the network, changes in security. I mean, the whole deal. What are some of your top takeaways that you can share with our audience? Yeah, there's a lot has been happening in the workplace arena lately. So this is not new, right? This is not something that all of a sudden started happening when COVID-19 hit. The digital workplace was already transforming before COVID-19 happened. What COVID-19 has done is that it has massively accelerated the pace at which this change was happening. So for example, right? Remote work was already there before COVID-19 hit, but now everybody's working remotely. So in a many ways, the solutions that we have for remote work, they have been strained to a point never seen before. Networks that support these remote work environments have been pushed to their limits. Security was already there, right? So security was a critical piece of any of the thinking, any of the frameworks that we had, but now security is pivotal and central to any discussion that we're having about the workplace environment. Data is being generated all across the, all across the environment that we operate in, right? So it's no longer being generated in one place, being stored in another, it's all over the place now. So what COVID-19 has done is that the transformation that was already underway in the digital workplace, it has taken that and accelerated it massively. The key takeaway for me is, right? That we have to make sure that when we are working with our customers, our clients, we don't just look at the technology aspect of things, we have to look at all the other aspects as well, the people and the process aspects of this environment. It is critical that we don't assume that just because the technology is there to address these challenges that I just mentioned, our people and our processes would be able to handle that as well. We need to bring everybody along, everybody has different needs and we need to be able to cater to those needs effectively. So that's my biggest takeaway. Make sure that the process and the people aspect of things goes hand in glove with the technology that we are able to bring to bear here. Got it, thank you. So Arwa, let's go to San Francisco and bring in Arwa to the conversation. You're one of the areas of focus is HPE GreenLake. You guys are early on with the as a service model. Clearly we've seen more interest in cloud and cloud-like models. I wonder if you could just start by sharing what's GreenLake all about? Where does it fit into this whole workplace next conversation that we're having? Yeah, absolutely. HPE GreenLake effectively is the cloud that comes to your data center, to your colo or to your edge, right? We saw with public cloud, the public cloud brought a ton of innovations into the sort of hyperscale model. Now with HPE, what we've done is we've said, look, customers need this level of innovation and this level of pay as you go economics, the management layer, the automation layer, not just in a public cloud environment, but also in our customer's data center or to the other potential edges or colo scenarios. And what we've done is we've brought together, as Sada just mentioned, the best of our point next services, our software management layer, as well as HPE's rich portfolio of hardware to come together to create that cloud experience. Of course, we can't do this without the rich ecosystem around us as well. And so everything from, you know, some of our big SI partners like Wipro, who also have the virtual desktop expertise or virtual desk that then come together to start helping us launch some of these new workloads supported cloud services such as VDI. So from my perspective, VDI is the most important topic for a lot of our customers right now, especially in sectors like financial services, advanced engineering scenarios and healthcare, where they need access to their data centers in a very secure way and in a highly cost optimized way as well. Well, okay, thank you. And then let's bring in Satish and talk a little bit about the ecosystem. I mean, Wipro, that's really kind of your wheelhouse. We've been talking a lot on theCUBE about moving from an industry of point products to platforms and now ecosystem innovation. ROR mentioned VDI, we saw that exploding. Satish, maybe you could weigh in here and share with us what you're seeing in the market and specifically around ecosystem. As we all know, the pandemic has redefined the way we collaborate. To support this collaboration, we have set up huge campuses and office infrastructure. In summary, our industry has centralized approach. Now the very premise of the centralization, bringing people together for work has changed. These evolving workspace dynamics have triggered the urgency to reimagine the workspace strategy. CEOs, CIOs and CHROs are all coming together to redefine the business process and find new ways of engaging with customers and employees. As organizations embrace work from home for the foreseeable future, customers need to create secure by design workspaces for remote working environments. With Wipro Virtual Desk platform, we can help create such seamless digital workspaces and enable customers to connect, collaborate and communicate with ease from anywhere, securely with a consistent user experience. Through this platform-led approach, we are able to address the market demands which are focused on business outcomes. Okay, and this is the specifics of this hard news. You're talking about NVIDIA and Citrix coming together with your ecosystem, HPE, Wipro, and again, the many partners that you work with. Is that correct? Well, actually, Dave, we see a strong play of ecosystem partners coming together to achieve transformative business outcomes. As Arva said earlier, HPE and Wipro have long-standing partnership and today's announcement around HPE GreenLake is an extension of this collaboration where Wipro will leverage HPE GreenLake and Wipro Virtual Desk platform to offer VDI as a service in a paper user model. Our aim is to enable customers to fast-track their digital workspace transformation efforts by eliminating the need to support upfront capital investments and over-provisioning costs while allowing customers to enjoy the benefit of on-premise control, security, and compliance. Together, we have implemented our solution across various industry segments and deliver exceptional customer experiences by helping customer businesses in their workspace transformation journeys by defining their workspace strategy with an intelligent platform-led approach that enables responsiveness, scalability, and resilience. It's known that Wipro is recognized as a global leader in the digital workspace and VDI. With HPE being a technology leader enabling us with high level of programmability and integration capabilities, we see tremendous potential to jointly address the industry challenges as we move forward. Excellent. Sada, I want to come back to you. We talk a lot about the digital business, the mandate for digital business, especially with the pandemic. Let's talk about data. Earlier this year, HPE announced the number of solutions that use data to help organizations work more productively, safely, the gamut. Talk about data and the importance of data and what you guys are doing there specifically. Yeah, that's a great question. So data is fundamental to everything that we are doing in the workplace arena, right? So from a technology perspective, data provides us with the wherewithal to be able to make all the changes that we want to make happen for the people in the process side of things. So the journey that we've been on this past year is a very interesting one. Let me share with the audience a little bit of what's been going on. On the ground with our customers, what's been happening in the field. So when COVID-19 hit, right, a lot of our customers were subjected to these shutdowns which were very pervasive. And they had to stop their operations. In many cases, they had to send their employees home. So at that point, HPE stepped in the Pointnext organization, stepped in and helped these customers set up remote work options which allowed them to keep their businesses going while they handle these shutdowns. Fast forward six months and the shutdown were starting to get lifted. And our customers were coming back to us and saying to us that, hey, we would now like to get at least a portion of our workforce back to the normal place of work. But we're concerned that if we do that, it's going to jeopardize their safety because of the infection concerns that were there. So what we did was that we built a series of five solutions using various types of video analytics and data analysis technologies that allowed these customers to make that move. So these five solutions, let me walk our customers and our clients and audience through those. The first two of these solutions are touchless entry and fever detection. So this is the access control of your premise, right? So to make sure that whoever is entering the building does so in a safe manner and if there's any infection concern, we stop it at the very get go. Once the employees are inside the workplace, the next thing that we have is a set of two solutions. One is social distance tracing and tracking. And the other one is workplace alerting. What these two solutions do is that they use video analytics and data technologies to figure out if there is a concern with employees adhering to the various guidelines that are in place and alerting the employees and the employers if there is any infringement happening which could risk the overall environment. Finally, we realized that irrespective of how much technology and process we put in place, not everybody will be able to come in to the normal place of work. So what we have done is that the fifth solution that we have is augmented reality and visual remote guidance. This solution uses AR technologies to allow people who are on site to take advantage of the expertise that resides off site to undertake complex tasks, tasks which could be as complex as overhauling a machine on a factory floor using augmented reality where somebody off site who's an expert in that machine is helping somebody on site. Data has become central to a lot of the things that we do. But as I said, technology is one aspect of things. Ultimately, the people process technology continuum has to come together to make these solutions real for our customers. Thank you. Arwa, we just have just about 30 seconds left and I wonder if you could close on, we're talking about cloud, hybrid. Everybody's talking about hybrid. We're talking about the hybrid workplace. What do you see for the future over the next two, three, four, five years? Absolutely. And I think you're right, Dave. It is a hybrid world. It's a multi-cloud world. Ultimately, what our customers want is the choice and the flexibility to bring in the capabilities that drive the business outcomes that they need to support. And that has multiple dimensions. It's making sure that they are minimizing their egress costs and many of our on-prem solutions do give them that flexibility. It is the pay-per-use economics that we talked about. It is about our collective capability as an ecosystem to come together with Citrix and NVIDIA, with our SI partner, Wipro and the rich heritage of HPE's services as well as hardware to bring together these solutions that are fully managed on behalf of our customers so that they can focus their staff, their IT capabilities on the products and services they need to deliver to their customers. Awesome, guys. I wish we had more time. We got to go. Dave Vellante for theCUBE. Keep it right there. Lots of great more content coming your way.