 We're back at Veeamon2022. My name is Dave Vellante. I'm here with my co-host, David Nicholson. Another Mass Boy coming on. Patrick Osborn is the Vice President of the Storage Business Unit at HPE. Good to see you again, my friend. It's been a long time. Yeah, it's been way too long. Thank you very much. I can't even remember the last time we saw each other. It might have been in our studios in the East Coast. But well, it's good to be here with you. Lost been going on. Of course, we've been following from afar, but give us the update. What's new with HPE? We've done some stuff on GreenLake. We've covered that pretty extensively. And it looks like you got some momentum there. Yeah, quite a bit of momentum, both on the technology front and certainly the customer acquisition front. The message is certainly resonating with our customer. So GreenLake is the transformation that's fueling the future of Hewlett Packard Enterprise. And so the momentum is great. On the technology side, we're at well over 50 services that we're providing on the GreenLake platform. Everything from solutions and workloads to compute, networking, and storage. So it's been really fantastic to see the platform and being able to really delight the customers. And then the momentum on the sales and the customer acquisition side, the customers are voting with their dollars, right? So they're very happy with the platform, certainly from an operational perspective and a financial consumption perspective. And so our target goal, which we've said a bunch of times, is we want to be the hyperscaler on-prem. We want to provide that customer experience to the folks that are investing in the platform. It's going really well. Well, I have a question. As a former analyst, you'd be obnoxious and so forth. So I'll be obnoxious for a minute. I wrote a piece in 2010 called At Your Storage Service, saying the future of storage and infrastructure as a service, blah, blah, blah. Do you feel like now, of course, you don't want to over-rotate when there's no market? There was no market for a green lake in 2010. Do you feel like your timing was right on, a little bit late, a little bit early? Looking back now, how do you feel about that? Well, it's funny you say that on the timing side, we've seen iterations of this stops and start forever. That's true. Financial gimmick. Yeah, I started my career at Sun Microsystems. We talked about the big freaking web-tone switch and the network is the computer. You saw storage networks. You've seen a ton of iterations in this category. And so I think the timing's right right now. Obviously, the folks in the hyperscaler class have proved out that this is something that's working. I think for us, the big thing that's really resonating with the customers is they want the operational model and they want the consumption model that they're getting from the as-a-service experience, but they still are going to run a number of their workloads on-prem and that's the best place to do it for them economically and we've proved that out. So I think the time is here to have that bifurcated experience from an operational and financial perspective. And in the past, the technology wasn't there and the ability to deliver that for the customers in a manner that was useful wasn't there. So I think the timing's perfect right now to provide them. As you know, the Cube has had a presence at HPE Discover. Previous, even HPE Discover and same with Veeam, but we've got a long history with HPE slash HPE. When Hewlett Packard split into two companies and we made the observation, wow, this opens up a whole new ecosystem opportunity for HPE generally and storage business specifically, especially in data protection and backup and the Veeam relationship, like the ink wasn't dry and all of a sudden you guys were partnering, throwing joint activities and so talk about how that relationship has evolved. Yeah, so from my perspective, we've always been a big partnering company both on the route to market side. So our distributors and partners and we work with them and big channel business. And then on the software partnership side, that's always evolving and growing. So we're a very open ecosystem and we like to provide choice for our customers. And I think at the end of the day, we've got a lot of things that we work on jointly. So we have a great value prop first phase of that relationship was partnering, we've got a full boat of product integrations that we do for customers. The second was a lot of special sauce that we do for our customers for co-integration and co-development. We just did, we had a huge session today with Rick Vanover and Federico on our team here to talk about ransomware. So we have big customers suffering from this plague right now and we've done a lot together on the engineering side to provide very, very well engineered, well thought out process to help avoid some of these things. And so that wave two of how do we do a ton of co-innovation together to really delight our customers and help them run their businesses. And I think the evolution of where we're going now, we have a lot of things that are very similar strategically in terms of we all talk about data services and outcomes for our customers. So at the end of the day, when we think about GreenLake, so like our virtual machine backup as a service or disaster recovery, it's all about what workloads you're running, what are the most important ones, what do you need help protecting that data and essentially how can we provide that outcome to you and you pay it as an outcome, right? And so we have a lot of things that we're working on together in that space. Let's take a little bit of a closer look at that. So first of all, I'm from California so I'm having a really hard time understanding what either of you were saying your accents are so... We could talk in Boston. Your accents are so thick, I can barely, but I know I heard you say something about Veeam at one point. Take a closer look at that. What does that look like from a ransomware perspective in terms of this concept of air gapping or immutable volumes? And just as an aside, it seems like Veeam is a perfect partnership for you since customers obviously are gonna be in hybrid mode for a long time and Veeam overlays that nicely. But what does it look like specifically, immutable air gap, some of the things that we've been hearing a lot about? Yeah, so for us, I'm exact sponsor for a number of big HPE customers and I'll give you an example. One of our customers, they have their own cloud service for time management and essentially they're exploited and they're not able to provide their service. It has a huge ripple effect. If you think about inability to do their service and then how that affects their customers and their customers' employees and all that, it's a disaster. No pun intended. And the thing is when we learn from that and we can put together really good architectures and best practices. So we're talking today about three, two, one, one. So having three copies of your data, two different types of media, having an offline copy, an offsite copy and an offline copy. And so now we're thinking about all the things you need to do to mitigate against all the different ways that people are gonna exploit you. And we've seen it all. You have keys that are erased, primary storage that is compromised and encrypted. The people that come in and delete your backup catalog, they delete your backups, they delete your snapshots. So they get it down to essentially, I'm either gonna have one set of data, it's encrypted, I'm gonna make you pay for it. And 40% of the time they pay and they get the data back. 60% of the time they pay and they get maybe some of the data back. But for the most part, you're not getting your data back. So the best thing that we can do for our customers to come with a very prescriptive set of t-shirt configuration sizes, standardization, best practices on how they can take this entire ecosystem together and make it really easy for the customers to implement. But I wouldn't say it's never bulletproof, but essentially do as much as you can to avoid having to pay that ransomware. So three, two, one, one. Three copies, meaning local. Yeah. Okay, so you can do fast recovery if you need to. Two different types of media. So tape fits in here, not necessarily flashing, spinning this, could it be tape? Yeah, a lot of times we have customers that have four different types, right? So they're running their production on flash, right? So we have our electros with HPE networking and servers running specific workloads, high performance. We have secondary storage on-prem for fast recovery. And then we have some form of off-site and offline, right? Off-site could be object storage in the cloud, right? And then offline would be an actual tape backup. The tape is out of the tape library in a vault, right? So no one can actually access it through the network. And so you'd sort of physical copy that's offline. So you always have something to restore. Where's the momentum today, specifically to the VM on? With regard to the VM partnership, is it security in ransomware, which is kind of a new thing for this world the last two years, has really come to the top? Is it cloud migration? Is it data services and data management? Where's the momentum, all of the above? But maybe you could help us parse that. Yeah, so what we're seeing at Hewlett Packard Enterprise, especially through GreenLake, is just an overall focus on data services. So what we're doing is we've got great platforms. We've always had HPEs known as an engineering company. Like we have fantastic products and solutions that customers love. What we're doing right now is taking essentially a lot of the beauty of those products and elevating them into an operational experience in the cloud, right? So you have a set of platforms that you want to run, have mission critical platform, business critical, secondary storage, archival, data analytics, right? And I want to be able to manage those from the cloud. So fleet management, HCI management, protocol management, block service, what have you. And then I want a set of abstracted data services that are on top of it. And that's essentially things like disaster recovery, backup, data immutability, data vision, understanding what kind of data you have. And so we'll be able to provide those services that are essentially abstracted from the platforms themselves that run across multiple types of platforms. We can charge them on outcome based, right? They're based on consumption. So think about something like DR, right? You have a small set of VMs that you want to protect with a very tight RPO. You can pay for those 100 VMs that are the most important that you have. So for us driving that operational experience and then the cloud data service experience into Green Lake gives customers a really, gives them a cloud experience. So have you heard the term super cloud? Yeah. Have you? Yeah, absolutely. So it's a term that we kind of coined, but I want to ask you about it specifically in terms of how it fits into Australia. So the idea is, and you kind of just described it, I think, whether your data is on-prem, it's in the cloud, multiple clouds, we'll talk about the edge later, but you're hiding the underlying complexities of the cloud's APIs and primitives. You're taking care of that for your customers, irrespective of physical location. It's the common experience across all those platforms. Is that a reasonable vision, maybe even from a technical standpoint, is it part of HPE's strategy? And what does it take to actually do that? Because it sounds nice, but it's probably pretty intense. Yeah, so the proofs in the pudding for us, we have a number of platforms that are providing, whether it's compute, or networking, or storage, running those workloads that they plumb up into the cloud. They have an operational experience in the cloud, and now they have data services that are running in the cloud for us in GreenLake. So it's a reality. We have a number of platforms that support that. We're going to have a set of big announcements coming up at HPE Discover. So we led with Electra, and we have a block service. We have VM backup as a service, and DR on top of that. So that's something that we're provided today. GreenLake has over, I think it's actually over 60 services right now that we're providing in the GreenLake platform itself. Everything from security, single sign-on, customer IDs, everything. So it's real. We have the proof point for it. And GreenLake is essentially, I've said it's the HPE Cloud. Is that a fair statement? 100%. I'm kind of redefining Cloud. And one of the hallmarks of Cloud is ecosystem. So roughly, and I want to talk more about sort of, you've got to grow that ecosystem to be successful in Cloud. No question about it. HPE's got the chops to do that. What percent of those services are HPE versus ecosystem partners, and how do you see that evolving over time? So we have a good number of services that are based on HPE, our tried and true. They've got good tech. Yeah, absolutely. So number of that. And then we have partners in GreenLake today. We have a pretty big ecosystem. And it's evolving too. So we have customers and partners that are focused. Our customers want our focus on data services. We have a number of opportunities and partnerships around data analytics. As you know, that's a really dynamic space. A lot of folks providing support on open source analytics. And that's a fast-moving ecosystem. So we want to support that. We've seen a lot of interest in security. So being able to bring in security companies that are focused on data security, data analytics that understand what's in your data from a customer perspective, how to secure that. So we have a pretty big ecosystem there. And just like our past at HPE, we've always had a really strong partnership with tons of software companies. And we're going to continue to do that with GreenLake. You guys have been partner-friendly. I'm going to ask Antonio this discover in a couple of weeks. But I want to ask you, when you think about, again, back to AWS is the sort of prototypical cloud, you look at like a snowflake and a redshift. A redshift guy probably hates snowflake. But you see, two guys love sell a lot of compute. Now, you as a business unit manager, do you ever see the day where you're side by side one of your competitors? I'm guessing Antonio would say absolutely. Culturally, how does that play inside of HPE? I'm sort of testing your partner friendliness. And how would you? How do you think about that? Well, I mean, at the end of the day, for us, the opportunity for us is to delight our customers. So we've always talked about customer choice and how to provide that best outcome. I think the big thing for us is that from a cost perspective, we've seen a lot of customers coming back to HPE repatriation from a repatriation perspective for a certain class of workloads. So from my perspective, we are running, we're providing the best infrastructure and the best operational services at the best price at scale for these customers. Really, you're seeing, OK. So I think that was definitely culturally HPE has to. I think you would agree, it has to open up. You might not, you're going to go compete based on the merits of your product and technology. The repatriation thing is interesting. Because I've kind of always been a repatriation skeptic. Are you actually starting to see that in a meaningful way? Do you think you'll see it in the macro numbers? I mean, cloud doesn't seem to be slowing down. The public cloud growth, whatever, 35%, 40% a year. Yeah, so we're seeing it in our numbers. We're seeing it in the logo, the new logo, and existing customer acquisition within GreenLik. So it's real for us. And they're telling you it's purely cost. Cost, it's that simple. Cost. So they get the cloud bill. We do, too, get the email from my CFO. Why the cloud bill so high this month, right? Part of that is it's consumption-based, and it's not predictable. Yeah, and also, too, one of the things that you said around unlocking a lot of the customer's ability from a resourcing perspective, right? So we can take care of all the stuff underneath, right? The undercloud for the customer, the platform, so the stores, the serving, the networking, the automation, the provisioning, the health, right? As you guys know, we have hundreds of thousands of customers on the Aruba platform. We've got hundreds of thousands of customers calling home through InfoSight, right? So we can provide a very rich set of analytics, automated environment, automated health checking, and a very good experience that's going to help them move away from managing boxes, right, to doing operational services with GreenLik. We talk about repatriation often. There was a time when I think a lot of us would have agreed that no one who was born in the cloud will ever do anything other than grow in the cloud. Are you seeing organizations that were born in the cloud realizing, hey, we know what our 80% steady state is and we've modeled this? Why rent it when we can own it? Or why rent it here when we can have it as operational cost there? Are you seeing those? We're seeing some of that. We're certainly seeing folks that have a big part of their native or their digital business, right? It's a cost factor. So I think one of the other areas too that we're seeing is there's a big transformation going on for our partners as well, too, on the sell-through side, right? So you're starting to see more niche SaaS offerings. You're starting to see more vertically focused offerings from our service provider partners, our MSPs. So it's not just like in either or type of situation. You're starting to see now some really, really specific things going on in either verticals, customer segmentation, specific SaaS or data services. And for us, it's a really good ecosystem because we work with our SP partners, our MSP partners. They use our tech. They use our services. They provide services to our joint customers. For example, I know you guys have talked to Island here in the past, right? It's a great example for us, for customers that are looking for DR as a service, backup as a service, hosting. So it's a nice triangle for us to be able to please those customers. They're coming on tomorrow at 11-11. I think you're right on. The one, I think, obvious place where this repatriation could happen is the Sarah Wong and Martín Casado scenario where SaaS companies cost a good sold, become dominated by cloud costs. And they say, OK, well, maybe I'm not going to build my own data centers. That's probably not going to happen. But I can go to Equinix and do a Colo. And I'm going to save a ton of dough, kind of managing my own infrastructure with automation or outsourcing it. So Patrick, got to go. I could talk for you forever, with you forever. Thank you so much for coming back in the queue. Always a pleasure. Go, go Celts. Yeah. How are you feeling about the, we always talk sports here in a few months. How are you feeling about Celts? My original call today was Celtics in six, but we'll see what happens. You like Stephen? You like Celtics? Celtics six, even though tonight they got a little. You still believe you got to believe. All right, I believe. Yeah, it'll be better than the Miami's Mickey Mouse run there in the bubble. A lot of assholes attached to that. I love it. You got to believe here on the cube. All right, keep it right there. You don't care. Because you are from a sports town. Where are you in California? We have no sports. All right, keep it right there. This is the cubes coverage of Veeamon 2022 Dave Vellante for Dave Nicholson. We'll be right back.