Hewlett Packard Enterprise Company (HPE) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

Well, hello, and a very warm welcome to the Hewlett Packard Enterprise Discover Virtual Experience. I'm Daisy McAndrew.

And I'm Tim Stenovec. To say that this HPE Discover is like no other is an understatement. The state of the world, amid a global pandemic, has changed everything, and it's hit very close to home for HPE.

Well, it certainly has, Tim, because HPE's CEO, Antonio Neri, himself recently shared that he tested positive for COVID-19. But I am so pleased to say that Antonio is able to join us today to talk about all that's ahead for this HPE Discover Virtual Experience. Antonio, before we talk business, I know the entire community, including myself, really wants to know, how are you feeling?

Well, first of all, hi, Daisy, and thanks for having me today. I feel much better. I'm now into the second week, and I have to say I feel pretty much back to normal. Obviously, the first few days were a little bit more difficult where you're tired, you're lightheaded. But I feel much better, ready to go for the week ahead, which is a very exciting week as a part of our HPE Discover, which this year is a virtual experience, and you will see we are raising the bar once again.

Certainly raising the bar. And so many changes. Antonio, we've got your keynote coming right up in just a moment. I'm so glad you're well enough to bring that to attendees. What can we expect to hear from you?

Well, as always, we want to come across as the best partner for our customers to work. We listen to them. We understand their needs. And we're going to demonstrate the progress we made in the last year. As you recall, last year, I said that we're going to make everything we do in this company available as a service by 2022. So I'm going to provide an insight into that. And with a series of announcements, which are very exciting, around the cloud services and our software portfolio. We'll also talk about the -- a new age of insight, is a new area we enter in. And I have asked my dear friend, John Chambers, to talk about this, because even in the pandemic, we see that the opportunities continue to grow tremendously. And we believe we need to move from collecting data to providing insight to the business. And John and I have a unique point of view. I'm sure the audience will enjoy hearing from John how we think about the future.

I'm sure you're right, Antonio. We look forward to hearing more from you in your keynote.

Well, thank you for covering us this week, and I hope to speak to you throughout the event. Take care.

Antonio, you, too. All right, Tim. Well, as they say, let's get on with the show.

Thanks, Daisy. It is so great to hear from Antonio. And by going virtual, HPE has managed to make Discover into a more global, yet more intimate experience for people around the world. It's going to be a great couple of days.

Tim, you're so right. 150 sessions coming right to you, the attendee, live and on demand. You can see in the content HPE will provide at your own pace. You choose your own adventure, if you like. Now all of the things you've come to expect and look forward to from past Discover events are still available. The sessions, the demos, training, the HP leaders, industry experts and customers, all available to you in this new virtual experience. So HPE has even managed to bring a little bit of Vegas to this event. What do I mean? Well, you know Vegas never shuts down and neither does this, the HPE Discover Virtual event. This Discover is always on with live programming to accommodate any time zone in the world with a wealth of on-demand content available in your own time anytime.

A special thank you today to customers and partners. Just by registering, you help in the fight against COVID-19. Each registration for Discover Virtual Experience translated into a $10 donation on behalf of HPE to 1 of the 10 charities in the fight against COVID as the company lives up to its purpose of advancing the way people live and work.

That's such great stuff, Tim. And thank you, of course. Now as an IT leader on the front lines during the COVID pandemic, and as we make our way forward in the digital transformation that's become mission-critical for businesses today, HPE is here to help. In 2020, the success of businesses around the globe won't be judged on earnings or stock prices. This year will be all about how enterprises stepped up in society or in support of their employees as COVID-19 swept the globe and life became remote. Now, of course, the tech industry was front and center in a movement known as Tech for Good. And I'm really thrilled to be joined now by tech industry leader, Sally Eaves, to talk about the role the industry needs to play in the rebuilding of work and the rebuilding of societies in a post COVID-19 world. Sally, a very warm welcome. I want to start off by asking you, does the tech industry have a responsibility to -- I know it sounds like a cliché, but make the world a better place? And if it does, how?

Firstly, wholeheartedly, yes. As you know, Tech for Good is a massive passion of mine, and it's not something just to be spoken about. It's something that we have to do. It must be actualized. And I think COVID-19 is a tipping point moment for Tech for Good. We've seen how we can come together. We've seen how we must come together, and tech could be a massive force, not just for digital transformation for business and for business continuity to keep business going, but much more than that. It can make a pivotal difference for society as well. So we've seen this tipping point moment. I think the high-performance computing consortium is one great example of that. The tech industry coming together, 11 different tech companies, an ethos, a collaboration above competition and working together hand-in-hand with a variety of different other organizations, especially education, especially academia, closing the gaps. Now we've seen innovation, for example, around vaccines and pharmaceuticals would normally have taken, say, 15 to 18 months. We've seen huge strides in 7 weeks. That's unprecedented. But we've also seen, over this period of time, digital equity gaps. We have to close them. But, again, we've seen tech companies stepping up to the plate in 24 hours coming out to schools, setting up WiFi systems in car parks, doing all sorts of things at very short notice and being very pragmatic at times as well, but it's been about that doing. So I think now Tech for Good is becoming embedded in everything that we do. And I'm -- looking ahead from COVID-19, for me, the positive legacy of this is that this is being embedded into all business models. I've always said this, it's not an add-on. It's not an [ office ]. Tech for Good should be at the heart of all we're doing as good businesses. So I think in the future, people won't be looking on return on investment. I'd like to think of it as return on social investment. And I have a real clarion call to really follow that example. And I think this it's here to stay, a tipping point moment for Tech for Good right here right now.

It certainty is, what you call a tipping point moment. So I think all of us realize that this is a big moment and a big moment of change. And I want to talk to you now about trust in tech and what's changing in that area. Is this an opportunity to help rebuild some of the erosion of trust that exists towards technology today, Sally?

Absolutely. I think we have to grab hold of this moment. We're starting to change the narrative. Again, something else I talk about a lot, in the past, some of the headlines around tech have used certain language, and it's been scary, words like elimination or destruction in terms of AI. And we're seeing now actually tech in partnership can make such a difference. This is -- this human tech partnership is the way forward. We've shown concrete examples of how we can step in and make a difference. So we need to focus on that and really expand it. So it is a tipping point moment in that sense. One of the aspects, I think, is communication. There's some recent research looking at trust, and it was saying that if people feel adequately informed, that's the biggest driver to changing your view about trust. And again, we can bake trust in. A blockchain tech, for example, is one way of embedding trust actually within the technology we use. And I think all the discussions there's been around track and trace systems, for example, to help over the COVID-19 experience, if something like that was used, that's a way to embed tech -- trust in with the tech itself. It has to be coupled with education, with awareness, making sure all voices are at the table. So it's not just tech driving change or government, for example, it's about every voice being heard, academia, civil society, the general public, and having that opportunity for cross sharing, and feel part of that conversation, feel listened to and to contribute before the outcomes rather than just kind of being a reciprocant of an outcome. So yes, again, trust, identity, massive key themes at the moment. And again, I think we're seeing some real progress to embedding that in and building that trust back.

And, Sally, it's not just the pandemic that we're all thinking about or experiencing at the moment. So I want to talk to you about the unrest surrounding social injustice and the worldwide call for change on that. Where does the tech industry come into play in that area?

Absolutely. A massively important point. I think we've seen, well, a, real leadership in coming forward and making a stand. That's absolutely critical. We need to have leaders at all the big tech organizations really stepping up to the plate here, and we've seen some powerful examples of that already. There's some practical things we can be involved in. I think AI is probably the most critical example of them all in terms of technology areas. We've seen that there are issues with bias in AI. We've seen the lack of diversity in the talent pipeline who is building AI. And that's not just about gender or about race. It's about whole diversity of experience of who is involved in building the tech of the future. So we need to do more work in that area. I think there's lots we can do to attract more people into the tech industry to fill the talent gaps, to change the conversation about what tech is. I think that embedding of purpose in all we do is absolutely critical. So yes, it's leadership. It's showing up. It's calling out when things are being done wrong and real practical examples of making a difference. And I think AI is probably the biggest talking point that worries people and where we've seen concrete examples of where it has gone wrong. So where it has, let's not hide away from that. Let's be transparent, massively important, and learn from those examples where mistakes have been made because then we can get better. We can learn, we can build and we can make improvement. So, again, it's this dialogue, people coming together, more open sharing around these development and investing in education. As you know, a massive -- with the foundation I have, a massive proponent of STEAM learning. So that creativity, diversity of experience, art skills alongside tech confidence as well and enabling more people to benefit from this, that's the way we start building into the future, and we start reducing the risk of inherent bias whether intentional or otherwise. So yes, tech and education absolutely hand-in-hand and investing to impact, massively important.

Well, Sally, I think you've really laid it out for us just now that so much work has been done, so much has been achieved, but there is still so much more to do and so much for us to discuss here. So, Sally, for the moment, thank you so much for being with me today. Sally is going to be back with me later in the day to wrap up all that's happened at the Discover Virtual Experience. Tim?

Over the next 20 minutes, Daisy and I will be joined by 3 more special guests to help set the stage for what's to come on day 1 of the HPE Discover Virtual Experience. Today kicks off with a keynote from HPE CEO, Antonio Neri. But before we hear from Antonio, we are going to spend next little bit with HPE's new CTO and Head of Software, Kumar Sreekanti; and CMO, Jim Jackson; we'll also get perspective from IDC's Crawford Del Prete. We're going to kick it off with Kumar Sreekanti. Kumar, welcome.

Thank you, Tim. Nice to be here.

Well, let's start with your new role at HPE, Kumar. You are now Chief Technology Officer as well as being the Head of Software. Congratulations on your roles. Of course, you come to HPE via the acquisition of your company BlueData. What can you tell us about your new dual role?

Yes, indeed. I've come to -- my entry into HPE is through the BlueData acquisition. I was the Co-Founder and CEO of BlueData. And in my new role, dual CTO as well as Head of Software, my CTO role is the classic technical advising to Antonio and my leadership team as well as working with our M&A and investment strategies and focus on organic and inorganic innovations and combining the software technologies that we have into the new era. As far as the software role is concerned, as you know, HPE's strategy is edge to the cloud platform company. Software is a very key component of this technology. So we have made a decision to bring all the key software technologies under one leadership so that we can focus on not only setting the strategy but executing and aligning the execution with the innovation.

So I want to drill into that a little bit more. I'm curious why HPE is entering the software business, specifically, though, in areas like containers and Kubernetes.

Yes. So what's happening in the modern application development is containers and cloud-native technologies is taking hold. And the customers are looking to innovate and modernize their applications. As you know, HPE, we announced the container platform back fall of last year, and this -- what this container, it's a very unique container platform, which takes advantage of open source technologies as well as the technologies that HPE has acquired through BlueData and MapR. And this brings all the both organic and inorganic innovation and build a very, very robust container platform for enterprises to modernize their applications. On the top of that, we have recently acquired an open source CNCF technologies company called Scytale. And this -- what it clearly indicates is we are committed to having an open source technologies and software technologies to help our customers to modernize their applications. And then as you can see, as our strategy has indicated, that our edge-to-cloud platform has 2 key components in it. One is a software that allows us to build elastic, scalable, automated, secure and optimized infrastructure, at the same time, building a runtime software that allows us to build workload optimized solutions. These 2 technologies are key for our GreenLake. There will be some exciting announcements. Stay tuned from Antonio in the keynote.

Well, speaking of Antonio, people who are watching right now who have seen previous keynotes know that he's talked about data being the new currency, and also unlocking value from all of an enterprise's data is the ultimate goal. So what do you believe must be addressed to make that a reality?

Yes. As I mentioned, data has a gravity. And what people don't realize is you can't shift the data overnight. And in addition, as it's been told, the data is the new oil, right? There is a lot of opportunity for customers to figure out how to get the value of this data. This is the reason why we have announced recently ML ops platform. It's a machine learning ops platform. And we are very focused on -- our platform is very focused on AI, ML applications around containerization. So we expect us to continue our journey in this direction and help the customers to realize the value at the lowest workload optimized cost for the customers.

Well, you and your team certainly spend a lot of time with clients. I would imagine that now most of it is virtual, previously would have been in person. But I'm curious, what are they telling you about their transformation journey?

We have spent a lot of time talking to the customers, and the customers are looking at modernizing their applications to make -- take advantage of all the new technologies and stay competitive. And another very interesting -- as we all know, as we just said, because of pandemic, the digitization -- or digital transformation has put additional requirement on these enterprises to transform them very quickly.

Kumar Sreekanti, HPE's Chief Technology Officer and Head of Software at HPE. It's great to have you with us today. Congratulations again on your new position. Thank you for joining us.

Thank you, Tim.

Okay. Let's get some analysis on everything that Kumar just had to say as well as expectations for this HPE Discover event. I want to bring Daisy back in. And we're thrilled to be joined by the President of IDC, Crawford Del Prete. Crawford, so great to see you today.

Look, you and I are hundreds of miles away, Daisy, thousands of miles away, and we have people tuning in from all over the world. This year's HPE Discover event is quite different from years past. What do you make of this virtual experience?

Yes. Thanks for having me, Tim and Daisy. It's fascinating, right? We've seen events change before our very eyes over the last 15 weeks here. And what I make of this is that in an interesting way, I think that HPE will be expanding their reach dramatically. This event lowers the barriers to making it to one of the faraway places that Discover typically happens, whether that be in Las Vegas or whether that be in Germany or whether that be in the U.K. or around the world. And I think this virtual event is another example of how companies are really focusing on creating an environment where people can get the information that they need. They can do it virtually. They can download the information that supports the videos that they're going to see. And HPE can amplify their message. And actually, in some ways, people can start to understand who else is there. You can understand the partners, the ecosystem partners that are at the event and really understand how HPE is planning to continue on their journey but also participate in this new normal going forward and help lend a hand in transitioning to this new normal. So, look, I think that this event is yet another evolution and a really positive evolution.

So, Crawford, what are you looking to hear from Antonio Neri's keynote today?

Well, when I look at Antonio's keynote, you have to remember, HPE has been on a journey, and that journey is to support customers where they are in their hybrid cloud evolution. And at IDC, we believe, and our research says, that the majority of applications are still outside of the cloud, outside of cloud service provider. So what that means is the customers are looking for cloud service experiences within their data center, and they're also looking for that ability to move across clouds and be able to have services that support these clouds within their physical environments. So I think you're going to continue to see an evolution of that message. You're going to see more services that HPE is developing to support that long-term hybrid environment.

Well, the world that we're in right now, just close to halfway through 2020, is completely different than the one that we entered back in January of this year. How has the landscape changed for HPE since COVID-19 in the marketplace or just in its business approach?

Well, for HPE, it's -- and all technology companies, it's really quite amazing, right? You have all these sales reps that are now inside salespeople. They have to meet with their customers virtually. And then also, we're seeing that, particularly, companies like HPE and many tech companies have really stepped up with a level of empathy around trying to understand how can customers be successful in this new normal. Now, of course, if you're a customer in the retail business or if you're a customer in the tourism business, that's been a massive pivot, and it's been devastating for a lot of those sectors. And HPE, I think, is really focused on trying to help those companies visualize their journey going forward as we start to get back to work in different geographies around the world. But beyond those segments, what we -- what you start to see is that how can HPE do 2 things? How can they help companies be productive while information workers are working from home? And that means secure access to applications. That means being able to get the information that you need and make the decision at the edge of the network. So HPE being able to offer edge-based solutions is very, very important in that environment. Additionally, we've seen that HPE, I think, is going to take a stance here and really focus on how do they develop services that will enable companies to get back to work productively. So that means being able to really help companies think through and have services to think through what does a return to site plan look like, how do I have services that are going to help my employees feel safe, feel productive, feel like they can operate virtually if that's required. And I think there's an entire service catalog and service portfolio that you'll likely see going forward from HPE and from companies like HPE in order to enable the journey from work from home to sort of a hybrid work-from-home environment to ultimately a new normal, which is, I think, the journey we're on over the next 12 months.

Crawford, I'm lobbying to ask you about the subject matter that Sally Eaves and myself were talking about just a few minutes ago. We were discussing the responsibility that tech industry bears in society today and how that's changed. And when it comes to helping find a cure for this pandemic and providing technology to communities in need, there's so much to do. And, Crawford, are you seeing tech companies step up?

Yes, Daisy, I am. I'm seeing -- obviously, to varying degrees. And whether that means a company providing the compute power to try to research ways -- in HPE's case, that could mean providing supercomputing power to companies that are trying to crack the code around COVID-19. Whether that means the tools to help with things like contact tracing, whether that means having edge devices as well as geospatial devices to help understand who were you with, if you were around somebody who's been infected, I think that tech companies are trying to step up and are making a commitment to try and get through this ordeal in as rapid a way as possible. But let me just say that when you think about tech companies in general, we believe at IDC that what this ordeal represents is almost like hitting the fast forward button by 5 years in a number of different areas. In the future of health care, in the future of work, in the future of collaboration, in the future of education. And you kind of get the point. And I think that tech companies need to continue to innovate.

It's fascinating what you were saying, Crawford, there about the speed in which everybody is having to either change the way they think or to literally innovate and invent things. And with that speed, there must come dangers.

Yes. Well, of course. And, of course, some of those dangers, the tech industry is well schooled in kind of pass/fail and experimentation, perpetual beta, trying these things and then, of course, quickly course correcting. And I think that what you're putting your finger on basically is a very, very important trend, which is that we can experiment around the way people work and the way people collaborate. But then there are areas where experimentation is a lot more risky when it gets into health care, when it gets into the caring of individuals who are sick. And in those areas, obviously, we have government controls and we have to be very, very careful about those things. But I think that the experimentation nature of technology is something that, in the end, will be of value here because it will allow us to try many different things in order to reinvent the new normal, which is kind of where we're headed.

Crawford Del Prete, thank you so much for joining us.

Thank you.

Now for HPE's Chief Marketing Officer, Jim Jackson, who's joining me today to make sure you, the viewer, gets everything possible out of the HPE Discover Virtual Experience. And, of course, this is new territory for all of us, whether you're a presenter, a customer, a partner, an influencer, an analyst or whether this is your 10th HPE Discover or perhaps your very first. Welcome, Jim, to the program.

Thanks, Daisy. Excited to be here. It's going to be a great day.

Well, Jim, here we are in our new virtual setting, but tell us about the journey to create this event.

Yes. We had to pretty much rethink everything about this amazing event: content, audience acquisition, demos. We had to really rethink it all. And for us, it really all started with the vision, and that vision was to bring the Discover experience to our customers, to our partners and to our team members. So that kind of guided us. The other thing is this opened the aperture for us to really reach a global -- a true worldwide audience. So we're really, really excited about what we're going to do over the next few days and coming weeks. Daisy, you've been to our Discover in-person events. We have an amazing large demo hall, and what that enables us to do is showcase our technology. We had to rethink all of that for a virtual delivery, and I'm so proud of the teams because we have over 61 demos. And if you think about it over the first couple of days of the event, we're going to showcase that over 1,700 times live. Meaning if you have a question, we will have experts on the line who can address your questions. We have another 100-or-so sessions as well that people can attend. And then, finally, for us, the party doesn't stop after the first week. We're going to continue this through multiple waves in the follow-on weeks. So we are really excited and fired up to get our story out.

Now, Jim, I am hearing quite a lot of whispers about some really pretty exciting names we're going to hear from.

Daisy, we have some amazing speakers that are going to be part of the Discover Virtual Experience. We have Lewis Hamilton, six-time Formula 1 Champion; Simone Biles, Olympic champion, 25 medals; Steve Kerr from the Golden State Warriors; we have John Chambers, former CEO of Cisco; Soledad O'Brien; Toto Wolff; Christian Horner; Daniel Levy; Rick Welts; Susie Wolff. We have just an amazing set of speakers. Great stories, but also reinforcing the messages that we want to get across. It's going to be really exciting to hear from all of them.

Well, I can't wait to hear from them. But, of course, we are just about to hear from Antonio himself. Can you give me any hints about what we might get to hear from him in just a moment?

Antonio is going to demonstrate massive progress toward delivering against our edge-to-cloud platform as a service strategy that we rolled out last year. This is really unique in the industry, and it's what's needed to help customers accelerate to digital transformation. There's really 3 sections to Antonio's keynote. The first is how we're here to help with customers' recovery. We have got amazing stories that you're going to hear from multiple different customers, and they're going to really bring that to life. We also have the Cerner CIO that will be joining Antonio. Then we also have John Chambers. I talked about that earlier. John is going to join Antonio, and they're going to talk about how great companies really support their customers and their partners and their team members during a time of crisis, but also how they come out on the other side, and what are some things that you should be doing to really be more prepared for the future. And then finally, we have some significant industry reveals that Antonio is going to announce. These are really, really significant. They're in the cloud space. So we're going to be announcing new cloud services that span from edge to cloud and that really are targeted at the 70% of applications that we feel will not go to the public cloud. So huge, huge announcements.

And such a huge amount of work and such an ambitious project. It's going to be so exciting over the next couple of days. Well, it's Jim Jackson, HPE's Chief Marketing Officer. So good to have you with us just now. And that brings us to the main event. We'll be hearing again from Antonio himself in just a moment. But before we go, Tim and I want to let you know that we will be here with you throughout the day. We'll be right back straight after Antonio's keynote, and we'll count you down to Keith White's spotlight. Then later today, I'll wrap up all that took place on day 1 at the Discover Virtual Experience with analysis and a look ahead at what to expect from day 2. But right now, let's listen to the keynote from Antonio Neri.

Welcome, everyone, to HPE Discover Virtual Experience. This is a truly global event. Over the next 24 hours, we are streaming Discover to you wherever you are around the world, translating content into 10 different languages, and we have hundreds of HPE experts available to speak with you anytime. I know you have no shortage of virtual events to attend, and I'm honored you have chosen to spend time with me and my HPE team members. So thank you. You may have noticed, I'm coming to you from my home in California. We slightly adjusted the virtual experience plans after I tested positive for COVID-19 last week. The good news is I'm feeling much better and have learned to set up my home production studio in my living room. But joking aside, this is a very serious virus, and I feel fortunate that I'm well enough to join you at HPE Discover. Today, we will focus on 3 topics. First, we will discuss your immediate needs for recovery post-COVID, things like connectivity, capacity, cash flow and business continuity. We are here to listen and here to help. Second, we will discuss how we are entering what I call a new age of insight that is driven by the next phase of digital transformation. I have asked John Chambers, former Chairman and CEO of Cisco and my dear friend, to join me for this discussion. Third, we will discuss HPE's expanded portfolio of new cloud services and software that brings to you a cloud experience for all your apps and data no matter where they live. This accelerates the commitment I made last year to deliver everything to you as a service by 2022, transforming HPE into the edge-to-cloud platform as a service company. Before we get started, I wanted to share the last few weeks has been very hard for me to process. I have felt many emotions, anger, disbelief, sadness, grief and frustration, with the systemic operation and racism that still exist in our society. HPE as a global company has a responsibility to help shape a world that is equal for all people. I am committed to taking a stand, to speaking up, to advocate within and outside the HPE for equality. We have a belief at HPE, and it is to solve humanity with humanity. Everyone deserves to live free of oppression and racism. I challenge you to join me to use this moment to take a stand to speak up on inclusion and to advocate for equity. We have to do better as a society. And together, we can make a difference and be a force for good. So let's get started. We are living in unprecedented times. The COVID-19 pandemic created many new challenges not just for your technology, but also for our society as a whole. At HPE, our purpose is to advance the way people live and work. Solving challenges like these is why HPE exists. And through this unsettling time, I have been really proud of HPE's response. We consider it our responsibility to help the world navigate this pandemic. We have prioritized protecting the health and safety of our team members and supporting our customers and partners as we weather this storm together. The future everyone talked about before the pandemic is now here ahead of schedule. Three years ago, we predicted the enterprise of the future will be edge-centric, cloud-enabled and data-driven. Today, that's no longer a prediction. It is a reality. And we know this edge-centric, cloud-enabled world will require the right technology, expertise and financial flexibility to help you accelerate your transformation. These ingredients made us unique before this crisis. They were also essential to you when you needed our help the most. And these same ingredients are what will enable us to continue to serve as your strategic partner going forward. During the pandemic, we also responded with very important initiatives to address your key needs. For example, we designated $2 billion in financing through HPE Financial Services to help customers and partners with financial hardships. This program helped May Seed, the leading agricultural company in Turkey, when financial uncertainty threatened to derail a critical IT initiative. They turned to HPE for financing help by participating in our 2020 payment relief program. Rather than jeopardizing the production and delivery of crucial crop seed to more than 40 countries, May Seed was able to eliminate disruptions to keep their supply chain on track while deferring more than 90% of the cost until next year. Our Aruba networking capabilities have been deployed in drive-up and virtual health care clinics and in schools that are facilitating distance learning. Let me give you an awesome example. In the state of Arkansas, right here in the United States, Bentonville Schools had 1 business day to move 18,000 students and 1,200 teachers to virtual learning. Days after the shutdown, a photo emerged of students huddled outside the school on a cold, rainy day. Their families did not have Internet access. Our local Aruba teams from interaction created turnkey WiFi solutions with drive-up connectivity for students, teachers, families and community members in the school parking lot. Our high-performance computing solutions are helping scientists and leading research institutions speed up drug discovery with complex modeling simulation, AI and machine learning capabilities. At The University of Alabama in Huntsville, HPE cleared the way to provide Dr. Jerome Baudry with full free access to our Cray Sentinel supercomputer to fight COVID-19. We also joined forces with the U.S. government and other high-tech companies to form the White House High-Performance Computing Consortium, giving COVID-19 researchers access to HPC resources. It is clear, HPE's edge-to-cloud strategy delivered as a service is the right solution now and in the future. You asked us for immediate help in your hospitals, schools, stores, employees, homes and other unexpected places. You needed equipment, capacity and connectivity as well as security, services and support across your edge locations and data centers. You wanted flexible financing to get it deployed immediately. Around the globe, thousands of HPE Pointnext Services members provided the critical support to large or small companies alike to run their operations smoothly without interruption. And HPE will not be who we are without the dedication of our partners. We have hundreds of thousands of partners who build, deliver and help manage solutions in over 80 countries. Together, we're all working side-by-side to build incredible solutions that solve your most immediate and unexpected challenges. I am proud to say that these were just some of our unique assets that we brought together to help you respond and recover. I know many of you have your own unique situations and needs like this. Rest assured, we are here to help, and we will make them happen for you. Here's a video showing some stories of what our HPE team members and our customers achieved together. [Presentation]

While technology accelerated these victories, our team members and partners made them happen. Their daily acts of innovation and the power of their "yes, we can" spirit inspire me every day. It makes me even more proud to be part of HPE. To demonstrate our commitment, you may have noticed when you registered for Discover, we committed to donating $10 for every single customer and partner who join us today. So on behalf of HPE, in your name, we have donated to 10 amazing nonprofit organizations, all making a real impact on the life of people around the globe. Like all of you, we are still learning about driving our business and serving customers through this pandemic. On the frontline of our response here at HPE was Liz Joyce, our Chief Information Security Officer, with representative from every team across the company. I'm happy to have Liz with us today to share her insights. Welcome, Liz, and thanks for joining us, and thanks to you and the entire team.

During this unprecedented time, what were some of the most unexpected challenges that the team found?

Yes. Thanks, Antonio. I think we, like everybody, learned a lot during this event. The first thing that jumps to mind for me is the fact of the truly global nature of this event. We, as a company, at HPE, have a good history with business continuity and resilience, but even we weren't fully prepared for global pandemic. And so with the breadth and the scale of everything going on, we had to very quickly react and adapt and put in place a lot of global structures in order to support the massive amount of activity that was going on. So that was everything from 24/7 war rooms, to all of the structures in order to have local action, with strategic and global decision-making, and all of that supported by a huge amount of communication. So we're managing globally but at this local level. I think the other really key thing is around the fact that a crisis, in my mind, is normally a time-bound, finite event. And it's usually measured in minutes and hours and days and weeks. We have been in this for months, and so this is not a short-term crisis. This is a long-term sustained event. And so as we do things as part of the crisis and managing it, we need to think of them in terms of they may become foundational to what is going to be our new normal moving forward. And so we have to be very thoughtful in that, make sure that we have sustainable and manageable processes. I think those have been the 2 biggest challenges to date.

We are, what, 4 months into it. Obviously, we have a lot of learnings that you just went through it. But as we go forward, how we are thinking differently? And what advice actually you can share with our customers?

Yes. I think a couple of things that we're definitely doing differently is we are thinking global but acting local. So the word you've been using at Discover, glocal. It really is about managing the entire process globally. You want to keep everybody safe no matter where they are. You want to provide consistent services and products to our customers no matter where they are. So you need that constant global structure. But to do that, you also need to have local detailed knowledge. So where are people? What are the conditions? You have to be able to merge those 2 things in order to ensure that we can still get on with our job. I think the new normal, we're all trying to figure out the new normal. We're trying to understand how we can work remotely and still get the same or even better outcomes. But then when we really do need to go to sites, how can we do that safely and securely and keep people protected?

So, I mean, obviously, we are planning our return to work, and your team was at the beginning of the crisis through the crisis management team now under kind of returning back to whatever the new normal is. I think about automation because, also, we're going to be way more distributed. I think about security, obviously. I think about safety. So what is top of mind for you and the team right now?

Yes. Well, all of those things, safety, first and foremost, for everyone. And obviously, we're collaborating with all of the teams to deliver on that to keep people physically safe. From a online, cyber perspective, we obviously -- it's all again about data and intelligence and also speed of response. So having all of the information, we've been able to gather that, been able to truly understand, again, at a global scale, whether people are at home or whether they're on the network, just have that visibility and ensure that we can protect them. That automation is really key because that speed of response, and you're talking about a global situation, it's just really important. So understanding your tooling and your configurations, focus on automation. And the insights you can get from the data and applying those in a very automated, real-time, consistent way, those are all critical, fundamental to us ensuring that we can protect everyone going forward.

Well, thank you, Liz, for joining me today. But most importantly, thanks to you and the team for all the hard work, dedication, has been long hours managing the crisis, getting us through the crisis, obviously, preparing us to get back to work. It doesn't go unnoticed. And what you guys are doing is just amazing to me. But also, we're going to learn quite a bit, as you said, and we're going to share this with our customers. So anyway, thanks for joining me today, and first and foremost, be safe.

Thanks, Antonio. Be safe.

Based on our own learnings and from helping customers, today, we released a new report, the new IT playbook for disruptive times with strategies and best practices for accelerating successfully into the next chapter. Our customers have told us they need help getting back to work in the new normal, whatever the new normal may look like. So to help get our customers and communities back to work safely, we launched 5 new solutions through HP Pointnext Services to address critical needs such as social distance tracking and tracing, touchless entry and fever detection. Another inspiring example was our partnership with Cerner health care. When the U.K.'s National Health Service, or NHS, rapidly required increased hospital capacity, Cerner health care transformed the ExCel London convention center into a 100-acre temporary hospital in days. Please join me in thanking all the Cerner employees and the medical professionals who helped to make this happen. I had the chance to catch up with the CIO of Cerner, Bill Graff, and asked him to share Cerner's amazing story with us today. Hi, Bill, thank you for sharing your experience and insights with us today. Cerner is on the front lines every day with response to COVID-19. However, why don't you share a little more to our audience about who Cerner is and what do you do?

Thank you, Antonio. Cerner is a 40-plus year-old company that's been focused really the last 40 years on digitizing health care. Really, over the last few years, we believe that the health care digitization has happened, and so now we're not only focusing on continuing that effort, but also taking our big data platforms and driving insights through our population health platform as well as our electronic medical record platforms to better provide insights and continue to improve health and care for all of our clients, primarily in the provider space.

Thank you, Bill. Tell us more about your learnings from the NHS Nightingale experience, which was amazing.

The Nightingale experience was there based in London, and we were asked by our clients there to help set up a field hospital, allowing for a surge of COVID-19 cases. So they asked for Cerner's assistance in setting up a 4,000-bed, basically field hospital in a large auditorium space. So in working with our partners, HPE, I called Antonio and asked for him to help us expedite some additional hardware capacity, which HPE did very generously, got that to us in time. As well as our consulting organization and technology organizations helped the actual client become prepared in new processes and workflows to be able to support the surge that was happening in London at the time.

Yes. I think it's an amazing and inspiring story. I'm glad we could help. And thank you for your partnership, and thank you for joining me here today, Bill.

Thank you, Antonio.

Our conversation went on to cover many more topics, including Cerner's outlook for the future. So please visit our [indiscernible] website to watch more. As we recover, I believe it is important to focus on and discuss the future. Mary Meeker recently published a report title Our New World 2020, which explores the impact of COVID-19. She made a striking observation in describing the state of the world at the height of the pandemic. She said, "We are awash in data but lacking connectivity and insight." Even in the early days of the pandemic, officials around the globe shared spreadsheets to track utilization and hospital capacity. We have enormous amount of data we couldn't analyze, and what we did analyze often created conflicting answers. Despite decades of investment in technology, there remained hundreds of dark, unconnected pools of data. Researchers and providers were overwhelmed by the volume of the data, unable to create insight and action from portions of information. We cannot repeat this failure. I believe we are nearing the end of the information era, which focused on generating and collecting massive amounts of data, data that could not be brought together to create timely insights and actions to change our future. The next decade must be about insights and discoveries that are share and elevate the greater well-being of every human being on this planet. Today, we are entering the age of insight. [Presentation]

The age of insight required new principles and priorities for digital transformation. The focus is to build an edge-to-cloud platform that connects, protects, analyzes and acts on all your data and brings agility to your apps to unlock your enterprise's full potential. These capabilities will be mission critical to you and unique to your strategy, industry and customers. Your edge-to-cloud platform will allow data and services to move without constraint. This is possible when you build up on open-source, cloud-native technologies, optimized for a highly distributed infrastructure model based on proven trust and identity. Our future can unlock you and your data into someone else's wall garden. To make the next wave of digital transformation a reality, our first priority is to address the workloads that must be close to the data, whether the edge or in data centers. Almost 10 years after public cloud emerged, more than 70% of apps and data are still outside the public cloud. They still lack agility due to data gravity latency and app entanglement. As a result, you have 2 divergent operating models: one in the cloud and one on-premises, while paid higher cost to maintain them both. In the next wave of digital transformation, I believe we will shift from a cloud-first mandate to a cloud-everywhere mandate. And to bring the next wave of digital transformation into focus, I had a chance to sit down with my good friend, John Chambers, Founder and CEO of JC2 Ventures and Former Chairman and CEO of Cisco. Thank you for joining us today, John. I appreciate you making the time to speak with me and also to speak to the audience. We have an incredible cast attending this webcast. The first question I have for you, John, you have managed a powerhouse through 6 different market crises. Just amazing to think about 6 market crises. What advice you have for today's leaders as they navigate through this uncertain future?

Well, it is my sixth financial crisis; my fifth health care crisis, although, obviously, the most severe; my third supply chain crisis. So I've seen the movie a number of times. And the playbook, both on what you do and learning from my mistakes in the past as well, is remarkably repeatable. First thing is, as a leader, you don't hide. You need to be very transparent, out in front. Secondly, you want to be realistic, how much was introduced by the crisis you're dealing with, and how much was the company also needed to change because you must address both at the same time. Then you basically say, what are the platforms or key focus area. I like our numbers, 5 to 7 platforms that are going to lead you through the crisis and prepare you for the outcome. You anticipate what are the elements here in terms of what you will look like 12 to 18 months, paint that picture for your employees, for your customers, your shareholders, your partners. And then you regularly communicate back on how you're moving through those objectives. The platforms you deal with are usually around how do you control expenses, free cash flow, your employees, your customers. You also want to say, what are my new big bets we're going to make through it? And a crisis always lasts longer than we anticipate and usually deeper. So you try to make your changes one time, prepare yourself for the future. Then what's exciting is once you do that, then you take your company. And remember, my parents are both doctors. They taught me to deal with the world the way it is, not the way I wish it was. We all wish we could avoid this. But once you're here, what are you going to look like 2 and 3 and 5 years out? It's a chance to do a new IPO. It's how do you really position the company and your employees to not only survive this but to lead in the next generation of great companies.

In many ways, you have reinvented yourself every time there is a crisis, learned from the past, making decision quicker, obviously, but also positioning yourself for the massive opportunity ahead, because where there is a crisis, there is an opportunity.

So part of it is reinventing yourself, and I absolutely agree with that. But part of it is the aspects of the playbook you can run again and again. Reinventing yourself is the hardest thing for a CEO to do. It's how do you have the courage to say, let's learn from my strengths, but also, what am I going to have to do differently in this next era. You've got to disrupt or you get disrupted. You have to have the courage to initiate that vision and strategy and say how we're going to change. And this is where culture and communication become so important.

We are going through a crisis right now, right? And I believe the world is going to change forever. We're going to live in a massive distributor world. And I believe many organization are totally unprepared. They never thought they will send 100% of their people working from home. I think -- and I talked about the power of delivering outcome from the data. And so when you think about the next wave of digital transformation, what do you think are the key principles and priorities customers should have in mind? Because you and I talked early on, it's not about the digital transformation, it's becoming digitally native in everything we do.

So, Antonio, when I really think about what's about to happen, first, 40% to 50% of the Fortune 500 will not exist in a decade. It's going to be a brutal change. And these terrible events we're now seeing will actually accelerate that. Probably 60% of the startups won't exist in a decade. And a number of them won't exist in 2 to 3 years. So it's a period of time whether you either disrupt or you get disrupted. Your ability to compete not against competitors, but compete against the new market transitions, the new business models, outcome-focused, enabled by the Internet of everything, big data and being able to analyze that and then do the compute, do the storage, do the access to that big data, the applications, the security at the edge. And it gives the company a chance to really transform themselves into a direction. One of the positives out of these challenging events will be companies will move much faster to a digital world. HPE, I think, is positioned yourself for how do you do that. How do you do it with innovation, how do you do it as the cloud moves to the edge? How do you use this digital, if you will, architecture to disrupt.

And now, we talk about the edge, right? We try just to explore a little bit about the distributor world where the edge is where we live and work. And you and I have both the same vision. We believe that's the big opportunity going forward. And we both invested in a company called Pensando. Maybe you want to share with the audience a little bit about how we're thinking about that future together.

Well, what was fascinating, Antonio, the first time you and I talked, I used acquisitions at Cisco, where we did 180 of them to really move into new market areas. Then I began to learn how do you do strategic partnerships. With start-ups, they're often able to attract the talent at a faster pace, and their investors are willing to invest 10 years out, which is hard to do it as a public company. So the ability to partner with start-ups in a way that a large innovative company can partner with a start-up that's very innovative and change your market is there. With Pensando, this is a team that has built $8 billion products, usually 50% to 70% market share. And it's a company that combines basically the ability to do storage and security and compute at the edge. And I think we both envision how that's going to transform, where probably 75% of the data and applications will occur at the edge. It's a team that loves you all and you all love them. And this is where when you partner, you've got to have a culture that moves rapidly together. We've been together since you literally were a key investor in our last round, but our teams have melded so well together. I can't tell the difference between your team and my team at that end.

So in light of everything going on in the world today, this, I think, is a nice pivot, right? How do you build the culture for transformation? Because we talk about reinventing yourself, transformation never ends, right, it's a journey here. How you do that over and over and over again?

Well, I think it first starts with -- you've got to have a strong culture yourself. One of the many reasons that I love HPE is Lew Platt. When I first came here to Silicon Valley...

That's the time I joined HPE when Lew was the CEO.

Oh, did you? Amazing man, but your culture was amazingly strong. I called him up, and I said, I'm in charge of a company called Cisco, not the food company. I've only got 400 employees. We're doing something called the Internet, and I don't understand the valley. He asked me to come over and spend time with him. And I met with him every quarter for the next 3 years. He taught me about Silicon Valley. By that time, we were on a roll on our way to becoming the most valuable company ever in history. I turned to Lew and said, "What can I do to pay you back?" And he said, "Do it for the next generation." So I have, over the last 3 decades. But the cool thing is now to work together to change the marketplace. Back to the cultural part of that, you can't have a great company without a very strong culture. You may like it or you may not. I love the HPE culture. HPE, what you all have done, it starts with the CEO. You've got to walk the talk, you've got to have the courage. You can't say change is good for you all, not for me. You lead by example, and you have to reinvent yourself every 3 to 5 years. Also the culture of are you a good person. People love working here. I love the culture that you've built. But you have the courage to say, we've got a change. You outline a strategy and vision on how you change and then you pull your team with you. It's an honor to be a wingman and part of that, and we'll do our best not to let you down.

Well, thank you, John, and I appreciate you sharing your thoughts today with us. For me, it's an honor to work with an iconic person like you. I never stop learning from leaders like you because in the end, Silicon Valley has done amazing things. But ultimately, we as the leaders, have a responsibility to do it in a sustainable way. And you have been a voice in the market for decades. And so for us to partner together on something that we believe is going to change the world, it's just a unique opportunity that we take it very seriously. And thank you for being with me today.

Yes. It's my honor. You really think about leadership, the role of the CEO is simply strategy and vision, develop, recruit, retain the leadership team to implement the strategy and vision, the communications and the culture, and I'm betting on HPE for the future.

Thank you, John. Next, I wanted to introduce you to an innovative company at the forefront of building an edge cloud platform and who is on the front lines of ushering an age of insight. If there is an automaker that's nearly synonymous with driver safety, it is Volvo. If there is a technology that's pushing the auto industry in the vast unknown, it is autonomous driving. So what it does look like when Volvo enters the race to build the safest, self-driving car? The answer is Zenuity, a start-up launched by Volvo to dream up the car of the future and turn it intra reality. Zenuity's CEO, Dennis Nobelius, has been on both sides of the driver safety conversation. He guided the creation of the model 90 for Volvo before leading its self-driving car start-up company, Zenuity. I had the opportunity to catch up with Dennis earlier. Let's see what he had to say. Thank you, Dennis, for joining me today. It's an honor and a privilege to have you as a part of our event to share your story. I hope everything is going well in Gothenburg. I note that the summer is always an important part of the season that I know you and the rest of your competitors are looking forward to it. But why we don't jump into it? Zenuity is a new company, and it has a great motto, which is make it real. So how you put in action the make it real in your day-to-day activities?

Thank you, Antonio, and thank you for having me here. Yes. So we are a young company, but we also have a very strong heritage on the safety side. But when it comes to make it real, it's all about bringing automotive software out on the streets, in the hands of customers and we're all about -- we are super focused on the unsupervised driving, so making autonomous driving real. And we also believe that this technology will change the way we live in our society and actually the way we build our society. So it's a technology that holds a lot of potential in saving lives. And when it comes to making it real, you need a few things, you need a lead customer, and we have Volvo Cars, both as owners and as a lead customer. And they are so committed in making this technology come to life. And then of course, you need talented people and a very strong ecosystem. And here is also where we are teaming up with HPE and think that this partnership will prove a lot when it comes to making it real.

So I'm sure there is a lot of people out there wondering how autonomous vehicles really work. Maybe you want to share with the audience kind of the life cycle of an autonomous vehicle. How that works?

Sure. So right now, we are in the development phase. What that means is that we equip cars with kind of 30-plus sensors and a big trunk with a lot of computers. We go out, we test drive this, and we test it and collect data all over the world. So it will be in Malaysia, it will be in U.S., of course, be in China. So all over the world, collecting data, sending that back to a certain data center provided by HP. And then we simulate the data, so we cannot leave all that roads traveled every night, and resimulate and test and run our features. So that's for the development phase. Then moving into production because validating autonomous driving is really complex, and you need also the customer fleet. So the kind of the Volvo Cars out on the street, we need those as well to test features and to send it back, doing dark launches and finally, be able to validate autonomous driving and switch it on. So that's kind of the life cycle of the data.

And that's an amazing -- because it kind of -- process because I was there with you, right? So we drove through the streets of Gothenburg and seeing the amount of data you're collecting. It's just mind-boggling. Maybe you just can share with the audience here. How much data you have collected like in half an hour driving?

Yes. No. So it's like 16 terabytes an hour, at least. And then we are running more than 100 petabytes of data just to get this -- yes, to get the entire system to work. And then you need to scrap continuously. So actually, the amount of data you collect is even greater than that.

So now this is a perfect example from the edge-to-cloud kind of transition we are seeing, right? And the -- and how we create data. And to me, this is a perfect opportunity to derive insights of the edge. Obviously here, it's all about safety. As you think about the future, right, and HPE and Zenuity have partnered together to build this platform. Think about what going on -- what's going on in the process with the developers? Because obviously, in your company, everybody is a developer, right?

Yes, absolutely. I mean what we're doing right now is working very intensively. We're also looking into the next levels. So we're having research activities in the field of AI, of course, federated computing and the next levels. And that's where we believe where we can actually train the neural networks out close to the cars, close to the different sites globally. And that's what you need to have that data loop, we call it the machine, to be up and running. And that's one of our key advantages to build this together with you.

And it's all about intelligence and automation because one of the things are -- when you and I reviewed the project last time, obviously, the amount of automation in the platform to make the data available immediately to the developers. It's just amazing, the amount of software and integration that takes place.

Exactly, and you need to search for the chronic cases, you need to have a good search algorithm to directly get the data in the hands of the developers, so you know exactly what to test for and what to understand. So that's really a key part of our process and our way of working.

Well, we are super proud to work with you, Dennis, and the Zenuity team. I think what you're doing is simply amazing. I mean Volvo is recognized for safety. It's a brand that everybody knows. And I'm sure you're going to position your company and also the Volvo brand in ways that people have never imagined before. But ultimately, it's all about driving that digital automation and transformation through a use case, I think it's going to change society forever, like you just said. And we're super proud to work with you and your team to provide you the infrastructure or the software and the services to be able to deliver against the unique vision.

Thank you very much, Antonio. And autonomous driving is all about safety and data, and you're assisting with that. So thank you for leading this together with us.

Well, thank you for being with us today. That was an amazing example of Innovation HP can help you deliver to accelerate your own digital transformation. As you can see, the world is shifting from centralized and closed approaches in large data centers to a future of small centers of data everywhere, highly decentralized and distributed. This shift demands a common cloud platform that can put the agility and intelligence close to your data sources to create real-time insights everywhere. Today, public clouds are extending their platforms into the data center in what Gartner calls distributed cloud. The problem is these solutions were architected to be very centralized and rely on connectivity to their control plane. They still don't address the other 70% of your apps and data. They are not open, and they don't enable up movement between other cloud platforms. Data transfer and egress is expensive. We know the realities of your enterprise. With HPE GreenLake, we deliver cloud services directly to your data in the environment of your choice with one consistent operating model and with visibility and governance of all your apps and data. And with more flexible financial terms to preserve your cash flow, all from one platform, to help you go even faster. Today, I'm excited to introduce our next-generation of HPE GreenLake cloud services with point-and-click, self-serve simplicity. So you can quickly deliver services to your developers, data scientists and line of business so they can create solutions that they like to your customers, protect your business from risk and streamline your operations. HPE GreenLake is delivering a whole new cloud experience, enabling you to explore our services, initiate a free trial and get pricing online. All of our new class services can be deployed and run on your choice of 17 pre-integrated workload optimized configurations available in small, medium and large sizes. These solutions can be delivered to your edge, colo or data center in as little as 14 days. And each one is pay-per-use, rapidly scalable and managed for you. For those who want the private cloud experience, we are launching a series of HPE GreenLake cloud services for virtual machine services, container cluster services, storage, [indiscernible] and more as a service. Through GreenLake central, you can provision VM and compare instances in just 5 clicks. We also introduced new cloud data protection services, which is an enterprise cloud backup service that modernizes backup and recovery and helps you get value from your data, all delivered with speed and agility without the data egress costs or locking. And to deliver against our edge-to-cloud platform strategy, we are enhancing a new cloud services for the Intelligent Edge. Based on the Aruba edge service platform, or ESP, to unify, secure and automate network operations and serve as the foundation for realizing the full potential of the edge. HPE GreenLake is the cloud that comes to you. As we continue to transform HPE, software is a significant focus for us. Today, we have more than 8,000 software engineers, focused on you more than software for the most important part of our business. That is why I'm also very excited to introduce a new software portfolio, HPE Ezmeral and our first 2 offerings, HPE Ezmeral Container Platform and HPE Ezmeral ML Ops, both available as a software license or as a cloud service offering through HPE GreenLake. While most enterprises are investing in AI and machine learning, only 6% have a mature process to operationalize their ML models. With our HPE Ezmeral ML Ops software solution, data science teams can instantly spin up and scale containerized environments for their ML pipelines, with secured access to the data they need so they can deliver insights in minutes, not months. With the new HPE GreenLake ML Ops cloud services, you can bring DevOps agility to the end-to-end machine learning life cycle, to accelerate time to value for AI projects from pilot to production. I am really proud of what the teams have delivered here today as it shows tremendous progress towards our promise to transform HPE and to deliver everything to you as a service by 2022. We are building for your future. With our new HPE GreenLake cloud services, you have data egress charges ever. With the public cloud, users can pay 2x the costs for storing data just to get it back. More and more of you have shared how inflexible your public cloud costs actually are. With GreenLake, we give you much more flexibility to plan and land cost, how and when you want. Our offering is elastic and pay-per-use, providing the financial guardrails that fits your needs. With HPE GreenLake and our container services based on Kubernetes, you are not locked in. You can move those workloads and data to any public cloud later if that makes sense for you. And HPE Pointnext services can advise you on the placement of your workloads and data to maximize your budget and get the right mix across your hybrid estate. We have heard your concern about how some software companies are changing their cloud license in terms of requiring you to buy new licenses to move into a public cloud. Not with HPE GreenLake cloud services. You can use your existing licenses. If you have this issue, we are here to help. Finally, in many cases, you can begin building your HPE GreenLake cloud with your existing infrastructure. We can help you repurpose it and move it to this model and potentially return value from those assets to fund your transformation. Over the last 3 years, we have returned to customers more than $0.5 billion to fund their transformation. As we continue to build the HPE GreenLake Cloud Platform and HPE Ezmeral software portfolio with greater automation, self-service and ease of use, we can unlock many more possibilities for you. You focus on your business, customers and data, we will do the rest. We just covered a lot. We are in the age of insights and technology and digital transformation are more critical than ever before. HPE is answering the call to bring the right technology, people and economics to solve the world's most pressing problems. We are driving the next wave of digital transformation, and the next wave will be to become digitally native in everything we do. This will be required in order to connect, protect, analyze and act in a new normal. We are committed to being the edge-to-cloud platform as a service company by transforming our portfolio to deliver meaningful customer outcomes. So in closing, I want to say that I am more optimistic about the future than ever. In moments like this, people, communities and companies show the world who they truly are. At HPE, we are continuing to deliver on our purpose to advance the way people even work. It is how our founders, Bill and Dave, imagined our company, and it remains our North Star today. I am incredibly proud of the innovation we continue to bring to market, but what is more important is our belief that technology's greatest promise lies in its potential for positive change to map our galaxies, to prevent future pandemics, to heal our environment. And that enormous impact is only possible because of you, our customers and partners. Technology is enabling real tangible change and at HPE, we are leveraging our most powerful innovation so that you can accomplish more than ever before. I know we can and will get to this unprecedented time together. I am inspired and humbled by the humanity in your responses and recovery efforts. And our society is stronger for it. As we begin to reimagine a new and better world for ourselves, HPE is committed to helping each of you move forward. Thank you for joining us, and I look forward to speaking with you again soon. Please stay well and safe. Thank you.

It won't be long now before we hear Keith White's much anticipated HPE GreenLake announcement. But before that, to shed some light on how HPE GreenLake is helping customers around the world is Mitsuyoshi Ogawa, joining me all the way from Japan, a very warm welcome. You are the Vice President and General Manager of Pointnext Services, very warm welcome to you, Ogawa-san.

I'd love to start off by, if you could just help us understand a bit more about your region, a bit more about businesses in Japan, how they've changed since the start of the year? And what is most concerning them right now?

[Foreign Language] The Japanese government lifted the state of emergency. And then during the state of emergency, as you can imagine, okay, everything in the south, we closed the school and also the department stores are closed and the restaurants, et cetera. And also the business is the -- that a lot of the Japanese company closed their office and then start on their working at home. And then now we are trying to get back to the normal mode, but it's very different from before the COVID-19.

And you're saying that, of course, what's normal now was never normal before. But specifically, what challenges do you think the businesses are now looking to you to help them with?

Yes. Sure. Actually, as I mentioned, some company still -- even, after we have lifted the state of emergency, that some of the company continue to work at home. And also, a company recently announced that the 15% of their employees continue to work at home permanently. So the -- every company is trying to change the work style. And also they are trying to enhance the remote work environment. So we are now trying to help that kind of the implementation of their remote working environment, such as implement faster resource infrastructure and also the enhance of their network. And also the implementing [indiscernible] for the Microsoft solution, et cetera. So we are now helping from infrastructural point of view to drive the remote work environment.

I suppose a lot of that, Ogawa-san, what you've been describing, would chime in with how Antonio has been talking about how HPE is here to help. We're hearing that phrase a lot at the moment, aren't we? Are there any more examples of how in your area in Japan, HPE is trying to help its customers?

Sure. Actually, there are 2 aspects. So how we can help the people in Japan. And also, how we can have for our customers. So how we can help out the people in Japan with the [ statement ] of the vision? This is the kind of the global program for Aruba business. So we are now offering here to donate the temporary network, wireless network environment to the healthcare facilities. So in Japan, we have signed the temporary healthcare facility to handle the COVID-19. So we are providing the -- trying to providing the temporary wireless network to connect their healthcare equipment. So now we are discussing the 3 sites to help -- how we can help. And secondly, how we can help the customer is that we continue to support, the on-site for the data center because the -- it's very important, business continuity for our customers. So we are supporting on-site data center continuity. And also we continue for the healthcare project at the customer side.

Ogawa-san, I'd love to talk more now about HPE GreenLake. Specifically in Japan, how are your customers responding to it? And how do you think it's been helping them?

So we now are providing GreenLake model to our Japanese customers a lot. And there was recently after COVID-19, some of the client is serving for their cash flow. So we're now offering the buyback program, which is the buyback, the HPE existing infrastructure from them to us and then we providing HPE GreenLake model by using that infrastructure. So we're helping their cash flow. And also the -- as I mentioned, most of the company side remote working. And then they need to enhance their remote work environment. So we're providing a bunch of desktop infrastructure solution with HPE GreenLake.

So great to get the Japanese perspective and Japanese experience. So many, many thanks to you, Mitsuyoshi Ogawa. And thank you for your time. Right now, though, it's time for us to check back in with Tim. Tim?

Thanks, Daisy. Great stuff. Keith White's spotlight is just around the corner. But before we hear from him, I want to bring in Erik Vogel. He's global Vice President of Customer Experience for HPE GreenLake. Erik, thank you so much for joining us.

So what do you think were the biggest takeaways from Antonio's keynote?

Well, I'll tell you what I'm most excited about is really hearing about our transformation to really becoming an as-a-service company. And a lot of those key points he was making about the new services we're launching and what's coming with HP. I think should be really exciting for everybody. I know it is for me, really positioning us as a true -- everything as a service edge-to-cloud company. And this is a new day for HP and a new day for GreenLake.

Given what you've heard from customers, how do you think they're going to respond to this GreenLake news?

Yes. The response up to this point has been fantastic. And I imagine that it's just going to continue that trend. What we've been hearing from customers, and then we talked to over 1,000 of them last year. What we're finding is they love that public cloud experience. And that is the new bar, the ability to get things easy, simple, fast. And we've responded. So HP GreenLake is responding to that by being able to provide that cloud experience for customers on-prem. We know that customers have moved a lot of the easy step to public cloud, and they've started to slow, and they're looking for a solution to address those applications that can't move in the on-prem environment, but they want to get that cloud-like experience, and that's what we're bringing with GreenLake to those customers. So the response has been tremendous, and we're going to continue to see that trend, I'm sure, because this is really what our customers are asking for. They're saying, we want a way to address those on-prem applications, but we want to put that experience that we love, which is that public cloud experience. So bringing that cloud experience to our customers, I'm sure we're going to see continued interest in these GreenLake solutions.

Well, Keith White's spotlight is just around the corner. And give us an idea of the anticipation around it and why customers are so excited to hear what he has to say.

Yes. I think what we're going to hear is really starting to focus on the solutions, how we're executing against those solutions, what customers can start buying and consuming and how it can really drive business value within their environment. We're going to hear from some customers who are leveraging GreenLake, how they're using it. And I think that's going to open the eyes of a lot of our customer base who might not be aware that really what GreenLake can do, especially if you're thinking about GreenLake from the historical perspective, it's more just a flexible capacity model, now really looking at it as a true cloud solution and all of the value that it can bring. So when we hear from Keith, I'm excited to hear some of the specific examples around the specific offers and specific services we're going to be launching and really getting into the heart of here is the value it can drive for our customers. I think that's going to be very exciting for all of our customers, not just existing GreenLake customers.

Well, a lot of big and exciting news are breaking today, Erik, thank you so much. And that moment is here, Keith's spotlight is about to start. Let's listen in.

Hi, everyone. My name is Keith White, and I'm so excited to be leading the HPE GreenLake business. I joined HPE in January of 2020, and it's been a very interesting time for sure. I came from a long career at Microsoft, where my last role was leading the intelligent cloud business and Azure for the past several years. Now I've seen firsthand how our customers are digitally transforming and modernizing their environments and how the industry has accelerated to a hybrid and distributed cloud world to meet those needs. I'm very excited to be at HPE. We're with the forefront of this transformation to help our customers across their entire hybrid estate. So welcome to all of you. When I arrived at HPE, I found an amazing foundation in business within HPE GreenLake. To date, we have approximately 1,000 customers and $4 billion in contract value across 50 countries. HPE GreenLake is being used for several Fortune 500 companies and across all major industries. Now the customers I met with, they just love the value proposition of HPE GreenLake. It's a better way to deliver infrastructure as a service to them, all managed for them in a pay-per-use model in their data center, so they can reduce costs and focus their valuable resources on more critical and value-add efforts. Now as Antonio mentioned in his keynote, there's a shift to distributed cloud and on-prem solutions across the market. Public clouds are extending their platform into the data center. And as I've experienced firsthand, distributed on-prem systems are totally different than a central control model of public cloud. We believe solutions need to be autonomous and not rely on connectivity back to the mother ship. They also need to be open, built on open source APIs, using tools like Kubernetes versus closed systems that essentially block app and data movement between cloud platforms. As we've demonstrated, HPE is here to help. We understand the realities and requirements of the enterprise, and I'm very excited to share what we've been up to. Now in the next 30 minutes, we're going to try to accomplish 3 things. First, as Antonio and John Chambers discussed, we know your current and future efforts to digitize your operations and business models are not just aspirational, but they're reality today. Last week, I had the opportunity to speak with Tanja Vainio. Tanja is the Managing Director of ABB's robotics and automation business for their automotive and Tier 1 segment. We discussed how HPE and ABB are working together to define the factory of the future and help drive the success of our customers, and I'm really looking forward to sharing that conversation with you. Second, I'll be joined by Arwa Kaddoura, who leads our HPE GreenLake go-to-market business, and she'll demonstrate the new catalog of HPE GreenLake services that we launched today. So I'll also walk us through an exciting and immersive look into HPE GreenLake to give us a sense of the breadth and depth of the platform and how easy it is to use these cloud services. And finally, Kumar Sreekanti, HPE's Chief Technology Officer and Software General Manager, will join me to talk about how HPE Ezmeral, our newly launched modern software portfolio, and GreenLake together deliver our strategy to be an edge-to-cloud platform as a service company and bring tremendous value to our customers. So let's jump in. So it starts with solving some core customer challenges. Our customers basically tell us that the public cloud gives them speed and agility, but only for about 30% of their apps and data. The other 70% of current and future workloads lack that same agile experience. They can't easily be refactored for the public cloud or they need to stay close to the data from a physical standpoint, and to the other apps at the edge or in colos or in data centers. As a result, most organizations are forced to deal with the complexity of 2 divergent operating models while paying higher cost to maintain them both. With HPE GreenLake, we bring the agile cloud experience directly to the other 70% of current and future workloads. In a pay-per-use model, we provide one consistent operating model with visibility and control across your public clouds and on-prem environment. This applies to all your workloads, including cloud-native and non-cloud-native applications. Our approach delivers other benefits like no cloud lock-in, no data egress charges that you would otherwise incur when you want to move data out of the public cloud. You're free to use your existing third-party software licenses. And as part of running it all for you, we provide mission-critical support SLAs and much, much more. To accelerate our strategy to becoming the edge-to-cloud platform as-a-service company, today, we announced a new catalog of cloud services from HPE GreenLake that bring a variety of new capabilities to your developer, data science and DevOps teams as well as new services to help manage your cost and compliance across your hybrid estate. Accessible from hp.com or from within GreenLake Central, our new cloud services can be deployed on your choice of 17, pre-integrated workload optimized configurations available in small, medium and large sizes. These solutions can be delivered to your edge in a colo facility or data center in as little as 14 days. Each 1 is pay-per-use, rapidly scalable, self-serve, automated and managed for you. So you can focus those critical resources on your outcomes that matter the most. Now I'm excited to introduce my first guest, Tanja Vainio of ABB. ABB is a global leader and pioneer in electrification, industrial automation, motion, robotics and discrete automation and power grids. Tanja is the Managing Director of Robotics and Automation for ABB's automotive and Tier 1 segment. We spoke last week about our exciting partnership to help accelerate their digital transformation and our shared vision for the factory of the future. Here's our conversation.

Hi, Tanja. Thank you so much for taking the time to talk with us today. Let's first start with ABB's own digital transformation and the part that HPE has played in it. Now you're a fantastic HPE GreenLake customer. And that's inspired new ways of looking not just at your business but also how it can impact and totally transform industrial environments. Can you share with us more about the partnership and your efforts here?

Thank you, Keith. First of all, building an ecosystem, together with leading industrial partners is key part of our strategy. And it's important for us, not only in our own digital journey, but also transforming the industries in the future. And HPE is a fantastic example of that. Together with our domain expertise, our products, our offering and HPE's expertise in IT infrastructure, we really can have end-to-end automation solution for our customers. In our own operations, we use GreenLake solutions as key parts of our IT infrastructure, both for manufacturing and for process automation. And like you said, moving into our customers, one of the exciting developments and one of the common solution that is really exciting for me is the secure edge data centers.

Well, that's super interesting. How do you see the use cases manifesting themselves here?

If you're edge data center, it is like a data center, but really with the physical size of an IT rack, offering ultimate flexibility. And we use it as an enabler to deploy the ABB Ability digital solutions and other IT solutions in the same platform, with practically any workflow directly at the premises of our customers. And it's really not only about productivity, security and efficiency. It's also about user experience. At Robotics and Automation, we focus on easy-to-use robotic applications. And it's very good fit with the GreenLake solutions that offer self-service, automation and management. And when we combine this together, we free up time for our customers to really focus on what is essential. Running their business and innovation.

This is really where the power of HPE GreenLake comes into play. The as-a-service experience, bringing the power of self serve, automation and scalability into a pay-as-you-go environment. Can you share how GreenLake is bringing value to ABB and to your customers?

It's all about speed and agility. And in today's ever-changing business environment, everybody needs to have the ability to react fast. And if your systems are holding you back, then it's really difficult to stay ahead of the trends and run your operations effectively. And you talked about future of industries, and future of industries are all about data-driven services. And it's all about flexibility. And if we combine the data-driven services with new business models, such as robotics as-a-service, that's an ultimate value-add for our customers and really the flexibility that they need because then you are able to access latest technologies and latest innovation, in my case, in robotics applications without the upfront investment, really using day-by-use model.

Well, you mentioned data and before you go, let's talk about how ABB is leveraging all the data you're gathering and analyzing as part of the factory of the future. Data is the lifeblood of any organization. And when you can pull the right insights from it, everything runs better, faster and more cost effectively. What are some of the outcomes that you're able to deliver here?

Absolutely. And I'm happy that you say that it's not only about data because it's -- data is the basis, but then it's understanding the data and really delivering and making an action based on the data. And only disclosing the loop translates the data into productivity. And let me give you an example of one of the big manufacturers, where we have a large majority of the robots connected. We started to look at the locks of the robots, and we found out that some of the robots actually had micro-stoppages. So fast stoppages that even the operators could not really depict them and could not realize that this is happening. And we could only do that by reading the locks and reading the data. By correcting what was happening, we were able to really improve the productivity for our customers significantly. And it's not only about looking into the past. It's also about looking into the future and using the data in order to predict and really avoid any stoppages. And Keith, you mentioned a few days ago that in your experience, improving the productivity by 10% is often bringing bottom line improvements to our factories that are really a factor of 2, and I really support that with our experience. So with that, I'm super excited to continue the partnership with HPE because it really offers value for our customers with the end-to-end automation and bringing also the flexibility, combined with data analytics.

That's just amazing, Tanja, thank you so much, and we're excited to continue the partnership as well. The factory, the future, bringing robotics-as-a-service and even this whole predictive maintenance strategy to improve efficiencies within the manufacturing scenario. It's just amazing. And frankly, so interesting. So thank you so much for taking the time. Really appreciate the opportunity to get a chance to talk with you and look forward to spending more time with you in the future. Thanks so much.

Thank you, Keith.

I want to thank Tanja so much for taking the time to talk with me and share her story with us. The factory of the future, robotics-as-a-service and prescriptive maintenance are really game changers in the industry. I look forward to a lot more exciting and innovative solutions from our work together. Now as you just heard, HPE GreenLake is bringing a whole new level of speed and agility to our customers' digital transformation and modernization efforts as well as their apps and data where they need to reside. Now I'm pleased to introduce Arwa Kaddoura, our Vice President of Sales and go-to-market for the HPE GreenLake business. She will take us through a demonstration of the newly announced GreenLake services as well as a guided tour of HPE GreenLake. Welcome, and take it away, Arwa.

Thank you, Keith. I'm excited to walk through some of the incredibly powerful features of HPE GreenLake and show you the experience it delivers. So let's get started. I mentioned the experience. For the next-generation of cloud services from GreenLake, we've accelerated every step of your experience from pricing and delivery of services to provisioning on-prem resources on the fly, to driving insights across your multi-cloud environments. So let's start at hpe.com. The first thing we've done is to build an entirely new digital experience for HPE GreenLake, enabling our customers to explore our services, initiate free trials and get pricing online. Let's take the example of virtual machines. I can select the virtual machine service, learn a little bit about the offer and go right into our pricing tool. We've structured our offers and what we're calling t-shirt sizes to make it simple to configure and price and super fast to deliver. In fact, once you've placed an order, you'll receive your HPE GreenLake solution in as little as 14 days. This rapidly accelerates the buying cycle for cloud services on-premises, enabling you to respond remarkably fast when new opportunities arise. Let's see how this works. We're in the pricing tool for virtual machines. And now we're just going to size the workload, select the options we want and boom, we've got a price, all in about 8 to 9 clicks. Now let's talk about another major innovation for HPE GreenLake, HPE GreenLake Central. GreenLake Central is really the hub of HPE GreenLake. It's a software platform that centralizes the operations and insights for all of the GreenLake services you're using. For example, there are widgets for cost and capacity and widgets for services like VMs, containers and ML Ops. So let's continue with our virtual machine example. You'll find a widget right here on the console that gives you high level KPIs about your VM environment, number of instances, utilization, et cetera. And if I want to provision a new instance, I can launch that right here from GreenLake Central. This self-service point-and-click experience gives developers the freedom they need to deploy code faster. I'll show you. Let's select the type of incidence I want to spin up. Give it a name, select the network, define a schedule, review and complete. 5 clicks. That's how simple it is to deploy a new instance. We also announced an as-a-service container offering, built on our HPE Ezmeral Container Platform software. This container service brings speed and portability to both your cloud-native and non-cloud-native apps using open source Kubernetes. And we have a unique data fabric that provides persistent container storage for stateful apps. Let's take a look. With HPE GreenLake Central, we can create a cluster right here from the main dashboard. Here, we click into the container widget, give our cluster a name, select a blueprint and create a cluster. Now our cluster is ready for our developers to use within the platform. That's all there is to it. There's more to HPE Ezmeral than the container platform. We're also introducing our new ML Ops service. This is an end-to-end data science platform that brings DevOps agility to the machine learning cycle in your own environment. Your data science teams can instantly spin up and scale containerized machine learning environments with a rich set of tools to build their models and secure access to the data that they need. Now enterprises can turn their AI experiments into operational deployments, which is critical in our age of insights, and it's all available through HPE GreenLake. The new service is, of course, integrated into HPE GreenLake Central. So it simplifies IT admin tasks, and lets data scientists focus on their work. Here, within what we call the ML Ops work bench, I can create a new project. And as services are consumed by the users, I can track usage and costs right from the main dashboard. Speaking of managing usage and costs, let's keep going with the demo. One of the key pain points for IT executives and the line of business is managing costs across hybrid cloud environments. Without the visibility GreenLake delivers, it's really hard to do and costs can quickly spin out of control. With HPE GreenLake Central, we integrate cost KPIs into the dashboard, so you can easily see your current monthly costs by service, by location, by any number of different criteria. And see how your spend is increasing or decreasing over time. And because HPE GreenLake has such a sophisticated metering engine, you now get self-service visibility into who is using? How much? Of which resources? So you can make better decisions about where to optimize costs. What's even more powerful, as you can see here, is that we give you the ability to connect your public cloud subscriptions and get a holistic view across your entire hybrid estate. Now let's take a look at our capacity management capabilities. Our goal with HPE GreenLake is to make sure that you always have capacity ahead of your business demand not overprovisioned, not underprovisioned, but safely in the green zone that you see on this chart. Part of the HPE GreenLake service is active capacity management, which means we're always monitoring your environment and working with you to align your capacity with business needs. This keeps you from buying for the high watermark, and that saves you upward of 30% to 40%. The last thing we're going to look at is compliance. With our continuous compliance capabilities, our experts work with you to tailor frameworks according to your specific needs and requirements, selecting from over 1,500 controls to ensure compliance across a wide range of areas, HIPAA, GDPR and so on. The continuous compliance widget shows the status of the automated compliance controls so you can easily spot failures. And it gives you a detailed view of your compliance status with remediation guidance to keep your business protected. I hope you're as excited as I am with all the new great capabilities and services we're rolling out. HPE GreenLake is really delivering the cloud experience everywhere across our data centers, colos and edges and providing new levels of speed, ease and value. Pretty cool, isn't it? Now back over to you, Keith.

Thanks, Arwa. As you can see, we put a lot into the new HPE GreenLake with point-and-click, self-serve simplicity, so you can quickly order, price, configure and operate new services for your developers, designers, engineers and data scientists. And with deep integration around cost and compliance, including Azure and AWS, you can truly manage and optimize your entire hybrid estate, all managed for you by HPE Pointnext and our partners. I'm excited to welcome in Kumar Sreekanti. He's HPE, CTO and Head of Software, and he's going to help me introduce the new Ezmeral software portfolio and the unique capabilities it brings to HPE GreenLake. Professor, welcome, and congrats on the announcement.

It's great to be here, Keith. Thank you.

Awesome. Well, as Antonio mentioned, we're becoming a cloud services and software company. Can you share with us this Ezmeral news and help us understand what it is?

Yes. You bet. We announced at the Discover as a part of Antonio's keynote, HPE software platform branded Ezmeral. It's essentially encompasses our container platform, our data fabric and our various solutions, including ML Ops. It allows our customers to run, manage, control, secure their data and applications. It's built on a proven technologies from BlueData, MapR as well as organic technology of InfoSight and others that we are in HPE. This is a very powerful platform. It provides the customers to give ability to run both stateful and stateless applications, meaning legacy and non-legacy applications like CNCF. And it is a very unique innovation and very unique opportunity for us. It's not only available to the customers to run on their hardware as well as a part of the GreenLake.

Love it. No, that's exciting. And so as you think about your overall software strategy, does this -- how does Ezmeral sort of manifest itself inside this broader strategy you're going after?

Very good question, Keith. So as you and I have talked many times, think of our strategy, HPE strategy going forward on the 2 axis. On the horizontal axis is what is GreenLake, which is part of the GreenLake team builds and develops to build, what I call, a fleet software, automated, secure, elastic, scalable, and optimized software that allows us to run large number of applications in a repeated fashion, Ezmeral is on the vertical axis, that's a runtime software that allows us to build workload optimized applications that are very efficient and it provides the customer best cost for the workload. And together, these 2 is our go-forward strategy that allow us to help build HPE's one-of-the-top software platforms that provides the GreenLake, the ability to give the customers the solutions.

Got it. So you mentioned a couple of things that I thought were really interesting. One is the most value or best value per workload, then the efficiency. So how should our audience think about HPE from a software standpoint and the differentiation and unique value that we bring to our customers?

A very good question. In fact, there are many differentiations. So I'll start with -- we are -- HP is one of the most innovative hardware companies. So we are actually not only giving the customers the workload optimized on the software as well as on the hardware. Focusing on the HPE Ezmeral platform, HPE Ezmeral platform is of -- only of its kind that allows both stateful and stateless workloads. In other words, customers don't have to lift and shift and run everything on a CNCF or repurpose modernize applications overnight, which allows us to run both applications in a uniform fashion under one pane of glass. In addition, all our software will be available through GreenLake on a pay-per-view basis managed for our customers by the GreenLake team, which focus on elastic, scalable and complete runtime stack. There's a lot more on my blog that customers can actually have details around this.

Great. I'm excited to read that and get -- and thanks for the clarity on that. That's super helpful. So shifting gears over to your role as CTO. You've talked about the world being hybrid. You've talked about digital transformation as being an imperative. How are we helping customers as a company, especially in this COVID environment to really continue the acceleration around this transformation and hybrid world?

Yes. It's very good question. We've been spending a lot of time with the customers. I know some of sometimes, in fact, even this morning, we were on a call together with some of our key partners. I think COVID magnified the digital transformation by an order of magnitude, right? We have always believed you can take the data to the compute. I think a lot of people have tried it. I think we want to take compute to the data, and we have a unique advantage as an edge-to-cloud platform. As-a-service company, we understand. So what we are really noticing customers are saying is, we are collecting the data where you collect. And we want to make sure we want to have the ability, whether it is edge, it's a data center. It's a GreenLake, it's the cloud. It doesn't matter for us. We want to have a seamless ability for customers to provide a complete solution. That's exactly what we just talked about, Ezmeral software and GreenLake software. So we also notice that as a part of this COVID, people want to modernize their applications. And if you notice them, they can modernize overnight, and this is where our Ezmeral platform allows, you can actually run both legacy applications and a cloud-native applications under the same umbrella of -- single pane of glass.

No. That's fantastic. Again, frankly, you and I spend a lot of time with customers. This should actually enable a whole new set of experiences for our customers. Can you share us -- share with us a little bit about how we're focusing here?

Yes. So you and I've talked about this many times, right, the era of trying to sell isolated summer isolated storage instances. It is over. Customers are looking for outcomes and solutions. What we have talked about earlier in the conversation, customers are looking for a complete experience solutions, this is what we are focused on. This is what the GreenLake team is focused on. An example of that is ML Ops that we just announced ML Ops as a service, so that in the context of AI/ML, customers can focus on building the model and running the models as opposed to worrying about how do you actually train, build and life cycle the model management. And we are just getting started.

Thank you, Kumar. Super insightful. I learn something new from you every single time we talk. So thanks so much.

It's been a pleasure, Keith. Good partnership here.

Thanks, Kumar. That was super insightful. Now both Kumar and I couldn't have chosen a better time to join HPE. We're excited about this market opportunity and what we're hearing from our customers about the value we can bring to their transformation and modernization efforts. Now we rely so heavily on our partner ecosystem to bring solutions to our customers. And as part of the transformation to an as-a-service company, we're expanding and deepening our engagement with many system integrators, ISVs, MSPs, colos and telcos, along with our traditional reseller and disti partners. As you can see, we've made a lot of headway here. And although we're all experiencing challenging times, HPE is here to help. We want to help you manage through your current realities and accelerate your plans for the future. So to summarize, HP GreenLake provides the market-leading IT-as-a-service platform, for delivering the modern cloud experience to customers' applications, data and workloads in their location, at the edge, in a colo, in the data center and in the cloud. And we do this in a self-served pay-per-use all-managed as-a-service by HPE Pointnext and our partners. We provide customers with the ability to pay for what they use to eliminate overprovisioning and free up capital, especially in these challenging times. We ensure customers always have capacity ahead of demand and provide the speed and agility they need to rapidly innovate and meet their customer needs. You saw this with ABB. All of this with no cloud lock-in, no data egress charges and the flexibility to leverage your existing investments. We invite you to visit us on the web, and please attend these additional sessions and demos to learn more or reach out to one of our HPE representatives and request a trial. Thank you so much for spending the time with us. We're really excited to have the opportunity to partner with you on your digital transformation and modernization journey. Thanks, and have a great day. [Presentation]

Okay. Great stuff there. You have it. Keith White's much anticipated spotlight, really drilling down on HPE GreenLake's new capabilities and how the cloud experience is being ramped up to a whole new level.

That's right, Daisy. Keith focused on HPE GreenLake's commitment to customers and their support through this next wave of digital transformation. He talked about delivering a new cloud experience at faster speeds than ever, really bringing agility and insights into workloads and places that traditional cloud cannot. Now to help us unpack everything that Keith said, we have Erik Vogel with us here again. Hey, Erik. Good to see you.

How do Keith's announcements show HPE's commitment to being an edge-to-cloud everything as a service company?

What we just heard, and what's really exciting with the launch of the new services, the everything as a services and solutions that we've launched, it really now is positioning us squarely in that everything as a Service space and providing that as a cloud service. And it's not a service that our customers have come to expect and come to demand from us. So this is really exciting for us. If you look at some of these specific services around virtual machines and containers, this is a cloud experience. This is very similar to what our customers are already seeing and used to in public cloud, but now we're doing it on-prem. And we're putting it where they need it, when they need it. So significant advancement. This is really exciting stuff.

Erik, how have customers been using HPE GreenLake? Give us some examples of what they're doing with the technology.

Yes. What really started out as -- so if you think back, GreenLake, historically, was very much around flexible capacity, giving customers the ability to adjust how they pay for this solution. So moving from a traditional CapEx model, where they have to go buy a whole bunch of gear and then begin to consume it and moving to a true consumption economic model, where they could basically pay for what they were using. The next step, and what we're seeing now with customers is they want that end-to-end experience, that cloud experience. They don't want to have to manage the infrastructure. They don't want to have to deal with it in their data centers. They want HPE to take care of that, and they want that point and click ease, that simplicity of cloud for that infrastructure. So this is what we're seeing our clients moving into. They're saying, "Hey, for our data center consolidation, we've got to quickly go in and provision our virtual machines or our virtual targets. We don't want to have to go stand up the hardware and provision it and do all of that. We just want to point and click and provision those targets and migrate these applications and move these applications. And we want it for our virtual machines. We want it for our containers. We want you to make it fast and easy for us." And that's how we're going to see customers begin to use this as a true cloud solution, again, sitting where their apps and data reside, which is the on-prem, the colo or at the edge, which is really unique and innovative for those clients.

Look, this is a crowded market. So how much of a differentiator in the marketplace are the new HPE GreenLake solutions?

Yes. This is -- well, it's a crowded space. What we're doing, I don't think anybody else is doing today. This is very unique. We are able to take these high-value services with the infrastructure HPE is known for, provided as a cloud service with a cloud experience and put it directly where the customer wants it, where the applications and data reside. That is key. And that is a significant differentiation between what the public cloud providers can do and even what our other competitors, traditional competitors are doing because we're marrying the best of what public cloud offers with the best of the on-prem infrastructure capabilities. So giving customers the control, the regulatory requirements that they have, being able to meet those by having this sitting within their data center, giving them the performance and the low latency. Things they couldn't achieve with one or the other, we're bringing the best of both worlds to our clients, very differentiated.

Well, given this news, I'm expecting that you're already starting to hear from customers at this point. How do you think they're going to respond?

I'm sure the response will be tremendous. It was tremendous before. After -- especially as we started to get into this whole COVID shutdown in March, we really started to see more and more interest in GreenLake solutions. And now with these announcements, where we're really making it and providing that cloud-like experience, we expect that demand to continue. This is a real option for our customers. This is something they have been asking for and they've been demanding, and we expect that demand to continue in the future.

Awesome. Really exciting news, Erik. Thanks so much for sharing your insights with us and with the audience around the world. Daisy, back to you.

Thank you, Tim. I really think one of the highlights from Keith's spotlight was that interview with an early adopter of HPE GreenLake's new capabilities, ABB. Now Keith sat down with the Managing Director of Robotics and Automation. Let's hear what they had to say.

Thanks so much, Tanja, for taking the time to way talk with us. Now obviously, there's been a lot of challenges going on in the world today. So I'm excited to talk with you about the road to recovery. Now you've been quick to respond to the needs of factories and fulfillment centers as they're just now beginning to come back online. Tell us a little bit about how you supported your customers during this uncertain time.

In the last months, the remote services suddenly became super important. And to respond to our customers' needs, we made our connected services and all the remote support free of charge to our customers until the end of the year. And it's not only about connected services and remote support. We are also looking at innovative ways to do factory acceptances. So we have now a remote factory acceptance test, but also how we deliver services in general. So we are looking at new ways to do service and maintenance using artificial intelligence and virtual reality. And with that, we are able to support our customers in new ways in this new situation.

Now do you see that combination of automation and robotics becoming more relevant in a world struggling through a pandemic?

I guess this would be the case even without the pandemic. But for sure, pandemic is accelerating this development. At very first step, it was about, how do we ensure the safety in the factories? And how do we deliver remote services? Now in the second step, it's more about supporting our customers how to bring the factory loads back to the normal level, and, at the same time, keeping the rules for social distancing and making sure that employees stay safe. So with that, I believe that robotics and automation will continue to be key pillars moving forward, and this will be accelerated now with the new situation that everyone is facing.

And how do you see the outlook of factory of the future driving operational equipment efficiency, given some of the global economic recovery forecasts?

I would not tie robotics and automation to any economic forecast. Because at the end of the day, we need to deliver value for our customers from day 1. That said, for sure, one aspect of factory automation and robotics is becoming more important than ever before, and this is flexibility. So I do believe that the current situation and the need for flexibility will actually drive the demand for robotics and automation even more than before.

So does the pandemic delay or accelerate our journey to a more digital production line?

I believe that the situation will accelerate the digitalization actually throughout our lives, not only in the industry. Because everyone needs to be prepared if something like this happens in the future. And this is also the feedback that I hear from our customers. The ability to run businesses without stoppages in any situation as well as ability to ensure the workers' safety is priority #1. And with that, we are really looking forward, robotics and automation being the key drivers for industry moving forward.

Now you've spoken recently about the ongoing need for female diversity in STEM. Can you share some of your thoughts on the concepts of diversity for women, especially as it relates to innovation and challenging our own thinking?

I think diversity is more important than ever before because we cannot solve new challenges with the past methods in today's world, and that requires innovation. And innovation requires challenging our thinking. And in all honesty, it is not always easy to challenge our thinking because we really have to be prepared to see the other side of the things. But only by doing that and only by challenging our thinking, we can move forward.

Well, as the pace of innovation continues to accelerate, how does this idea of the diversity of thought play into the future of technology?

I believe it plays a key part of that. Just looking at what we do in ABB robotics at the moment. We are looking at -- and we are having the most innovative robotics portfolio that is really the widest in the whole industry. And in addition to that, we are now combining it with automation portfolio from Vienna. So that whole requires innovation moving forward. And we are not stopping there. We have an incubator for artificial intelligence. We have an incubator for collaborative robots, for health care, for digital automation, just to name a few. We are investing in software, in artificial intelligence. And that all requires innovation. And we come back to diversity. And of course, diversity comes in all senses and forms. So we talk about age diversity, we talk about gender diversity, we talk about cultural diversity. But I think in the technology, in the world of technology, where there is less females, gender diversity is a top priority.

100% agree. Now ABB and HPE are working together on projects right now that have the ability to rapidly transform productivity, agility and safety in the world's industrial environments. What's the most exciting thing for you about being part of that right now?

I work in an automotive industry and with automotive industry. And I believe that this industry is maybe in front of biggest transformation ever. We are looking, for example, how do we move from inflexible production lines into flexible production cell concept that allows customers to manufacture different parts in one line. And that alone is exciting. But if you look at it from end-to-end perspective, it's not only about manufacturing infrastructure. You can really provide value to our customers by combining the manufacturing infrastructure with IT infrastructure. And that's where the partnership with HPE comes into play, and being able to offer that whole package for our customers is super exciting for me.

We really appreciate the opportunity to partner with you on this. Can you tell us why you chose HPE to be your partner here?

For ABB, foundation of an ecosystem with selected industrial key players is an integral part of our strategy and really needed to transform industrial environments in the future. And HPE is a wonderful example of that. Combining ABB's product solutions and our vast domain expertise together with HPE's expertise in IT infrastructure, we can offer our customers end-to-end automation solutions, providing reliability, productivity, flexibility and even worker safety.

That's fantastic. We really appreciate the partnership and really appreciate you spending some time with us. Thank you so much, Tanja.

Well, that was a really fascinating interview from Keith. Why? We heard some interesting insights about how that HPE ABB partnership is reshaping the future of manufacturing.

That's right, Daisy. And we are just around the corner from hearing Irv Rothman, the President and Chief Executive Officer of HPE Financial Services, deliver his spotlight. And definitely a critical voice that customers want to hear from as businesses look to recover and reshape their future during this challenging time.

Well, Tim, there really is a lot of excitement around Irv's spotlight coming up in just a little while. Now HPE Financial Services has been a critical help to customers in the face of this pandemic. We're now really helping enterprises address key issues like cash flow. But as businesses switch gears, looking to the long road ahead, many have completely rethought their business models and IT budgets. Now joining me now to give us some deeper analysis is Jenny Marinaro, Vice President of Global Strategy at HPE Financial Services; and also Susan Middleton, Director of Flexible Consumption and Financing Strategies IDC. Ladies, thank you so much for joining me.

Susan, I want to start with you. We've heard a lot from some of the immediate needs customers are facing or did face rather when the pandemic first hit. But I'd love you to tell me now where businesses are now, what they think their most critical needs are now to get them into recovery.

We've talked a lot about disruption at IDC, but this is the ultimate disruption. But now where we are is customers have come to the other side, and organizations are starting to take a serious look at, what worked? And what didn't work? What do they need to focus on to continue to support all the changes that have taken place over the last few months? So for instance, we're seeing things like there was immediate need for work from home. But going forward, is that going to still matter? And we're finding that a lot of organizations are saying, "You know what? We were still productive. We were able to work with our clients. So if there's not an urgent need to go back into the office, let's continue to support that." But that means making sure that not only do all your employees have the right equipment they need, they need VPN access. They need bandwidth. They need remote support. When we look at consumers, when we were all in shutdown, what mattered most to us in terms of supply chain was making sure that we had groceries, toilet paper, things like that. For organizations, it was much more about setting up all your end users to be remote. And if those services and support did not work, then that was a really red flag for what your future investment strategies need to be going forward.

Jenny, similar question to you. Obviously, as Susan was saying there, we all had that initial firefighting stage, where we're just struggling to keep afloat to mix my metaphors. But of course, now we are in a different stage. And how do you think customers are facing this new stage. And what do they need?

Well, it's been such an interesting time, right?. We all keep saying that people, whose life was about digital, long-term transformation, had to suddenly become very new to in very real terms to solve those problems. And as they're coming out of the crisis and looking forward, what we're hearing is they're looking at a very new tomorrow. It's not the tomorrow they envisioned in their 2020 business plan. It's something that has catapulted forward. A lot of technology got deployed rapidly through the pandemic period, and it's created the possibility of accelerated transformation. What we're hearing from customers is they want to seize that. They want to do different things, but they are kind of also between the devil and the deep blue sea in the sense of a huge amount of uncertainty. And a lot of what people have gone through already has created deficits in their budget. They are -- they're depleted in a lot of ways. So we're talking to a lot of customers about, how do they seize that new tomorrow? How do they embrace the digital leap that they've been through as it were? And how do they do it right now rather than wait for a 2020 budget or true post-COVID situation?

I think that's so interesting, that phrase you said there about accelerated transformation because that is how it looks from the outside. But then when you start to see what it would feel like from the inside for most businesses or most individuals, most of them feel exhausted in some way or another. Lives have spent either financially or physically all their employees. So it is like this totally disruptive state, but there's not a lot of gas in the tank.

That's exactly right. Because for a lot of businesses, their revenue streams haven't come back. So what do CFOs do when you don't have revenue coming in? You lock down expense going out. So it creates almost like the rock and a hard place. I keep mixing metaphors today, but it's really tough. You see the opportunity, but you're seeing it behind a locked gate. So the key to that lock is financial vitality.

Susan, similarly, on that point of businesses feeling depleted and exhausted, whether it's physically or financially. That is the sort of the state that a lot of companies find themselves in right now.

One of the first reactions within this change for how to respond to the pandemic was CFOs looked at I'm going to conserve as much capital and cash as I can. So in order to fulfill needs for employees that were working from home, we saw a lot of focus on alternative methods. So instead of using capital, using operating budgets. So that was great for short term leasing. It was great for flexible financial models like as a service and pay as you go. And it also, we saw -- another reliance was to use certified used equipment. So anything that could reduce the price tag was deployed immediately. And frankly, I think that's going to be the outlook for most of 2020 because Jenny pointed out that revenue has not come back yet for a lot of these companies. So they recognize that to improve their productivity, they need to be much smarter about how they're going to budget their money and what they're going to spend it on. So I expect to see continued investment in those types of models as CFOs and IT managers look at more innovative ways to conserve money, but meet the capacity requirements that they need going forward.

There's a lot in that inbox. Jenny, talking about the inbox, I'd like to ask you specifically about HPE Financial Services. Just tell us a little bit more about how they're helping businesses in the way that Susan was just talking about, reimagine their IT infrastructure.

We're asking people to think very differently, to innovate, to capture Susan's word, in how they think about infrastructure. So the things that we have, like old IT, pre-owned IT, they really gives some strategic thought to the placement of those things within their IT infrastructure. The truth is a lot of dollars get used every year in upgrading systems that are essentially giving end users the same functionality. And we're saying like maybe you don't need to do that. Maybe you can use pre-owned equipment to stabilize and reduce your expenditure on maintaining functionality. And that gives you the option of investing in a lot more new, and, again, thinking about that in a very different way. So one of the solutions that's super popular right now is what we call accelerated migration, and it's a process of us looking at the infrastructure customers already have in place and talking about really doing 2 things. One is turning it instantly almost like imagine a magic wand, turning that infrastructure immediately into an as a service platform, so customers can pay as they use. And the second is turning it into a source of capital, literally buying out the IT infrastructure that a customer has to create the kind of cash infusion that allows them to invest in innovation projects. So we've been really trying to bring customers to a place where they can think about their entire tech estate and think about it in terms of what's maintaining functionality? What needs to transform to as a service? And what can become a source of income that I can use to really propel my transformation efforts forward?

Susan, I just want to turn now to as a service models and what the crisis has done as far as shining a light on to them.

This is definitely a tipping point, I think, in terms of market awareness and adoption for as a service models. So we just did a survey at the end of May, and we asked about interest in as a service models. And over 43% of the respondents worldwide said, "Yes. That is something that we're definitely going to take a significant look at." It removes a lot of the pain points that we're hearing customers talk about today. So remote service and monitoring, being able to deploy the assets immediately. Someone is monitoring at all times to make sure that you're meeting the service levels that you require. You're meeting the capacity needs that you require. If you need more capacity, it's there. If there's a chance that you need to detune a little bit and slow down, that option exists as well. The adoption trend is there. We started with very large organizations. Now we're seeing mid-sized organizations look at it. But there's a great play there for mid- and small-sized companies. And I do think now, when you're looking at, how could I have responded faster? These models provide a lot that can help organizations. And a big piece of this, too, is the whole automation. As a service models are being monitored constantly. So that is happening all behind the scenes. So that if you're an organization that had so many different fires to put out basically through this process, if you had an as a service model already deployed, that was happening for you. So you could focus on other urgent needs within your organization. So I think a lot of the tales that have come out of this process, you're going to see a lot of those adopters of these models really tout how well this worked for them.

Jenny, do you agree? Or were you surprised by Susan's market research that the tide seems to be turning on those models?

No. For me, Daisy, it's all part of that digital leap forward the companies have made. Something that people might have had their toe in the water was on the plan for 2021, 2022 all of a sudden hit home. It's like, yes, if we've done this now, we'd be in a better place. So whether it's the as a service move, whether it's trialing with things like pre-owned, whether it's building flexibility around systems, you have to keep super secured, so they have to stay on-prem, I think everybody is certainly saying, "I can't wait for 2022. I need to do it now." So to me, it totally makes sense. And it's totally in that framework of the digital leap.

And Jenny, we know that Irv Rothman's spotlight is just around the corner. And from what I'm led to believe, an interview you did with Nationwide Building Society will be part of it. And obviously, I don't want you to give too much away, but can you give us a little sense of what we're going to hear?

Yes. And actually, I was speaking with a lady called Debbie Hubbard from Nationwide. And it's a fascinating story because it covers a whole bunch of instances where Nationwide has taken quite a different approach to how they've spun their technology. So she's going to talk about what they did during the COVID crisis. She's also going to talk about what they've done more systemically as well as a big picture commitment they have to sustainability and a circular economy. It's practical. It's results-oriented. And I think it will be super in terms of first-hand experience customers can take on board themselves after they hit the spotlight.

And Susan, anything that you're particularly keen or looking forward to hearing?

So it's interesting the sustainability and circular economy angle. Because we're finding that one of -- when customers put as a service models in place, there were a lot of different pieces of that, that they recognized would help their organization. But we're definitely finding, through surveys and our research, that now they're starting to focus on other intangible topics that might not have been related necessarily to cost and support. But the whole concept of having safe and secure disposal has become paramount for clients. And they're also looking at refurbished gear. So if you take that gear out of my sight, it's good to know that it's going to be repurposed and reused someplace else because that helps the whole circular economy discussion. And as we've seen, and as you have talked about a lot, Jenny, we're seeing organizations really get behind that mindset that they don't want to be innovated to insecure, disposal, e-waste and a lot of the recycling issues that you hear about. So anything that can be done there is really gratifying for clients right now.

Now, Jenny, I don't know whether you can tell Susan whether she's going to hear what she wants to hear. I don't know if you can give us a sneak peek of what the highlights should be in this presentation.

Well, Irv has 30-plus years experience working directly with CIOs and CFOs. And he's going to bring together in the spotlight the thinking of both leaders to give people a path forward. So whether it's just shoring up the coffer so you can run what you need to today or it's about building tomorrow, he's going to be talking about that. And sustainability is such a huge part of it. And you have to have that practical part that Susan talked about, things like you have to have locked down, rock-solid data security. So I think you can look forward to Irv addressing some of those topics as he speaks. It's going to be a great spotlight.

Hello out there, everybody, and thanks so much for joining us today. This steep line you see here is not the unemployment rate or any sort of debt number. Now we've seen a lot of similar trending curves recently, haven't we? But this one, I believe, tells us everything we need to know about 2020 so far. It's actually the use of the word unprecedented in online media. Now we've just lived through 6 months of incredible history, painful for many, intense and strenuous for all and maybe even inspiring at times. One thing we can all agree on is that these last few months have acted as oxygen on the flame of change. Prior to the pandemic, working from home was not that unusual, but not practiced by all. Now it's everywhere, and it could be the future of work for many. So do you think the majority of your workforce will be location-independent anytime soon? And have you started envisioning the implications? Many business models are changing or will change, and the questions we face can be daunting. So how do we embrace these tectonic shifts even as we face economic challenges and uncertainty? How do you prepare for and build what's next when, in just a few weeks, your IT budgets can be depleted, delayed or maybe even shut down? And quite importantly, how can we do some good along the way? Can we build a more sustainable IT? So businesses and the planet can thrive. And it's not one or the other. To take a step back and fuel our determination, I'll soon be joined by customers who are working to reimagine their IT estate. Renowned technology analyst, Jeremiah Owyang, will also share his perspectives on opportunities for the new world. So let's get started. If you're here today, you probably think as I do that digital transformation can do extraordinary things. Virtually every company is a technology company, and digital drives the world today, more so than maybe even just a few weeks back. But this dynamic is not without consequences. I'm sure you're concerned by the amount of e-waste that increases exponentially as the world population grows and access to technology expands. In fact, e-waste will exceed 50 million tons in 2020. It's 2% of all solid waste. That doesn't seem like a big percentage, right? But consider e-waste is the fastest-growing waste stream in the world, and it now accounts for up to 70% of the toxic waste just in U.S. landfills alone. Our industry simply cannot turn a blind eye to this. HPE has designed an overall approach to sustainability and a more circular economy. And it all starts with product design and manufacture. There are innovations around materials, energy efficiency and recyclability. And when the products are used, it's about optimizing the IT infrastructure to reduce energy and waste. Now a key component of this is HPE's pivot to offer its entire portfolio as a service. This eliminates overprovisioning as near real-time usage information leads to higher utilization while avoiding the cost of depreciating or idling equipment. And finally, at end of use. Whether your technology is aging or simply unused, we partner with you to wage a war on e-waste. We own and operate 2 substantial technology renewal centers, 400,000 square feet in total. One is on the U.S. East Coast and the other one's in Scotland. And in each location, your technology, from 52 countries in 2019, is taken in and refurbished. The data is properly and securely overwritten, and then it is reused. Now beyond the planet's well-being, there is a business benefit to this. We see this war on e-waste as an enabler for your business. How so? Jenny Marinaro, our VP Strategy, sat down with Debbie Hubbard from Nationwide Building Society to help paint the picture and let you imagine how this could work for you. So let's hear from Jenny and Debbie now.

Well, welcome, Debbie, and thank you for joining us.

Thank you.

Why don't we start by talking about Nationwide? I know it's a very special organization with a very special mission.

Yes. So Nationwide was founded in around 1984, where a group of people got together, built their savings to help someone else buy their first home. That ethos for Nationwide continued since then. So we now help many first-time buyers. Last year, it was 1 in 6. First-time buyers get into their first home. So it's really important to us, that culture of helping people. We were one of the first to come up with our Internet banking offering in 1997. One of the -- a group of organizations, who are in the first wave, who adopted Apple Pay, which, in the current environment that we have, contactless payment has become all the more important. So the innovation agenda is still there to this stage.

Now I believe your role in that innovation agenda is about equipping the people of Nationwide with the technology, the devices and the tools they need to be successful. Why don't you tell us a little bit more about that?

So we support around 20,000 colleagues. They work in a variety of locations. They're geographically spread throughout the U.K. They're also doing a variety of different roles. So everything from people in a branch, people in contact centers to IT professionals, they all require desktops, laptops or mobile devices. So our team supports the provision of those and the support of it throughout its life.

So 20,000 end users, that has the potential to be a great deal of e-waste, but I know that's something you and Nationwide are very committed to making sure it doesn't happen. Can you tell us more about your sustainability agenda?

The sustainability is really important in Nationwide. We try to send 0 waste to landfill. We're Carbon Trust Accredited. We look to make sure that when we take the device on, we look to build it through its life cycle with the user. Then once we're finished with it in terms of our estate, we send it off to be upcycled, so that it can have its next life.

And how did you get started, Debbie?

We had started to lease with HPFS, and it became a natural addition when we discovered the asset upcycling service to investigate that and look at what it would mean to Nationwide.

Well, the environmental benefits from asset upcycling are pretty clear, but IT equipment, particularly end user devices, often store some pretty sensitive information. Were you concerned about that at all?

Certainly, we -- data security is obviously really, really important for financial services. We've got to consider that the data that we hold for our members is something that's very important and very precious. So we have to make sure, at the end of the time that we've used the IT equipment, that we dispose of that in a secure fashion. We've got to ensure that we meet all our regulatory compliance. But it's more than just that. It's about doing the right thing. We're also very conscious of our sustainable footprint on the world, as a lot of organizations are. So we're looking to make sure that everything's dealt within a sustainable fashion. We also -- obviously, there's an economic benefit to working with HPFS. The asset upcycling means that the devices can be passed on to be used for the next group of people, and that helps return something for our bottom line on top of the fundamental focus, which is the data security.

So thank you. That's really helpful to hear insights about data security and all the additional benefits from upcycling. But I know you also believe that the partnership you have with the vendor you choose is super important as well and became particularly so during the COVID crisis. Can you tell us more about that?

Certainly. So we had a bit of a problem where the U.K. went into lockdown. Everybody had to stay home. But by the same token, we're still a financial services organization, and we've got to look after the data and the equipment that we have in our possession. So once we're in lockdown, we realized that if anybody was to leave the organization, we couldn't get the device back in the same secure fashion that we normally would. Because we've built up the partnership with HPFS, we got in touch with our account team and said, "Can you please help us here? We're not quite sure how we're going to achieve this, but we've got this problem. Can you help us find a solution for it?" I'm really pleased to say that the account team were phenomenal. They turned around not only a new process, but also, more surprisingly, a change in contract within around 24 hours. And anyone who's gone through that contracting process can often realize that contracting didn't normally take 1 to 24 hours in any organization. So not only to have that new contract in place, but to give us that confidence that our devices were being picked up, securely wiped and then returned to us, so that we could reuse them for the next user because we try and make sure we maximize the investment in any equipment.

Well, Debbie, thank you. It's been a tremendous pleasure speaking with you today, and great to hear the insights and experiences you've had about deploying IT asset upcycling. Thank you again.

Thank you.

Irv, back to you.

Thank you, Debbie, and thanks, Jenny. This story brings to light two simple and universal truths about technology. One, there is a lot of technology, more and more tech everywhere. And there is a cost to it. If you manage an IT budget, you know this better than anyone. Data center equipment for one is a significant investment, $157 million on average for a typical U.S. data center. And, two, a lot of that technology is sitting idle or aging. Research has shown that on average, around 30% of servers in large data centers are sitting idle, unused or underutilized, but still draining power. This translates into at least $30 billion in wasted data center capital around the world every year. Now bringing these two truths together and you have the ingredients for a recipe that will serve both your business goals and have a positive impact on sustainability. With programs such as HPE asset upcycling that Debbie Hubbard described or with the move to as a service models, where technology comes back to us, we've taken in over 8 million assets in our technology renewal centers over just the last 2 years. 90% of these get reused. We find them a new home. Close to 10% gets recycled, and only a fraction becomes e-waste. And to be clear, we take in practically any technology no matter the vendor or life cycle stage. Of the data center tech we do take in, about 40% is HPE. And when it comes to workplace devices, about 80% is HPE Inc. The rest, literally any other vendor you can name. So for you, think of the possibilities for your entire IT estate, from your data centers to the edge, to your end users' workplace devices, even some 3D printers. And when you take this deliberate path toward a more sustainable and circular IT, your choices lead to significant e-waste avoidance. With HPFS and 90% technology reuse, you can reduce environmental impact in considerable proportions. For just this last year, the CO2 we saved is equivalent to the average emission of 37,000 cars. And the waste kept from landfills could pile up to 434,000 moving boxes. And when upcycling and reuse are simply not possible, recycling in a secure, environmentally responsible way is the best option. Last year, in our technology renewal centers, the equivalent of 120 million plastic bottles was recycled, and the list simply goes on and on. All this is thanks to your decision to reimagine your IT estate. The technology we take in from you and refurbish is often sold as pre-owned to other customers who need it. There's been a big uptick in pre-owned technology this year. As the pandemic spread, HPE Financial Services' essential personnel worked tirelessly to ship tens of thousands of pre-owned PCs and data center gear to hospitals, government agencies, banks, educational facilities and other businesses who urgently needed technology. This was done to equip employees and their families working and learning from home or to make online food ordering possible or to keep a hospital running and save patients' lives. But this trend for preowned started way before. It's a profound shift toward a wiser use of IT budgets and more market circularity. Now recently, we connected with our partner, WWD, and one of their customers, Boys Hope Girls Hope. And I believe Kristin Ostby even braved the tropical storm in Guatemala to make this video. So I'm very grateful. Why don't we hear their thoughts on pre-owned technology? [Presentation]

Thank you. It's a great story and an inspiration to all of us, and we're so glad to be a part of it. And on that note, I have to say a special thank you to our partner community, who is doing an incredible job helping customers achieve their goals and solve their most pressing problems. Boys Hope Girls Hope is aligning budget to priorities without coming up short on efficiency. Nationwide is reimagining what it can do with their current IT assets to create more sustainability and infuse some vitality in their budget looking forward. You too may be looking at the possibilities to optimize and leverage your tech estate. Our teams of experts in both technology, asset management and financing are here to help you with that. Today, more than ever, you need a partner that can combine the financial acumen of a CFO with the technology insights of a CIO, so you can create a dynamic, sustainable IT investment strategy that works for you. Over the course of the last 4 years, we've put over $1.3 billion back into our customers' budgets with our HPE asset upcycling and accelerated migration solutions. In the case of Liberty Mutual, their approach has helped them accelerate their transformation and move to as a service with HPE GreenLake. Let's hear about this now from Chris Lund at Liberty Mutual. [Presentation]

If you want to hear more about Chris' story, I encourage you to join the discover session with our COO, Gerri Gold. And we know your challenges are many as IT leaders. Sometimes your most pressing needs are just keeping the lights on and the business running. And surely, it's been a tough start to 2020. And that's why in early April, I approved the allocation of $2 billion to help you. This includes a suite of programs, including technology buybacks and rentals to help alleviate your financial constraints. We also offer a 2020 payment relief program where you can acquire the technology you need today and pay only 1% of the total contract value each month in 2020, thereby deferring over 90% of the cost until 2021. Our objective is simple. It's to help you avoid freezing projects that you deem important for the near or long-term future of your company. And speaking of the future, I'd like to welcome someone with a vision as to where we're heading and what will make a difference tomorrow, technology analyst, Jeremiah Owyang. Jeremiah has perfected the concept of work from anywhere, as you'll see.

Jeremiah, welcome. You do have a unique working setup. Can you tell us about it?

Yes, welcome to the Tiny Airstream Studios in the heart of Silicon Valley. Rent is very expensive around here, and I actually did an economic calculation. I could just afford an Airstream for a small monthly fee. And it made a lot of sense for economic reasons. Not only is it an asset, which I could resell at a great valuator, but it's something that I can quickly just pay on a monthly basis. Secondly, it's great for the environment. It's just 29 steps from my house. And then the most important thing is my customers love to come out and hang out. It's a great experience for all of us.

That certainly sounds nice, Jeremiah. As a technology analyst, how do you think business leaders should anticipate what's coming next in this fast-changing world?

Yes. Unfortunately, times look like they're going through a really tough time. And I think it's going to be challenging going forward. Not only do we have a climate crisis to contend with, but the economy is up and down, political strife. And then on top of that, we're in the midst of a pandemic. Now that's a lot to take in, but the important thing to think about is, what will our customers do? They could radically shift directions, and we might be stuck in the lurch, not even connected.

So what should business leaders do then?

Well, I have some good news. We can really focus on a mindset, shifting from being fragile to actually being agile. So a fragile business is one that doesn't change. And when it does, it goes very slow. And when it hits an immovable object, it could actually shatter. That doesn't sound fun. Instead, we should actually have an agile business, a company that's constantly changing. And when it does, it does so very quickly. And more importantly, it grows during times of change rather than shatters. So we have to shift from fragility towards agility.

And can you give us an example we can relate to?

Absolutely. We all love forests. But did you know that the trees are actually interconnected like a network under the ground using a network of fungi? You've heard of the worldwide web, but this is actually called the wood wide web. And the fungi are sharing nutrients from tree to tree. It's an ecosystem that enables agility for all of those creatures. Now this applies to your own company as well. Rather than think of your own company as a stand-alone tree, we're actually connected to an ecosystem of buyers and sellers of assets, talent, data, hardware and everything that we need. We're not in isolation. When we're actually connected to the ecosystem, our company can be more agile.

So staying on the economics conversation, what question should businesses be thinking about?

We should think of our companies like an agile start-up. Start-ups are shy of having too many assets which become liabilities. Instead, they think about, how can we make everything be on demand or like a utility? This could be from the actual physical real estate to hardware, networking gear, talent and even data. And the opportunity is to quickly onboard these items. Sometimes preowned makes a lot of sense. And then when it's time to change the business, whether it's shrinking it or growing it, we can quickly have those assets sold to the ecosystem and upcycle it and then bring in new assets. Our company's actually agile. And of course, this is great for all of us. We can sleep better at night knowing that our company will be agile during times of great change.

So Jeremiah, what's the most exciting prediction you have?

In our research, we found that companies are becoming more digitally connected to their ecosystem of partners, manufacturers, customers and beyond. This means that the amount of information flowing and assets between them is moving at a rapid pace. And it's actually very difficult in the future to tell the difference between your own customers and employees. They start to look like one unified body. And when you hit this level of maturity, it means that your company is a core part of this ecosystem connected in a very agile way, and that means your company will be resilient and can survive any change that comes.

Thanks so much for these insights, Jeremiah.

Thanks for having me, everybody.

Well, I think it's fair to say that transformation is not an option. Profound shifts are underway now, and only the digitally fit will thrive. So CFOs, our suggestion is don't cut IT blindly. Your company can and must transform. We think you should work with your CIO and IT leaders instead, so you can create financial vitality from your technology, and you can contribute to a more sustainable IT. And bring us in. Let's get creative together and use today's challenges as an opportunity to reimagine and optimize your technology estate. And whether we're talking about from edge-to-cloud to end user, wherever your workplaces may be, this will be for the good of your company and the betterment of the planet. A few months back, we received a special award presented to us by HPE's CEO, Antonio Neri. It was the Force for Good award in recognition of all HPFS is doing for circular economy. We know that we owe this award to the choices you make around your IT and sustainability. Because you are helping build something that is more dynamic, more agile and sustainable. So we all have an opportunity to improve for the better. Now let me close by thanking all of you for joining us, and we leave you with this message from our team. [Presentation]

So the digital transformation of edge-to-cloud is creating data at an unprecedented pace, and all of that data, it creates challenges for companies who need to store, access and analyze it. The solution, a data fabric. I'm joined here by Ted Dunning. He's the Chief Technologist, Data Fabric, at Hewlett Packard Enterprise. Ted, thanks so much for joining us.

I just want to start by establishing what exactly a data fabric is. It's a term that's been in use for a couple of years, but define it for us.

Yes. It's a term that's evolving a little bit. And rather than talk about exactly what it is, I prefer to talk about what a data fabric does. And what a data fabric does is it enables you to run the right programs at the right time, in the right place with the right data. That used to be easy when there was one thing to do with one kind of data in one place. But people's business doesn't happen in a data center anymore. Instead, it happens wherever they touch their customers, and that can be all over the place. And it can be time-critical as well, and there's lots of programs that need to touch that data. And that's made this job of running things in the right time, place and so on much, much harder. And a data fabric is what solves that problem.

Well, with the digital transformation, enterprise data is increasing by an estimated 40% per year. Thinking about legacy IT systems, how can they keep up? And how does the data fabric help?

Well, that's exactly the point. Legacy data systems don't keep up. There's a couple of assumptions that they're based on that are basically incompatible with the highly variable, fast-growing world that we have. And to make it all worse, IT budgets are not growing at that comparable rate. And so people have to do, with essentially the same level of resources, a job that's growing bit by bit, or many bits at a time even, and that's hard. Now the data fabric is changing some of the rules of the game, things that we thought were set in stone.

So how does a data fabric actually make the collection of data easier?

One of the cool things it does is it lets people focus on a singular part of the overall business task. So if we're talking about telemetry, that's one sample application, which many people use, it's possible then for the person building the data, making the data, recording the data to focus purely on the recording task, on inserting the data into a stream. It's possible then for the person analyzing the data to look at a single stream, a single data source and see the entire world in a drop of data. They each can focus purely on their own task of data origination or data analysis. And the third person, the person administrating the system, can worry about geography. This is a separation of concerns. The old ways of doing things tend to have people worry about everything all the time. And if everyone does that, it leads to a real problem, productivity. If, on the other hand, we allow people to focus on the key parts of the task that they're good at, then we can make these problems much, much easier to solve.

In terms of solving those problems, give us an idea of the biggest effect that a data fabric could have on an enterprise.

There are a couple of major effects. One is that we can break down geography. Another is we can surpass elements of scale that have defeated us in the past. That could be in terms of number of bytes, but it can also be in terms of the number of objects. And then thirdly, it helps us have more multi-tenancy. And the essence of multi-tenancy is what happened at one of our customers a couple of years ago where 2 people sat down at lunch time, one lamenting, "If only we had this data, I could do X." The other responding, "We do have that data because I was doing something else." Now because they were able to work together on the same data fabric, because that data fabric supported that multi-tenancy, they were able to prototype over the next few days a feature of an entire business practice that, that customer has attributed to causing an incremental $1 billion, with a B, in incremental revenue.

How do you see the space evolving moving forward, if you think just 10 years down the line?

Yes. No, that's incredibly dangerous and really, really hard for a technologist to do. But 10 years ago, we had an idea, and the idea was to build something that people could share, that could scale, that could provide this geographical distribution. And that vision, I think, was pretty much on target. And I think we're going to have a lot more of the same, but we're also going to turn the entire Internet upside down.

What exactly does that mean for the average Internet user?

The design of the Internet has been all about a few large sources of information, pushing it to millions and billions of consumers. But we're seeing an inversion of that where we have gazillions, and that's a technical term, of data sources that are driving data to a few large aggregation points, well, actually, many of them but not as many as data sources by a long shot, and then turning that data inside out and driving it back toward consumers for benefit of various kinds. That might mean something as prosaic as better manufacturing, but it can also mean real effect on our daily lives as well.

Who's generating the most data? Where is this data coming from?

The customers that I've seen who, you might say, have gone from 0 to 60 faster than anybody you might imagine is, interestingly enough, the automotive industry. They're developing autonomous vehicles, and to have those vehicles behave safely in the real world, you have to sample the real world. You have to see what things really look like. And these companies are acquiring data at a rate of gigabytes per second per test vehicle, and there could be hundreds of them. That leads to petabytes per day and hundreds and hundreds of petabytes, even exabytes, of retained data that has to be analyzed well, and moving that data from the cars to the core is difficult. But the goal eventually is to have these cars run safely and to acquire more data when something is novel and interesting.

Ted, it's been a fascinating conversation. Thank you so much, and thanks for joining our Hewlett Packard Enterprise Discover Virtual Experience. I'm Tim Stenovec.

Data is growing at this staggering speed. How do we take all of that data and make it work for us? What kind of computing power do we need? Here to tell us is Peter Ungaro, General Manager of High-Performance Computing and Mission-Critical Solutions at HPE. Peter, thanks so much for being here. It's great to see you.

Good. Thanks, Tim. Glad to be here.

I think for a lot of people, it's a challenge to really wrap our heads just around the concept of exascale. How powerful is an exascale computer?

Yes. In supercomputing, we really try and look at the physical world and recreate it digitally. And exascale is just the way to think about a performance level of a supercomputer. So it's actually measures of floating point operations of the system, and exa is a quintillion or 1 billion, billion floating point operations per second. That's like one with 18 zeros behind it. So it's a huge number. I mean to give you a perspective, Tim, the entire galaxy of the Milky Way is about 1 billion, billion miles wide.

So it's a huge, huge figure. What can we do with supercomputers that are that powerful?

In supercomputing, as we do a model or a simulation of the physical world, we're trying to make it more and more accurate. And so the more capability, the more power that we are able to have, the larger the model that we can do, we can add in more science or more physics into the model to really try and represent it as accurately as we possibly can. So it just gives us a capability to do that with larger and larger problems faster and faster.

Well, we're certainly not carrying around supercomputers in our pockets, at least not yet. But how does supercomputing impact daily life? What are some of the applications of the technology?

Every day, we drive our cars, and one of the things that we do with supercomputers is we look at crash testing vehicles. So we try to identify how to make these vehicles safer and safer in an auto accident. The thing that we can do as we start to scale this up is we can not only model a car within a supercomputer crashing maybe against the wall or against another vehicle, but we can start to model human beings inside the car, a baby in a chair in the backseat of the car with working organs and such and really understand how the human body interacts with the vehicle upon impact to make the vehicle safer and improve our -- safety of our lives.

I understand that HPE has a relationship with the Department of Energy and the national labs. Take us into that relationship. I know that they've bought a number of these exascale-class systems, right?

Yes, that's right. The Department of Energy is one of the largest users of supercomputers in the world today, and we have a long, very collaborative relationship with the Department of Energy, which is very exciting and very important relationship with us, because we actually do co-development on new machines. They tell us what their applications and what their needs are, and we're able to understand that and build supercomputers that really enable that. So that's a really big partnership for us overall. In fact, when you talk about exascale, the first 3 exascale supercomputers in the world are going to the Department of Energy, and we're super proud at HPE that they selected us for all 3 of those.

You really sound like the type of person who thinks a lot about the future. Now as the speed of supercomputing continues to get faster and faster, what else becomes possible? What does the world look like in a decade, in 20 years, beyond?

One thing we all agree on is that data continues to grow. And wherever that data is -- any company, small and large, they're dealing with just a huge growth of data overall. And so what that means is in order to do supercomputing with that data or to do modeling of that data, or to do analysis to get some business insight from that data, we have to compute on it. And so the models get larger and larger. And we have new technologies, new ways to compute on these models with new algorithms like artificial intelligence and machine learning. And so I really believe that these supercomputing technologies are going to become more and more important. And I think, really, as we go out and think about it in the future, virtually all corporations of larger size, the Global 2000 and companies like that, will have supercomputing technology in it. And they'll be needed to do these next generation of really digital transformations that these companies are going through and do this advanced modeling. So pretty much, I think, supercomputers will become very pervasive in the future and be used across a variety of different analytics and scientific applications.

How does an exascale technology that's used in these labs, that's used by the Department of Energy, how does that then translate to use in commercial business?

One of the things that we're very excited about is that we're building -- is we're building like these large exascale supercomputers. And just to give you a perspective, the 3 systems that I mentioned before, if you added them all up, that's more powerful today than the entire top 500 fastest supercomputers in the world of today. So just to give you a perspective of that. But what we see is that those technologies that we develop for those machines, we like to call them Exascale Era technologies, these technologies are going to be delivered to companies in much smaller sizes. So a national laboratory that's buying an exascale computer, think of it that they may have 100 cabinets that are like refrigerator-sized cabinets that have -- packed full of processors and interconnect chips and software technologies to make them work together. We'll take that same technology in a much smaller scale, maybe a cabinet or 2, or maybe in a smaller business, even a server or 2. And that's what's really exciting, is taking these technologies from the extreme scale and bringing it down to be able to be used by all corporations to handle their massive growth of data and their digital transformation.

What's the application of this technology that excites you the most?

None is more interesting than what's going on right now with COVID-19. I mean one of the exciting pieces about being part of the supercomputer industry is just seeing what these amazing scientists and engineers do with our systems, and I think there's no better time to see that with -- than right now with COVID-19. And we see a number of researchers using our systems to help to find a therapy, a cure for COVID-19. So it's really exciting to see people leveraging these supercomputers and trying to solve a problem that's affecting all of us around the world today.

Yes. We're watching the solution happen in real time. Fascinating stuff, Peter. Thank you so much for joining me, and thanks so much for watching.

Well, hello, and a very warm welcome to the HPE Discover Virtual Experience. I'm Daisy McAndrew with today's headlines. And it's here where we will recap the key announcements, offer insights into how the news made at Discover today will benefit customers and differentiate HPE in the marketplace. Well, today has been, of course, all about how HPE is accelerating recovery and transforming our future. And I'm thrilled to be joined by Hewlett Packard Enterprises' Jason Newton, and back again with me is also Sally Eaves. Thank you both so much for being here on what is certainly a big day. There's always such a buzz, isn't there, around day 1 at Discover.

And Jason, I want to start by looking at it from HPE's perspective, what did you make of this new format, virtual format?

I really loved it. I thought it came together beautifully. It really felt interpersonal, getting to know Keith White; of course, Antonio and his guests, the energy of all the guests and the celebrities really came through well for me on the screen. I thought John Chambers was an absolute treasure. Simone Biles was a breath of fresh air. It really enabled us to help our story and demonstrate to the market just how rapidly Antonio Neri is transforming HPE.

Sally, this is a whole new way of doing things, isn't it?

Absolutely. Absolutely. And I, first of all, echo the subject of energy. I absolutely love that. For me, massively important, the passion really came to the fore. And some of the stories that were brought to the fore weren't just about digital transformation for business, it was also about wider purpose transformation for society as well and building that shared value. That, for me, massively important. So tech for good and tech for business, hand-in-hand. That was massively -- it's embedded in the entire keynote throughout a lot of day 1. So really impressive of the whole leadership there.

And Sally, you just mentioned the keynote. And of course, the day kicked off with the always much anticipated CEO keynote. Several things stood out during Antonio Neri's remarks. Of course, he spent much of the 45-minute keynote talking about how HP is helping customers. Jason, what was your takeaway on that?

I think it just really showcased how different HP and unique HPE really is. Of course, we brought the technology to the problems, and we've been doing that for decades. But you really got the value of our people, our expertise there on the ground. When our customers had challenges, we were there to help them physically put those solutions into place. And then, of course, the financial flexibility in a time where cash flow was at a premium. So I think it really showcased the unique ingredients that Hewlett Packard Enterprise can bring to bear to solve not only these immediate needs of the COVID-19 crisis but also the transformation needs going forward.

And Sally, it's such an extraordinary time to be having to make such an important speech. It's such a big moment in history, not just for tech, but for the world.

Echoing that point on finance, actually, I've been really impressed by everything around it. We're here to help, it's not just a motto. It's been something that's substantiated. There's been true action around that. I've been involved in HPC consortium. We've seen examples around that. And it's been really important here with financial flexibility alongside tech has made a massive difference. Lots of businesses, if you didn't have that flexibility, they couldn't defer payment, they wouldn't have been able to carry on. And we see a lot of real-world examples how businesses have been able to carry on, but also in education, lots of different sectors. So that real tech human partnership, it has to be leadership and organization that cares. And again, throughout day 1, in the heart, the people, the purpose behind the tech has really shown. So I've been really impressed by that.

And there were some meaty announcements in that speech. We heard Antonio underscore how HP is committed to being the edge-to-cloud Platform-as-a-Service company. And his goal, he says, is to have everything as a service by 2022. Jason, why is that so crucial now?

Well, it's crucial now because that's what customers are telling us more and more. That's exactly what they want. They want to focus on their business and their customers and their outcomes and their digital transformation strategy. They don't want to deal with the technology that's underneath of that. And ultimately, what the edge-to-cloud platform strategy is all about is about data. Customers are -- have massive amounts of data, but most of that data goes unused, and it can't be acted on in the time -- in the right place and the right time in order to create value. So what an edge-to-cloud platform does is it brings all of the collection, the connecting, the protecting, the analyzing of all of the data at all of the edges and connects it with the power of the cloud and their applications in their data center. And that's ultimately the ultimate aim that we're going for to help customers unleash the value of all of that data with that platform.

And it wasn't just Antonio we heard from. Of course, we also heard from HPE's Financial Services, Irv Rothman, on financial flexibility and what's available. Now HPE is talking today about how it's here to help companies rebuild and modernize. Sally, I imagine that flexibility is crucial for businesses at the moment.

It's absolutely vital and that -- if there hadn't been that over this period of time, and everybody is dealing with different types demand or lapse in demand, depending on what you're looking at, the personal context matters and knowing that you've got trust and support and you can defer payments or you can have the new consumption models where you pay for what you use, it massively helps. But also investment for the future. We've seen how vital digital transformation is, the businesses of all sizes of all types in all sectors. So these are some really interesting developments around consumption. And that also we had a release investment from your existing estate and use that to kind of fuel your innovation going forward. So again, this flexibility and the agility to adapt and grow, not have to do everything upfront, that's massively important, particularly for SMEs and never more so than at this time. And we've seen a massive acceleration of innovation actually over the COVID-19 experience in certain areas, particularly research, that we've seen. And I think we can use that as an example and a tipping point in many other sectors as well. And this financial backing, tech, finance people that all has to come together, and we've seen some exciting announcements about that today.

And Jason, that flexibility is also all about the relationships, isn't it, and the collaborations and the partnerships?

Yes, absolutely. I think what Irv and his team do a great job is they really establish a more of a long-term relationship with that customer. And they look at their asset strategy, their financial strategy and their business strategy holistically over the long term. This isn't a leasing business. This is a financial partnership business to really help them maximize all of the assets that they have and repurpose them and transform them in a sustainable way to help the business grow.

And Sally, we heard this phrase being discussed today, that today is the age of insights. Antonio Neri said the age of insights has replaced the information age, and he talked about the next wave of digital transformation. What did you make of that?

Absolutely. I love this. So something echoes, something that I would like to give out as we speak. So I talked about the 3 Vs, the velocity, the volume, veracity of data. And in the past, we've had this information age. It's all been about the volume, the quantity of data, that sometimes, the nuances, the insights from that have got lost. And particularly with things like 5G becoming more mainstream, that will only grow. So we need to be in a new era now, and that's what Antonio was stressing, is age of insights where we're looking for enabling insights for action, informed action that can make a difference, both in our businesses and the wider society as well. And he was also talking about the move towards highly decentralized and distributed models and shifting away from this highly centralized approach to large data centers. And in the future, we're going to more smaller data everywhere.

Well, I want to talk a little bit more about some of the big product announcements, HPE GreenLake Cloud Services and the new software business, HPE Ezmeral. Jason, what should customers take away from those announcements? What do they mean?

Antonio made a promise last year that we were known as a product company, we're going to become a services company and a software company. And I think he delivered on that in spades today with the announcements. They weren't products. They were actually cloud services. The way that Keith White and team, and if you saw the demo, it really brought it to life just how simple, point-and-click, just a complete cloud experience. But it's a cloud experience that comes to you in your environment, in your edge, in your data center. So I think it's really unique. And I think that the conversation right now is about distributed clouds, and I think GreenLake squarely put themselves in that conversation today as an alternative for customers who need that agility and that intelligence where their applications live. And then secondly, we saw the announcement of Ezmeral, our new software portfolio and brand, new container platform and machine learning operations platform that are really aimed at bringing that DevOps agility to the machine learning workflow. So pretty big, monumental and, again, another example of how rapidly Antonio is transforming HPE.

Sally?

The personalization aspect of this was really important in 2 specific areas. So one was speed and agility. I thought the 14-day delivery offer was really exciting, that consistency of end-to-end services. So you've got that visibility around governance, around compliance, around all the things that you described around edge-to-cloud, but also the ability to adapt and grow with you. You don't have to do everything straight away. There's a lot of talk around how you could build new excellent infrastructure, for example. And also the ability to reuse licenses. I love the fact there's no lock-in. There's no data egress costs. I think that's a real differentiator, actually, in the market, so that was really, really good to see. So again, it's all being about partnership, not just from the tech, but also about how you can access it and how that's relevant for you and can grow with you and depending on your context. I also love that point around machine learning as well. I think there can be a real opportunity here to really add value from AI projects. And sometimes, in the past, we've seen how they can get stuck at different stages within the journey. I really think that will be a differentiator in this particular area.

And Antonio didn't only talk about HPE, did he? I thought it was really interesting to see him take on the competition. He mentioned AWS, Google Cloud Services, Microsoft and Oracle by name, saying that the new HPE GreenLake Cloud Services will bring agility and workloads to locations that competitors don't. Sally, how is HPE positioned in that space? And were you surprised to hear him really take the fight to the competition?

Yes. Yes. It was a real kind of leadership moment, wasn't it? It was a real standing-on positioning, which I thought was really exciting. And kind of -- I mentioned, I think kind of the key areas there, it wasn't just the tech, it was around the finance and around the access and the ability to personalize to your business content. It was something for all different sizes of business to grow and develop with you on your journey. So I love that. But in particular, the differentiation around things like licenses, not having those additional costs around data egress, for example, no lock-ins. That is a big, big standpoint, but then everything around the end-to-end, seamless platform-as-a-service experience was very, very impressive.

Okay. Jason, well, I think we've pretty much covered the headlines today. What do you think is in-store for day 2?

Well, it's another action-packed day tomorrow. We're going kick off the day with Keerti Melkote, our President of the Aruba Group. He'll be sharing the latest innovations from Aruba and our cloud-first ESP network that they announced a few weeks ago. Then Soledad O'Brien is going to join us, and she'll be hosting our Women Leaders in Technology event with some special guests and surprises there, and then really good, rich conversation that will be happening in that session. And then we'll end the day -- today, we ended the day with Performing Under Pressure with Simone Biles and Lewis Hamilton and others. Tomorrow, we're going to be speaking to the team leads and the principals and presidents of those different organizations, and they're going to be discussing the business of sports and how that's going to change as we go forward, and how technology and data are going to intersect the sports experience. So it's going to be an exciting day.

A lot to look forward to tomorrow. But for now, for me, I just want to say a very big thank you to Jason Newton and Sally Eaves for giving me and you so much insights and perspective. And that just about does it for me today. I'll be back tomorrow with my colleague, Tim Stenovec, for a preview of Keerti Melkote's spotlight session on intelligent edge. We'll have a live session on Women Leaders in Technology as well as a deep dive into HPE's approach towards diversity and inclusion with its Chief Talent Officer. But until then, do spend some time getting the most out of your HPE Discover Virtual Experience. I promise, it will be worth it. I'm Daisy McAndrew, and I'll see you tomorrow.