Oktane20 Customer Q&A Hewlett Packard

Satish Iyer: Hewlett Packard Enterprise is the Edge-to-Cloud Platform-as-a-Service company that helps organizations transform by unlocking the value of their data anywhere.

Satish Iyer: GreenLake central is our platform for driving the GreenLake experience. Think about it as a way by which our customers will consume every service we launch.

Satish Iyer: My team's focus is primarily around looking at our customers' transition into the hybrid pub cloud environment. So our customers are aspiring to get in a public cloud, and our goal is to bring that experience or that simplicity and the ease of use on-prem and to drive that truly transformational experience for our customers.

Frederic Kerrest: So Satish, welcome. We're excited to have you here today. Obviously Hewlett Packard Enterprise, a provider of IT infrastructure and services, thousands of customers, $30 billion in revenue. Yet as we've discussed, you're continuously needing to evolve to better serve your customers. Can you tell us what digital transformation looks like for HP and how you're thinking about the customer experience?

Satish Iyer: Thank you, Freddy. Happy to be here. So, nowadays, if you think about it, right, every company's a technology company in a sense of whatever the company does, whether they are an agriculture, to an architecture, whatever products they make. I think whatever products they deliver to the market, they can't do that efficiently without tech. I think this is why we see every organization and every industry looking at technology and to transform digitally, right? And we in HPE are reinventing ourselves as a business to deliver our products as-a-service from Edge to Cloud, and to provide our customers with a much more of a seamless cloud-like experience, and help accelerate some of their outcomes they're looking at. And by specifically our focus is to see how we can help them unlock the value, right, of the data everywhere. And that's been our core focus. So we are transforming in this digitally as well along with our customers in this whole journey.

Frederic Kerrest: That's great. Now HP has gone through obviously a lot of changes over the last couple of years. Can you tell us about how your business models evolved? And what's GreenLake's role in that transformation?

Satish Iyer: Yeah. So, you know, so HPE GreenLake was launched little more than two and a half years ago. And within GreenLake we have more than thousand customers. And most of these customers, they don't want just the flexibility, but they also want to make sure that not just the flexibility in the products and the services they use, but they want to actually have flexibility in terms of how they use them, what level of support structures do they receive, right. So we introduced this GreenLake, HPE GreenLake, which is actually the market leading as-a-service offering right now and it actually delivers, you know, on demand capacity, planning, and it combines like the agility and the economics of public cloud and with the security and the performance of on-prem IT. So it's important for us to kind of bridge the gap because customers actually like the cloud-like experience they get in public cloud, but they also have their own reservations and needs to be with security and performance with an on-prem. So with HPE GreenLake, we are trying to bridge that gap between the cloud experience as well as also bringing it on-prem, right?

Satish Iyer: And when we talk about HPE GreenLake, it's also important that we offer our customers a fully managed cloud experience. So it is important because as a company we have moved away from just delivering infrastructure. But now when we talk about managed experience, now we think we are part of that transformation, you know, whatever the customers are. So we design, build and manage and optimize these infrastructures, and mostly for off-premise cloud, as you want to call it. And we are truly part of this hybrid journey for our customers.

Satish Iyer: So one of the key things we launched in last December was what we call as HPE GreenLake Central. So GreenLake Central is fundamentally a portal and a platform by which our customers can basically get all the cloud experience from in like one single user experience from a single pane of glass, but at the same time for all their workloads. So they should be able to manage whether they are on Edge, on-prem, or off-prem, as a true as-a-service experience. So, in theory, what this has done is, you know, as we as a company transform and evolve to support this SAAS and as-a-service transitions, right, tools like Okta and identity have been very instrumental because, you know, coming back to the point I made earlier, this is about the cloud experience. So when we are driving this cloud experience to our customer, you know, identity and things become very important for us to drive this real consistency and security for our customers.

Frederic Kerrest: Yeah, and identity obviously sounds like a pretty core piece of the entire experience that you're trying to deliver.

Satish Iyer: Absolutely. Right.

Frederic Kerrest: You consider a building identity into HPE services yourself? Or what led to the decision of bringing Okta versus dedicating an internal development team just around identity?

Satish Iyer: Yeah, I mean, you know, again, my focus is primarily building these hybrid cloud softwares and the innovations on top of, you know, very core infrastructure offering, right? So if you have any software engineering teams, we can pretty much build anything, right? At least that's what you always hear.

Frederic Kerrest: Yeah.

Satish Iyer: But it's important for us to say that, look, we noticed very early on that, you know, we need to solve this problem, we need to solve the identity problem. And we needed to have an identity infrastructure, identity solution, which is kind of built and solid for the cloud because we are in the cloud business, we are enabling our customers on the cloud journey, right?

Frederic Kerrest: Yeah.

Satish Iyer: So one of the things is it's important for us to know that you say our transformation is going to happen really quickly, right?

Frederic Kerrest: Yeah.

Satish Iyer: And we need to understand what is core versus context, it's the same things pretty much every business goes through, right?

Frederic Kerrest: Yeah.

Satish Iyer: So we kind of identified that look, identity is super, super important, but that's not our business, right? It's important to know somebody else, like Okta does it really well, let's make sure that we get the best in class of what's already available, right? So in some way I would probably say that we did, there has been some efforts to kind of get some of the open source technologies to see whether we can take advantage of some of them. But ultimately we decided with Okta because primarily, you know, you guys are kind of, you know, born in the cloud. You guys are very, you know, you have a very, very nice cloud strategy, and you are a completely SAAS company.

Satish Iyer: And I think it was very important for us to be able to take advantage of aspects of how do we federate identities across our customers, how do we unify some of these things across many service providers, because we are not really looking at HPE; we are looking at HPE, we are looking at our customers, we are looking at a bunch of SAAS partners, because, you know, our solution set actually has other SAAS providers, as well as hyperscalers, right?

Satish Iyer: So customers are truly hybrid, and a lot of our customers actually have public cloud persons. So it's important for us to make sure that any identity solution we pick has to basically make sure that it satisfies and it actually works across all of these environments.

Frederic Kerrest: Got it. That's great.

Frederic Kerrest: And I know that time to value was important for you and partnering with Okta PS, I think you were able to go live very quickly in like 30 days or something, is that right?

Satish Iyer: Yeah, I think the original evaluation was somewhere around August, September. And I think we actually have done with all the engineering effort some time early in November, and actually we started already onboarding customers by the time. So I would probably say, yeah, it was pretty quick. And there was been I think a pretty tight partnering and engagement with the Okta PS.

Frederic Kerrest: So the value of identity obviously has been this mornings theme and it's something we think about constantly. Identity is clearly important to your work. What's next for HP when it comes to identity?

Satish Iyer: Yeah, I mean, you know, as a company, you know, our CEO, Antonio, had announced last year that, you know, we as a company will offer everything we offer as-a-service in three years.

Frederic Kerrest: Noticed that.

Satish Iyer: Right. So we have maybe a little bit more than two years left, right? So, and for an infrastructure company, which basically, you know, is provides best in class service storage and compute environments, these kinds of transitions are not easy, right? So and it's important for us, we have to transform ourself if we need to start helping our customers in this journey. Since we have to offer everything we offer as-a-service, you know, we are executing to that vision, you know, we need to find new ways to innovate and we need to bring that Edge to cloud experience. And that's basically our mantra is how do we act, we are Edge-to-Cloud-Platform-as-a-Service company, which actually drives the outcome of our customers and drives that experience.

Satish Iyer: So, and lot of on-prem compute and storage today, more and more customers now want optimized infrastructure. They want to have solution sets which cuts across on-prem cloud, as well as also hyperscalers, so I think, you know, from a GreenLake perspective, we have started to provide ways our customers can consume this flexibly, and we need to have right identity structure, we need, so that, at the center of all of this, to be able to scale.

Satish Iyer: Like I said, our customers not only touch, you know, when we are executing to our, let's say our HPE GreenLake on-prem in a customer site, we are looking at cloud native, non-cloud application sets. We are looking at applications and ecosystems which come in public cloud. We are looking at customers' SAAS partners, for example, they may have an ITOM partner, they may have an ITSM partner, and then they may have their own directory services, right?

Satish Iyer: So we need to be able to make sure that any of the solutions we actually bring to the table has the right structure so that it can scale across all these elements. So the right automation at the right scale is the key for that.

Frederic Kerrest: I'll wrap up with an Okta specific discussion. Yesterday we talked about our platform services and how organizations can leverage them by API or SDK to build any identity experience on top of Okta. We also discussed how the Okta identity cloud gives organizations like yours flexibility. What's your take on our new innovations and how they will benefit HPE?

Satish Iyer: Yeah, I mean, you know, let me just start off by saying, you know, identity is kind of a, one of the critical aspects to provide this consistent user experience. When we talk about hybrid cloud, we are talking about an ecosystem which is very, very complex, right? And so for us, you know, we have leveraged a docked identity cloud to provide a broad set of identity and access management features in, you know, pretty much in our what we call as a everything-as-a-service platform.

Satish Iyer: Okta cloud product has allowed us to support, you know, I would say a lot of the customers' [inaudible 00:10:45] requirements through enterprise federation, from SAML, to OIDC, to Active Directory. So I think to me the power of Okta identity cloud, the APIs, and the SDKs, they provide a very easy to way by which interface to drive this power of identity in the cloud, right? So we have used some of those APIs to automate a lot of the common processes, and we are going to continue to do so more because a lot of our customers, as you see in the last few weeks in terms of what's happening around the world, cloud is going to become more and more common and because customers are experiencing these work culture from wherever they are.

Satish Iyer: So I think as we go through this, you know, having a very strong identity backbone becomes really important. And I think the global reach of some of your products in terms of, you know, that kind of allowed us and continue to allow us to focus to drive more value within the product. And I think that's the key for us.

Frederic Kerrest: That's great. Well, thank you very much Satish for sharing that with us today. We greatly appreciate it. Thank you for your partnership and for being a customer, and look forward to the journey ahead.

Satish Iyer: Thank you, Freddy. Thanks. Nice talking to you.