ESG Videos

Announcer: The following is an ESG On Location video.

Mark: The key themes that HPE has been talking about at Discover are to be edge-centric, data-driven, and cloud-enabled. Now, putting all those together can be quite difficult, but one of the ways that HPE has been talking about doing so is with the announcements around flexible consumption, particularly its GreenLake Hybrid Cloud. I wanted to find out exactly what this flexible consumption actually meant.

Scott: Cloud technologies have fundamentally changed, not just the way that we build applications with rapid speed and agility, but also in the way that IT's consumed, you know, through consumption and pay-as-you-go economic models. We've had flexible capacity on the market for eight years, and that was really designed to address that need to provide pay-as-you-go economics for the enterprise data center environment. However, as we move to the cloud, there's a need to help with the operate part of public cloud environments. For example, in AWS, they call these landing zones. How do you set them up to provide security, compliance, cost optimization? These are all new services that we're bringing to the table with GreenLake Hybrid Cloud.

And then, the second part to it is, in partnership with Microsoft, we've co-engineered and co-developed and tested a Microsoft Azure stack solution to bring that cloud technology back into the data center. So, we drop that on top of flexible capacity, so it's all consumption-enabled, and through that, we provide a seamless cloud experience, whether you're on-prem or operating in the public cloud.

Mark: Okay. So, when you say flexible consumption, you're talking, if I understand it correctly, about something which is not paying for a slice of pizza, but the whole ability to make a pizza, to change the size of the slice, to change where the slice is, and to eat it, if you like. So, it's consumption in its broadest sense, rather than just buying by the slice.

Scott: Absolutely. It's the whole life cycle management of that IT environment. And I think the key here is, this isn't about flexible payment terms. This is a true pay-per-use outcome-based service.

Mark: Yeah. And how far do you see this going? You're talking about this initial announcement. There is room for growth with this sort of approach to IT. Is that what you see? How much further does this go?

Scott: We've chosen to focus, initially, with Amazon and Microsoft. We have ongoing discussions with Google, and that's part of the roadmap. But, ultimately, we believe that the experience of building, deploying, and running applications in the cloud should be as consistent as possible, and we really want the decision about, we like to call it, the right mix, about what makes sense to run where, to be driven by performance, or cost, economics, not necessarily a situation where you're locked into one place or the other because of technology availability.

Mark: Well, and that's interesting. When you say hybrid cloud and not locked into one, what do you mean by that? How broad is the choice or the flexibility?

Scott: When you develop applications, and one of the beautiful, I think, compelling reasons about the public cloud is there's just an amazing set of toolsets available to help developers rapidly innovate and develop applications, and traditionally, if you wanted access to those, you had to run your application in the public cloud. What we're trying to do is bring that technology back into the data center so that, from a business perspective, as a developer, your choice to where it needs to run can be based more along the lines of data affinity, privacy, protection, what performance you might need, and economics, not necessarily a decision that's made just because of lack of technology availability in one place or the other.

Mark: But now, I'm not thinking, if I am that consumer, that user, then I'm not thinking necessarily about the brand name or necessarily an approach. I'm thinking about an outcome, a need.

Scott: Correct, correct.

Mark: Okay. How would you encapsulate, in a few seconds, how a potential user of this service should view it? What are they going to get? How is it different?

Scott: Maybe the best way to answer that is to almost look at different roles. For example, if you're, perhaps, a manager of developers or a Chief Development Officer, what you wind up is, now, in an environment where you don't have to think about multiple different operating systems, multiple different toolsets, maybe even multiple different versions of a piece of application software you have to build. Your developers now have a consistent environment, whether it's in your own data center or in the public cloud. So, that really reduces cost and it's the speed to be able to get those applications developed.

On the flipside, if you're a CEO or perhaps in charge of compliance, you now have a set of tools that allow you to, for example, manage compliance. Let's say you're a health care provider and you have patient data that is centrally housed but that needs to be accessed by remote sites or perhaps even through patient mobile applications. We can monitor how that data is flowing, where it's located, which workloads are accessing it, and we provide checks, and we correlate that with HIPAA requirements. We can show you, in a single pane of glass, whether or not you're incompliant or not. We can tell you which applications and workloads are not in compliance and what can be done to remediate that.

Mark: All right. So, I'm going to take the summary as, people can focus on what they want done rather than how it's going to be done.

Scott: Correct.