Cloud AI Journey With HPE | Episode 5: Antonio Neri at NVIDIA GTC

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Antonio Neri

President & CEO

HPE

HPE outlines how AI is transforming enterprise data storage management

Enterprise data storage is entering a new era as artificial intelligence reshapes the demands placed on modern infrastructure. Faced with surging volumes of unstructured data, GPU-driven workloads and hybrid cloud environments, organizations are reengineering storage strategies to keep pace.This shift is fueled by the convergence of flexible cloud consumption models, unified data services and the growing necessity for automation

HPE’s Antonio Neri talks AI, data centers and the future of infrastructure at GTC

Artificial intelligence is fundamentally reshaping the data center landscape, driving a transition toward intelligent infrastructure capable of powering the next generation of applications and enhancing business productivity.HPE’s Antonio Neri talks with theCUBE about AI’s impact on data centers and intelligent infrastructure.The industry is witnessing a significant push toward creating scalable, efficient and sustainable solutions tailored to meet the intense demands of AI. This drive also prioritizes ease of deployment and faster time to value for enterprises, according to Antonio Neri (pictured, right), president and chief executive officer of Hewlett Packard Enterprise Co

play_circle_outline Unlocking Business Potential with HPE's AI Solutions: Energy, Storage, and Cloud Infrastructure Insights

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Episode 5: Antonio Neri at NVIDIA GTC

Antonio Neri

President & CEO HPE

search

>> Hello, everyone. I'm John Furrier, host of theCUBE. We are here in San Jose at the GTC, NVIDIA's annual conference in the HPE booth with the CEO, Antonio Neri, star of the show with Jensen Huang just earlier before we came on doing a big booth crawl with Jim Cramer from CNBC. I thought that was fantastic if not the pomp and circumstance of the people. You're a rock star out there. Congratulations.

Antonio Neri

>> No, I just laughed it off to Jensen. But besides that, I think it was fun to have both Jensen and Jim, obviously, someone there people listen to, to invest and saying great things about what we're doing, and you can see here in the booth.

>> Yeah, I mean, we've been saying on theCUBE pod as you know, our commentary, we've been following the AI infrastructure. We've been saying that as soon as the AI infrastructure hits the table, that's going to unleash the data wave. That's the agentic. That's a big part of the theme. You guys are capturing a lot of that value now on this crossover. As data centers become AI factories and AI factories become large scale clustered systems, you got all the gear. You guys have been doing the hardware. They have the operating system software. You guys got solutions you guys talked about today. There's a real thirst for solutions for the hardware. What's your impression of GTC and what are you guys talking about here?

Antonio Neri

>> Well, it's a great event. Obviously, it has established a new thinking about data center and the next generation of applications be more intelligent using AI. But when I think about AI, I think about it as a business productivity tool and as a way to change the world for better. But ultimately you need a lot of infrastructure, and that's what Jensen talked about. And obviously if you walk here through our booth, you can see we serve many, many customer segments because not every customer is created equal. So on that side of the booth we talk about AI factories and building massive infrastructure, and you saw the latest technology with direct liquid cooling, no using fan and being more efficient. When you come here, you talk about enterprise AI, and there it's all about the simplicity and time to value. So HPE brings to bear enormous amount of intellectual property to deploy with the simplicity and sustainability in mind.

>> Antonio, one of the things I love about this show is that it hits all my buttons because it's mainstreaming what we've been talking about for 15 years on theCUBE with you, bounded by energy, a theme we hear a lot about. I mean, we should be talking about data center and power and cooling, certainly on servers. You guys build engineering solutions around energy, a big constraint you guys design around. And then now data, which he said storage is going to be completely changed, because storage has to store all these tokens, and he's talking read writes, but I heard token version of read write. So the whole infrastructure is changing and also the cloud is a big part of that. And so we've been talking private cloud. I'm going to go back, I think HP actually coined the term hybrid cloud. If I go back to my CUBE history in 2012 or '13, I think it was actually HP that actually coined hybrid cloud. But we'll check that.

>> We coined many things.

>> So private cloud, you guys have a solution for private AI.

Antonio Neri

>> That's a big part of here. We got the digital twin activation here. That was a big theme in the keynote. So you got digital twins. You got omniverse. That's a hot product. Servers themselves are now bounded by energy and need scale. What is your vision around how HP's going to move that product portfolio into the future? What do you guys have right now? Is it private AI is the launch pad for that? Or hardware's going to be built around it? What's the strategy? What's your vision?

Antonio Neri

>> Yeah. Well, if you go back to 2018 and think about enterprise, I said that enterprise in the future will be edge-centric, cloud- enabled, and data-driven. We saw Jensen today talking about AI embedded at the edge. At the time we're talking about more edge computing. Now we're talking about inferencing capabilities. So HPE has a huge DNA on building edge solutions from the network up because ultimately it starts with the connectivity and then bringing out these amazing inferencing capabilities to process data real time and to provide answers. Cloud-enabled, we think of hybrid, and you talk about us coining the world hybrid, and AI needs a hybrid environment. Because data lives everywhere and the reality, you need to use as much data as possible to really fine-tune and generate these tokens or train a model for that matter. But now you think here going to physical AI, actually there is not a lot of data to train the systems. You need to use perception and simulation to train these robots. And so all of that needs massive amount of compute, which HPE has been the market leader in supercomputing. So we already built the systems for decades, and you look about how to do it sustainably, we do it with liquid cooling and we are the only company that has 100% coolant. Even if you walk here, nobody has it. So for me it starts with that understanding and foundation and that's why one of the core foundations is the network. And Jensen talked a lot about the network today, but I spoke about this as a part of the Juniper acquisition, why the network is a core tenant of the stack. And I'm excited about what we're going to do together with Juniper once the deal closes because we need to think about outside the rack, intro the data center. And Jensen does not have all of that capability.

>> Yeah. I mean, they have some piece parts.

>> Obviously, the enterprises are adopting it. The partner network, you can see here, at the ecosystem, as we call it, the events that we've covered on theCUBE over the years, those companies are partners with NVIDIA now. They're very partner-centric. What is your relationship with NVIDIA? Could you share? Last time we talked, you went great detail on the depth and completeness of the relationship with NVIDIA. Talk more about that because this is a critical partnership because they have the goods on the chip side and I'm impressed by the architecture and .

Antonio Neri

>> It's not just the chip, it is also they have built so much around the libraries that you need. And if you look at that system behind me, that was designed together with NVIDIA for time to value and simplicity of deployment at the enterprise level, They don't care about the chips, they don't care about everything else. They care about how I can deploy an AI environment to develop or an AI application at the speed of the business. And that level of partnership requires co-engineering. I think Jensen understood you can't just be a partner to resell what they have, but you need a partner that also can bring other things to the table to accelerate that adoption. So that's why, from an enterprise perspective, we believe we are the best partner and when it comes down building at scale, we're also one of the greatest partner because we know how to do it because of our super computer partnership we have for decades.

>> I mean, you guys got super computing in the bag.

>> You have HPC, you've done that. Been there, done that. Now it strands over to AI. One of the big takeaways I wrote about on the keynote, obviously, enterprise computing is a big part of their pillar. That's a world we love and live in. He said, "Enterprise AI adopts. It's accelerating. Obviously, we see that. Full stack AI solutions, AI powered workforce. " I want to get your reaction to that because we used to live in a world where marketing had two sides, speeds and feeds and solutions, and there's always been that debate. I've been on those CUBEs where it's like don't talk speeds and feeds talk solutions. Or don't talk solutions, talk speeds and feeds. We are living in a time now, where both speeds and feeds like nerd talk, like getting down and dirty in the engine, and solutions at the same time. So both are in play. What's your reaction to that? Because most of his keynote was talking a lot about performance numbers that you'd be in a technical discussion with the engineering team. So you have the best of both worlds.

Antonio Neri

>> Well, Jensen is an engineer, so obviously he loves history, he loves sharing stories that people can relate to. But and solution in my mind is all about outcomes. So you need to talk about having the best infrastructure with the speeds and feeds built around solutions that ultimately deliver an outcome. And in that case, outcome is our answers, answers to a robot that can do the right thing or a large language model giving you the right answer for the prompt. You just ask a question. It's no different than Antonio Neri there. You ask a question, he will answer it to you and obviously has guardrails. But fundamentally it's about an outcome. And I think that's a new marketing skill we all have to learn.

>> Well, we love benchmarks. We're going to do a little AI lab on our own, but I think people are trying to figure out, this is a good pivot into the next question, which is, agents are coming. That's a big part of it. Some are saying, I was in a conference and you had the naysayers like, "Oh, agents is BS. It's way down the line." I'm like, "Dude, no way. It's happening. It's happening now. " There might be some trajectory growth functionality, but agents are coming, they're here, coming fast. And so you have this next wave. So a lot of customers are trying to formulate the strategy of how they're going to re-architect their enterprise because they're going through-

Antonio Neri

>> Business business engineering 101.

>> Yeah, give us your take on it.

>> So what I think about it, when I talk to customers

Antonio Neri

>> and I do at 50% of my time, what they're doing, enterprises. Remember, there is three segments, model builders, service providers, sovereign clouds and enterprise. And enterprise, they're taking workflows. They are re-engineering the workflows. They are digitizing it, automating it, and then using agents to deliver the solution. So they're using a combination of large language models and agents for specific tasks. And what they realize is that one large language model needs a lot of training in order to provide a very comprehensive answer. And you saw how many tokens you need. But perhaps agents are very good at specific tasks that can do with fewer tokens. But then you have multiple agents stitched together that our automate workflow. And I think that's why we are seeing an acceleration of the adoption of AI and enterprise because of the agentic approach.

>> You've seen many waves in your career, I know we've talked about your history.

>> I'm old. - HPE now, experienced.

>> You're a good reasoner. You can infer.

Antonio Neri

>> You've been trained so you got good inference. You need that reinforced learning. I could use some of that.

>> I'm being reinforced every day learning.

Antonio Neri

>> We're a mixture of experts

>> and the chain of thought is coming clear. As you look at the history of where we are in the industry, I take constant pause of how big this cycle is and we've seen many waves of innovation. You've lived them. You've written a story on those. Right now the confluence of backend, front end, process management, business model, transformation, which is data-driven technology transformation, digital transformation as we call it, all happening at the same time. And there's skill gaps. You got agents coming, so it's really a crazy good time. How do you look at that trend, and with your customers, what is the number one, two or three things that you're hearing from them? Because they have to stand up basically a new environment because competitive advantage is an extinction event for them if they don't.

Antonio Neri

>> Yeah, I think first nobody wants to be left behind. We learned that tough lesson during COVID. If you were not a digital company, you suffer quite a bit, and now they are realizing with AI it's going to get even worse. So first takeaway, nobody wants to be left. Second takeaway it is a little bit daunting because this entire stack that Jensen talked about and we talked about here is an alien stack. It's not the stack they know from traditional IT. And so the skill sets are not there. So they need partners like us in order to define the use case and deploy the right solution. That's why.

>> Securely too, by the way.

Antonio Neri

>> That's why private cloud AI such as sweet spot for enterprise because they don't need to build infrastructure. It comes with the application. You know what I mean?

>> What's the number one reason why private cloud AI is

>> working in your opinion?

Antonio Neri

>> It's because it's solving the fundamental problem that I don't need to buy a server, a storage, a networking, all the software and I have to stitch it together. It comes in one skew and it comes with a cloud native and AI driven experience. Three clicks, less than 30 seconds, I'm done. And by the way, I can scale up and scale out based on my needs. It could be size. It could be other things. So I mean that's fundamentally what they're asking us to do. And HPE is uniquely position because on one end we have infrastructure know-how. On the other end, we have a very large services organization and we know have to do this on enterprise level.

>> We covered you when you made that move I think four years ago roughly. It was a bold bet. How's that turning out? Obviously, we see good performance.

Antonio Neri

>> Well, GreenLake today is a hybrid cloud. We are building agentic approaches inside the cloud, and today we have 41,000 customers using it. And last year, we had 10,000 on the platform.

>> You told me, I think at that time when me and Dave asked you, we liked the strategy, of course. We were on the record on that. We were right and you were right too.

Antonio Neri

>> Thank you. - You said to me

>> and Dave, "We're going to get operating leverage from this as well as being faster with customers. " I think something to that effect, maybe I'm paraphrasing a little bit, but that was the main thought. Are you seeing that leverage? Is that operating leverage helping you be faster, more nimble? What's been the main benefit that's come out for you guys on operational side?

Antonio Neri

>> Well, first of all, it's a unified experience. Whether you consume CAPEX or OPEX, doesn't matter. Whether you deploy an access point or a private cloud AI is inside the same unified cloud native AI driven experience. This booth here shows our agent AI journey using OpsRamp. OpsRamp was one of the acquisitions we built to drive observability. We acquired last year Morpheus to drive the orchestration for hybrid on-prem and off-prem. We added our own hypervisor to make the solution flexible so customers can use different type of tools, reduce cost, and fundamentally I think customers understand that.

>> So more agility in terms of innovating?

Antonio Neri

>> Well, also, it's faster to innovate

>> because now you are under one common platform in a cloud native approach using devops and CICD. Therefore, the infrastructure that we deploy actually comes with that innovation.

>> I had someone on our podcast come on

>> and say, "John, it's service as software."

Antonio Neri

>> Yeah.

>> So it's not long as SaaS, software as service.

>> That's right. - It's service as

>> software. Or in this case...

Antonio Neri

>> By the way, in the last two years,

Antonio Neri

>> we finally crossed the $2 billion annualized revenue subscription on the platform, and now we see a growth of 45% every quarter. So that operating leverage is also on the financial side.

>> Yeah, huge fan of that. Again, it makes people, I think

>> that you're coming up being digital is a must- have in this era. I think if you don't have technology and services, the old, "Hey, we have professional ."

>> And that's what differentiates us.

>> I think that is a really strong, you don't have

Antonio Neri

>> to be just technology all the time. That's great too, that scales, but you can scale service.

>> Some companies me are only

Antonio Neri

>> supply chain companies. We are an innovation-driven company with a platform at the core that delivers the unified experience for any infrastructure, networking, server and storage. And with new Juniper, we rather more networking and then ultimately make AI simple to deploy as you make this transition.

>> Antonio, I really appreciate you taking very valuable time out of your schedule to sit down on our podcast here at theCUBE on the ground. Final question for you, two-part question. Summarize this keynote from Jensen today and the vibe here in this show from the ecosystem, the whole totality of the event from two perspectives, for people that don't know what a token is, and then for people who love tokens. For the non-techie, what's the importance of this event and keynote to their world? And then for us and who are builders and doing stuff, what's the significance and the most important takeaway from you standpoint?

Antonio Neri

>> Obviously, Jensen is an innovator at heart. He's an inspirational leader. We got to know each other and respect each other. I always learned from others, to be honest with you, and so for me it was a way to learn from him how he thinks about the future. In many ways, it's not that different, but obviously he has a unique position today and the question is how together we solve problems? So he brought me new ideas of what we are doing that together with him, we can accelerate his vision that ultimately we both companies win. So a token is an answer in many ways and you predict the next answer and these tools are simply remarkable. I think the challenge we're going to have is fundamentally how we do it sustainably and how we do it in an inclusive way because you don't want to leave anybody behind. And last but not least, how we do it securely so that the world gets the benefit in solving also societal challenges, not just business challenges.

>> Antonio, I thank you for doing a deep dive with me, little podcast style. Great to see you. Thanks for coming on theCUBE.

>> Thank you, John. - John Furrier, your host,

>> with Antonio Neri, CEO.

Antonio Neri

>> Really, getting it all done here and the next generation infrastructure is coming fast to the table. That's going to open up another wave of agentic software storage transformation. And again, business transformation is happening. It's a data problem. It's a CFO opportunity. It's every single department. And of course, theCUBE's got you covered. I'm John Furrier, thanks for watching.

Episode 5: Antonio Neri at NVIDIA GTC

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>> Hello, everyone. I'm John Furrier, host of theCUBE. We are here in San Jose at the GTC, NVIDIA's annual conference in the HPE booth with the CEO, Antonio Neri, star of the show with Jensen Huang just earlier before we came on doing a big booth crawl with Jim Cramer from CNBC. I thought that was fantastic if not the pomp and circumstance of the people. You're a rock star out there. Congratulations.

Antonio Neri

>> No, I just laughed it off to Jensen. But besides that, I think it was fun to have both Jensen and Jim, obviously, someone there people listen to, to invest and saying great things about what we're doing, and you can see here in the booth.

>> Yeah, I mean, we've been saying on theCUBE pod as you know, our commentary, we've been following the AI infrastructure. We've been saying that as soon as the AI infrastructure hits the table, that's going to unleash the data wave. That's the agentic. That's a big part of the theme. You guys are capturing a lot of that value now on this crossover. As data centers become AI factories and AI factories become large scale clustered systems, you got all the gear. You guys have been doing the hardware. They have the operating system software. You guys got solutions you guys talked about today. There's a real thirst for solutions for the hardware. What's your impression of GTC and what are you guys talking about here?

Antonio Neri

>> Well, it's a great event. Obviously, it has established a new thinking about data center and the next generation of applications be more intelligent using AI. But when I think about AI, I think about it as a business productivity tool and as a way to change the world for better. But ultimately you need a lot of infrastructure, and that's what Jensen talked about. And obviously if you walk here through our booth, you can see we serve many, many customer segments because not every customer is created equal. So on that side of the booth we talk about AI factories and building massive infrastructure, and you saw the latest technology with direct liquid cooling, no using fan and being more efficient. When you come here, you talk about enterprise AI, and there it's all about the simplicity and time to value. So HPE brings to bear enormous amount of intellectual property to deploy with the simplicity and sustainability in mind.

>> Antonio, one of the things I love about this show is that it hits all my buttons because it's mainstreaming what we've been talking about for 15 years on theCUBE with you, bounded by energy, a theme we hear a lot about. I mean, we should be talking about data center and power and cooling, certainly on servers. You guys build engineering solutions around energy, a big constraint you guys design around. And then now data, which he said storage is going to be completely changed, because storage has to store all these tokens, and he's talking read writes, but I heard token version of read write. So the whole infrastructure is changing and also the cloud is a big part of that. And so we've been talking private cloud. I'm going to go back, I think HP actually coined the term hybrid cloud. If I go back to my CUBE history in 2012 or '13, I think it was actually HP that actually coined hybrid cloud. But we'll check that.

>> We coined many things.

>> So private cloud, you guys have a solution for private AI.

Antonio Neri

>> That's a big part of here. We got the digital twin activation here. That was a big theme in the keynote. So you got digital twins. You got omniverse. That's a hot product. Servers themselves are now bounded by energy and need scale. What is your vision around how HP's going to move that product portfolio into the future? What do you guys have right now? Is it private AI is the launch pad for that? Or hardware's going to be built around it? What's the strategy? What's your vision?

Antonio Neri

>> Yeah. Well, if you go back to 2018 and think about enterprise, I said that enterprise in the future will be edge-centric, cloud- enabled, and data-driven. We saw Jensen today talking about AI embedded at the edge. At the time we're talking about more edge computing. Now we're talking about inferencing capabilities. So HPE has a huge DNA on building edge solutions from the network up because ultimately it starts with the connectivity and then bringing out these amazing inferencing capabilities to process data real time and to provide answers. Cloud-enabled, we think of hybrid, and you talk about us coining the world hybrid, and AI needs a hybrid environment. Because data lives everywhere and the reality, you need to use as much data as possible to really fine-tune and generate these tokens or train a model for that matter. But now you think here going to physical AI, actually there is not a lot of data to train the systems. You need to use perception and simulation to train these robots. And so all of that needs massive amount of compute, which HPE has been the market leader in supercomputing. So we already built the systems for decades, and you look about how to do it sustainably, we do it with liquid cooling and we are the only company that has 100% coolant. Even if you walk here, nobody has it. So for me it starts with that understanding and foundation and that's why one of the core foundations is the network. And Jensen talked a lot about the network today, but I spoke about this as a part of the Juniper acquisition, why the network is a core tenant of the stack. And I'm excited about what we're going to do together with Juniper once the deal closes because we need to think about outside the rack, intro the data center. And Jensen does not have all of that capability.

>> Yeah. I mean, they have some piece parts.

>> Obviously, the enterprises are adopting it. The partner network, you can see here, at the ecosystem, as we call it, the events that we've covered on theCUBE over the years, those companies are partners with NVIDIA now. They're very partner-centric. What is your relationship with NVIDIA? Could you share? Last time we talked, you went great detail on the depth and completeness of the relationship with NVIDIA. Talk more about that because this is a critical partnership because they have the goods on the chip side and I'm impressed by the architecture and .

Antonio Neri

>> It's not just the chip, it is also they have built so much around the libraries that you need. And if you look at that system behind me, that was designed together with NVIDIA for time to value and simplicity of deployment at the enterprise level, They don't care about the chips, they don't care about everything else. They care about how I can deploy an AI environment to develop or an AI application at the speed of the business. And that level of partnership requires co-engineering. I think Jensen understood you can't just be a partner to resell what they have, but you need a partner that also can bring other things to the table to accelerate that adoption. So that's why, from an enterprise perspective, we believe we are the best partner and when it comes down building at scale, we're also one of the greatest partner because we know how to do it because of our super computer partnership we have for decades.

>> I mean, you guys got super computing in the bag.

>> You have HPC, you've done that. Been there, done that. Now it strands over to AI. One of the big takeaways I wrote about on the keynote, obviously, enterprise computing is a big part of their pillar. That's a world we love and live in. He said, "Enterprise AI adopts. It's accelerating. Obviously, we see that. Full stack AI solutions, AI powered workforce. " I want to get your reaction to that because we used to live in a world where marketing had two sides, speeds and feeds and solutions, and there's always been that debate. I've been on those CUBEs where it's like don't talk speeds and feeds talk solutions. Or don't talk solutions, talk speeds and feeds. We are living in a time now, where both speeds and feeds like nerd talk, like getting down and dirty in the engine, and solutions at the same time. So both are in play. What's your reaction to that? Because most of his keynote was talking a lot about performance numbers that you'd be in a technical discussion with the engineering team. So you have the best of both worlds.

Antonio Neri

>> Well, Jensen is an engineer, so obviously he loves history, he loves sharing stories that people can relate to. But and solution in my mind is all about outcomes. So you need to talk about having the best infrastructure with the speeds and feeds built around solutions that ultimately deliver an outcome. And in that case, outcome is our answers, answers to a robot that can do the right thing or a large language model giving you the right answer for the prompt. You just ask a question. It's no different than Antonio Neri there. You ask a question, he will answer it to you and obviously has guardrails. But fundamentally it's about an outcome. And I think that's a new marketing skill we all have to learn.

>> Well, we love benchmarks. We're going to do a little AI lab on our own, but I think people are trying to figure out, this is a good pivot into the next question, which is, agents are coming. That's a big part of it. Some are saying, I was in a conference and you had the naysayers like, "Oh, agents is BS. It's way down the line." I'm like, "Dude, no way. It's happening. It's happening now. " There might be some trajectory growth functionality, but agents are coming, they're here, coming fast. And so you have this next wave. So a lot of customers are trying to formulate the strategy of how they're going to re-architect their enterprise because they're going through-

Antonio Neri

>> Business business engineering 101.

>> Yeah, give us your take on it.

>> So what I think about it, when I talk to customers

Antonio Neri

>> and I do at 50% of my time, what they're doing, enterprises. Remember, there is three segments, model builders, service providers, sovereign clouds and enterprise. And enterprise, they're taking workflows. They are re-engineering the workflows. They are digitizing it, automating it, and then using agents to deliver the solution. So they're using a combination of large language models and agents for specific tasks. And what they realize is that one large language model needs a lot of training in order to provide a very comprehensive answer. And you saw how many tokens you need. But perhaps agents are very good at specific tasks that can do with fewer tokens. But then you have multiple agents stitched together that our automate workflow. And I think that's why we are seeing an acceleration of the adoption of AI and enterprise because of the agentic approach.

>> You've seen many waves in your career, I know we've talked about your history.

>> I'm old. - HPE now, experienced.

>> You're a good reasoner. You can infer.

Antonio Neri

>> You've been trained so you got good inference. You need that reinforced learning. I could use some of that.

>> I'm being reinforced every day learning.

Antonio Neri

>> We're a mixture of experts

>> and the chain of thought is coming clear. As you look at the history of where we are in the industry, I take constant pause of how big this cycle is and we've seen many waves of innovation. You've lived them. You've written a story on those. Right now the confluence of backend, front end, process management, business model, transformation, which is data-driven technology transformation, digital transformation as we call it, all happening at the same time. And there's skill gaps. You got agents coming, so it's really a crazy good time. How do you look at that trend, and with your customers, what is the number one, two or three things that you're hearing from them? Because they have to stand up basically a new environment because competitive advantage is an extinction event for them if they don't.

Antonio Neri

>> Yeah, I think first nobody wants to be left behind. We learned that tough lesson during COVID. If you were not a digital company, you suffer quite a bit, and now they are realizing with AI it's going to get even worse. So first takeaway, nobody wants to be left. Second takeaway it is a little bit daunting because this entire stack that Jensen talked about and we talked about here is an alien stack. It's not the stack they know from traditional IT. And so the skill sets are not there. So they need partners like us in order to define the use case and deploy the right solution. That's why.

>> Securely too, by the way.

Antonio Neri

>> That's why private cloud AI such as sweet spot for enterprise because they don't need to build infrastructure. It comes with the application. You know what I mean?

>> What's the number one reason why private cloud AI is

>> working in your opinion?

Antonio Neri

>> It's because it's solving the fundamental problem that I don't need to buy a server, a storage, a networking, all the software and I have to stitch it together. It comes in one skew and it comes with a cloud native and AI driven experience. Three clicks, less than 30 seconds, I'm done. And by the way, I can scale up and scale out based on my needs. It could be size. It could be other things. So I mean that's fundamentally what they're asking us to do. And HPE is uniquely position because on one end we have infrastructure know-how. On the other end, we have a very large services organization and we know have to do this on enterprise level.

>> We covered you when you made that move I think four years ago roughly. It was a bold bet. How's that turning out? Obviously, we see good performance.

Antonio Neri

>> Well, GreenLake today is a hybrid cloud. We are building agentic approaches inside the cloud, and today we have 41,000 customers using it. And last year, we had 10,000 on the platform.

>> You told me, I think at that time when me and Dave asked you, we liked the strategy, of course. We were on the record on that. We were right and you were right too.

Antonio Neri

>> Thank you. - You said to me

>> and Dave, "We're going to get operating leverage from this as well as being faster with customers. " I think something to that effect, maybe I'm paraphrasing a little bit, but that was the main thought. Are you seeing that leverage? Is that operating leverage helping you be faster, more nimble? What's been the main benefit that's come out for you guys on operational side?

Antonio Neri

>> Well, first of all, it's a unified experience. Whether you consume CAPEX or OPEX, doesn't matter. Whether you deploy an access point or a private cloud AI is inside the same unified cloud native AI driven experience. This booth here shows our agent AI journey using OpsRamp. OpsRamp was one of the acquisitions we built to drive observability. We acquired last year Morpheus to drive the orchestration for hybrid on-prem and off-prem. We added our own hypervisor to make the solution flexible so customers can use different type of tools, reduce cost, and fundamentally I think customers understand that.

>> So more agility in terms of innovating?

Antonio Neri

>> Well, also, it's faster to innovate

>> because now you are under one common platform in a cloud native approach using devops and CICD. Therefore, the infrastructure that we deploy actually comes with that innovation.

>> I had someone on our podcast come on

>> and say, "John, it's service as software."

Antonio Neri

>> Yeah.

>> So it's not long as SaaS, software as service.

>> That's right. - It's service as

>> software. Or in this case...

Antonio Neri

>> By the way, in the last two years,

Antonio Neri

>> we finally crossed the $2 billion annualized revenue subscription on the platform, and now we see a growth of 45% every quarter. So that operating leverage is also on the financial side.

>> Yeah, huge fan of that. Again, it makes people, I think

>> that you're coming up being digital is a must- have in this era. I think if you don't have technology and services, the old, "Hey, we have professional ."

>> And that's what differentiates us.

>> I think that is a really strong, you don't have

Antonio Neri

>> to be just technology all the time. That's great too, that scales, but you can scale service.

>> Some companies me are only

Antonio Neri

>> supply chain companies. We are an innovation-driven company with a platform at the core that delivers the unified experience for any infrastructure, networking, server and storage. And with new Juniper, we rather more networking and then ultimately make AI simple to deploy as you make this transition.

>> Antonio, I really appreciate you taking very valuable time out of your schedule to sit down on our podcast here at theCUBE on the ground. Final question for you, two-part question. Summarize this keynote from Jensen today and the vibe here in this show from the ecosystem, the whole totality of the event from two perspectives, for people that don't know what a token is, and then for people who love tokens. For the non-techie, what's the importance of this event and keynote to their world? And then for us and who are builders and doing stuff, what's the significance and the most important takeaway from you standpoint?

Antonio Neri

>> Obviously, Jensen is an innovator at heart. He's an inspirational leader. We got to know each other and respect each other. I always learned from others, to be honest with you, and so for me it was a way to learn from him how he thinks about the future. In many ways, it's not that different, but obviously he has a unique position today and the question is how together we solve problems? So he brought me new ideas of what we are doing that together with him, we can accelerate his vision that ultimately we both companies win. So a token is an answer in many ways and you predict the next answer and these tools are simply remarkable. I think the challenge we're going to have is fundamentally how we do it sustainably and how we do it in an inclusive way because you don't want to leave anybody behind. And last but not least, how we do it securely so that the world gets the benefit in solving also societal challenges, not just business challenges.

>> Antonio, I thank you for doing a deep dive with me, little podcast style. Great to see you. Thanks for coming on theCUBE.

>> Thank you, John. - John Furrier, your host,

>> with Antonio Neri, CEO.

Antonio Neri

>> Really, getting it all done here and the next generation infrastructure is coming fast to the table. That's going to open up another wave of agentic software storage transformation. And again, business transformation is happening. It's a data problem. It's a CFO opportunity. It's every single department. And of course, theCUBE's got you covered. I'm John Furrier, thanks for watching.