 Live from Madrid, Spain. It's theCUBE, covering HPE Discover Madrid 2017. Brought to you by Hewlett Packard Enterprise. Welcome back to Madrid, everybody. This is theCUBE, the leader in live tech coverage, and this is day two of HPE Discover 2017. I'm Dave Vellante with my co-host, Peter Burris-L.N. Andrioli is here. He's the senior vice president and general manager of the hybrid IT group at HPE. Great to see you again. Great to see you, David. Great to see you, Peter. So a lot of good energy here. The story, Alan, is coming together. We've seen it over the last five years, but really fine-tuned the organization and seems like things are going well. We have more clarity on our strategy that I've ever seen in a company. And this was not easy to do because the market is changing so fast. We are addressing $120 billion market in hybrid IT. We lead the market in compute. We lead the market in storage. We lead the market with private cloud. We have invented composable. We are ramping up our hardware converge offering. And now on top of the infrastructure, we're building this layer of one sphere which is managing a multi-cloud environment for the data. And we adjusting our services to become advisory and consumption models. This is having such an impact on our customers. 74% of our customers are going for hybrid IT journey. So we have organized ourselves to make this journey to be basically the partner of choice for our customers as they go through that. I mean, it's so cloud of the last five, seven years, cloud and open-source software have really disrupted our industry. You've had to respond to that. And basically bringing cloud-like operating models to your customers. Yes. Have you done that? How do you rate your progress and where are you to date in that regard? So, you know, the first decision we had to make is are we a neutral party to help our customers? Yeah. We need to redo it. Yeah, yeah. They're getting you back, right? No, I don't know if you can see that. L.A. came by on his scooter. Here we go. Let's catch this. Here we go. This is called Payback. Okay. So, Terran Dr. Tom's interview. L.A. came by with his scooter. I can't get you out of there. I will get you out of there. I will get you out of there. I will get you out of there. It's great fun of the kid. We can keep it. That's all right. That's good. So, the decision we had to make is are we the partner for our customers to go through the cloud? Or are we saying on-frame is better? And we've decided to be this partner. Because we believe there is value for everyone. And we believe it's not a one-way street. And we see actually that 32% of the customers who have moved workloads to the cloud are bringing these workloads back on-frame. So, we are the advisor. We help them go through this journey. We really mean it. We help them to go on Amazon. We help them to go on Azure. We help them to go on Google. And we help them make it work. And this is why it's a service-led journey. The problem if you go in the public cloud is that we don't really know how much it's going to cost you. And you don't really have a single pane of glass to have all your data being managed across what is now an ecosystem. We enable them to do that. And the market we are directly addressing on-frame is not shrinking. We still see huge pockets of growth in flash storage, in HPC, you've seen the results we have in HPC, in Mission Critical x86, in Hyper Converge. So, we are basically moving from the one-size-fits-all type of organization offering x86 and start-up storage to become a company that offers value to customers in specialized pools of compute, of storage, of networking, and offering them the end-to-end journey across the different stack. What I think is going to make a huge difference, if you look at the five-year horizon, is the growth of the edge. And the fact that 70% of the data are going to come from the edge. And then you really see the power of our strategy of hybrid IT, which goes from the edge, to the core, to the cloud. Because we will be able to enable our customers to have their data moving seamlessly across this journey. And we have exactly organized the company that way. One of the obvious use cases from what I like to call machine intelligence, or artificial intelligence, is really infusing artificial intelligence into infrastructure for predictive analytics and predictive maintenance, IT operations management. InfoSight, you got through an acquisition of Nimble, and they've been impressed with the pace at which you've pushed that throughout the portfolio. I wonder if you could address that. We've been ourselves, I would say, we've been almost surprised. We looked at, we wanted to become the Flash company because we saw that the market over three years would completely move to Flash. And when there is such a pendulum shift, you want to be at the forefront. So we looked at all these companies who were having very strong position on Flash. And Nimble intrigued us because they had, by far, when we talked to their customers, the highest customer satisfaction. I think it was something like 87%. Yeah, the NPS is off the chart. The NPS is off the chart, right? And then we peeled the onion and we saw InfoSight, which was almost enough to start south because it was not part of our list, right? Initially, of our list of, you know, this is how we're going to select the company we want to acquire. And when we got into InfoSight, how it works, how we can actually port easily this to TreePower and then to SimpliVity and then to the rest of the portfolio, we felt, this is the crown jewel that is going to be the foundation of us. And not just the storage portfolio. And to end, so we're going to do this for everything. Now, we're going to do it in one day. The priority was to give a seamless experience to customers going TreePower on Nimble. So we've done that very quickly. We acquired a company six months ago and it's already there for TreePower. Next one will be SimpliVity, very, very soon in a few weeks. And then we'll go to the whole compute platform as well. And finally to networking. I hope, it's not a commitment that, I hope that by the end of next year, calendar year, we will be done for the whole infrastructure portfolio. And explain the benefit to customers. And then the benefit is that you basically have, you eliminate the need for level one and level two support because it's proactively, now, you have to be wanting to have your device calling home, right, because otherwise if you want your device to be in the data center and insulated from communicating with the network effect, then it's not going to work. So, but assuming you want your device to be connected centrally, so that it can be monitored centrally, the artificial intelligence that is embedded in InfoSight is basically going to monitor the behavior of your device compared with hundreds of thousands of other ones. And therefore anything that is deviant will be flagged as a potential problem and resolved before you even know about it. That's one. So when you end up having a problem eventually, which is becoming very, very rare, then you directly call a level three engineer who is an expert and who has on the screen the behavior of your device for the last month compared to others and the resolution is in less than a minute. So it's a revolution in the way to do service. So one of the things that we've observed as we've talked to customers is that the characteristics of the problems that they're now trying to solve have real world elements and that's really what the edge is about in many respects. For the first 50 years of IT, we were doing accounting and HR and supply chain and we were able to define what the data models look like. We could therefore say the data's going to be here, the processing is going to be here, we could build data centers. Now, as you said, 70% of the data is going to be coming from the edge. It's not clear necessarily where the best place to process that data is. Where's the compute going to be? How's it going to integrate with people? In many respects, hybrid IT is about diminishing the degree to which infrastructure dictates the way the problem gets solved. Would you agree with that? It's kind of like, let the data reside where it needs to reside and then make sure that the business has a natural infrastructure that reflects and corresponds to the work that needs to get done. I totally agree with your problems statement and the way you position the equation. In terms of semantics, I would just say we need to make infrastructure invisible. It's still there, because it's all running on infrastructure, your iPhone is infrastructure, your PC is infrastructure, I mean, your camera is infrastructure, it's all there. A CIO said to me not too long ago. We are having this interview, we are not thinking about what makes it happen. Our business is to talk and to communicate right now. This all has got to be seamless and that's how we need to make IT seamless. I had a conversation with the CIO. Invisible. Yeah, who said that the value of my infrastructure is inversely proportional to the degree to which anybody knows anything about it. So is that kind of what the HP promise is? We're going to let the data and the workloads define where the infrastructure goes and ensure we have those options. It's exactly right and the vehicle to do that, we call it autonomous data centers. Your phone is a data center. Your data center is a data center. Your off-prem cloud is a data center that you are subcontracting, right? So we want all of these to be autonomous and autonomous in terms of self-healing and everything else. And then the intelligence of where this data being moved and how you use what and when is this single pane of glass that we are developing around once fair? And how to get the customers to move their workloads and their business around that is what we do with Pointnext with services. This is our strategy. So let me see if I can, let me break that down a little bit. So we've got devices that are powerful enough that we could put new types of control, new types of workloads if we wanted to. We've got now the ability to package infrastructure and have a single pane of glass and have a common management framework. But when you say the Autonomous Data Center, it's we have a common business approach to thinking about policy, thinking about value, thinking about how we're going to do things. And we can put that into this entire vision and let it actually execute how that manifests itself from a business standpoint. But is that that right? It's exactly right. I love the way you put it. That's exactly what we are trying to do. It's not going to be done in one day, but that is our strategy and we have organized once again the whole company around it to execute this strategy and to make it happen for our customers. So if we think about what an HPE customer is going to look like in a really good HPE customer in 2023, what, what time? That's the whole time you're like. That's five years. No, I'm giving you that much runway because it's, you're right, it's not there yet. And if it's too ambitious and so be it, but how is a business person going to think differently about working, about the role that IT is going to play in the business and work what it means to have a great partnership with a company like HP? Yeah, so we are basically we, our motto is one size doesn't fit all. So we are first trying to understand the business of the customer and then we will apply solutions to enhance this business or to empower this business, right? So we have the biggest breath of infrastructure that you can think of, think about this infrastructure becoming self-healing, but this infrastructure is more and more specialized. There is HPC, there is Mission Critical, we just launched Superdome Flex for SAP, there is, we have all this specialization that allows customers to optimize their business outcome. Then we have the single pane of glass that allows everything to seamlessly operate the data, you know, all around. And then our point next services are going to work with the customers to architect their IT model in a way that their workloads are optimized. And one of the key is the right mix. The right mix of, you know, what you do yourself, what you got from multi-cloud, how much do you pay for it? How much do you anticipate that you're going to pay for it? Do you want this to be CAPEX? Do you want this to be OPEX? And then how do you manage the edge? And with Aruba, and with Edgeline, and then with our U IoT platform that can manage the data across the edge. We have the capability also to have the customer decide, do I want a lot of analytics and decisions to be made at the edge in my devices? And this is highly variable depending on what customer business model, you know, we're talking about. Or do I want all the data from the analog world to the sensors to come straight back to the ranch? All these decisions, we going to have platforms to allow customers to make these decisions, to decide kind of templates if you want, this is how I wanted to run and to be executed and then to be automatically, autonomously operating. That's our vision of how we can help our customers moving forward. Last question. So the attendees of Discover, your customers, when they go back and he or she talks to their boss, what do you want them to say about Discover 2018? We, you know, I invested two or three days of my time to come to HP Discover. It was really exciting because I felt that it's like a new company. It's the company I know, I know that they are customer first and customer last and they are the ones who helped me when I have a problem, whether they created it or not, they are here to help me. This is not going away. But they are taking us to the new world. They're going to help us to build our hybrid IT model. And I think we need to trust them to have a seat at the table when we make these decisions, boss. Intimacy, innovation. Yeah, innovation. Trust. HP is no longer wandering in the desert. Alan and really, thanks so much for coming on theCUBE. It was always a pleasure. It was a pleasure. Take care. Keep right there, everybody. Peter and I will be back with our next guest. Right after this short break, we're live from Madrid. You're watching theCUBE.