Announcer: theCUBE presents HPE Discover 2022 brought to you by HPE. Welcome back to Las Vegas, everybody watching theCUBE's coverage of HPE Discover 2022 in Las Vegas, this is day two, my co-host John Furrier and I, are pleased to welcome Fidelma Russo, who's the CTO of HPE, somehow newly minted CTO and Latha Vishnubhotla, who's the Chief Platform Officer of HPE, a lot of talk about platform, ladies, welcome to theCUBE, great to see you. Thank you >> Good to be here. So Fidelma, your awesome keynote yesterday really, it's starting to become clear, you're building out a platform, your job is to create that platform so that others can build value on top of it, maybe describe sort of how you see the role. Yeah, so it's a bit of non-traditional CTO role, you know, I have the CTO innovation aside but I also am building the platform and also the security piece to the platform. So, because you guys know me for a long time, I love to build products and so this is I get to build the platform and then I work with all of the different business units on taking their offers. First of all, kind of looking at, do they make sense? You know, are they adding to the platform? Do we have overlap in the portfolio and how do they come onto the platform and how do we make sure we have a consistent user experience all the way from the offer all the way through, you know, from the life cycle of that particular offer from, you know, just browsing the offer to actually using the offer to getting support on the offer. And a lot of that is ecosystem enablement, right? I mean, you're looking at that as well as do you consider that part of the portfolio in terms of some of those overlap discussions and where you leave off and they pick up on? So we have, you know, HP, I mean, we have, it's a partner first organization that helps us get our breadth and our scale across, you know, the globe and so basically the partner, when I say customer, I kind of mean partner as well and so, the partners, you know, we are working closely with a number of them to build tightly into the platform exposing our APIs, and then in terms of other areas, we'll have our marketplace where they may not be as tightly coupled, but they'll be in the marketplace and you can consume from the marketplace, so, it's a width and through partners. And Latha, interesting title, Chief Platform Officer, not a common title, so, you guys are partners in crime in this effort or maybe you could describe your role in a little bit more detail. Yeah so, as Fidelma mentioned, when we bring all these services and offers on top of the platform, what are the capabilities that we need to offer so that they're consistent, the customer experience, the partner experience is consistent, from the time they browse to buy it, operate it and you know, maintain it, throughout the journey, the experience is kept consistent for all the offers. For that, we need a platform, you know, otherwise, you know, everybody will build their own experience and for customer to operate hundreds of locations, it gets complex. The question on the platform I want to ask is, in this modern era 'cause we've seen the platform wars going back the old data center days where platform and tools are out there, very monolithic in some cases, as you have more of a distributed computing market developing which we all see with the edge and on-premises and public cloud cloud to edge, as you guys call it, what does the modern platform look like? What are you guys enabling? Because you have partners building on top of it, you have to enable value and their customers is your customer, so, what is the enablement that you're looking for? What are some of the first principles that you guys think about when you look at this modern platform on top of now Cloud 3.0, 2.0, whatever you want to call it, this next generation, what are some of the areas that you see that are key for HPE to build into the platform? Yeah so, first of all, API first approach is very key so that our ISVs and partners can develop on top of it, APIs are very key and security, building security from hardware, all the way to the services, the whole stack, integrating security into that and providing the ease of use features on top of it, whether it is by experience or having a unified support experience. So again, it all goes back to when you have hundreds of locations, how do you visualize what cases are running in your locations? What cases need to be fixed in terms of the infrastructure and all that? The wellness dashboards, all of that bringing onto the platform, so the customer can go through a day zero, day one, day two journey on the platform. Yeah, and it's all data's in there and the scalability of data with machine learnings here, I want to go to the next step and ask you guys, what do you think about the notion of integration? Because if you believe that the software industry has been, I won't say taken over, but, is driven by open source, open source is where all the action is but that's not the end game, scale, compute, and integration, you mentioned API first, that's just the beginning, the partner's got to integrate, they're going to talk to each other, you got security, how do you guys think about that? Because that's the top discussion right now, okay, I got Kubernetes clusters, I got Docker containers, I'm going to leverage all that open source into the platform but I got to integrate. So, you know, in terms of open source, I mean, we embrace open source, you know, our security IP, SPIFFE and SPIRE, so we are very active in that particular area and so we intend to engage in open source where it makes sense. And so, and enable people to tightly, like to easily integrate onto the platform with their preferred open source, you know, whatever they're looking for. And then the piece about that is what we want to provide is orchestration. So what are the hard things about open source? It's great to take something and you put it in and it's like, now you can't really use it, okay, and so how do we provide that consistent orchestration, that consistent automation and do it in a way that, because it's on a platform, you can now access it in a common way no matter where you are and so that's kind of our approach to it. I want to ask you guys about the announcements that you made yesterday Fidelma in your keynote, there were four key components, four pillars I guess you'd call 'em, the first one was core services. I want to comment, you tell course correct if I don't get it right but core services via a single common URL you showed cloud-like console, that's how we should be thinking about it? That's our platform , it's Cloud Console. Great, and then operating use, you got operational services, it is like deploy and provision, it's kind of the sys admin tools to do that, roles and personas, I saw that as, okay, resonates, it's like, I'm going to talk to the different personas, what are those personas? So, I mean, if you come in and you are a developer, you should be interested in cost analytics, but you're probably not really thinking about it. And so what that does is, so if you come in and you're a developer, over time, we will understand your history, we will understand your persona and we will curate your view to that persona, okay? So if I'm a finance person and I'm looking at my cost analytics, and I want to understand where my spend is and what the spend is on, you can also take a curated path through the Cloud Console so you just see what it is you want to see. Makes sense, you don't see all the extraneous data that you don't need, and then commerce, is that like billing or is that monetization or both? It's both, and so today it's billing and we've also brought the buy experience on there, so you can now go to the console, you can do your first purchase there, equally well, you can do a refresh of a subscription because, I personally think that most people don't do their first purchases there, but they will do their next purchase and they're, you know, refreshing their subscription and then you get all of the billing through and the visibility into your bills through the platform. And what's available today in market and how will that roll out? Yeah, so in market today, you can manage your subscriptions, you get your billing, you know, and your visibility into your billing and then over the next couple of months, we will be bringing out the buy experience and I think it's on Compute Ops Manager. So, that was announced for the compute, you know, to manage or compute from the cloud. Antonio and his keynote said, you know, customers ask me all the time, "which workload should go in on-prem and which should go in the public cloud?" And when I heard that, I said, yeah, I get that question all the time. And he said, "but that's the wrong question." I'm like, ah, but I want the answer to that, which should go where? Well, I mean, it is really a hard question to answer. And so, you know, I think you have to look at your workloads and you have to think about, are they latency sensitive? Okay, do they have high data gravity? Okay, and do they have different requirements, for instance, like, you may have a requirement that you want a very particular type of AI and ML that you can only get from a specific public cloud and then that's the right place to put it. So there's a whole slew of attributes that you have to look at to put it, you know, to put the workload in the right place. And what I would say is, I think like five years ago, six years ago, we all thought that every workload was going to the public cloud and now here we are and we have workloads staying in the data center, they may be moving to a colo, you know, also security is another key attribute, compliance, what are my compliance?

You know, for highly-compliant industries, taking workloads and putting them on the public cloud may work but many times it's too much of a compliance risk for people to figure out what to do. Data sovereignty is also another area that, you know, now we're starting to see in Europe, you know, data can't leave the country. So, there are lots and lots of attributes and I think workloads are going to exist everywhere. You didn't say predictability which used to be the default for on-prem, so, okay, we're making progress here and so now I want to ask you, you mentioned like, it may be some ML tool that you can only get in the cloud, is your strategy to close that gap over time or is it to maybe stay more focused? So, we believe that, you know, we serve our customers best by being focused, right? And so, we are, you know, we have innovations going on at the edge and I see you just talk to Phil and so, you know, our customers have compute needs at the edge, cloud needs at the edge, at the data center, and then in the areas where it makes sense, like our backup and recovery space to be hybrid where you can deploy the same backup and recovery service on-prem and in the public cloud, then that's where we will interoperate with the public cloud. But we're being very focused about where we value. Talk about security posture, how you guys look at that holistically, and then, maybe specifically in, you know, cloud, core, edge 'cause it's all cloud operations at this point, DevOps and now network programmability, what's the security posture, zero trust or trust? Trust and verify, zero trust, what's the view? Yeah so, leading with the zero trust approach, starting all the way from the hardware Silicon root of trust SPIFFE and SPIRE for the workloads and going up the stack, even including the network security as well. So this has to be viewed in a holistic fashion, security is always like that, you know, and that's exactly what we are doing on the platform. So zero trust more at the lowering the stack that's no perimeter there, so it's perimeters gone, you got to manage that, and then as you get software, shifting left as they call it, that's more trust-specific, trust and verify, is that what you're saying? Correct. >> Okay. Latha, maybe you could give us a little taste of the roadmap, when you talk to customers, what are some of the big challenges that they're throwing at you and what can we expect in the future from the platform? Yeah, so from the challenges point of view, it is ability to run workloads wherever they want, whenever they want and having that capacity available in a, you know auto scale fashion, this is what they're looking for and that's exactly what we are addressing on the platform. We have the infrastructure which is available as a Infrastructure-as-a-Service, we are bringing SaaS modules on top of it, all of this is combined on the platform, right. Is your strategy going forward, Fidelma, to leverage the hyperscale APIs and primitives specifically by building a substrate on top of those? Or is it really to let them handle that and you build the substrate for your part that's on-prem maybe the hybrid and out to the edge? So I think it's a combination of both. It's kind of where it makes sense, you know, if you look at the offering for HCI, the GreenLake for HCI that like shows your VMs on-prem, but it'll also show you your VMs in Amazon, so leveraging their API, so that's where we build a substrate that goes across, I don't believe in a cloaking mechanism, it's never made sense in this world because you always end up degenerating down to, you know, like the smallest set of things so it's a combination, it's APIs integration where it makes sense where customers want to have a common experience on-prem and in the cloud and then it's, you know, really focusing for us on the edge, the data center and the cloud. I got to follow up on the cloaking mechanism, isn't VMware a cloaking mechanism? Is Kubernetes a cloaking mechanism? No, that's orchestration. Well, I think in terms that, you know, we've had many efforts in this industry for, I'm going to build a manager of managers, you know, the paint of glass that's going to cover the world and that has never worked. You know, so and VMware and Kubernetes are way more than that. Good answer, that's a safe answer. Final question as we wrap up, what is the value promises that you guys talk to customers about when you see customers saying, we're building this platform here we got today here's the roadmap, here's our promise, here's what we're trying to do, what's that message? So the message is really, you know, we're focused on, you know, where people want to run their workloads and you know, traditionally, we've always come to market with you know, they're great in their silos but they don't make it easy for customers to, you know, to consume, to get support, to even think that they come from the same company. So first of all is, let's bring them all together, let's make sure that when you look at HP and you use HP that, you know, it's a cloud experience and that you don't kind of feel the seams between the organizations and on that, you know, it's rapid engagement with the customer to get their feedback. And so that's what the platform is all about, making that journey for the customers smooth and easy, and then, you know, and then delivering the offerings that make sense where we can differentiate ourselves and add value and that's kind of what we talked-- And of course ecosystem, if it works, the ecosystem's thriving, that's a big kind of scoreboard feature. Exactly, and the partners are front and center, you know, we can't deliver the value without them and so being able to access those through the GreenLake portal is also, you know, a huge value to everybody, because again, you're not trying to combine all of these different pieces from different parts of the organization and the ecosystem. Guys, I want to thank you for coming on theCUBE, Fidelma, I was really excited when I saw that you took the job as CTO, you're somebody I've known for a long time and watched your career, you got product chops, Latha, it's great to see you in this it's great to see women in products and technical roles, I love it, and so, good job, good job HPE. well, hey. We didn't get the secrets out of you, the one I hear that's on the roadmap and the all the secret sauce, we'll get you back. You'll see us. Thanks again. >> Thank you. Thank you. For John furrier, our guest, and this is Dave Vellante at theCUBE's coverage of HPE 2022 Discover, we'll be right back right after this short break. (gentle music)