HPE Tech Talk Podcast - What is Cloud 2.0?, Ep. 8

[HPE-Editor]

A cloud experience to address data gravity, TCO and gives you the choice to choose. HPE's Arwa Kaddoura, joins us to discuss what’s next in the cloud experience. hpe.com/greenlake

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Transcript

Robert Christiansen:	[0:58] Hi everyone. This is Robert Christiansen with the office of the CTO at HPE. Welcome to the Tech Talk. This week, I'm really excited to have Arwa Kaddoura who is the Vice President of Global Sales for GreenLake. Welcome Arwa.
Arwa Kaddoura:	[1:08] Thank you for having me. It's good to be here.
Robert:	[1:10] Well, it's good to have you here. I've been super excited about having you on the podcast. It was one of those things that, we have so many great people in the company that I wanted to speak with regarding the things that we're doing. And you've recently joined us mid-pandemic, which is always an interesting story. And I wanted to just get a sense, as you joined in HPE, this is a huge transition. I think you came out of Microsoft, right?
Arwa:	I did.
Robert:	[1:40] You did. Tell us about what was leading up to your transition out of Microsoft and why did you join HPE in what I would consider a really interesting time in the world, these days?
Arwa:	[1:55] Goodness. Yes. That's a big question. [2:43] I was instantly fascinated with sort of this notion that HPE is working on, not the next “me too” sort of public cloud solution, but on how do you bring cloud capabilities to the data center, to the co-location and to the edge.
Robert:	[3:24] It was just a little mind blowing for me to be honest and I kind of felt slightly ignorant, not really knowing that HPE even was embarking down this road. Obviously, I thought of HPE as an infrastructure company, as a great technology company that had fantastic hardware. I didn't really think that HPE had a roadmap in terms of bringing the cloud to the on-prem world. And because of that, honestly, it just became to me, sort of cloud 2.0.
Arwa:	[4:00] Cloud 1.0, I would think about as public cloud. Let's build a bunch of centralized data centers and let's figure out how to consolidate in a multi-tenant environment, customer access to cloud. And then let's give them sort of an entry point into that. And then the next layer, which obviously is the harder layer, is how do you then reverse that? How do you bring cloud capabilities back to the customer wherever they choose to put it in, and not obviously force them to only have public cloud options? [4:46] And again, I saw it as a huge market opportunity having come firsthand, knowing the challenges of our customers at Microsoft, that our customers were always asking us about, "Look, I can't move everything to the public cloud. So how else do you help me?" Again, HPE was a partner of ours from an Azure stack perspective, but obviously, Azure stack is just one of those small solutions, but I really saw the promise in HPE GreenLake for the market. [7:30] So, the themes of customer issues can be clustered in a few big buckets. TCO, total cost of ownership. Big, huge topic for them. And part of that TCO conversation is always that upfront cash outlay. Like, "I don't want to be writing a check for millions or tens of millions or however much to bootstrap my next initiative." [7:50] Then the next bucket is time to value. "I need speed. I can't afford for my procurement to take a few months while they bid it out and they try to find the best vendor and meet all the specs and requirements. … And that's exactly where GreenLake comes in. [8:49] GreenLake is no longer the DIY. We can manage the solution as completely as you would like for us to do. So, everything from our ability to have the infrastructure sized for you, tuned and optimized for your workload, we can help create the architecture on your behalf. … We do all of the implementation, full setup. And again, if our customers choose, we can fully manage the solution as well with our GreenLake management services. Or, we also want to give our customers the choice to work with the partners that they trust, and we have several hundred partners that are approved partners that can help manage a GreenLake environment. [9:45] Best of all, we also started coming out with the self-service capabilities. So now with virtual machines as a service, we effectively give you GreenLake Central, which is the control plane to allow you to provision your own resources internally, to tag them back to projects so that you can internally allocate the right cost structure. You have user provisioning. You have IT costing show backs. You have compliance center. So, we've really created a rich set of capabilities that I think address TCO. [13:12] We have a significant lead. And it goes back to sort of the reason that maybe you and I joined, which is the minute we heard this, to be honest, look, I'd love to think that I'm a huge visionary, but I was almost dumbfounded, like, oh my God, this seems so obvious now that I've heard about it.
Robert:	So true. So true. I can't tell you the aha moment. I just go, what?
Arwa:	[13:35] Exactly. And it's incredible that, to be honest, that HPE had the foresight to say and to bet on this market opportunity as early as we did. I think that is where I'm super excited about being part of this journey: we're not just starting. We have a rich set of capabilities from services, from technology, from software, from management services, that are coming together, not just today, but over the past few years and allowing us this opportunity to now accelerate. So, look, good for our competitors. I think they're probably being pushed by their own customers to say, "Well, why aren't you doing this? Because HPE is giving me this option." And they're seeing that without this, they're likely to be less relevant when they're talking to their customers. So, I think they have to play it a little bit of catch up. I think for us, what we have to do is really make sure that we continue to understand how we support our customers. And what are those workloads? What's that partner ecosystem going to look like? What are those ISV applications? What are the self-service capabilities? All of those things that we've already started to do, it's really just a question of how we can continue to make this better.
Robert:	[15:0.0] Well, speaking of that, we recently made an announcement that was, I'd say about three months ago with SAP.  We've always been a great partner with SAP. That's number one. Nobody runs more SAP than HPE.
Arwa:	And it's amazing, not many people know that, by the way. … I always start by quizzing people. I go, "Do you know which company powers SAP infrastructure more than any other company?" And everybody kind of looks at me and I go, "HPE powers 40% of SAP customer environments."
Robert:	So, let's pivot that relationship that we have. A deep, deep relationship with SAP, longstanding. How did that get pivoted into GreenLake, as a part of our strategy, how do you see that happening?
Arwa:	[16:20] Yeah. We basically support SAP in two ways and as you're probably familiar, the first way is what we've always had or at least what we've had maybe for the last few years, which is the whole, look, we can bring, again, the infrastructure, the service capabilities, all of that together, and support a customer in a consumption model, making sure that they have a right size capacity model in support. And then the managed services obviously can help the customer then manage all the way up to right below that application layer. [17:10] So, we have the GreenLake for SAP. Sort of our, you can come to us, we'll make sure that we architect and bring the right level of infrastructure all the way up to the managed services. [17:55] But, in terms of what we announced in September, this was what we're calling the SAP HANA Customer Edition. So, this becomes, SAP's fully managed offering to their customers, fully powered by HPE GreenLake. And so, effectively, for those customers that want to migrate to S/4HANA, but they still want to have the full flexibility of having this in their data center or their colo, and they want it fully provided by SAP, this is their answer. So instead of just saying, "Look, I'll just take the SAP public cloud version," which they could also do via SAP. This now allows them to say, "Look, SAP, I want to migrate to S/4HANA, but I want to do it using a private cloud option or an on-prem option." Again, fully managed by SAP. We have worked with them to come up with a fantastic solution. The customer basically only deals with SAP in that situation. SAP will obviously bring us in to make sure that, for every one of those customers, we will ensure full end to end capability. But it's great because it's a joint offer fully powered by GreenLake, but the customer then just has the one sort of person to hug.
Robert:	So that's like, I like to use to say, "One champagne glass to drink from." How's that? Well, it's just got to be accountability.
Arwa:	There does.
Robert:	[20:20] But here's the thing, is that when you talk about a single person to hug specifically with GMS or GreenLake Managed Services, you got to start stitching together. If you're dealing with a software layer, if you're dealing with an operating systems and you're dealing with someone like SAP or a Splunk or something like that, you start going down the list of all the vendors that are necessary to stitch these systems together, instead of doing a DYI, but there's only one phone number to call or someone to hug, that's a substantial lift on premises, in anybody's book, anybody's book. And you know as well as I do, that's a big, big step.
Arwa:	[21:04] Totally. Yeah. And it goes without saying that this is an incredible capability to offer customers. When you can say, "Look, I'll do all the heavy lifting for you. Let's just make sure that we understand the outcomes versus let's sit there and talk about every tiny little widget." And I also think, not many technology companies out there are set up to succeed. A lot of people can say they do that, but to have the level of expertise, end to end, to be able to deliver that outcome is where I think some companies will fall short. But to your point, this is where we've invested an incredible amount of, to your point, this is where we have to build an ecosystem around ourselves. We can't deliver everything to customers, only through HPE. We need the ISVs, we need the big system integrators, we need some of the third-party software platforms, because ultimately what our customers always tell us is, they want choice. And people want to be able to select some components and we need to be open enough and GreenLake needs to be an open platform that allows for some of that customer choice so that if people want to build a best of breed, end-to-end capability, we need to be there to ensure that they can do that.
Robert:	[22:52] That's fantastic. So, hey, tell us about what's coming up on GreenLake Day.
Arwa:	Oh, my goodness. GreenLake Day is really... This is going to be, I think, officially our first GreenLake Day. Team Canada actually did this in June ahead of Discover. What we really want to accomplish is: We want to be able to bring all of our latest and greatest capabilities and be able to communicate to our ecosystem, our customers, our prospects exactly what it is that we're working on so they have some indication of what types of things to expect from us. So great opportunity for our customers to join us next week. It will be December 9th, and we'll cover three things. I probably won't give all the details here as this will be posted a little ahead of that day. But if I was to give you a sneak peak, I would say, we are going to be talking about industry solutions. So, we're going to try to give you guys some examples of where some of those ISV partnerships, et cetera, are coming through with end-to-end solutions. We're going to be talking about our latest HPC as a service offering. We today have a fantastic HPC GreenLake solution, but we are going to be announcing some pretty cool additional capabilities on the 9th. And there's also an enhanced managed security offering that we will also be announcing and giving more details about. So those are sort of the three big buckets, and I'm super, super excited to have your audience as well as our customers and prospects, join us that day to hear more from us about what we're bringing to the market. … And I guess I should just maybe point out to folks, if they do want to sign up for GreenLake Day, it's just hpe.com and it's right on our homepage. You can register to join us and see all the various sessions that you may be interested in.
Robert:	And thank you again for joining us today, Arwa. I really appreciate it.
Arwa:	Awesome. It was so good to be with you, Robert. Thank you.
Robert:	Hey, this is Robert Christiansen, and that was a perfect conversation to have leading up to the HPE GreenLake Day. So, stay tuned for some upcoming episodes as we continue to discuss the hot topics that are in the tech industry today, what HPE is doing about it, and more importantly, how it matters to you. … And until next time, take care.

HPE Editor
Hewlett Packard Enterprise

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