Cloud AI Journey With HPE | Episode 1: Driving IT Operations Innovation: HPE OpsRamp’s Vision for Observability and AI

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Varma Kunaparaju

Senior Vice President / GM, Cloud Platform & OpsRamp

HPE

Hang Tan

Chief Operating Officer, Hybrid Cloud

HPE

Savannah Peterson

Principal Analyst & Host

SiliconANGLE Media, Inc.

HPE synergizes with OpsRamp to rethink hybrid cloud management

The digital transformation era demands efficiency, agility and adaptability. As businesses navigate an increasingly complex IT landscape, hybrid cloud strategies have become indispensable.Following its acquisition of OpsRamp, Hewlett Packard Enterprises Co. has fostered a unique kinship aiming to propagate the hybrid cloud operating model.“What we saw, as hybrid cloud became more pervasive, was that it created a lot of problems when customers went to the public cloud in what we call a ‘hybrid by accident’ way … now, you have created a lot of different operational silos,” said Hang Tan (pictured, right), chief operating officer of hybrid cloud at HPE

Breaking the cloud silos with HPE: The future of hybrid cloud and IT observability

The cloud revolution has been transformative for enterprise IT, but not always in the ways businesses expect. Many organizations found themselves in the hybrid cloud by accident rather than intentionally. Now, they’re saddled with operational silos and inefficiencies from a convoluted technology stackHow big is the enterprise problem of fragmented cloud infrastructure? And how are platforms such as HPE GreenLake poised to remedy the situation?“I think what’s great about Hang [Tan] and what he talks about here is that a lot of people ended up in the cloud by accident and not on purpose and not intentionally,” said Rob Strechay (pictured, right), principal analyst at theCUBE

play_circle_outline HPE's hybrid cloud strategy evolution

play_circle_outline Focus on observability and unified hybrid cloud operations model

play_circle_outline OpsRamp acquisition and integration

play_circle_outline Emphasis on multi-vendor support and customer choice

play_circle_outline Results of OpsRamp's acceleration post-acquisition

play_circle_outline Empowering Data Centers with Generative AI and Compliance-Focused Monitoring for Enhanced Observability

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Episode 1: Driving IT Operations Innovation: HPE OpsRamp’s Vision for Observability and AI

Varma Kunaparaju

Senior Vice President / GM, Cloud Platform & OpsRamp HPE

Hang Tan

Chief Operating Officer, Hybrid Cloud HPE

Savannah Peterson

Principal Analyst & Host SiliconANGLE Media, Inc.

HOST

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Savannah Peterson

>> Good afternoon, cloud fans, and welcome to our very exclusive new series with HPE, where we are giving you the play-by-play coverage of the cloud AI journey. I am very excited for this first interview, kicking us off in this series, to have Hong and Varma with us. We're going to be diving in to HPE's hybrid cloud strategy as well as the OpsRamp offering and what that means for observability and what lies on the horizon. Hong and Varma, thank you so much for taking the time today to come hang out. This is going to be a blast.

Hang Tan

>> Thank you for having us.

Varma Kunaparaju

>> Thank you for having us.

Savannah Peterson

>> Yes, I love it. You're glowing, you're radiating. This is going to be sweet. Hong, I'm going to start off with you because you sit in a unique position as one of the visionary leaders in this hybrid cloud strategy. There's a lot of complexity. Talk to me about HPE's vision, strat, and how you're looking at this landscape right now.

Hang Tan

>> Yeah, and thanks for the question because I would say that it's really been a journey because we were one of the leaders to really pioneer the idea of hybrid, you could say six, seven years ago. And we didn't all have it figured out in the beginning, but we had a very deliberate evolution of our strategy. And it started out in the beginning just focused on consumption, right? Really matching the business needs of the customer with our offerings so that they can pay for what they consume, right? So that was really the first step in our journey. Then it was really about bringing the cloud experience on-prem, and that was a big win for our customers with HPE GreenLake.

Hang Tan

And then we asked ourselves, "Okay, so now what?" And what we saw as hybrid cloud became more pervasive was that it created a lot of problems when customers went to the public cloud in a sort of what we call a hybrid by accident way, where they basically led the lines of business, deploy public clouds on their own, and so now you have created a lot of different operational silos. You had operational silos for your traditional infrastructure, for your private cloud, as well as for all the public cloud deployments you have. And so that's the next big problem we're going after, which is how do we simplify hybrid multi-cloud operations in a cloud-native way, in a unified way that truly brings the next generation of AI and automation to bear. And so that's really the big focus for us in this next phase of our hybrid cloud, our GreenLake journey.

Savannah Peterson

>> Yeah, it really has been a journey, and it's an exciting moment in that journey. I'm going to bring Varma in in just a second, but I have a follow-up for you on that, Hong, because I think it's really important, and I know it's going to be a core theme of our conversation. We talk a lot about silos. It's definitely a buzzword that happens in a lot of technological conversations. But I'm curious, just because you really are on the front lines here, what are some of the disadvantages or the challenges of those silos, and why is it so important that you have this unified observability and ability to build and create outside of silos in the unified platform?

Hang Tan

>> Yeah, that's a great question, and Varma can probably answer it better than me, but what I would say is you end up creating a lot of risk for yourself, for the business, right? You're not doing things in a consistent way, you're trapping costs, you're trapping your data, you're trapping your resources as well, because now you have folks that have to specialize in different stacks. And so I think it's just a lot of trapped costs and trapped resources and business continuity risk and governance risk. So that's why having a unified consistent operating model, as we would like to call it, is really important. And we'll talk about observability, but we have this term which is called a hybrid cloud operating model, which is you have a consistent way to deploy, monitor, observe, orchestrate, protect, and also optimize your end-to-end hybrid cloud estate in a unified way, right?

Savannah Peterson

And that's really the ultimate vision that we're executing to. And we want to do that, by the way, in a truly multi-cloud, multi-vendor way because a lot of the players out there, they promise exactly what I just said, but it's only within their four walls, their wall garden, right? If you fully bought into their ecosystem. But we really are about customer choice and freedom from lock-in, and so we offer that unified experience, supporting multiple clouds, supporting multiple vendors.

Savannah Peterson

>> I think that's such a good point, and I like that you just called it out, Hong, the fact that everyone says they do this, but to actually do that and have the interoperability and the freedom of choice like that for each one of your customers, first of all, it's a lot of complexity, and second of all, there's a lot of different puzzle pieces that have to go into that and work cohesively. It's a challenging approach, but an impressive one, particularly when we think about how so many different things are going to scale in this era of AI that we're in right now. I think it's actually pretty cool. Speaking of pretty cool, it's exactly why we have Varma with us here to talk about this today. Varma, just in case some folks aren't as familiar with OpsRamp as they might be with HPE, give us the overview, give us a little bit of company background, and then we'll dig into the technical fun.

Varma Kunaparaju

>> Thank you. So like what Hong said, from the beginning of the company, OpsRamp's vision is the world is going to be hybrid in nature and the infrastructure is federated from on-prem, private cloud to public clouds. The enterprise is no longer a single estate of one workload running in the cloud and one workload running in private, but people forget that the consumption of those workloads are coming from branches and edge locations that also is part of the overall infrastructure. So the vision behind OpsRamp is to really create a single integrated operations framework for enterprise IT to really deliver that mission-critical business services that business units really look for in a unified framework. That's the vision behind the company, and we always believed in not creating those silos, like what Hong mentioned. It's no longer okay to say... You know, I've been talking to a number of enterprises. They have workloads in the cloud, but at the end of the day, what they care about is the end user experience that their business units are asking for, and they wanted to view those SLAs and outcomes that the businesses are demanding. And that's the modernization of operations, that's the OpsRamp's journey from the beginning to the HPE acquisition, and post-acquisition, we're accelerating that.

Savannah Peterson

>> Yeah, it's an exciting time and a worthy mission. I'm not surprised you find yourself where you are now. That acquisition you just mentioned happened 18 months ago, correct?

Varma Kunaparaju

>> Correct.

Savannah Peterson

>> How's it been so far? Don't worry, it's not like there's anyone from HPE listening. I'm kidding.

Varma Kunaparaju

>> No, it's terrific. For any young company with a limited go-to market, the number one thing that you really achieve when a large enterprise like HPE, with its global reach, global sales teams, the partner ecosystem, is incredible. So the number one benefit that OpsRamp got is the go-to-market velocity and acceleration that HPE brought to the table. The second thing, which is equally important in my mind, is the product investments that we made and the support that we received for making that acceleration of product journey. Like Hong mentioned, multi-vendor support. A lot of enterprises acquire the assets, OEMs, but you become HPE-only, then the customers don't get the full value. So in fact, after the acquisition, our multi-vendor support where we not only support HPE but non-HPE gear into the environment is the number one. Number two, we double down our full-stack observability with cloud-native standards and OpenTelemetry and open standards, using eBPF and a bunch of modern cloud, cloud-native technologies that allows us to instrument these infrastructures and applications' full-stack observability. And number three is the AI and AI-related investments that we did and we announced in last year's Discover, the OpsRamp copilot, and we continued the journey to really accelerate the product acceleration. Last but not the least, network observability, which is we partnered with Aruba, which is a large networking division of HPE. We support multi-vendor network observability that we integrated into Aruba's thing to accelerate a full-stack network observability, which is not look at network performance management, but network performance, topology, and configuration all together to view a unique network observability. So both product acceleration as well as go-to-market acceleration is what we got benefited post-acquisition in the last 18 months.

Savannah Peterson

>> Both of those things sound like wonderful things to any innovator or business center, so lovely to hear that. Hong, I'm curious, for you, a company of HPE's scale and scope and market cap, you've got a few options in terms of the partners and players that you can bring into the fold, if you will. What was it about OpsRamp that made it such a wonderful fit and the right merriment of brains here?

Hang Tan

>> Yeah. And I got very excited about this. Varma knows. What got us excited, first of all, like I said before, it fits on the bullseye in terms of what we're trying to accomplish from a strategy standpoint, right? Really solve that complexity problem in terms of hybrid multi-cloud operations, and OpsRamp was really the bullseye. And what we thought made OpsRamp unique is that you have observability players that are focused on the public cloud, you have observability players that are more tied to traditional legacy infrastructure, and all of them are trying to evolve and modernize, but OpsRamp is the one that was built from the ground up, truly a modern SaaS architecture that addressed the hybrid problem from the ground up, and that was what really excited us about the company and Varma's leadership. So that was what made it work. And like Varma said, when the strategy and the team aligns and there's great technology on both sides, great go-to-market on both sides, that's where the magic happens.

Savannah Peterson

>> That is where the magic happens, and that's also where the magic gets to happen for the HPE community and the OpsRamp community. I mean, both of you coming in there with the attitude of freedom of choice for the developer, the end user, for the customer, whoever that might be, it's actually a really imperative DNA to share when it comes to product development. Otherwise, you're going to perpetuate that silo game, like you were talking about. Varma, how many people were on the OpsRamp team when you guys got acquired?

Varma Kunaparaju

>> We were about 370 or so people at the time of acquisition.

Savannah Peterson

>> Oh, nice. Okay, so pretty decent size compared to the, according to my notes, 60,000 employees at HPE. We were talking about this before the show last night, and I got to dig into it. I'm excited that Hong's comfortable to talk about it. As someone who's been at technology for a long time, when we think about large companies and their acquisitions of companies that are a different scale in terms of their size, or funding, or market cap, whatever that might be, there's not always a happy marriage in terms of how there's power-sharing or what happens to that technology. Sometimes it kind of gets piled in the corner and hidden away. Other times, what it seems like we're seeing right here is big elevation. Why is this mix so good across your teams, and how did you make Varma feel confident that he wouldn't lose the culture or the quality of OpsRamp in coming into the nest?

Hang Tan

>> Great question. I would say, well, first of all, we talked about the strategic fit. This really complements our overall portfolio, and what it does is it makes us, HPE, the only player that has a full hybrid cloud stack, right? From the infrastructure building blocks to then taking those infrastructure building blocks into T-shirt-sized cloud services, then having the runtime layer now with virtualization and containers. Now we have a full suite of hybrid cloud management capabilities with OpsRamp being a key cornerstone of that. So we clearly have a full stack and OpsRamp fits very well, we have a sum-of-parts strategy, but what I'm a firm believer, and I'm a long-term practitioner of technology strategy, is that just because you have a sum-of-parts strategy doesn't mean that you can neglect individual pieces within that portfolio. Each piece in that portfolio has to stand on its own merits, it has to be able to compete in the marketplace and win business on its own merits. So it's very important for us to make OpsRamp successful, leveraging the capabilities we have, but we want OpsRamp to be a market leader in hybrid observability, period, not tied to anything. And Varma and I talk about this all the time, OpsRamp is really a star in our portfolio. It's a billion-dollar business. I truly believe that this is a billion-dollar business in the making, so-

Savannah Peterson

>> Love it. You heard it here first....

Hang Tan

>> that's our commitment, it's our commitment, right? We're not here to... Yeah. So Varma, you want to add to that?

Varma Kunaparaju

>> I think you put a bullseye on my back for multi-billion dollar revenue here. So no, I think I'm excited about the opportunity. The de facto leadership in hybrid observability can only come when you have a fundamental stack that supports from ground up that, and I think OpsRamp has the underpinnings for doing that, and the go-to-market capability that HPE provides, with almost 11,000-plus salespeople in the field, it is an achievable target.

Savannah Peterson

>> Well, now you've got two of us who are going to be holding you accountable for that billion dollars, Varma, so you better get ready. I am a believer. I agree with Hong that there's going to be a lot of opportunity, but emphasis and importance on observability now and in the future. What are some of the results that you've been able to realize so far, Varma, and what can we expect in terms of the product offering moving forward?

Varma Kunaparaju

>> So first of all, post-acquisition of HPE, we kind of had two pursuits. One is a standalone OpsRamp pursuit. We kind of enhanced our sales specialists, in HPE's terminology they call sales specialists. We opened a lot of new geographies that OpsRamp, when we were privately held, did not have. So these specialists in these geographies coexist and collaborate with the rest of the HPE sales teams in these regions to expand our footprint and being able to bring the new logo acquisitions that we did. In the last year, we had a number of standalone new logo acquisitions that we did, number one. Number two, we also kind of, strategically, HPE decided to take pieces of this technology to bundle with some of the HPE motions, which is GreenLake and their complete git portfolio. So that also accelerated. In the last year alone, we added about 600-plus new logos into OpsRamp portfolio, and it is a massive acceleration from where we came from 18 months ago. In terms of what... Yeah, go ahead.

Savannah Peterson

>> 600 is no joke. What is that, 50 a month or something? That's a lot.

Varma Kunaparaju

>> Yeah. Yes.

Savannah Peterson

>> That's actually really impressive.

Varma Kunaparaju

>> Teams have been very busy.

Savannah Peterson

>> Yeah.

Varma Kunaparaju

>> Yeah, thank you.

Savannah Peterson

>> Yeah, you're going to be even busier going for that billion here now the rest of this year. But that's exciting. And I'm just curious now just your hot take, Varma. In terms of industry adoption and vertical adoption, are you noticing that there's a greater market craving from certain verticals, or are we reaching a point now where every industry is really having to think about their hybrid strategy, particularly as we move into our AI future?

Varma Kunaparaju

>> No, absolutely. Every industry, this is pretty horizontal in nature when it comes to IT and IT operations management. It may not be industry-specific from a need perspective, maybe use cases in some retail industry potentially call for how does a consumer experience of a retail application is going to see, and in the case of branch offices, you may find hybrid observability needs to kind of address the last mile and making sure that the branch office or retail location is getting what they need to do. We have a lot of applications that we accelerated in the last 18 months ranging from financial institutions to large retail deployments. Without naming the companies, we have deployments into 2,000 stores where hybrid infrastructure stack is the footprint in these 2,000 stores, where hybrid observability from infrastructure that is sitting in the store, in a back office, all the way to the cloud workloads that are supporting those infrastructure elements are all part of the use cases that we have addressed in the last 18 months post-acquisition.

Savannah Peterson

>> That's a really good example because there's a lot of things going on within a store in terms of actions, and needs, and privacy, and a whole bunch of other things, so it's an excellent example. Hong, similar question to you. Are you noticing any trends in the industry, anything that everyone needs right now? Is any vertical jumping out in front, or is everyone starting to really realize that now is the moment to make this transformation and really think about your hybrid strategy?

Hang Tan

>> I think it pervasive business. It is quite pervasive. I mean, I'm not going to cite specific surveys, but I've come across, obviously we talk to a lot of customers and we've seen a lot of the data. You could say anywhere from 70 to 80% of customers out there, enterprises out there are either looking to repatriate or rebalance their workloads across public and on-prem. And so I don't think I'm going out on a limb when I say that hybrid is now the dominant IT architecture. So I think that's today. And I think the other thing is, honestly, there's a lot of what I call a quiet repatriation, a quiet rebalancing. People just do it because they make sense. They're not making big public pronouncements like a few years back, when people were making big public pronouncements about going to the public cloud. Now, people are just quietly repatriating because that's the right thing to do. There's no announcements you need to make.

Savannah Peterson

>> And you would be the one who would know that. I'm so tempted to ask you who those folks are, but I bet you can't tell me, so I'm going to spare you the embarrassment. But I do think that's really interesting. Okay, so I have two final questions for you. I'll go to you first on this one, Hong. What's next? What's next on the horizon for us? Looking forward over the next year, what are you hoping to be able to build with Varma, with your customers? Where are we going to be?

Hang Tan

>> So I think what gets me excited is, especially with AI, there's a couple of vectors. One is really just think about, hey, the autonomous data center of the future, right? The autonomous infrastructure of the future. And leveraging generative AI, leveraging agents, I think that's often talked about, and I think that's within reach, how do you have a truly intelligent self-managing, self-optimizing data center. I think that's within reach now. The other piece which is really just monitoring AI workloads, monitoring AI agents and making sure companies are able to meet compliance and privacy requirements. That is also a very interesting observability problem to solve because AI, it is such a massive workload and such a distributed workload that it requires you to have the capabilities to monitor everything, your networking, your compute, your storage, even the wide-area network, edge locations, data, the movement of data. So I think that's a massive observability challenge that people will face, and that's why we think that OpsRamp is perfectly positioned to go after that.

Savannah Peterson

>> You just brought up a really good point, Hong, that I want to double down on a bit. When we talk about, you mentioned the edge, 50% of data is at the edge, and when we think about having observability on that, particularly as we roll out in an era of AI PCs and other devices, it's going to get really interesting and it's going to be even more critical, arguably even exponentially more critical, or at least twice as much if we're talking about having access to twice the data, to be able to have the observability tools there and to know what's going on everywhere all at once in real-time. I think it's pretty cool. Varma, what about you? What's next for the squad that at least that you can reveal to us? Where are you driving now that you've got even extra wind beneath your sails here at HPE?

Varma Kunaparaju

>> I think on the autonomous theme that Hong brought up, where we see is the ability to ingest this large volumes of instrumented data, right? The instrumentation and observability is not just monitoring metrics kind of a thing. It's logs, metrics, faces, events, and the topology information, and bringing all of that together from these large edge locations to all the way to the public cloud stacks and bringing that into AI, machine learning-driven, copilot-driven operations, that's our North Star in terms of what we wanted to deliver to enterprise IT organizations, is the outcome where they really get the insights into their infrastructure operations in this massive amounts of data that they're ingesting and being able to find that probable root cause and deliver that copilot-driven operations is where we are putting a lot of investment, and I think early releases of that we already did in terms of creating natural language-based queries. But what we are doing more than using regular foundational models, we are trying to fundamentally create foundational models that are meant for observability data and train those models to deliver the outcomes that the IT operations teams really need. That's what we are driving towards in the next 12 months. You will see more announcement from us and the results from that, and we are collaborating across HPE teams to deliver that very uniquely.

Savannah Peterson

>> I love that. It's no wonder that you're collaborating across teams as someone who's here to combat silos, Varma. So that makes perfect sense. Okay, my final question for you, because all of this technology is super cool, but at the end of the day, it's about the humans that it impacts as a result of all this hard work that we do. So I'll let you decide if you want to keep your HPE hat on or your OpsRamp hat on for this or not, but my final question to you is, what do you hope that AI and this technological revolution that we're amidst does for you, for your family, for your community, for the people that you care about? Varma, I'll start with you.

Varma Kunaparaju

>> I think, first of all, it brings productivity, I think efficiency. In my view, whenever a new technology gets introduced, there's always this myth that what does it mean kind of a thing, but I think at the end of the day, what we see today with some of these AI LLM models is more in the support and support-related use cases. But I believe what is in the horizon is being able to gear the productivity and efficiencies that all the operations teams can get benefited, at least from an OpsRamp lens, from an HPE lens, is to be able to view IT the efficiencies that they need.

Savannah Peterson

>> I love it. I think it's great. It's all about that efficiency and productivity, but also just giving you a higher quality of life as a result of not doing a bunch of repetitive stuff. Hong, what about you? What are your hopes, and dreams, and aspirations for our AI future?

Hang Tan

>> Yeah, well, maybe I'll stick to the IT domain for now, but definitely I agree with Varma there. For a long time, IT department CIOs have really struggled with these mandates to modernize, transform while at the same time keeping cost in check, right? And I think last year, more than any year, those pressures came to a boiling point, and I think this is where really AI comes to the rescue in combination with a unified operating model that we're providing, is going to allow CIOs to really take a ton of cost out, drive a ton of productivity, and redirect those things into innovation, into transformation, and allow them to be purveyors of innovation to their respective lines of businesses as opposed to being viewed as a cost center. So that's what I'm really excited about.

Savannah Peterson

>> Ooh, I love that, even just the way you summarized that at the end there, the shift from being a cost center to being an innovation center. It's an exciting idea and concept for any team or any part of an organization or community for that matter. Wow, okay. Hong, Varma, this has been absolutely awesome. I really appreciate both of you taking the time. This has been a fun and exciting one. I can't wait to have you back on when OpsRamp hits the 1 billion mark and we get to celebrate and hopefully get to continue this conversation. Thank all of you, wherever you might be tuning in on this beautiful planet we happen to have a tape. I'm here in Boston, Massachusetts at theCUBE's studios. We are going to be breaking down this segment. Rob Strechay and I, one of our analysts, are going to be giving you a play-by-play of this and the industry to follow up, as well as a number of other great videos that are going to come out in this fantastic Cloud AI Journey series that we're doing here. So be sure and stay tuned. Let us know what you thought in the comments, maybe tell us what you're excited about in our AI future. My name's Savannah Peterson. You're watching theCUBE, the leading source for enterprise tech news.

Episode 1: Driving IT Operations Innovation: HPE OpsRamp’s Vision for Observability and AI

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Savannah Peterson

>> Good afternoon, cloud fans, and welcome to our very exclusive new series with HPE, where we are giving you the play-by-play coverage of the cloud AI journey. I am very excited for this first interview, kicking us off in this series, to have Hong and Varma with us. We're going to be diving in to HPE's hybrid cloud strategy as well as the OpsRamp offering and what that means for observability and what lies on the horizon. Hong and Varma, thank you so much for taking the time today to come hang out. This is going to be a blast.

Hang Tan

>> Thank you for having us.

Varma Kunaparaju

>> Thank you for having us.

Savannah Peterson

>> Yes, I love it. You're glowing, you're radiating. This is going to be sweet. Hong, I'm going to start off with you because you sit in a unique position as one of the visionary leaders in this hybrid cloud strategy. There's a lot of complexity. Talk to me about HPE's vision, strat, and how you're looking at this landscape right now.

Hang Tan

>> Yeah, and thanks for the question because I would say that it's really been a journey because we were one of the leaders to really pioneer the idea of hybrid, you could say six, seven years ago. And we didn't all have it figured out in the beginning, but we had a very deliberate evolution of our strategy. And it started out in the beginning just focused on consumption, right? Really matching the business needs of the customer with our offerings so that they can pay for what they consume, right? So that was really the first step in our journey. Then it was really about bringing the cloud experience on-prem, and that was a big win for our customers with HPE GreenLake.

Hang Tan

And then we asked ourselves, "Okay, so now what?" And what we saw as hybrid cloud became more pervasive was that it created a lot of problems when customers went to the public cloud in a sort of what we call a hybrid by accident way, where they basically led the lines of business, deploy public clouds on their own, and so now you have created a lot of different operational silos. You had operational silos for your traditional infrastructure, for your private cloud, as well as for all the public cloud deployments you have. And so that's the next big problem we're going after, which is how do we simplify hybrid multi-cloud operations in a cloud-native way, in a unified way that truly brings the next generation of AI and automation to bear. And so that's really the big focus for us in this next phase of our hybrid cloud, our GreenLake journey.

Savannah Peterson

>> Yeah, it really has been a journey, and it's an exciting moment in that journey. I'm going to bring Varma in in just a second, but I have a follow-up for you on that, Hong, because I think it's really important, and I know it's going to be a core theme of our conversation. We talk a lot about silos. It's definitely a buzzword that happens in a lot of technological conversations. But I'm curious, just because you really are on the front lines here, what are some of the disadvantages or the challenges of those silos, and why is it so important that you have this unified observability and ability to build and create outside of silos in the unified platform?

Hang Tan

>> Yeah, that's a great question, and Varma can probably answer it better than me, but what I would say is you end up creating a lot of risk for yourself, for the business, right? You're not doing things in a consistent way, you're trapping costs, you're trapping your data, you're trapping your resources as well, because now you have folks that have to specialize in different stacks. And so I think it's just a lot of trapped costs and trapped resources and business continuity risk and governance risk. So that's why having a unified consistent operating model, as we would like to call it, is really important. And we'll talk about observability, but we have this term which is called a hybrid cloud operating model, which is you have a consistent way to deploy, monitor, observe, orchestrate, protect, and also optimize your end-to-end hybrid cloud estate in a unified way, right?

Savannah Peterson

And that's really the ultimate vision that we're executing to. And we want to do that, by the way, in a truly multi-cloud, multi-vendor way because a lot of the players out there, they promise exactly what I just said, but it's only within their four walls, their wall garden, right? If you fully bought into their ecosystem. But we really are about customer choice and freedom from lock-in, and so we offer that unified experience, supporting multiple clouds, supporting multiple vendors.

Savannah Peterson

>> I think that's such a good point, and I like that you just called it out, Hong, the fact that everyone says they do this, but to actually do that and have the interoperability and the freedom of choice like that for each one of your customers, first of all, it's a lot of complexity, and second of all, there's a lot of different puzzle pieces that have to go into that and work cohesively. It's a challenging approach, but an impressive one, particularly when we think about how so many different things are going to scale in this era of AI that we're in right now. I think it's actually pretty cool. Speaking of pretty cool, it's exactly why we have Varma with us here to talk about this today. Varma, just in case some folks aren't as familiar with OpsRamp as they might be with HPE, give us the overview, give us a little bit of company background, and then we'll dig into the technical fun.

Varma Kunaparaju

>> Thank you. So like what Hong said, from the beginning of the company, OpsRamp's vision is the world is going to be hybrid in nature and the infrastructure is federated from on-prem, private cloud to public clouds. The enterprise is no longer a single estate of one workload running in the cloud and one workload running in private, but people forget that the consumption of those workloads are coming from branches and edge locations that also is part of the overall infrastructure. So the vision behind OpsRamp is to really create a single integrated operations framework for enterprise IT to really deliver that mission-critical business services that business units really look for in a unified framework. That's the vision behind the company, and we always believed in not creating those silos, like what Hong mentioned. It's no longer okay to say... You know, I've been talking to a number of enterprises. They have workloads in the cloud, but at the end of the day, what they care about is the end user experience that their business units are asking for, and they wanted to view those SLAs and outcomes that the businesses are demanding. And that's the modernization of operations, that's the OpsRamp's journey from the beginning to the HPE acquisition, and post-acquisition, we're accelerating that.

Savannah Peterson

>> Yeah, it's an exciting time and a worthy mission. I'm not surprised you find yourself where you are now. That acquisition you just mentioned happened 18 months ago, correct?

Varma Kunaparaju

>> Correct.

Savannah Peterson

>> How's it been so far? Don't worry, it's not like there's anyone from HPE listening. I'm kidding.

Varma Kunaparaju

>> No, it's terrific. For any young company with a limited go-to market, the number one thing that you really achieve when a large enterprise like HPE, with its global reach, global sales teams, the partner ecosystem, is incredible. So the number one benefit that OpsRamp got is the go-to-market velocity and acceleration that HPE brought to the table. The second thing, which is equally important in my mind, is the product investments that we made and the support that we received for making that acceleration of product journey. Like Hong mentioned, multi-vendor support. A lot of enterprises acquire the assets, OEMs, but you become HPE-only, then the customers don't get the full value. So in fact, after the acquisition, our multi-vendor support where we not only support HPE but non-HPE gear into the environment is the number one. Number two, we double down our full-stack observability with cloud-native standards and OpenTelemetry and open standards, using eBPF and a bunch of modern cloud, cloud-native technologies that allows us to instrument these infrastructures and applications' full-stack observability. And number three is the AI and AI-related investments that we did and we announced in last year's Discover, the OpsRamp copilot, and we continued the journey to really accelerate the product acceleration. Last but not the least, network observability, which is we partnered with Aruba, which is a large networking division of HPE. We support multi-vendor network observability that we integrated into Aruba's thing to accelerate a full-stack network observability, which is not look at network performance management, but network performance, topology, and configuration all together to view a unique network observability. So both product acceleration as well as go-to-market acceleration is what we got benefited post-acquisition in the last 18 months.

Savannah Peterson

>> Both of those things sound like wonderful things to any innovator or business center, so lovely to hear that. Hong, I'm curious, for you, a company of HPE's scale and scope and market cap, you've got a few options in terms of the partners and players that you can bring into the fold, if you will. What was it about OpsRamp that made it such a wonderful fit and the right merriment of brains here?

Hang Tan

>> Yeah. And I got very excited about this. Varma knows. What got us excited, first of all, like I said before, it fits on the bullseye in terms of what we're trying to accomplish from a strategy standpoint, right? Really solve that complexity problem in terms of hybrid multi-cloud operations, and OpsRamp was really the bullseye. And what we thought made OpsRamp unique is that you have observability players that are focused on the public cloud, you have observability players that are more tied to traditional legacy infrastructure, and all of them are trying to evolve and modernize, but OpsRamp is the one that was built from the ground up, truly a modern SaaS architecture that addressed the hybrid problem from the ground up, and that was what really excited us about the company and Varma's leadership. So that was what made it work. And like Varma said, when the strategy and the team aligns and there's great technology on both sides, great go-to-market on both sides, that's where the magic happens.

Savannah Peterson

>> That is where the magic happens, and that's also where the magic gets to happen for the HPE community and the OpsRamp community. I mean, both of you coming in there with the attitude of freedom of choice for the developer, the end user, for the customer, whoever that might be, it's actually a really imperative DNA to share when it comes to product development. Otherwise, you're going to perpetuate that silo game, like you were talking about. Varma, how many people were on the OpsRamp team when you guys got acquired?

Varma Kunaparaju

>> We were about 370 or so people at the time of acquisition.

Savannah Peterson

>> Oh, nice. Okay, so pretty decent size compared to the, according to my notes, 60,000 employees at HPE. We were talking about this before the show last night, and I got to dig into it. I'm excited that Hong's comfortable to talk about it. As someone who's been at technology for a long time, when we think about large companies and their acquisitions of companies that are a different scale in terms of their size, or funding, or market cap, whatever that might be, there's not always a happy marriage in terms of how there's power-sharing or what happens to that technology. Sometimes it kind of gets piled in the corner and hidden away. Other times, what it seems like we're seeing right here is big elevation. Why is this mix so good across your teams, and how did you make Varma feel confident that he wouldn't lose the culture or the quality of OpsRamp in coming into the nest?

Hang Tan

>> Great question. I would say, well, first of all, we talked about the strategic fit. This really complements our overall portfolio, and what it does is it makes us, HPE, the only player that has a full hybrid cloud stack, right? From the infrastructure building blocks to then taking those infrastructure building blocks into T-shirt-sized cloud services, then having the runtime layer now with virtualization and containers. Now we have a full suite of hybrid cloud management capabilities with OpsRamp being a key cornerstone of that. So we clearly have a full stack and OpsRamp fits very well, we have a sum-of-parts strategy, but what I'm a firm believer, and I'm a long-term practitioner of technology strategy, is that just because you have a sum-of-parts strategy doesn't mean that you can neglect individual pieces within that portfolio. Each piece in that portfolio has to stand on its own merits, it has to be able to compete in the marketplace and win business on its own merits. So it's very important for us to make OpsRamp successful, leveraging the capabilities we have, but we want OpsRamp to be a market leader in hybrid observability, period, not tied to anything. And Varma and I talk about this all the time, OpsRamp is really a star in our portfolio. It's a billion-dollar business. I truly believe that this is a billion-dollar business in the making, so-

Savannah Peterson

>> Love it. You heard it here first....

Hang Tan

>> that's our commitment, it's our commitment, right? We're not here to... Yeah. So Varma, you want to add to that?

Varma Kunaparaju

>> I think you put a bullseye on my back for multi-billion dollar revenue here. So no, I think I'm excited about the opportunity. The de facto leadership in hybrid observability can only come when you have a fundamental stack that supports from ground up that, and I think OpsRamp has the underpinnings for doing that, and the go-to-market capability that HPE provides, with almost 11,000-plus salespeople in the field, it is an achievable target.

Savannah Peterson

>> Well, now you've got two of us who are going to be holding you accountable for that billion dollars, Varma, so you better get ready. I am a believer. I agree with Hong that there's going to be a lot of opportunity, but emphasis and importance on observability now and in the future. What are some of the results that you've been able to realize so far, Varma, and what can we expect in terms of the product offering moving forward?

Varma Kunaparaju

>> So first of all, post-acquisition of HPE, we kind of had two pursuits. One is a standalone OpsRamp pursuit. We kind of enhanced our sales specialists, in HPE's terminology they call sales specialists. We opened a lot of new geographies that OpsRamp, when we were privately held, did not have. So these specialists in these geographies coexist and collaborate with the rest of the HPE sales teams in these regions to expand our footprint and being able to bring the new logo acquisitions that we did. In the last year, we had a number of standalone new logo acquisitions that we did, number one. Number two, we also kind of, strategically, HPE decided to take pieces of this technology to bundle with some of the HPE motions, which is GreenLake and their complete git portfolio. So that also accelerated. In the last year alone, we added about 600-plus new logos into OpsRamp portfolio, and it is a massive acceleration from where we came from 18 months ago. In terms of what... Yeah, go ahead.

Savannah Peterson

>> 600 is no joke. What is that, 50 a month or something? That's a lot.

Varma Kunaparaju

>> Yeah. Yes.

Savannah Peterson

>> That's actually really impressive.

Varma Kunaparaju

>> Teams have been very busy.

Savannah Peterson

>> Yeah.

Varma Kunaparaju

>> Yeah, thank you.

Savannah Peterson

>> Yeah, you're going to be even busier going for that billion here now the rest of this year. But that's exciting. And I'm just curious now just your hot take, Varma. In terms of industry adoption and vertical adoption, are you noticing that there's a greater market craving from certain verticals, or are we reaching a point now where every industry is really having to think about their hybrid strategy, particularly as we move into our AI future?

Varma Kunaparaju

>> No, absolutely. Every industry, this is pretty horizontal in nature when it comes to IT and IT operations management. It may not be industry-specific from a need perspective, maybe use cases in some retail industry potentially call for how does a consumer experience of a retail application is going to see, and in the case of branch offices, you may find hybrid observability needs to kind of address the last mile and making sure that the branch office or retail location is getting what they need to do. We have a lot of applications that we accelerated in the last 18 months ranging from financial institutions to large retail deployments. Without naming the companies, we have deployments into 2,000 stores where hybrid infrastructure stack is the footprint in these 2,000 stores, where hybrid observability from infrastructure that is sitting in the store, in a back office, all the way to the cloud workloads that are supporting those infrastructure elements are all part of the use cases that we have addressed in the last 18 months post-acquisition.

Savannah Peterson

>> That's a really good example because there's a lot of things going on within a store in terms of actions, and needs, and privacy, and a whole bunch of other things, so it's an excellent example. Hong, similar question to you. Are you noticing any trends in the industry, anything that everyone needs right now? Is any vertical jumping out in front, or is everyone starting to really realize that now is the moment to make this transformation and really think about your hybrid strategy?

Hang Tan

>> I think it pervasive business. It is quite pervasive. I mean, I'm not going to cite specific surveys, but I've come across, obviously we talk to a lot of customers and we've seen a lot of the data. You could say anywhere from 70 to 80% of customers out there, enterprises out there are either looking to repatriate or rebalance their workloads across public and on-prem. And so I don't think I'm going out on a limb when I say that hybrid is now the dominant IT architecture. So I think that's today. And I think the other thing is, honestly, there's a lot of what I call a quiet repatriation, a quiet rebalancing. People just do it because they make sense. They're not making big public pronouncements like a few years back, when people were making big public pronouncements about going to the public cloud. Now, people are just quietly repatriating because that's the right thing to do. There's no announcements you need to make.

Savannah Peterson

>> And you would be the one who would know that. I'm so tempted to ask you who those folks are, but I bet you can't tell me, so I'm going to spare you the embarrassment. But I do think that's really interesting. Okay, so I have two final questions for you. I'll go to you first on this one, Hong. What's next? What's next on the horizon for us? Looking forward over the next year, what are you hoping to be able to build with Varma, with your customers? Where are we going to be?

Hang Tan

>> So I think what gets me excited is, especially with AI, there's a couple of vectors. One is really just think about, hey, the autonomous data center of the future, right? The autonomous infrastructure of the future. And leveraging generative AI, leveraging agents, I think that's often talked about, and I think that's within reach, how do you have a truly intelligent self-managing, self-optimizing data center. I think that's within reach now. The other piece which is really just monitoring AI workloads, monitoring AI agents and making sure companies are able to meet compliance and privacy requirements. That is also a very interesting observability problem to solve because AI, it is such a massive workload and such a distributed workload that it requires you to have the capabilities to monitor everything, your networking, your compute, your storage, even the wide-area network, edge locations, data, the movement of data. So I think that's a massive observability challenge that people will face, and that's why we think that OpsRamp is perfectly positioned to go after that.

Savannah Peterson

>> You just brought up a really good point, Hong, that I want to double down on a bit. When we talk about, you mentioned the edge, 50% of data is at the edge, and when we think about having observability on that, particularly as we roll out in an era of AI PCs and other devices, it's going to get really interesting and it's going to be even more critical, arguably even exponentially more critical, or at least twice as much if we're talking about having access to twice the data, to be able to have the observability tools there and to know what's going on everywhere all at once in real-time. I think it's pretty cool. Varma, what about you? What's next for the squad that at least that you can reveal to us? Where are you driving now that you've got even extra wind beneath your sails here at HPE?

Varma Kunaparaju

>> I think on the autonomous theme that Hong brought up, where we see is the ability to ingest this large volumes of instrumented data, right? The instrumentation and observability is not just monitoring metrics kind of a thing. It's logs, metrics, faces, events, and the topology information, and bringing all of that together from these large edge locations to all the way to the public cloud stacks and bringing that into AI, machine learning-driven, copilot-driven operations, that's our North Star in terms of what we wanted to deliver to enterprise IT organizations, is the outcome where they really get the insights into their infrastructure operations in this massive amounts of data that they're ingesting and being able to find that probable root cause and deliver that copilot-driven operations is where we are putting a lot of investment, and I think early releases of that we already did in terms of creating natural language-based queries. But what we are doing more than using regular foundational models, we are trying to fundamentally create foundational models that are meant for observability data and train those models to deliver the outcomes that the IT operations teams really need. That's what we are driving towards in the next 12 months. You will see more announcement from us and the results from that, and we are collaborating across HPE teams to deliver that very uniquely.

Savannah Peterson

>> I love that. It's no wonder that you're collaborating across teams as someone who's here to combat silos, Varma. So that makes perfect sense. Okay, my final question for you, because all of this technology is super cool, but at the end of the day, it's about the humans that it impacts as a result of all this hard work that we do. So I'll let you decide if you want to keep your HPE hat on or your OpsRamp hat on for this or not, but my final question to you is, what do you hope that AI and this technological revolution that we're amidst does for you, for your family, for your community, for the people that you care about? Varma, I'll start with you.

Varma Kunaparaju

>> I think, first of all, it brings productivity, I think efficiency. In my view, whenever a new technology gets introduced, there's always this myth that what does it mean kind of a thing, but I think at the end of the day, what we see today with some of these AI LLM models is more in the support and support-related use cases. But I believe what is in the horizon is being able to gear the productivity and efficiencies that all the operations teams can get benefited, at least from an OpsRamp lens, from an HPE lens, is to be able to view IT the efficiencies that they need.

Savannah Peterson

>> I love it. I think it's great. It's all about that efficiency and productivity, but also just giving you a higher quality of life as a result of not doing a bunch of repetitive stuff. Hong, what about you? What are your hopes, and dreams, and aspirations for our AI future?

Hang Tan

>> Yeah, well, maybe I'll stick to the IT domain for now, but definitely I agree with Varma there. For a long time, IT department CIOs have really struggled with these mandates to modernize, transform while at the same time keeping cost in check, right? And I think last year, more than any year, those pressures came to a boiling point, and I think this is where really AI comes to the rescue in combination with a unified operating model that we're providing, is going to allow CIOs to really take a ton of cost out, drive a ton of productivity, and redirect those things into innovation, into transformation, and allow them to be purveyors of innovation to their respective lines of businesses as opposed to being viewed as a cost center. So that's what I'm really excited about.

Savannah Peterson

>> Ooh, I love that, even just the way you summarized that at the end there, the shift from being a cost center to being an innovation center. It's an exciting idea and concept for any team or any part of an organization or community for that matter. Wow, okay. Hong, Varma, this has been absolutely awesome. I really appreciate both of you taking the time. This has been a fun and exciting one. I can't wait to have you back on when OpsRamp hits the 1 billion mark and we get to celebrate and hopefully get to continue this conversation. Thank all of you, wherever you might be tuning in on this beautiful planet we happen to have a tape. I'm here in Boston, Massachusetts at theCUBE's studios. We are going to be breaking down this segment. Rob Strechay and I, one of our analysts, are going to be giving you a play-by-play of this and the industry to follow up, as well as a number of other great videos that are going to come out in this fantastic Cloud AI Journey series that we're doing here. So be sure and stay tuned. Let us know what you thought in the comments, maybe tell us what you're excited about in our AI future. My name's Savannah Peterson. You're watching theCUBE, the leading source for enterprise tech news.