 All right, welcome back to the Venetian in Las Vegas. You're watching theCUBE's live coverage of VMware Explorer 2023. I'm Dave Vellante with my co-host, Rob Stretchy. Brian Thompson is here as the vice president of GreenLake Cloud Product Management. Brian, good to see you again. We just feel like we were just here last week. Yeah, a few weeks ago. A whirlwind, yeah. And I was just saying that I think HPE, so far, the only company that has announced LLMs as a service. So it's kind of forward thinking. I've asked a number of companies, when are we going to have it there? Like, let's get through the summer first, you know, figuring out, so that's pretty good move, brave move by you guys. I think forward looking, you have some advantages there, obviously, with your HPC chops. And it was good to see you again. Yeah, good to see you guys. So what's been the uptake, the momentum post discover? We had all the announcements. I know you're working hard to hit all those promised deadlines. Yeah. But what's been the customer reaction? And you haven't taken the summer off, have you? Yeah, no, definitely not. I think discover was just kind of the beginning, right of the never ending growth in velocity that we're seeing spin largely in GreenLake. You know, a lot of the messaging that kind of came out, releasing new offerings, AI and the LLMs support, and things that were providing there were of course a key part of this. But even things were here this week, here at the VMware Explorer as well, things like our HP GreenLake for VMware VCF as a new solution. And we're starting to build more and more momentum there. Just overall adoption of GreenLake has continued to really take off. Yeah, so you announced VCF support at Discover, right? And then, so the big announcement here is private AI and it starts to come into focus where we built our power law, right? We have a few very large models. I think the vertical axis was size of model. The horizontal axis was model specificity. And you guys are going to play in that long tail. Your customer's going to take that and apply it in a lot of different places. And that model seems to be playing out, but what do you make of all that sort of AI discussion specifically as it relates to how customers are thinking about whether it's private infrastructure or public infrastructure, it seems to be split. Is that what you're hearing? Yeah, it's almost like workload placement, right? Just choosing those workloads and where they're going to leverage the right solutions. We've seen this even above the LLM work that we're doing, the new, from a hardware perspective, right? New, ProLiant, or Gen11 servers with different NVIDIA GPU support, and some of those joint solutions are kind of key for private solutions delivering that, right? Whether it's kind of a generative AI workloads for video creation, content creation, video analytics type services, or even some like natural language support and speech recognition, some of those different solutions. We've seen those optimized surface areas now in the hardware perspective, and now we look at the announcements here this week with the private AI as a logical progression building on VCF as that foundation. Yeah, I mean, VMware, I don't know if it's public, but they gave some data points in the analyst because I won't give the exact data points, but they have a big cloud business and it's growing fast. And obviously you guys are a huge part of that. So we've, we're not repatriates, I've said, okay, but there's very clearly a trend we're reaching some kind of balance or an equilibrium, VMware calls it cloud smart, you guys obviously have been in hybrid cloud forever. Antonio loves to brag on the fact that he was first to come up with that trend, but he was right. And then it's coming true, that balance, and it seems to be reaching sort of a stable state. Why did you agree with that? Why do you see that happening in the marketplace? Yeah, I 100%, I think we see that too. It's kind of like the predictions of 10 years ago, everyone will be in public cloud. And then even now the opposite rotation of like, oh, everybody's going to repatriate back. That's not true either. It's really, how do I find the optimal surface area to run depending on workload, right? There are a number of use cases and scenarios where businesses are finding running in on-prem is more cost effective. You of course have the security, geo-compliance, any of those concerns at times, but really it comes down to, what's my total cost to deliver this? What's the agility I'm achieving? So we see that balance and that true hybrid cloud experience of workload placement and leveraging the right tool for the right job. Yeah, so how do you see the ecosystem expanding? Because I think, again, having been at HPE myself, HPE and HPE back in the day, I've always been an OEM of VMware's from way back. In fact, one of the most successful OEMs, even outside of Dell, owning them from that. How do you see the relationship in the ecosystem? And specifically, I mean, you guys announced VCF and a couple others as well, other solutions around the VMware family. It would seem that you guys are really working together and has that accelerated since the extraction from Dell and they've gone out of there? Yeah, I mean, HPE's been a partner of VMware for 22 years. If you think about the history of joint innovation up to and including during that time, they were owned by Dell. It's just it's a core platform technology that's consumed by a broad swath of customers. We have rich heritage and expertise, optimizing architectures, hardware solutions to deliver that service. If we look at the evolution and adoption of GreenLake where we augment this, right? So it's not just about kind of a reference architecture and best practices to deploy, but how do I deliver a service experience and software lifecycle management and augmenting services that really deliver that solution? That's been core. And I think of that joint innovation and working closely together as product and engineering teams, focusing on customer outcomes has been a big part of this too. So it's, I think it's been a strong relationship and we see that just continue to grow. And in part of what you're bringing to this with GreenLake is kind of a cloud operating model, right? So that's actually one of the biggest pivots too, right? We get that question all the time is, what is GreenLake? It's really that IT as a service consumption model. How do I deliver these solutions in a consumption experience, right? So rate card driven unit of measure, but I'm able to get that agility of almost public cloud hyperscaler type of experience where I have that elasticity on demand. I'm not locked into the step function of pre-provisioning or the cost associated with that, investing ahead of consumption. So it really has worked well and it's been game changing for a lot of organizations consuming these technologies in more of that as a service motion. What are you finding customers preference today? I thought when you guys announced GreenLake, I'm like, fantastic. It was one of my about time moments kind of like V-SAN, you know, disaggregating, but it's hard to come up with that cloud operating model and make it substantially identical. But what are you finding? I assumed it was going to be give me managed services, but it seems like some customers want to still get their hands dirty. What are you seeing in terms of that next? No, it seems very true. That's why GreenLake isn't just one thing. It's really a portfolio of services because we see that same spectrum. There are customers that are looking for that fully managed, give me the interfaces and enable my end users all the way through. I actually still want to operate it, but I want to leverage certain levels of best practices or certainly that consumption model. So even like the VCF Cloud Foundry solution or Cloud Foundation solution, I'm going back to pivotal days. This is kind of that common piece too, right? Where we think about those layers of services and that demarcation of responsibility where we take on the burden of software lifecycle management, monitoring of the underlying infrastructure, but the customer retains full control over that management domain, certainly into the data plane and their workloads. It's kind of that right mix that we see a lot of ask for and demand. We take on that complexity of the underlying piece, but give them still full control and they retain that management configuration support. Beyond is sort of some of the Dell ownership stuff that Rob was talking about. How has GreenLake affected the way in which you think about ecosystems? Because GreenLake is essentially a cloud. The hallmark of a cloud is a robust ecosystem. It's not just infrastructure partners or technology suppliers. You're a cloud provider now in a sense. So how has it changed the way you think about evolving the ecosystem? I think it still comes down to a lot of what are the consumable solutions available via the platform? But I think it also pivots in that cloud operating model to things that are more evergreen in nature. It's not about this version, this instance, this point in time. It's a set of capabilities. It's a platform that continues to evolve, expand, mature, and add capabilities, which is a different model. It's a different way that we've approached a lot of the solutions that we've enabled via GreenLake to be more of that evergreen cloud type of service. So when you say evergreen, you mean an infrastructure layer that is something that somebody can tap for new apps or you're talking about sort of new customers? Yeah, I think this way is historically, and you might have a solution where I provide you a generation of hardware with a version of software and you're off and running. And 18 months into that, you want to upgrade or there's a new piece that kind of comes into that. That's still a step function that goes with it. A lot of where we're pivoting a lot of these cloud solutions and services moves into I'm consuming a service from HPE. Today it's delivered on this version of hardware and this version of software, but at the end of the day, I start to become abstracted from that. And it's just constantly maintained and updated and growing. I'm getting new capacity when I need it and new capabilities as they roll out. And I've bought into that ecosystem, not a bespoke kind of point-in-time solution. How do you see GreenLake in the context of, obviously VMware is talking about a lot about multi-cloud across cloud services. You might know kind of a super cloud cheerleader, but super cloud is an architectural concept. It's not a product that you buy. And I often wonder, because people don't wake up in the morning and say, oh, I need a super cloud. No, that's not what it's about. But how much pain do you see in the multi-cloud world? First question. Second part of the question is, very strong hybrid story. How much of an opportunity do you see when you talk to customers of that cross-cloud simplicity story? I think that's key to all of the kind of hybrid cloud constructs is because every organization inherently wants that capability. Let me deploy the workloads where it needs to make sense. But now I have the complexity of different tool chain, different management consoles. I have inconsistent ways in which I deliver and operate those. I don't have the same kind of cloud FinOps model on how do I understand this space? So I think more and more as we think about a GreenLake, being that enabler from edge to core to cloud, how do we provide consistency or commonality? Starting with just portability of workloads, interoperability where appropriate, but how do we make it easy for customers to enable that experience, right? Whether it's things like, we announced support for EKS anywhere and that simple connecting my private cloud to AWS at Discover, same things that we've done with things like deploying in Equinex and enabling their fabric to easily connect to my public cloud instances and bring that into private cloud. I think we look more and more for those opportunities to enable that experience for customers because they all face that challenge. So in the context of edge, I mean, I get, like if you have a big box store, like Lowe's or Home Depot, I get that it's kind of a smaller data center model that's a cleaner edge. When you think of the far edge, you know, windmills is my favorite example, you know, factories, et cetera. How do you think about that opportunity? Is it a skinny down version of your stack? Or something completely different? Yeah. So I think that that's actually the next frontier that we're really tackling now, working with customer challenges, whether it's because the use cases are different, right? Retail is very different than manufacturing or edge branch locations. What are the capabilities I need to extend? What is my tether? Can I be fully disconnected? Do I need to be tied to it? But it starts with kind of very small form factor. How do I provide the density for the compute and storage power that I needed those edge? We've been working to deliver things like zero touch provisioning. If I'm deploying to thousands of locations, I can't have the expensive engineers go to plumb this up, right? So both through our work with VMware, as well as solutions that we've announced and been working on edge capabilities of delivering cloud services to those edge capabilities and leveraging those small form factors. And no truck rolls. Yeah. Yeah. And I think that also, and going back to kind of cloud smart, and there's been a couple of different, we've talked to a couple of people who are using the cloud smart and cloud dash smart, the VMware term, how does what you're doing with GreenLake really apply back to that with VCF and what they're doing? And it's almost right cloud, right time. Yeah. And I think cloud, I don't think of cloud as just the hyperscalers. I mean, again, I think private public is all the same thing at this point. It's just cloud. Yeah. And is that how you guys are seeing that as well and how you're leaning in on it? Yeah, that's absolutely because those core tenants of cloud, not just public cloud, but how am I enabling self-service, elasticity, consumption-based, scale up, scale down. Those same paradigms were applying certainly to core, but now even to edge capabilities, right? So how do I deliver that same experience, the same capabilities, but where I'm now leveraging the density and power of compute that I can provide at the edge in a smaller form factor, right? You think about the density of cores, storage that we can provide in those solutions, even GPU support in those edge locations, doing AI services at the edge, video analysis for shoplifting or, yeah, a lot of this stuff that you can really start to leverage through that power, that's where we're seeing a lot of traction and growth. So Brian, this show for VMware is, you know, big themes, Broadcom, Multi-Cloud, AI. Yeah. What are the sort of big themes for HPE? Coming out of Discover, we kind of build on that, right? Certainly, AI is a key theme for everyone. And we look at it not even just with the large LLM support and things that we announced, but even in those hardware optimized surface areas in different ways in which we can deliver that for private AI consumption. I think the innovation with VMware, as we announced our HP GreenLake 4 VMware Cloud Foundation, this is a logical extension to move in and supporting that as well with those HPC form factors that we deliver today. We think about other things that are really tied, if you think about what HP's really recently announced, again, it feels like we were just here together, around that hybrid experience, right? The work that we've been doing with AWS and where we extend things like our Azure Stack solution, working with other hyperscalers. This is the common solutions that we're looking to solve for for customers, right? Brian Thompson, thanks so much for coming back in theCUBE. Great to see you again. So what feels like so soon. And I think you guys got cool stuff going on in the rest of the year. I presume you're going to be at the VMware Explore Barcelona. You guys got your own thing going on. So big second half. Yeah, looking forward to, we'll see you guys again soon. All right, thank you. All right, keep it right there, Rob Scratchey, Dave Vellante, John Furrier and Lisa Martin are in the house. You're watching theCUBE's coverage of VMware Explore 2023. We're live, we'll move right back.