From around the globe, it's theCUBE. Covering HPE Discover Virtual Experience, brought to you by HPE. Hi, and welcome back, I'm Stu Miniman, and this is theCUBE's covers of HPE Discover 2020, the virtual experience. Going to be digging into GreenLake and to help me with that, happy to welcome to the program, first time guest, Arwa Padura. She is the vice president of Worldwide Sales for GreenLake with Hewlett Packard Enterprise. Arwa, thanks so much for joining us. Thanks for having me. All right, so as I teed up, you're relatively new in the role, so if you could just give us a little bit about your background, what brought you to HPE and what your focus is there. Yeah, absolutely, thanks for having me. Week seven, so definitely new in the role, came from sort of a public cloud, cloud native set of experiences through Microsoft and previous to that, it was Xamarin, where we focused on a lot of mobile application development. Ultimately, what brought me to HPE, to be honest, is the fact that while cloud has brought a ton of innovation to many companies, many industries, many applications, I think I also see the opportunity that it's not just about public cloud, but it's about bringing cloud experience everywhere. And so looking at the agility, the innovation, the speed, and some of the cost savings that the cloud has brought companies, I believe that from a GreenLake perspective, we now have an opportunity to modernize IT infrastructure and bring it to our customers in a way that they've never seen before. And so ultimately that was what brought me to HPE. All right, Arwa, what excited me about having the discussion with you is you talked about some of the application modernization, cloud native pieces that you've got history on. My background's infrastructure, but as an infrastructure person, we know the role of infrastructure really is to support those application. A term I've used for a number of years now is you want to modernize the platform, and then you can modernize the application on top of them. What are you hearing from customers? When I talk to developers, often it is a hybrid model of how they're building things. It is no longer monolithic. Things are changing and moving everywhere. Data, of course, has huge importance. So help us understand that role of the application and data when it comes to GreenLake. Yeah, and I think one of the great points that whether it's research or our customers, what we ultimately know is 70% of absent data remain on premises today, right? Whether that's in data center, it's in co-location or at the edge, right? And that's for a good business reason that they have to remain in those data centers, right? We have things like latency that we have to deal with. We have governance and security. We have data gravity. We have application dependencies, right? And so being able to think about, well, how do you solve that problem for the remaining 70% of applications? So if they can't move into the cloud, well, how do we bring the cloud to them, right? And that's exactly where GreenLake fits in, which is let's create that cloud-like experience from everything for the obvious things, the pay-as-you-go, the sort of the self-service, the managed-for-you, right? Bringing that in to the customer's data center, again, colo, the edge, I think becomes a really powerful value prop. And again, from my experience, right? Not every application is going to be a cloud-native application that is being built newly for cloud-only capabilities. And there's still a lot of great applications that can still be built on-prem with cloud-like experiences that are brought to you by GreenLake. All right, so, Arway, you have the sales title. And when I think about HPE, HPE's had a number of offering to help customers along that journey towards that cloud model that you're talking about. A lot of them, I think back, go back seven years ago, it was very much, here is our stack and we have hybrid models and we're working with service providers. GreenLake is very much managed service. So help us understand a little bit from the go-to-market standpoint, the sales standpoint, that mind shift of going from here's gear or here's the stack we're doing to really it is a managed services offering. So I would think it's a different pitch, if you will. It's a different mindset. It's different necessarily who you might be selling it to. Absolutely, and I think if I had to think about what we're announcing at Discover, right? And how we're evolving GreenLake, it really starts to focus on launching new cloud services like containers, virtual machines, storage, compute, right? Sort of the core cloud offerings, but then also adding things like machine learning ops, data protection for cloud and on-prem and networking services, right? And from a GreenLake perspective, I think if I had to think about the go-to-market, it's yes, managed services, but what does that mean, right? That means new self-service cloud experiences via GreenLake Central, which has very detailed sort of consumption and billing data to allow you to have that transparency. It also gives you self-service capabilities, right? So that you can spin up virtual machines or configure the services that you need or that you've purchased from us. And then also having the ability now to have new workload optimized, sort of t-shirt-sized building blocks, right? So being able to very quickly find out from our customers what is it that they need, having sort of small, medium, large capabilities, again, thinking about those workloads that they're trying to support. And then in under 14 days, being able to deliver the capability to their doors and have that spun up and ready to go. Yeah, one of the advantages, of course, is rather than thinking about, okay, I've got all of these products, it's now more like a service catalog. I have a lot of different ways.  You talk about the ML and the analytics, of course. HB has done a few acquisitions in this space to help enhance that, like MapR. I know we've been talking a bit about blue data and the like. I'm curious from the touchpoints that you're having in customer. Is it shifting from, it's not necessarily, I think, the person that buys the server. Cloud often was the line of business driving from the application down. So how does that alignment between the field and the customer shifting? And how do you expect GreenLake to kind of move that along even more? Yeah, that's right. It becomes a business sort of driven conversation, right? So what are the outcomes that our customers are driving for from a business transformation perspective? So if you think about what they're trying to do is they don't want to have to worry about delivering their own IT, which often is slow, maybe contains supply chain risks. And then, of course, there's sort of the over provisioning risks that come with that as well. The way I see our role from a go-to-market perspective is we do have to engage and we are engaging new audiences that we probably haven't been as intimately sort of familiar with in the past. And that includes the line of business. That includes also the architects internally within companies that are designing sort of best of breed architectures to deliver the technology infrastructures that will power their next generation of internal applications or even their own solutions to the market. It includes, if you're talking about ML Ops, it includes talking to data scientists, right? And understanding, what is that specific machine learning scenario that they are trying to train a model around? And how do we help deliver the best solution for them? Because we also know that putting that in cloud most of the time is too far away from your data or the edge from which you are collecting data from, which again, becomes super expensive. You have latency issues and it's not a really great way to solve ML Ops, right? We feel like we have a much better solution. And in talking to some of those audiences that are trying to solve those business challenges within our customer base, we are finding ourselves also talking to a lot of new audiences. And one audience that I'm intimately familiar with is obviously the developer audience, right? Developers don't want to worry about IT infrastructure. They don't want to have to walk over and tell someone that, hey, I need you to configure X, Y, Z in order for me to start testing my code or my sort of MVP. They want to know that it's all managed, that it's quick time to value and that when they're ready to go, the infrastructure is there and ready to be deployed against the project that they're trying to execute. So those are really important audiences that I feel like we are starting to nurture and we will have a lot more content and relevance for going forward with GreenLake. Yeah, a really important point there. How do you kind of, there's a big ecosystem around GreenLake. So give me a little bit about the differentiation of HPE compared to some of the other hybrid solutions out there because I look, there's obviously hardware and software solutions that HPE has internally, but then you've also got VMware, Nutanix, Red Hat and others that are partners for certain offers there. How do you help customers sort through those? Yeah, absolutely. And I think it begins with delivering choice to our customers, right? At the end of the day, we need to make sure that we're optimizing for what our customers are looking to do. So there has to be an element of openness with HPE GreenLake that we're pretty proud to deliver. So we have multiple ISV partnerships. You mentioned some of them, VMware and Nutanix with respect to delivering some of our solutions. I think from a competitive advantage, I go back to the fact that the 70% of apps and data that are still sitting on-prem or in Colo and Edges, our competitive advantage comes from being able to bring a true cloud experience to those apps and data where I would argue no one else can do this in a way that has speed from a time-to-value perspective, scalability, being able to sort of go up and down, a managed for you, a true pay-per-use model and billing at that level of granularity and the self-service, right? Allowing you to self-provision and do some of those things once we've delivered the core capabilities for you. So from a competitive advantage, I feel like we cover off more of the cloud-like experiences than anyone else that does in the market. And then we also have the partnerships and the ability to bring in some of those third-party ISV solutions that work incredibly well on GreenLake. Yeah, one of the challenges we've seen in the field is customers, they do have, I guess we know, IT always is added. So you mentioned there are shifts, but customers absolutely have their data centers, they're using often multiple public clouds out there and then Edge, we're talking a lot about the Edge. So help us understand where GreenLake fits and how the portfolio helps customers as they need to be able to manage and optimize what they're doing across all those disparate environments. Yeah, I think you're absolutely right. Customers, first of all, are going to have a multi-cloud and sort of a multimodal strategy, right? Some things they're going to put in the different public clouds and some things they're going to maintain on-prem or in a colo, and then some things, of course, work better in an Edge scenario. The great part about GreenLake is we solve the on-prem estate problem in a really effective and cost-effective and time-to-value perspective really, really well. But with GreenLake Central, we also give you the transparency to manage your public cloud footprint just as well. So we allow you to unify across the different footprints that you want to have. And we're also not proprietary when it comes to GreenLake Central, right? You can plug in other pieces versus, maybe some of the hyperscalers that are trying to create more of a walled garden or a lock-in scenario where, yes, you get transparency, but only as long as you're within their solution. All right, so I understand there's about 1,000 customers or you've passed 1,000 customers using GreenLake, according to another interview that I did. So you've got sales, give us a little bit, what would we expect for kind of customer adoption and what else do you expect us to be looking at from the GreenLake offerings? Yeah, absolutely. And I think from a customer momentum perspective, it has just been fantastic to be part of this journey, at least for me for the past seven weeks. And to see our customers really embrace this new way of how we deliver IT infrastructure to them, I think in a way that meets them where they are, right? As they're transforming, we're bringing that on-prem cloud-like experience to their doorstep without them having to feel the pressure of migrating everything, whether it makes sense or not, into the cloud. Again, in terms of what's coming new, I would reiterate the fact that it is looking at all of the basic services like containers, VMs, storage, compute. It's also starting to optimize around specific workloads. Again, to the point earlier about MLops. But from what's new and exciting, I get really excited about, hey, I don't want our customer spending time thinking about how to architect and how to design the right IT or infrastructure offering. I want to be able to do that for them in order to deliver that experience that they need. And again, what that helps our customers with is cost, time to value, and the ability to get a pre-configured solution that is already optimized, right? We don't want our customer spending all of their time having to configure an architect IT infrastructure. We want them to worry about the business outcomes and then tell us what they need. And then we create those pre-configured solutions on their behalf, given their input. So again, it's a very cloud-like way to deliver our value to our customers. And I think it also frees up our customers to focus their resources on the real innovation that they need to drive at their business level versus focusing on things that we're experts in and we can bring to them in a much quicker and more value effective way. Absolutely. Thank you so much. Yeah, absolutely. We've heard loud and clear customers. They need to be able to shift away from things that they don't have differentiated and then don't add value to the business and focus on this business after that. Arwa, congratulations on the new position and definitely look forward to watching the continued progress. Good buzz around Green Lake. Fantastic. Thank you, Stu. Thanks for having me. All right, stay tuned for lots more coverage from HPE Discover, the virtual experience. I'm Spoo Miniman and thank you for watching theCUBE.


Hi, I'm Tim Burcham. I'm an employee with ARL now. For as long as ARL has been in existence, happy 25th anniversary.


Hi, I'm Ajay, I came here, I mean I didn't know what to expect over here, I mean I thought that I would come here and people would tell me what to do, but it was amazing, I came here, I explored a lot of things, I learned a lot of small programs, I got a lot of help from the mentors, it was fantastic.