Steve McDowell 0:03 Hey, Matt. Unknown Speaker 0:04 Hey Steve, what's up? Steve McDowell 0:06 We're back with another seems like really quickly back with another DataCentric podcast. I've been thinking a lot about HCI lately. vmworld is kicking off this week. And, you know, this new beast and stuff has already been announced. And it's just September feels like a lot to me. Yeah, I care so much about hypervisors. But I like the whole HCI. Let's put it all together and see what happens. Play. Sure. Yeah. Hey, so to help us talk about this. We have a special guest from from HP David Wang. He is the director Product Marketing for storage storage group at HP is where HCI lives. And David is the guy to talk about to talk about HCI and hp. Welcome, David, to podcast David Wang 0:57 guys. Appreciate it. Steve McDowell 1:00 Glad to have you. Hey, so before I start asking you a question, I just want to lay a little groundwork. So you know, thinking a lot about HCI. Looking at HCI. A couple of weeks ago, IDC published their worldwide tracker numbers for HCI and converged systems. And I know HP plays across that spectrum. I want to talk about converged infrastructure today. But you know, HCI, the market overall was was flat to maybe up just a tad. IDC says 1.1%. Canalys, a little different number. Every vendor in that space lost revenue here, except for HPE, you guys grew it 53 and a half percent. So first of all, congratulations. That's a fantastic, fantastic hit for you guys. David Wang 1:46 I really appreciate it. And we're excited about the quarter. Yeah. Steve McDowell 1:52 So let me ask you this. So I'm looking at HCI. You know, Matt, and I talked a lot about the general enterprise infrastructure market and software defined world. And over the past couple of quarters, it's been really ugly out there for those guys, right servers and storage, you know, separately or losing share at 510 percent, whatever numbers you want to look at. But HCI, which brings these things together, and kind of a unique way, is not losing, not losing that traction. What do you what do you what do you see happening in the HCI? world? And why is it Why is it staying healthy? David Wang 2:24 Yeah, absolutely. So if you think about where we are, not to COVID-ize our conversation, but you just think about the general trends with organizations and what COVID brings from business standpoint. You know, it wants to be lean and mean, they want to drive up higher productivity, they want to simplify everything from end to end. And HCI represents that experience. You know, we had HPC HCI, much more as an experience of how you manage infrastructure, you know, completely flipping on its head, how you deploy how you manage how you operate, how you scale it, how you support the system. And HCI as a category is doing really well because it brings that operating model that customers are looking for. And then going back to what you asked about the numbers. I mean, our strategy is really about being able to be that trusted advisor for customers and bringing a best of breed approach where we can give customers the right HCI solution for what they're trying to do with your business. And this quarter has been a fantastic quarter. And it's a moment for us to celebrate with our customers and partners, because it's a clear recognition that the HPP HCI strategy is hitting the mark. Steve McDowell 3:34 HCI Yeah, it makes a lot of sense. I have always been a fan of the approach, right. And I think as we've watched it evolve over the past half decade, almost a decade now. It's really taken on different flavors, right? The world started off thinking about HCI as an appliance, right, but it's so much more. And if you look at just across HP ees portfolio, you start to see that you guys have you know, simplivity you have your reselling systems with Nutanix, you have Vcn ready nodes, you have this thing called Deep ci. So if you know if I'm an IT buyer, and I'm stepping back and I'm looking at, you know, a distinct ci thing makes sense. It resonates Software Defined is is the way to run my infrastructure because, you know, our infrastructure can agree fungible, how do I look at HP portfolio and kind of kind of separate one from the other? Where do each of these things play in how do I look at that now? David Wang 4:29 Good question. Kind of mentally, there is no one size fits all right. If you look at you know, the way that we buy cars, you look at SUVs. Look at Toyota as a brand. It's a portfolio company. They sell different flavors of SUVs from the four runner to the Highlander to the Land Cruiser and beyond. And the reason for is because different SUVs they offer provide different capabilities and characteristics that are tuned for the use case. And that's where organizations should look at when they're thinking about HCI none of the things Let us just think about, what are you trying to do with your applications? Are you trying to power? Dozens of remote data centers across the world? Are you trying to consolidate mixed workloads within the same environment and centralized data center? Are you trying to establish a hybrid cloud? Are you trying to power business critical apps or general purpose applications, depending on all these different requirements requires a different solution. So if you look at simplivity, you know, simplivity, best in class, most efficient own one appliance for your general purpose HCI and general workloads. If you're a customer that is trying to get off of the attacks and looking at a at a neutral hypervisor, then a great solution is our pro line dx with Nutanix. And that's going to fit the bill there. And then if you are looking for an all VMware VCF environment, then we have the best in class Vcn ready nodes. And that's really allowing us to be able to address all those different workloads. Steve McDowell 6:06 And you have this thing called D HCI. Where's HCI? fit? When you look at across the range of simplicity? Nutanix and Vcn. Ready? David Wang 6:14 Yeah. Well, so going back to that analogy, right. Think about Twitter. Five years ago, nobody knew what a crossover SUV was. They're like, what a crossover between a minivan and an SUV? Like? Why would you do that? It's like taking two completely different design centers and gather. But do you look at where the world is today? Everybody loves a crossover SUVs, right? Because it provides incredible functionality. From a three rows standpoint, you know, a lot of whole capacity, a lot of people, but then it provides that great drivability that you'd expect from a minivan. And DCI is that moment for the industry for HCI. Because what we've done with D HCI, is completely shake up the category of HCI, fundamentally, because we talk together about HCI, being an experience, much more than architecture. But if you think about the workloads, HCI has always been a fantastic fit for general purpose applications and small scale environments. And then what do you do for business critical apps? What do you do for mix workloads? Well, unfortunately, Mr. Mrs. Customer, you go back to a traditional three tier stand with external storage, and then you bring a whole bunch of complexity that gets associated with those workloads. So then you're a customer, you're thinking, Man, I really love the experience, the operational model of what HCI provides. But then I really, really hate the model of a web three tier architecture provides. But I know I get better performance, resiliency and efficiency that caused us to look at this market holistically and say, how do we create that crossover SUV moment? How do we help our customers address these new use cases that are coming about where business critical apps and mixed workloads want to have the same love of an HCI experience? And now they can with this evolution in the market? And that's the HCI. Steve McDowell 8:10 Got it? So let me ask you this, is there a segment of the it of the it market reach guy does not play? Is it edge? It's in the data center? It's on demand, it's in the cloud? does it play across the board? Are there spaces where HCI just doesn't not applicable? David Wang 8:30 So I'd say before the advent of D HCI, I'd say what's what's been missing the ball is the core. Right? You know, if you look at the competitive landscape, everybody recognizes that, you know, HCI is is fundamentally restrained by its architecture, through a scale out Software Defined file system, you're just not going to bring it into those larger scale environments. Yeah, you're going to extend the data services into the cloud, you know, hybrid is a really good fit for GFC or hc as a category. But what you're not going to do with it is power your core, because there's too much reluctance. You know, we're hearing clients telling us that they're coming off of their first generation of all flash refreshed, and they're like, well, shoot, I want to go HCI. And they do a PFC. And they realize, Holy moly, the performance characteristics of an all flash, external storage San versus HCI is nine day. So that's where it's been missing, the market industry has not been able to properly provide the right architecture for the core. And that's what Steve McDowell 9:33 we're seeing in front of that, I think is, you know, I agree with what you're saying. And part of that, I think is the evolution of HCI. When we thought about HCI, five years ago, it was an appliance probably from Nutanix. And you know, that makes a lot of sense to put the model of appliance sizing the data center essentially right makes a lot of sense and things like Robo and higher into the edge. But then you go and move into a data center and like you say I have all my disaggregated storage CPUs and I want to scale them independently and manage it like a data center. And you're saying that's what D HCI really sit someplace? David Wang 10:09 And think about this aspects like, why do you love HCI, you love the operating model, because any VM admin, and it, generalists can look across the entire stack. All of the data services, all the resource provisioning happens at a VM basis. You don't have to manage lunz anymore, you don't have to worry about mapping your applications to the underlying storage infrastructure. It's all Software Defined vincentric. d HCI, brings that same exact operating model. But it gives you more flexibility, because now you get to scale your resources independently. Now, you're not over provisioned. Now, you don't have to worry about East West traffic for network latency. Now, you don't have to worry about the resiliency model that's limited within the HCI architecture. So it's like opening this whole new market space, where you can preserve the model of an IT generalist, a VM admin managing the whole stack. But you have no flexibility, you have more performance, more bam, more wherewithal, more resiliency, more efficiency. Matt Kimball 11:09 Hey, David, how does this play, so you need to get HCI below and for a lot of a lot of years. HP and others have positioned ci, you know, converged. infrastructure is kind of how you're describing DHCP. It kind of sounds like is there a distinction between the two that to draw? Or is this kind of the next generation of converged infrastructure? David Wang 11:33 A really interesting question, you know, go back 2010, right to 2010, I think was when the flex pause, and then v box came around, they had always promised simplicity. And actually, it goes back for a second, like, the whole past decade, has all been trying to drive towards it simplicity, because we all know, three tier architectures, super complex, different management across different silos super complex. See I came about and what do they bring, they brought best practices, they brought a pre established configuration of different systems that are designed to work together because they've been tested in the field, they might even ship them out together. But what it didn't solve was the management model of having to manage storage separately from your infrastructure from your compute, what it didn't solve for is the modularity because you're rolling in a giant rack of these converged systems. So you're not flexible enough. And so what HCI came about a few years later was like, Okay, look, we're gonna redefine this whole simplicity model ground up, you know, the world's moving to virtualization, the world is moving to it generalist, let's do a ground up approach. And let's also do a modular approach, you know, taking from the early days of the original hyper scalars, it was also an aggregated scale out model. Clearly, in the last few years, they've changed that model to a disaggregated model now, but you go back to the original Advent, it was modularity, make it easy to scale environment by adding a node and growing the environment. And that's how you compare ci from HCI. And so what dmci does is Yeah, it gives you the performance characteristics, the resiliency characteristics, the efficiency characteristics of ci, but it solves that fun and mental problem of complexity that exists in a CI architecture faces. Steve McDowell 13:32 David, as I understand it, dHCI. Doesn't require it's not really a Greenfield approach, right. I can walk into an existing vSphere environment and HCI eyes It does that. Did I read that right? On the white paper? David Wang 13:49 Yeah, I would I spend a little bit differently. It's not that it's not designed for Greenfield. It's that d h ci is designed for both Greenfield and Brownfield. So think about the use case, right, always, always go back to what the customer trying to do. If we see so many cases now within our, you know, our growing install base of ghci, where customers have recent investments and their server infrastructure, you know, there's a recent deal is huge, and that a huge fleet of proliant Gen nine servers, and they wanted the HCI operating model and so, you know, not to be named competitor vendor came in the equation said, Hey, I'll give you some amazing spirits, you're gonna love it, it's gonna simplify everything end to end. All you need to do is rip out all of your existing servers, and go buy new hardware that's optimized with our software defined storage platform to run your HCI. And customers like seriously, and for the last 10 years, that was the only way to do it because you cannot put a price tag and you probably could, but you can't put a price tag on simplicity because it is so important for what organizations are trying to do. So they're willing to give up those investment dollars. But we go back to the earlier conversation around. Today people are managing cash, they're looking at how they could be lean and mean. And So bottom line makes a big difference. And so with DGI, the reason why brownfields is so valuable for customers that you can now come into a an existing pro line, customer base. And we support a variety of pro line servers, the 380s, you know, 360s, the 580s, the 325, and so forth. But you can go to these existing customers and say, Hey, you want the HDX experience? Yeah. And you don't want to rip and replace your servers? Yeah, guess what, you have an answer now. And it's called ghci. Go buy a nimble storage array that's outfitted with the D HCI automation software and the OS image that allows for ghci to happen in about 15 minutes, I'll give you an HCI. And you don't have to spend $1 on your server infrastructure. Matt Kimball 15:57 That sounds like a really good opportunity for channel partners and systems integrators to go in and add value. David Wang 16:02 Absolutely. And that's, that's what we're trying to, you know, DCI is an is a new product and says we're talking to channel partners, and we're, we're showing them how they can increase their share of wallet, you have, we have channel partners that are really comfortable selling transactional servers, we have channel partners that are really good at selling storage infrastructure and haven't really done the other side, this is about going to those existing channel partners, and saying, Look, guys, I'm gonna give you a really sweet offering that your customers are going to love because of the experience, and you're gonna be able to grow, you know, you're gonna be able to grow beyond just selling servers or storage, you could sell the whole solution now. And you're going to save your customers a bunch of money at the same time. Steve McDowell 16:43 Yeah, I mean, it's a real value add, and it goes beyond just the kind of life cycle refresh, you know, cycle and channel partners get into you going to become a true trusted advisor to those to those customers. And so we talked a lot about D HCI. Right. And we started the conversation kind of drawn a distinction between the HCI and the other HCI solutions. Where are you? Are you seeing? Where's the hotspot? Where Where, where are you seeing good traction and adoption of HCI. Right now who's buying HCI in 2020, David Wang 17:17 The two inflection points that we're seeing is, is stirring a lot of growth. We talked about the core, obviously, with the HCI in that model. But the second inflection point that we're seeing is the edge. And the edge is a really hot spot for HCI. And if you think of what's kind of neat about the edges, we obviously talk about an industry that the edge is where the action is an edge is where the data is being created. And so we think about manufacturing facilities, you think about credit unions, you think about IoT, you think about retail outlets, all these different edge environs, and you can, you can have philosophical conversations about what the edge actually is. But the edge is all the data centers that exist outside of the core, right. And so it could be small, it could be medium science. But the whole notion here is that at the edge, you have a need for modernization, you might have some existing old infrastructure in your retail store that needs to be modernized, you might be growing new apps and data to support new IoT use cases in manufacturing plants. And what we're seeing is the appliance form factor of HCI, is the ideal environment to put within the edge. And so we're seeing a lot of interest. And a lot of the recent wins that we're seeing across HP and with our channel partners, is helping facilitate the movement of modernization at the enterprise edge. Matt Kimball 18:39 Can I ask a question on that? So because you bring up a really interesting point on the edge, and I know HP has made a lot of investments in its edge line, portfolio and kind of what it's doing for I know, it's more industrial. But do you see it a day, this is not I don't mean tomorrow or next quarter, but somewhere down the line where you see those edge line like form factors and servers that kind of are and I know there are tools associated today, but kind of a, you know, an HCI, like deployment on those EdgeLine platforms? Or is that just a little bit a bridge too far? David Wang 19:16 You know, conceptually, why not? Right? I think it really comes down to what are the workloads that you're trying to run in the environment. You know, HCI is designed perfectly for virtual environments. So you know, you have a handful of virtual machines. If you're, if edge line could be a fit, but right now the way edge lines been positioned is for those industrial data historian use type use cases, if customers have a need and fundamentally we look at from a customer centric standpoint, what are they trying to do at the edge will form factors important, right? You don't have space as King when it comes to edge environments. So the smaller the better. You have to be able to establish high availability in the smallest footprint. You have to be able to consolidate as much of the entire ICT stack as possible, which also includes data protection, by the way, right in the edge, you can't afford to have extra software for backup data. You can't afford and manage separate infrastructure for your data protection environment. And so anything about multi site management, all of those capabilities need to exist in a very small form factor package. So if your question, yeah, I mean, why not? I think it depends on the requirements of the use cases. Think price point is also a sensitivity issue that when customers look at an edge environment, they want to make sure they have the most cost effective solution. So we're actively exploring, you know, all these different options in between. I would mention from a form factor standpoint with simplivity. You know, we announced in April of this year, the integration of the AMD second generation epic processor, which brought brings a tremendous amount of VM density, and a one new form factor. And so now What's really unique about simplivity is within to us, which is two nodes, you can establish a true high availability HCI system, which is a way smaller footprint than any of our competitors can do. So you're already kind of seeing that that movement towards very small form factors, but high availability, high performance simplivity is alive and well at HP. So it's a platform you're committed to continuing to sell? Absolutely. It's a core to what we're doing. You know, there is it's a portfolio play as well as in the company, as we talked about before. But absolutely, we're double downing, you know, we recently established a center of excellence that pulls the best minds of our simplivity business or D HCI. Business into one central co E for H HCI. And what that's really allowed us to do is share best practices, look around common experiences, common control plane, common approach to support info site, and what that's allowing us to do. If you think about the one two punch that we have, with simplicity and ghci, those things coming together means HCI, without compromise HCI for every virtual machine HCI without any limitations. And that's really driving this incredible growth that we're seeing recently across the portfolio. Steve McDowell 22:13 Yeah, and I like what you're saying. And I like that you have this theory that kind of brings together the best and brightest internally. And I asked the question, because, you know, a lot of folks who watch the market, right, they they look at, you know, you're showing strong growth with Nutanix, and Dell and VMware, and I'm not gonna put you on the spot here, because I recognize where you're sitting, right. But you know, Dell, and VMware, are moving forward with this kind of this better together strategy, right? So those of us who like to watch this industry are always making predictions and gossiping among ourselves. So I love your answer. And I love that. That's how each approach what we didn't talk about does, you know, so we talked about HP, and we look at HP and how you talk about yourself. And it's very much about as a service and greenlake has become front and center. Right. And I saw two weeks ago, Michael Dell said Our future is going to be as a service. Yeah. HP is all about greenlake. has a service does HP or does HCI. How does that fit into that model? Does HCI have a place in there as a service? David Wang 23:20 Oh, my gosh, absolutely. And we're seeing a ton of interest, we're seeing deals being closed, because of the green like operating model. And if you think about HCI, it brings a management experience, if you think about Green Lake is bringing a consumption experience. And the one two punch between those two things are awesome. So if you're an organization that just wants to be dishing out virtual machines as a service, like we refer to the notion as VM as a service, and you want to be at the end vending machine, then you can easily do that with this operating model. You're not over provision, you're paying as you consume. And it's definitely a sweetener as we look at how we can differentiate. And so yeah, you know, Dell, Michael Dell came out with a similar notion. We obviously still believe were years and years ahead, and we have more capabilities that now allow that true consumption experience to happen. And it's recognition that they, they clearly see that we're on the right path here. And so, yeah, fundamentally, you know, we're seeing more deals, maybe I'll give you a quick example for one. You know, pet shore is a company and based in Australia, and their financial services organization. And what they were looking for was they're running in AWS consumption model as a service, and they're running VDI further sells Salesforce out there. When COVID hit, all of a sudden they had to scale up their VDI deployment for their entire company overnight. Right. And what they had realized they ran the economics, the transactional operating costs of the public cloud was cost prohibitive for them to continue to run the entire VDI environment, AWS and so they said hey, how do I get the same operational excellence? of the public cloud, but with better economics on prem. And that's where they ultimately went with Nimble Storage D HCI. But we have similar stories when it comes to simplicity. So we see as a service being a game changer for sure in the industry. Steve McDowell 25:13 Let me ask this question, because you mentioned a few times a dHCI. Does it only support Nimble Storage? Are they just tightly integrated? David Wang 25:24 So yeah, so d HCI. represents Nimble Storage with proliant servers with a unique management plane of software that's built into the platform. Steve McDowell 25:35 But I asked that question to ask this, does that expose all the goodness in nimble oS? Right, so through DHCP, I'm exposed to things like replication and, and maybe replication to a non ghci storage array. I mean, how does that play in? Yeah, good. Just to kind of consolidate that question, right? Does the Nimble Storage feature set or nimble as feature set kind of sit front and center within the HCI environment? David Wang 26:04 Absolutely. First Class, it is an all the way. And you think about the Nimble Storage, we built that storage platform to already be very VM centric, you know, you can think about innovation, such as our vCenter, plugin, and virtual volumes, you know, best in class in the industry, we have the market share leadership, when it comes to V Vols. With Nimble Storage, it's what we did was we built upon that API, we brought in all the hooks, we brought in data services, the ability to set up replication and policies all at the VM level. And we made the vCenter plugin even more robust, that includes all of the server integrations as well. And then brought in a new dashboard brought in predictive analytics across the whole stack, brought in wellness claiming that integrates in information diagnostics, up into the application layer, and all of that gets packaged in. And so the goodness of the people loved about nimble. Think about building upon that. And now letting vCenter plugin, the vCenter plugin being the interface to manage all those resources. Steve McDowell 27:12 Some a big a big part of the goodness of Nimble Storage, at least at least as a mad slap in my head at this whole section. Is their emphasized integration with the HCI and simplivity. Where does infosight fit alongside of your HCI? portfolio? So for both simplivity and dHCI? David Wang 27:32 Absolutely. Right. A couple of things to think about with the HCI. Or sorry, a couple things to think about with respect to infosight infosight has, if I were to put like, what the heck is info site? Why does it matter? They get two different areas. One, think about support, and what it means from a support standpoint. And the second dimension, think about what it means from an operating standpoint. And so if you look at you first asked about the HCI. If you look at it from a support standpoint, what is unique around the way you support D HCI is obviously as an integrated stack, you'll have one call for support. But what happens today, when you go through a support case with any other vendor is you talk to level one, you answer a bunch of mundane questions, they've escalated to level two, then level three. And that multi tiered support escalations, it's horrendous. What's unique around infosight for DHCP, from a support standpoint, is that yes, we have a one called support. But that one call to support is actually to a direct level three engineer, that's looking and evaluating your entire it stack. And that is completely unique, because it means that from a customer, they're getting resolution faster. And they're also having the predictive analytics that's associated because what's really neat, if you want to unpack technology for a minute is we have all this sensor data, telemetry data coming from the Nimble Storage arrays, we have a whole bunch of telemetry data coming from the VMware environment to the vCenter plugin, and then a whole bunch of data coming from the proliance servers. All that data gets aggregated together in a central data lake, where we're running machine learning our data scientists are evaluating the environments to drive better efficiencies, predicting and preventing issues across that stack. And so that's just that's making the support experience amazing for the HCI. And then the operational side, you know, we've added additional analysis and algorithms that look at things like how you plan your resources, you know, do you need more host CPU, the CPU, the memory, when you need those prescriptively getting recommendations on, you know, how do you rebalance your workloads? There's so many organizations that tell us like, Hey, I have so many VMs that are over oversubscribed, there's so many VMs that are spun up, but I'm not using it I have no visibility. The visibility at the VM level that we have with from an operations standpoint, is best in class in the industry and customers get all that richness for VM analytics for DCI, Unknown Speaker 29:55 What's been amazing watching... HPE acquired nimble About three years ago, almost three years ago, exactly right, it was 2017. About this time of year, or maybe early anyway. So HP acquired nimble about three years ago and infosight came along with that acquisition HCl was a nimble product, you worked on that a little bit. It's been amazing to us as we've watched HP, integrate and expand the footprint of info site, Matt, and I talked to some of the some of the supply chain security guys a few months ago, and and they talked about how info site, you know, it's it's a critical piece of how they're doing, you know, supply chain level security, from the validation, right, this is how we want to manage servers and manage lifecycle of servers. That's so far away from storage. But here it is, you know, as part of your HCI solutions, which really become this holistic data center, predictive analytics solution is not just about storage, or HCI. It really spans everything you're doing, including the converged infrastructure, mountains. David Wang 31:02 Absolutely, it's fundamental to the way that we think about infrastructure operations, like, I mean, just look, for example, like, you know, look at the maturity of it Ops, you start off with a whole bunch of on prem siloed tools that that reactively, look at little pieces of information, maybe your storage, or your network, maybe your compute. And then you move into the model of what the cloud could represent by aggregating machine learning. So then you're going from a diagnostic state to a predictive state. And then you have the ability to drive and recommendations that show you, hey, resize this volume to improve performance for your Oracle database, you know, move this epic, this action happen. And then now the last final mile is actually autonomous, controlling autonomous change. And so by having AI that's plugged into the infrastructure, we're actually starting to drive autonomous operations. And so customers are just love their static about that opportunity to drive that true level of simplicity, where you don't have to touch your infrastructure. Steve McDowell 32:06 So to kind of wrap this up, right, you talked a lot about rage ci plays today, and the portfolio that HP brings to bear. What's got you excited when you look out over the next. I mean, if you want to pre announce some stuff here, feel free. But when you look out over, you know, the next 12 1824 months, you know, what, what's got you excited, where were you focusing your energy David Wang 32:31 needs, this last quarter that we just that we just saw published from IDC, was a great quarter. And what's exciting for us is the channel partners, the customer base, the interest in this new category, and these inflection points at the edge and at the core that's being created because of what we started together and, you know, lead off with marketing, but based on customer needs, it's building and building and building. So it's like, what personally gets me excited is that we're like a startup in some ways inside of inside a bigger company. And the opportunity to really shake up this entire category reinvented, reshape what HCI means for organizations is going to be huge. And so really excited about what this means for customers and their outcomes and their ability to drive more agility and simplicity within their operations. And equally as excited about, you know, sharing that journey, in terms of what we can do at HP. So looking forward to next two years for Steve McDowell 33:29 sure. antastic Hey, so this week is Vm vmworld. HP, typically, especially there you guys have some stuff going on? David Wang 33:37 Absolutely. We got a good session on HCI, actually, as a matter of fact, in support of HCI month in September. So we are going to be doing some fun stuff and having some awesome demos, we're going to have sessions, where we bring a panel of folks come in talking about how our approach for HCI is going to support them. So definitely check out our session. Steve McDowell 33:57 So check out the check out the VMware or excuse me the vmworld agenda. I'll be there. Hey, thanks for taking the time. David, this is a great topic. And I think you know, we just kind of cracked a little bit on what HP can do an HDI space. David Wang 34:13 Yeah. Thanks, Dave. Thanks, Matt. Really appreciate the time today. Steve McDowell 34:15 Hey, so Matt, David was good. I think I've learned a lot about how HP is thinking about HCI. Looking back at the IDC numbers, this is interesting to me. And I'm not going to go too much into into, you know, where and how HP is necessarily making their money since we just spent some time with David. But Cisco shows up on the chart of so IDC looks at this from two perspectives. One is who's selling the HCI solution, right, who's got labels on the outside, and then who software is powering the HCI solution. That's a very different set of numbers. There we do see VMware and Nutanix with a little bit of growth, not a lot. Cisco is just all enough that you They're down 32%, taking barely 4% of the HCI software market what's going on with hyperflex? Unknown Speaker 35:09 That's a, that is a that's a big drop off. Steve McDowell 35:15 I mean, it seems like yeah, I mean, Cisco's model has been, you know, a very channel friendly partner friendly. You know, we'll bring our will bring our UCS servers and our software to bear you bring your storage, and we'll go sell it. And it seems like Nutanix has just stolen that market from Cisco. It seems to me that, across the board and compute Cisco has been has been very heavily focused on the software side and in a lot on the security and enabling of enterprise apps side of the equation. And that's definitely with intersite as well. I don't know that, that that's a shift in focus. But I hear them talk about that more now than I have in the past. And I wonder if there's maybe, you know, kind of a reprioritization of where they're putting their resources? I don't know, I'm not a close Cisco watcher, but I pay attention to them kind of in HCI. space. e ci is tough to man. Because I mean, really, it is a right now, it's a largely, you know, to from a software perspective, a temp game, right. It's VMware and Nutanix. Right. Right. Right. And then things like David talked about the HCI and simplivity. You know, we've talked to scale computing, and then there's pivot three, you know, there's a lot of, you know, I think Nutanix and VMware are aiming very much to the, to the core. We didn't want it, they would they want to be your data center operating system. And then some of these other things, you know, they play around the edges of that, and they all have their place. Yes, they're all special in their places. But yeah, that needed the market kind of the core is he talked about, it's been a, it's been largely Nutanix. And, and a VMware game. And, you know, I think it's hard for any company to play to play in that space, I think HP has actually been, they've been really, they're fun to watch, because I think they're probably from a diversity of solutions perspective, they might be the most well rounded with, you know, they have a very strong Nutanix partnership, they have a strong push behind simplicity. And now with the HCI. You know, they're kind of, you know, as David was talking about, they're kind of hitting all the different use case, edge cases and usage models that you might see out there. So we'll do the evolution. And we talked, we talked about this all the time, the evolution of HPV itself, right, since a split from HP has been, you know, instructive and fascinating, right? I look at a company like Dell, and Dell is a vertically integrated technology company, they make widgets, they sell widgets. HP, I look at them. And this is not true five years ago, I look at HP today. And in light, as you like to say, right, they look a lot like IBM, these guys are a services company with a portfolio of products to back up what it is they're installing in your data center. Right, IBM is proving to their portfolio, maybe too much to kind of hit that model. You know, HP will tell you whatever you want. But But, you know, first and foremost, you know, who would have thought when we heard Antonio stand on stage two and a half years ago and say our future is greenlake. And as a service, they would be as successful as they are? And, you know, they support that and they support it's a solution. So and in the truest sense of the word. Yeah. And I, you know, I think a lot of pundits, and I think the the market as a whole has maybe beaten them up a little bit. And for the wrong, and it's unwarranted. I mean, this is a company that's truly transforming the way they design deliver, installed product and solutions. I would argue not a product anymore, but solutions. And, you know, there's a there's a transformation that takes place. And, you know, instead of, instead of, you know, the market, understanding that kind of watching this, you know, they get beat up because maybe their quarterly numbers, or everybody wants them to be, but you know, their end state they are they're positioning themselves for where the market is moving to. And they're going to be there ahead of the market. That's gonna that's going to set them up very well, I think long term. Oh, yeah. And the problem with pundants, right is, you know, in the job that we have, we're all old school technology guys. And Wall Street's old school, Wall Street, guys. We're used to thinking about the world in a certain way. That that is changing. You turn into the quarterly earnings of almost any technology company now. And front and center. You know that they're saying the words, annual run rate, right. We never used to hear that. It was Here's our quarter. Here's our pipeline. Now it's here's the momentum of our subscriptions based services right on annuity, and not from a service contract perspective where we're used to hearing about that. But it's from Sarah, in terms of core, the business. And we're hearing that from everybody even starting to hear that from Dell. Certainly, VMware, HP has been doing this, and everyone around. Yeah. And you mentioned it earlier. I mean, even Michael Dell came out. And with an interview with CRN very strongly stated that they're moving, you know, there, he said, pretty much their entire portfolio is moving to as a service, I think there to what you're saying there's this recognition that there's a way that it wants to consume now and sex loud model. And if you don't move to providing your solutions and services and products that way, then you're going to be behind what just makes sense, because now as an IT guy, right? I have to go budget $11 million to do a build out. I can, I can, you know, amortize that over over three or five or seven years? Yeah. And in fairness, you know, I think the Twitter the twitterverse kind of blew up a little bit of Michael Dell saying that there's a lot of, you know, fun was had, but watching Dell over the past three years, right? They've been edging up to this. Pretty much what you want it to get as a service they would have with Dell cloud and some of the other things they've announced. I will say this for Dell. And you know, I, when I say it, sometimes people are like, Oh, you're being you know, that's not nice thing. I mean, this in a very positive way, they are so pragmatic in their approach to arkit. And you're right, they do a lot of there's a lot of inching up to the goal line, before they punch the ball over the over the over that goal line. Right. I mean, they and they do it at the right time, as those market, you know, as the market is fully kind of embraced, you know, said, you know, whatever the trend is, they're there and ready to with their solution. They don't they don't go out early ahead of the market. They they wait for them. Yeah, in the right, delta. I don't think anyone and I don't think Michael Dell would be offended by the statement. Right. Dells innovation and delta nice. We say define Dells disruption is not in driving technology innovation necessarily, right. They they look at where the puck is going, and they land right on top of it. They're not inventing new markets, but they'll come into a market that's lucrative and put their stamp on it. dominated? I don't know, I can't think of a market they've walked away from not being dominated. Yeah. And what you're saying they're ready when that market when that market, that opportunity approaches. They are ready because they've done a lot of work in the background that people aren't. Sure. Yeah. All right. So we're rambling on. We have VM ready to attend. I'm putting together my session list right now. Why are you laughing today? Yes, I am. Unknown Speaker 42:54 And I'll leave you at all. I don't think that's what's on your screen. Steve McDowell 42:59 That's another that's another podcast. We'll be back next week. Next week. We have but next week, we're going to be talking about security and supply chain. Yes, Unknown Speaker 43:09 we are with another cool guest. Steve McDowell 43:11 And then after that, we'll wrap up, wrap up vmworld. And all of the announcements that can America so I got a heavy list of a briefing deck sitting right here in front of me with the bang for the sand. Yep, yep. All right, go go do some leaf peeping or whatever it is you people doing the whole country and we will catch up again in a few days. Unknown Speaker 43:33 Oh, thank you.