Interview with HPE Greenlake SVP & GM Keith White | eSPEAKS

hi i'm james mcguire and today we're talking about where the cloud market is going very hard subject to keep up with to discuss that i'm joined by someone who knows a lot about the topic with me is keith white general manager hpe green lake cloud services keith thanks for joining us today hey fantastic to be here thanks so much james for having me i'm excited you know so your job title suggests that you've got to actually keep up with the cloud market which i don't i mean i try to do the same thing myself but of course we've got public cloud private cloud we've got multi-cloud of course everything needs to be you know native cloud there you know we talk about lift and shift and that's that's not you know some people frown on that so there's just a lot going on even here in 2021 we're still figuring out the cloud i thought several years ago i thought we were an old hat by now but certainly it is not uh so what do you see from your vantage point what are a couple of key trends that are going on in the cloud market these days yeah it's actually a great great point and you're right uh the big things i'm seeing are sort of three-fold one is it is a multi-cloud world most and many customers are running multiple clouds and so now they basically have four all four clouds green lake aws azure and so they're saying hey how do we manage that multi-cloud yeah the second one that i think is really interesting is the world is hybrid so i think there was a big push at least i know when i was at microsoft you know i was trying to get everyone to move to the public cloud but you know idc will tell us hey look 70 of apps and data are on and will stay on prem uh we're seeing uh you know real need for uh data and applications to stay local because of latency uh you know app app gravity app entanglement uh compliance regulatory so the world is hybrid and it's gonna stay hybrid for quite some time and so what's really important is that we have strong integration there and then i think the big biggest thing is this explosion of data like it is all about the data now data is the new gold for people right we'll try to figure out how do i monetize that data and you know so that's a key aspect of what we're seeing with the cloud and how do i leverage the cloud to to best analyze and make decisions uh with that data yeah it's interesting you talk about you know the idc figure because i've seen the gartner figure and i think at gartner a couple years back says something about by the year 2025 80 of the the data centers will be gone i might be slightly misquoting that but that was the intent i mean there was a sense that oh the data center is fading but now we hear from a lot of people oh no no the data center's not going anywhere uh what is your sense i mean is the data center here to stay or is are we in kind of a slow fade with the data center it's actually a really good good flag james because in essence what's happening is customers want to get out of the data center management business right i don't want to have to know about gigawatts and and how much do i have to pour concrete-wise and what's the tax implications so what's happening is data centers are are being consolidated pretty dramatically by our customers and they're also really leveraging the colos and so colos are really exploding so you think about the cyrus ones or the equinixes or the stripes i mean these things are growing exponentially and so i think people really want to have that control of hey this is my environment i can secure it i can manage it but i don't have to have to be in the data center management business so i'd say yes and and it's being moved into into other scenarios you know well let me ask my own question for my education about the colos and the rise of the colos is that why are companies using colos as opposed to simply going to one of the large you know brand name cloud providers why why go to a colo as opposed to azure it's a great question because you know i always sort of articulate uh an azure and aws as being just a big colo right hey i'm cola there now why they're doing it is because when you walk into the data center north if you've ever been uh into quincy washington where where one of the big microsoft data centers is at it's all the same right they they has to be standardized so that they can get the economies of scale so they can have the consistency of management if i'm the cio at liberty mutual i'm looking and saying hey you know what i need a little different power here i need a little different security here i need a little bit of application i don't i can't have the latency that i'm seeing with that piece of it i don't want to pay the data egress charges so for me i want my data center and that's why we really created hpe green lake because we bring the cloud to the customer and it's it becomes their cloud they get to define it they get to structure it so that it's going to meet their specific needs versus sort of taking what i have to uh with what the the public cloud offers so there's some great things to put in the cloud but at the same time i think that's why we're seeing that the colos explode because again uh there's every business is different everyone has different needs and so how do they optimize uh and and control and and structure for what exactly what they need interesting okay well what what do you see i mean as the pandemic we hope begins to fade are are you hearing from customers well we we really need to ramp up for later this year because we expect this kind of an economic explosion to go on or how do you see the the your your customers handles what we hope we service the end of the pandemic yeah i think the pandemic taught people a lot of things so one uh it really exposed some of the holes you know all of a sudden when everyone is sitting at home trying to access their systems and the information and do their jobs you know there's really some holes that were exposed to that at that stage the second is we've talked a lot for the last two or three or four years about digital transformations and modernization efforts that are happening um you know in essence i think what people have done coming out of that is they realize wow for us to really get and take advantage of that that explosion that you're talking about we really need to accelerate the digital transformation that we have and so how do we get there sooner and then i'd say the third is i think it's really made people step back and rethink what's that new normal right how do how do i make sure that i can manage this thing remotely how do i make sure i can have people work remotely a lot of companies are actually getting rid of office space and are going to a much more edge-based scenario right and so i think those are some of the things that we're seeing with customers but yeah there is a pretty big ramp up we're excited about the growth that we're seeing and the dialogues that we're having with our customers about uh their requirements going forward so if you're if you're looking at some of the the problems that you know a typical typical customer viewers might have i mean what's a what's the classic problem that that many of them are facing like is is it you know handling data is it realizing that maybe those apps aren't as portable as we hope they would be what's what's the classic problem you hear about yeah i think there's sort of two big things that that we're seeing and frankly uh great timing with you and i because we had two big things we had our green lake customer council two weeks ago and then we had our hpe board of advisors which is you know 20 cios from around the world there were two things that really popped one was hey give me more insight into what's happening across my system so uh help me with dashboards uh power bi type views um so that i i don't wanna manage it but i wanna i want people to be able to see what's going on with them and that could manifest itself in a chargeback or showback type scenario because most of these people are are running environments as their own kind of cloud provider to their line of business or their business units so i think that was sort of one was that set of insights and then the third is what you and i just touched on which is this whole idea of now that we have all this data help me actually make decisions from it so what are some of the tools and resources that we need uh we just announced uh yesterday that carestream who's one of the largest x-ray and medical device manufacturers in the world is using green lakes machine learning operations environment so that they can help doctors and and hospital staffs make decisions much much faster using ai that's coming off of those x-ray machines and those types of scenarios so we're seeing this big ask about hey yes data is exploding but help me get my arms around it and help me then use it to be effective decisions that can help us drive our company and our growth okay so let's talk about hpe green lake itself i mean i i think there may be a sense among some that it's a it's a uh generally a hardware play hp comes in and installs hardware and manages it it manages it in the consumer's data center but indeed there's also a strong software element is it is it correct to think it's primarily hardware or is it not necessarily i think it's a it's a great view because if you think about hpe uh typically a hardware vendor right compute storage networking great stuff from the edge with our aruba and and uh edge line products all the way up to the largest systems in the world with cray and that sort of thing right the reality is is we're really pivoting the company to be much more of a cloud services and software company and so what we're really trying to do is leverage the power of what we have with all of this great hardware and i don't know if you know but we have about a 16 000 person point next services organization which does all of the uh the installs and the the integration and then lands the systems and then supports them as they go forward but we take all of that and we provide that as a cloud service to our customers so that if they want to do machine learning operations like we talked about or sap or vdi or maybe i'm a hospital and i require electronic medical records in a secure scenario i can do that with confidence with green lake so yes um we're really broadening much more into uh green lake and hpe as a whole being much more about software and cloud services where that hardware really supports it um in an optimized way for the for the customer are there scenarios where customers are hiring hpe to come in and simply install and manage software and there really isn't almost no hardware in the deal yeah you know um one of the things that we we did the last two or three years is we we acquired a company called map r that does a very strong data file system and also a company called blue data and kumar srikanthi who is our cto and leads our software business he is architected with those resources and others a container platform that we call esmeral and that container platform provides very strong data capabilities as well as overall container capabilities and so you're seeing us use esmeral as a way to help customers modernize their applications from a container standpoint but also as they handle these large amounts of data wells fargo is a great example where we're using esmeral and green lake to provide them uh all of the petabytes of data that goes through their systems on a daily basis for their regulatory requirements um so i i think um what we're seeing is customers are are are consuming our software and cloud services um and and the hardware itself is actually really supporting that and at times we can use existing hardware um so the answer is yes and then other times we can bring in modern and optimized hardware for their specific requirements you know it seems like we're in such a transition phase now where you know companies really do have a foot in both worlds they have a footed in-house they have a foot in the cloud they're looking towards the cloud but they they they have a an extensive in-house infrastructure i mean what would you say to those people that who say hey you know companies don't don't try to like jazz up or improve your in-house just move everything to the cloud don't even bring in you know more things to the in-house infrastructure which is sort of what hpe green lake is doing i mean why not just go strictly to the cloud as opposed to trying to bulk up your in-house infrastructure yeah it's a really good point the the uh interesting thing one of our our cios uh at the board of advisors she said hey you know the blush has come off the bloom uh with the public cloud so we thought that we could go a cloud first cloud only and go and do that piece of it but then we realized wow the egress charges that we have to pay for or the way that we're being licensed on how that's that's approaching it so once they started to look at the economics of it and they looked at the efficiencies of it they said hey it is going to be a hybrid world and so how do we optimize that and so i they're turning to us with green lake to say hey we can bring that cloud to you you can get a consistent experience you can do a holistic governance piece of it and you know we're partnering we're partnering with microsoft and azure stack hci we're partnering with google and their anthos implementation we're partnering with red hat and openshift sap citrix nutanix a lot of these isvs because the solutions that the customers require they want that to be fully integrated so i don't see people saying hey you know we're going to try to try to do everything i think the the leadership of these organizations are now saying hey look what's the best scenario what's the most cost effective what's the most efficient what's the most productive for us and then they're saying hey hp help us look at this holistically so that we can go and do that in fact it's been really fun with green lake because and i saw this at microsoft too when when we were starting up the azure business customers are really looking to people to be partners um because in essence we're help we're basically helping them run and then in many instances running their data center for them and so it goes from being vendor you know transactional hardware to being partner in solving these business challenges and these business strategies and implementing these things so it's really interesting i do hear that from a lot of people that we want we want partnerships we don't want to just be sold solutions just actually partner with us and i think it it's partially because things have gotten so complex we don't want just a transaction in the walk away we need ongoing partnership with us that's right um you know let's let's take a look to the future i think companies you know would like a glimpse of what might be going on because they've got to do prepare you know prepare for it so if you look a few years out in terms of the future of the cloud what do you forecast yeah i see three things and you know it's amazing that the on-premise cloud is growing significantly along with obviously the public cloud and the expectations that customers have i think are really three-fold so one is they're going to want a fully integrated hybrid offering they're not going to want to have four different approaches they're going to want to have an integrated approach so i see the clouds coming together on on that front the second is i think with this explosion of data you're really going to start to see more hybrid scenarios right hey well maybe i want to store the data here locally so that it's secure and latency wise i have it but i want to use the power of some of the the cloud tools that are out there in order to really facilitate what i'm trying to do we don't really see a lot of what i'd say hybrid scenarios it's sort of like hey i'm running it in the cloud or i'm running it on-prem so i think that's the second one and then the third is i think you're just going to see an explosion of people no longer really talking about hardware speeds and feeds and really talking about the business outcomes and the expectations they have for uh these different cloud services so you know we've sort of made that that migration a bit um you know we used to talk uh i'd say two couple years ago we were talking about azure x you know this or or aws why this and i think that happens still but i think you're gonna start have people really talk about hey this is the outcome and the sla that i'm expecting not feature technology that sort of thing so it's really about what what the business outcome is it almost doesn't matter the underlying parts could come from several different sources but it's all about really of course the bottom line 100 100 yeah uh keith i think you've said it i i very much appreciate you sharing your expertise today i i learned something so um thank you very much thank you james thanks for the opportunity and anytime i can come back and help i'm happy to do so so thanks so much you

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