 Hi everybody, welcome back to Las Vegas. We're here at the Venetian Conference Center. This is Dave Vellante with Rob Streche. Day one, we got three days of wall-to-wall coverage. The Cube's here extracting the signal from the noise. Tom Black is the executive vice president and general manager for HPE Storage Cube Alarm. And Casey Taylor, first time on theCUBE, COO of HPE Storage Group. Guys, welcome to theCUBE. Casey, good to have you on for the first time. Thanks, guys. Now, you're very welcome. Casey, I saw you in action in April down at storage day. You were sort of emceeing the whole thing, and I said to you, wow, if you ever needed a job at theCUBE, you would be great. That's right, you did, yeah. So, but that was a big day for you all. It was the first time I was actually in Houston, loved the facility, great vibe. So, since then, what's been the reaction? I mean, now we're here at Discover, you get to, you guys are going to pre-announce, not pre-announce, but you announce, and now you get the thread, connect the dots to Discover. What's new since April? That's right. Well, it's been rolling thunder, honestly, since even before April. We've had a world tour connecting with customers, partners, and our field to really get everybody ready for these major announcements. 2023 is the year of storage, which has been great, and so there's been a huge amount of focus on our roadmap and our launches, and so we're continuing the momentum since we saw you, and obviously excited to be here at Discover, with some new announcements, and adding some features to some of our services, so it's been a busy time. Yeah, well, we're going to get into some of the announcements, but Tom, I want to give the audience an opportunity to understand the strategy. The interesting thing that I learned when we spent some time together in April is you came over from Aruba, from the networking side of the business, which of course is an awesome business, and they brought you in, Antonio put you in charge, says, okay, I want you to sort of rethink the strategy, this is my take, you can tell me this, and I want you to really drive some commonality across the portfolio, so explain the strategy that you're embarking on. Sure, so thanks, Dave. So if you think about, and actually in Silicon Valley, there's kind of this bus tour that goes around between networking and storage companies. In fact, one of my old supervisors runs NetApp, and my boss's boss runs Pure, and the engineers kind of go everywhere. We've chatted about this before. It's because fundamentally both industries are highly complex systems. Both industries have similar routes to market, B2B saleshorses, and actually are built, the hardest thing we do is large scale, highly available distributed systems, which is common, right? Now, the state of the art in a router is how good you throw away data, state of the art in data, and storage is how well you save data, so there's a little difference there. But the thing I noticed coming in was that while we had a strong, very strong loyal customer base, the portfolio kind of, it lacked a common theme, right? So we appeared a bit fragmented as we thought about things moving forward. Secondarily, having been in this situation before, obviously there were some very strong players in the market, so it was about take a step back and look at where has really the data growth gone and where have workloads exponentially increased in size? And the answer was a public cloud. And so when you talk to customers, as Antonio said today, 70% of the workloads are still on-prem, some verticals it's even more, some vertical is less, but just take that as a number. The real reason the public cloud one was not a financial model, the public cloud one on an operational model, right? And so we decided to make that our mantra and true North, that everything we were going to do would be based on the cloud operational model. And so we took the heritage of the Aruba networking platform, we made it a common platform for the company, HPE GreenLake Cloud Platform that Fidel Maruso runs, and then we started printing services on top. So you can think of my organization as building the kinds of services one might consume from a hyperscaler. And then as we started down that journey, what became really clear is customers liked our operational model and our cloud control plane so much so that they wanted to be able to visualize and see not just their on-premise estate, but also their public cloud estate. And so if you think through what we announced in April 4th was the, you know, we've collapsed all of block storage onto the Electro platform, and that thing continues to grow in triple digits for us, most successful product that we've ever built in the company. But the latest member of the Electro family called MP lets you go from a tiny box to many boxes, you know, dozens of, you know, controllers for IO processing, it performs as what you need, dozens of media shelf personas. It's all the same system. It's just how you describe your workload is how a cluster ultimately gets configured. And then we made it multi-protocol. As you know, on the 4th we announced our file offer on it as well. So really sticking to that cloud operational model, sticking to simplicity. And we brought that forward today with really three kinds of three additions, if you will, to the portfolio and the GreenLake Cloud Platform family. One is we enhanced our SaaS backup and recovery-based service to include popular applications like MS SQL, RDS from Amazon, EKS, EC2, EBS. So now you can create one data protection policy and whether the VM is in Amazon or Azure or on-premise in VMware, you get to apply that protection policy. The second thing we announced was storage fabric manager because as you know, Rob, right? Sands are a bit of a dark art, if you will. There's Illuminati that you go somewhere to become an expert on this. And especially with the skills gap now. I mean, they've all gone away. Right, once it works, it's like, don't touch my sand. Don't touch the sand. That's the last call you want to make as your stand at. So we decided to make that a very simple cloud service to help you visualize, deploy, you would remember, spot checks. Rob, right, against all that's automated. And we also, the way we build everything on the cloud is it's all a reusable microservice approach. So if you think about a scale out block system under the hood, actually the microservices that are the storage fabric manager are called behind the scenes to manage the fabric. So I'm no longer building custom code for every different use case. I'm in a cloud-like model. And then the last big announcement, which Antonio previewed, and then we followed up with today, is Private Cloud Business Edition, which the easiest way to think about it is it's a VM vending machine. Right, so you describe your workload or you describe your cores or memory or storage. We ship you network. We ship you compute. We ship you storage. And then you go to our cloud service. You plug in the black cable for power, the blue cable for network, and it dials into the cloud. You activate the vending machine, if you will. And now the interaction between the operator and our service is at a VM primitive level. Whether it's that on-premise, VMware substrate, or whether your VMs are an Azure or AWS. Again, all one policy for how you define your workloads, particularly data protection. So kind of move the store, if you think about April 4th, that was really a hardcore storage expansion. Today was broadening into workloads and enhanced data protection. So Casey, I got to ask you from a COO's perspective. I look at the storage business, HP is, it's good to great. You got a good business, but you got to make it great. I mean, Rube is a great business, right? Your HPC and AI business, a lot of potential upside there, but storage is a good business. It's what, four billion or so, I want to say. And generally speaking, the industry, it's a more profitable, services are good business, right? It's actually a great business. So what are your objectives in terms of the storage business? Is it gain share? Is it to drive profitability? Yes and yes, and kind of what's the strategy to get there? All of the above, yeah. I think that you're absolutely right. We need to take it from very good to great. I mean, Tom and the team have done a lot of work over the last few years to get the product side really humming and make sure that we have that full portfolio story, store, manage and protect now, right? So I think we're there and now it's about how do we accelerate, how do we execute and go after where the market opportunity is. And Antonio also, in a recent business review with both of us told us exactly that, right? We need to get this business going and we need to double down, right? So it's a huge focus for the company. It's also a proof point for the platform up till now with the services that we've put on really leading the way. Yeah, and I think you were saying earlier that you went on this tour and we're talking to a lot of customers over the last many months. How has that influenced exactly what you're seeing and how you're tuning that, tuning the message, tuning your go-to-market? How is that going to help going forward? Yeah, it's super helpful speaking to customers and partners. You hear from them the truth, you know, good, bad, the ugly. It's been wonderful to bring them along on the journey with us and early so that they can really have an impact on the offers as we release them. I think that that was a big difference for the April 4th launch was the amount that we brought people into the tent early and got feedback and great feedback, right? That actually really did end up in the product for the service that we've launched. So what we're hearing is really confirmation that the company strategy is resonating and there really is that appetite for the cloud operational model, right? Multicloud on-prem, that is definitely a custom and demand and so I think that the services that we are launching are resonating because of that easy to use, manage, provision, model. So I'll tell you on that one a little bit because it tells you a bit about how different this is than even just a few years ago. So one of the things we learned is we've basically stopped using PowerPoint in most of our meetings with partners and customers. In fact, I have sales leaders that have outlawed PowerPoint from their team's usage. Casey recently we put a call out, hey, in a few weeks we're going to meet in a certain city. This was for partner sales reps to get up to speed on the things that you saw today. Two-day meeting, 200 people showed up out of nowhere, not a single piece PowerPoint. All they were on console the whole time. Antonio himself can get on console and demonstrate to customers. So he stopped bringing our old PowerPoint decks and he just says, fire up, give me on the production cluster and he'll start clicking around showing how you provision the VM or set up back up. So just a real shift has come out of these engagements which is if you believe a picture is worth 1,000 words, getting on console, it's worth a million. So how does that affect, do you think about the traditional storage business? It's a box mentality. It's faster, cheaper, better, it's a better box. Now when you think about a console as your interface, what's behind that is, yeah, there's boxes behind that, but that's not what I consume. So people would ask, well, are you getting out of the box business? Are you, what about Electro? What happens there? So how do you think about sort of storage today? So we're certainly in the business of selling hardware. In fact, I would argue our hardware is really good hardware. The point though, if you think about customer agility, is when you interface with one of our cloud services, your kind of methods and procedures for maintenance, for configuration, for monitoring, don't change as you move across the different configurations or Electro systems. I think I support six different box or block hardware systems under the block storage portfolio, but it's a unified experience. So you're not retraining your staff on every iteration of technology. You have the same APIs hold true, you're saying provisioning workflows hold true. So it's really about how do you get our customer away from spending a lot of time trying to figure out every box to trusting that we'll get them to the right box for the right workload, but they don't have to retrain every time, especially important day in the partner community. The amount of time it takes to ramp the partner SES every time you change, fundamentally change a whole system is non-trivial. So this really gives our partners, gives our sellers and our customers an accelerated time to a business outcome. And I was going to say that that to me seems like your greatest advantage is the partners that you have out there. And that simplifying it to a more cloud operating model definitely helps them go out and have that conversation. Especially where you're saying, hey, they're getting on console and they're showing me at no PowerPoint. I mean, having myself not only been at HPE, but been at Amazon where PowerPoint was taboo. Basically, I think it does strengthen their abilities to go out there and do that. Are you finding that from them? Absolutely. No, our partners have access to our demo tools and they are using them. And it really has transitioned from a tell me to a show me environment. And that's what we have to do as we move to solution based selling. It's about outcomes. And I think that you have to look at the buying centers as well, the personas within customers. That's a lot of the conversations been coming up here with partners. They're also making that transition and we're helping them with that by giving them access to those tools and enablement. What's the hardest part of making that transition? I suppose it's somewhat, a lot of it's probably cultural, but there's technical aspects of it and then there's people in process. Maybe you could share some of your insights in terms of how you've affected that transition in the group. Why don't you go first? Yeah, I think it's about getting people to try it first, that first time and selling the value. Showing really that it's making their lives easier. And we've had great feedback from partners that have actually got on board with us. We're definitely showing up differently. We're engaging with their technical community a lot more too, right? Because storage, it is a complicated sell. And so when we get in with partners and we get in with their technical folks, I think is where we're really seeing some momentum. And the tools that we talked about, the demos and the show versus the towel is really helping. Yeah, it seems like that, again, going towards, like you were saying, with the sand management, being able to have that as a cloud service as a cloud-delivered service, makes total sense because people don't want to necessarily install on-premise to even go and do this, plus the upgrade ability, the backend, all that, the care and feeding aspects of it. I assume that's what you're hearing from your customers is, help me get rid of this care and feeding. I want it taken off my plate. Yeah, absolutely. If you think about PCBE that we launched today, I mean it searches the various knowledge bases of the constituent components in the cluster. It does all your ESX patching. It does your ILO patching. It does your operating system patching for your image. It fully life cycles the switch, the storage. So you do a one button, get me to the latest good config, and you're done. You're not sitting there piece by piece by piece, looking at security bulletins and trying to figure out what to do. So that, the giving our customers time back from the mundane and the rote, which by the way can get them in big trouble when you get wrong, as you know, right? You get the wrong security patch on something. You fail a compliance report. Things get tough, right? So really taking, automating that and taking that burden has been received very well. The trust factor. People are afraid of automation sometimes, but if they trust you, they're going to turn it over to you. The other thing with PCBE too, it's good to mention in terms of making things simpler, is the announcement today with our partnership with Equinix. Yes. Which means that we have pre-provision, PCBE, private cloud, you know, across different regions. You know, so there's plenty of benefits and we're getting really good feedback from customers about that too, quick provisioning. We had the Canadian Lottery on earlier today. That's exactly what they did through that case study. I got a last question. We're up against the clock here. So I know it's the year of storage, but it's also the year of AI. So I know you've been using AI in your portfolio for years, but now since the whole world is thinking about it, how are you guys thinking about, have you changed the way you think about AI at all? Have your customers sort of catalyzed any new thinking? So I think a couple of things hold true. Obviously from the keynote this morning, you saw kind of a very strong opinionated perspective from the company on AI, and we do believe we have a real right to play and actually a right to lead. Specific to storage, what we're seeing is the expansion of unstructured data lakes for the purpose of analytics, which is why we made one of the big moves we made in April 4th, and you'll see us continue. So we do really good in kind of low latency, low LTV type apps, think of it as airline ticketing, bank record processing, but people are also now starting to pay attention to, okay, I want to dump a bunch of this data into a data lake and I want to train a model against it. Classic would be weather forecasting. I'm going to take 10 years worth of previous weather, run my current model against it and help tune it and train it. So we're definitely seeing, a lot of these data lakes used to be very more vertical and maybe a little bit more narrow. We're certainly seeing it pop up just about everywhere right now. So if you think about combining our compute assets with our scale out high performance file asset now, it's a good combination and you'll continue to see us iterate on this as we move forward. It files the dominant platform on which the systems are going to be operating, these AI systems, right? And the cloud is not known for its file prowess. So far it's struggled with being basically, hey, it's simple, get put, but vile has been a different story. Vile's hard, as you know. Yes. All right guys, thanks so much for coming on. Congratulations. Thanks for having us. It was wonderful to see you again. I was excited to be on theCUBE and spend some time with you. So please enjoy the rest of your discover and hopefully it's worth your while and thank you for making the trip. Yeah, thanks for having us. Okay, hey, keep it right there. We got more action. Dave Vellante, Rob Strecce, John Furrier's in the house, Lisa Martin, up next Intel is back in theCUBE. We're going to talk about the future of AI powered silicon. You're watching theCUBE, the leader of live tech coverage from HPE Discover in Las Vegas. We'll be right back.