Wednesday, August 07, 2019

How Rapid Machine Learning Accelerates Venturi Formula E Team Racing to a Top-Efficiency Strategy

https://www.venturi.com/

A discussion on how data-driven technology and innovation are making electric racing cars an example for all endeavors where limits are tested and bested.

Listen to the podcast. Find it on iTunes. Download the transcript. Sponsor: Hewlett Packard Enterprise.

Dana Gardner: Hello, and welcome to the next edition of the BriefingsDirect Voice of the Customer podcast series. I’m Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst at Interarbor Solutions, your host and moderator for this ongoing discussion on digital transformation success stories.

Gardner
Our next advanced automobile racing technology innovation discussion explores the Formula E racing sport. We will now learn how data-driven technology and innovation are making high-performance electric cars an example for all endeavors where limits are tested and bested.

To learn more about the latest in data-driven Formula E growth and refinement, please join me in welcoming, Susie Wolff, Team Principal at Venturi Formula E Team in Monaco.

Welcome to the show, Susie.

Susie Wolff: Thank you for having me.

Gardner: Aside from providing a great viewing and fan experience, what are the primary motivators for Formula E racing? Why did it start at all?

Race on down to Electric Avenue 

Wolff: It’s a really interesting story, because Formula E is like a startup. We are only in our fifth season, and Formula E and the management of Formula E disrupted the world of motorsport because it brought to the table a new concept of growing racing.

Wolff
We race in city centers. That means that the tracks are built up just for one-day events, right in the heart of some of the most iconic capitals throughout the world. Because it’s built up within a city center and it’s usually only a one-day event, you get very limited track time, which is quite unusual in motorsport. In the morning we get up, we test, we go straight into qualifying, and then we race.

Yet, it’s attracting a new audience because people don’t need to travel to a race circuit. They don’t need to buy an expensive ticket. The race comes to the people, as opposed to the people going out to see racing.

Obviously, the technology is something completely new for people. There is very little noise, mostly you hear the whooshing of the cars going past. It’s a showcase for new technologies, which we are all going to see appearing on the road in the next three to five years.


The automotive industry is going through a massive change with electric mobility and motorsport is following suit with Formula E.

We already see some of the applications on the roads, and I think that will increase year on year. What motorsport is so good at is testing and showcasing the very latest technology.

Gardner: I was going to ask you about the noise because I had the privilege and joy of watching a Formula One event in Monaco years ago, and the noise was a big part of it. Aside from these cars being so quiet, what is also different in terms of an electric Formula E race compared to traditional Formula One?

https://www.venturi.com/

Wolff: The noise is the biggest factor, and that takes a bit of getting used to. It’s the roaring of the engines that creates emotion and passion. Obviously, in the Formula E cars you are missing any kind of noise.

Even the cars we are starting to drive on the roads now have a little electric start and every time I switch it on I think, “Oh, the car is not working, I have a problem.” I forget that there is no noise when you switch an electric car on.

Also, in Formula E, the way that technology is developing and how quickly it’s developing is very clear through the racing. Last season, the drivers had two cars and they had to switch cars in the middle of the race because the battery wouldn’t last long enough for a complete race distance. Now, because the battery technology has advanced so quickly, we are doing one race with one car and one battery. So I think that’s really the beauty of what Formula E is. It’s showcasing this new technology and electric mobility. Add to this the incredible racing and the excitement that brings, and you have a really enticing offering.

Gardner: Please tell us about Venturi, as a startup, and how you became Team Principal. You have been involved with racing for quite some time.

A new way to manage a driving career

Wolff: Yes, my background is predominately in racing. I started racing cars when I was only eight years old, and I made it through the ranks as a racing driver, all the way to becoming a test driver in Formula One.

Then I stepped away and decided to do something completely different and started a second career. I was pretty sure it wouldn’t be in motorsport, because my husband, Toto Wolff, works in motorsport. I didn’t want to work for him and didn’t want to work against him, so I was very much looking for a different challenge and then Venturi came along.

The President of Venturi, a great gentleman, Gildo Pastor, is a pioneer in electric mobility. He was one of the first to see the possibility of using batteries in cars, and he set a number of land speed records -- all electric. He joined Formula E from the very beginning, realizing the potential it had.

https://www.venturi.com/
The team is based in Monaco, which is a very small principality, but one with a very rich history in racing because of the Grand Prix. Gildo had approached me previously when I was still racing to drive for his team in Formula E. I was one of the cynics, not sure Formula E was going to be for the long-term. So I said, “Thank you, but no thank you.”

But then he contacted me last year and said, “Look, I think we should work together. I think you will be fantastic running the team.” We very quickly found a great way to work together, and for me, it was just the perfect challenge. It’s a new form of racing, it’s breaking new ground and it’s at such an exciting stage of development. So, it was the perfect step for me into the business and management side of motorsports.

Gardner: For me, the noise difference is not much of an issue because the geek factor gets me jazzed about automobiles, and I don’t think I am alone in that. I love the technology. I love the idea of the tiny refinements that improve things and that interaction between the best of what people can do and what machines can do.

Tell us about your geek factor. What is new and fascinating for you about Formula E cars? What’s different from the refinement process that goes on with traditional motorsport and the new electric version?

The software challenge 

Wolff: It’s a massively different challenge than what we are used to within traditional forms of motorsport.

The new concept behind Formula E has functioned really well. Just this season, for example, we had eight races with eight different winners. In other categories, for example in Formula One, you just don’t get that. There is only the possibility for three teams to win a race, whereas in Formula E, the competition is very different.

Also, as a team, we don’t build the cars from scratch. A Formula One team would be responsible for the design and build of their whole car. In Formula E, 80 percent of the car is standardized. So every team receives the same car up to that 80 percent. The last part is the power train, the rear suspension, and some of the rear-end design of the car.

https://www.venturi.com/
The big challenge within Formula E then, is in the software. It’s ultimately a software race: Who can develop, upgrade, and react quickly enough on the software side. And obviously, as soon as you deal with software, you are dealing with a lot of data.

That’s one of the biggest challenges in Formula E -- it’s predominantly a software race as opposed to a hardware race. If it’s hardware, it’s set at the beginning of the season, it’s homologated, and it can’t be changed.

In Formula E, the performance differentiators are the software and how quickly you can analyze, use, and redevelop your data to enable you to find the weak points and correct them quickly enough to bring to the on-track performance.

Gardner: It’s fascinating to me that this could be the ultimate software development challenge, because the 80/20 rule applies to a lot of other software development, too. The first 80 percent can be fairly straightforward and modular; it’s the last 20 percent that can make or break an endeavor.

Tell us about the real-time aspects. Are you refining the software during the race day? How does that possibly happen?

Winning: When preparation meets data 

Wolff: Well, the preparation work is a big part of a race performance. We have a simulator based back at our factory in Monaco. That’s where the bulk of the preparation work is done. Because we are dealing with only a one-day event, it means we have to get everything crammed into an eight-hour window, which leaves us very little time between stations to analyze and use the data.


The bulk of the preparation work is done in the simulator back at the factory. Each driver does between four to six days in a simulator preparing for a race. That’s where we do all of the coding and try to find the most efficient ways to get from the start to the finish of the race. That’s where we do the bulk of the analytical work.

When we arrive at the actual race, we are just doing the very fine tweaks because the race day is so compact. It means that you need to be really efficient. You need to minimize the errors and maximize the opportunities, and that’s something that is hugely challenging.

https://www.hpe.com/us/en/home.html
If you had a team of 200 engineers, it would be doable. But in Formula E, the regulations limit you to 20 people on your technical team on a race day. So that means that efficiency is of the utmost importance to get the best performance.

Gardner: I’m sure in the simulation and modeling phase you leverage high-performance computing (HPC) and other data technologies. But I’m particularly curious about that real-time aspect, with a limit of 20 people and the ability to still make some tweaks. How did you solve the data issues in a real-time, intensive, human-factor-limited environment like that?

Wolff: First of all, it’s about getting the right people on-board and being able to work with the right people to make sure that we have the knowhow on the team. The data is real-time, so in a race situation we are aware if there is a problem starting to arise in the car. It’s very much up to the driver to control that themselves, from within the car, because they have a lot of the controls. The very important data numbers are on their steering wheel.

They have the ability to change settings within the car -- and that’s also what makes it massively challenging for the driver. This is not just about how fast you can go, it’s also how much extra capacity you have to manage in your car and your battery -- to make sure that you are being efficient.
The data is utmost in importance for how it's created and then how quickly it can be analyzed and used to help performance. That's something HPE has been a huge benefit for us for. ... We can apply that ability to crunch the numbers more quickly.

The data is utmost in importance for how it’s created and then how quickly it can be analyzed and used to help performance. That’s something that Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) has been a huge benefit to us for. First of all, HPE has been able to increase the speed at which we can send data from factory to race track, between engineers. That technology has also increased the level of our simulator and what it’s able to crunch through in the preparation work.

And that was just the start. We are now looking at all the different areas where we can apply that ability to crunch the numbers more quickly. It allows us to look at every different aspect, and it will all come down to those marginal gains in the end.

Gardner: Given that this is a team sport on many levels, you are therefore working with a number of technology partners. What do you look for in a technology partner?

Partner for performance 

Wolff: In motorsport, you very quickly realize if you are doing a good job or not. Every second weekend you go racing, and the results are shown on the track. It’s brutal because if you are at the top step of the podium, you have done a great job. If you are at the end, you need to do a better job. That’s a reality check we get every time we go racing.

For us to be the best, we need to work with the best. We’re obviously very keen to always work with the best-in-field, but also with companies able to identify the exact needs we have and build a product or a package that helps us. Within motorsports, it’s very specific. It’s not like a normal IT company or a normal business where you can plug-and-play. We need to redefine what we can do, and what will bring added performance.

We need to work with companies that are agile. Ideally they have experience within motorsports. They know what you need, and they are able to deliver. They know what’s not needed in motorsports because everything is very time sensitive. We need to make sure we are working on the areas that bring performance -- and not wasting resources and time in areas that ultimately are not going to help our track performance.

Gardner: A lot of times with motorsports it’s about eking out the most performance and the highest numbers when it comes to variables like skidpad and the amounts of friction versus acceleration. But I can see that Formula E is more about the interplay between the driver, the performance, and the electrical systems efficiency.

https://www.venturi.com/

Is there something we can learn from Formula E and apply back to the more general electric automobile industry? It seems to me they are also fighting the battle to make the batteries last longest and make the performance so efficient that every electron is used properly.

Wolff: Absolutely. That’s why we have so many manufacturers in Formula E … the biggest names in the industry, like BMW, Audi, Jaguar and now Mercedes and Porsche. They are all in Formula E because they are all using it as a platform to develop and showcase their technology. And there are huge sums of money being spent within the automotive industry now because there is such a race on to get the right technology in the next generation of electric cars. The technology is advancing so quickly. The beauty of Formula E is that we are at the very pinnacle of that.

We are purely performance-based and it means that those race cars and power trains need to be the most efficient, and the quickest. All of the technology and everything that’s learned from the manufacturers doing Formula E eventually filters back into the organizations. It helps them to understand where they can improve and what the main challenges are for their electrification and electric mobility in the end.

Gardner: There is also an auspicious timing element here. You are pursuing the refinement and optimization of electric motorsports at the same time that artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) technologies are becoming more pervasive, more accessible, and brought right to the very edge … such as on a steering wheel.

Is there an opportunity for you to also highlight the use of such intelligence technologies? Will data analytics start to infer what should be happening next, rather than just people analyzing data? Is there a new chapter, if you will, in how AI can come to bear on your quest for the Formula E best?

AI accelerates data 

Wolff: A new chapter is just beginning. Certainly, in some of the conversations we’ve had with our partners -- and particularly with HPE -- it’s like opening up a treasure chest, because the one thing we are very good at in motorsports is generating lots of data.

The one thing that we are clear at, and it’s purely down to manpower and time and resource, is the analyzing of data. There is only so much that we have capacity for. And with AI there are a couple of examples that I wouldn’t even want to share because I wouldn’t want my competitors to know what’s possible.

https://www.hpe.com/us/en/home.html
There are a couple of examples where we have seen that AI can constitute the numbers in a matter of seconds and spit out the results. I can’t even comprehend how long it would take us to get to those numbers otherwise. It’s a clear example of how much AI is going to accelerate our learning on the data side, and, particularly, because it’s software, there’s so much analyzing of the data needed to bring new levels of performance. For us it’s going to be game changer and we are only at the start.

It’s incredibly exciting but also so important to make sure that we are getting it right. There is so much possibility that if we don’t get it right, there could be big areas that we could end up losing on.

Gardner: Perhaps soon, race spectators will not only be watching the cars and how fast they are going. Perhaps there will be a dashboard that provides views of the AI environment’s performance, too. It could be a whole new type of viewer experience -- when you’re looking at what the AI can do as well as the car. Whoever thought that AI would be a spectator sport?

Wolff: It’s true and it’s not far away. It’s very exciting to think that that could be coming.

Gardner: I’ll be watching. I am afraid we will have to leave it there. We have been discussing how data-driven technology and innovation are making Formula E racing an example for all endeavors where limits are tested and bested.

Please join me in thanking our guest, Susie Wolff, Team Principal at Venturi Formula E based in Monaco. Thank you so much, Susie.

Wolff: Thank you very much.


Gardner: And a big thank you as well to our audience for joining this BriefingsDirect Voice of the Customer digital transformation success story. I’m Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst at Interarbor Solutions, your host for this ongoing series of Hewlett Packard Enterprise-sponsored interviews.

Thanks again for listening, please pass this along to your IT community, and do come back next time.

Listen to the podcast. Find it on iTunes. Download the transcript. Sponsor: Hewlett Packard Enterprise.

A discussion on how data-driven technology and innovation are making electric cars an example for all endeavors where limits are tested and bested. Copyright Interarbor Solutions, LLC, 2005-2019. All rights reserved.

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Wednesday, July 31, 2019

The Budding Relationship Between HPE and Cohesity Brings the Best of Startup Innovation to Global Reach and Support


Transcript of a discussion on how edge-centric data and compute require a management lifecycle capability at the edge and how a tag team of startup and global vendor are building such a solution.

Listen to the podcast. Find it on iTunes. Download the transcript. Sponsor: Hewlett Packard Enterprise.

Dana Gardner: Hello, and welcome to the next edition of the BriefingsDirect Voice of the Customer podcast series. I’m Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst at Interarbor Solutions, your host and moderator for this ongoing discussion on digital transformation success stories.

Gardner
Our next partnership innovation discussion explores how the best of startup culture and innovation can be married to the global reach, maturity, and solutions breadth of a major IT provider.

Stay with us now as we unpack the budding relationship between an upstart in the data management space, Cohesity, and venerable global IT provider Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE).

To learn more about the latest in total storage efficiency strategies and HPE’s Pathfinder program please join me in welcoming our guests, Rob Salmon, President and Chief Operating Officer at Cohesity in San Jose, California. Welcome, Rob.

Rob Salmon: Thanks for having me, Dana.

Gardner: We are also here with Paul Glaser, Vice President and Head of the Pathfinder Program at HPE. Welcome, Paul.

Paul Glaser: Thanks, Dana, I’m happy to be here.

Gardner: Paul, how have technology innovation, the nature of startups, and the pace of business today made a deep relationship between HPE and Cohesity the right fit for your mutual customers?

Glaser
Glaser: That’s an interesting question, Dana. To start, the technology ecosystem and the startup ecosystem in Silicon Valley, California -- as well as other tech centers on a global basis -- fuel the fire of innovation. And so, the ample funding that’s available to startups, the research that’s coming out of top tier universities such as Stanford, Carnegie Mellon, or MIT out on the East Coast, fuels a lot of interesting ideas -- disruptive ideas that lead their way into small startups.

The challenge for HPE as a large, global technology player is to figure out how to tap into the ecosystem of startups and the new disruptive technologies coming out of the universities, as well as serial entrepreneurs, foster and embrace that, and deliver those solutions and technologies to our customers.

Gardner: Paul, please describe the Pathfinder thesis and approach. What does it aim to do?

Insight, investment, and solutions

Glaser: Pathfinder, at the top level is the venture capital (VC) program of HPE and can be subdivided into three core functions. First is insight, second is investments, and third is the solutions function. The insight component acts like a center of excellence, it keeps a finger on the pulse, if you will, of disruptive innovation in the startup community. It helps HPE as a whole interact with the startup community, the VC community, and identifies and curates leading technology innovations that we can ultimately deliver to our customers.

The second component is investments. It’s fairly straight-forward. We act like a VC firm, taking small equity stakes in some of these startup companies.

https://www.cohesity.com/
And third, solutions. For the companies that are in our portfolio, we work with them to make introductions to product and technical organizations inside of HPE, fostering dialogue from a product evolution perspective and a solution perspective. We intertwine HPE’s products and technologies with the startup technology to create one-plus-one-equals-three. And we deliver that solution to customers and solve their challenges from a digital transformation perspective.

Gardner: How many startup companies are we talking about? How many in a year have typically been included in Pathfinder?

Glaser: We are a very focused program, so we align around the strategies for HPE. Because of that close collaboration with our portfolio companies and the business units, we are limited to about eight investments or new portfolio companies on an annual basis.

Today, the four-and-a-half-year-old program has about two dozen companies inside in the portfolio. We expect to add another eight over the next 12 months.

Gardner: Rob, tell us about Cohesity and why it’s such a good candidate, partner, and success story when it comes to the Pathfinder program.

Salmon: Cohesity is a five-year-old company focused on data management for about 70 to 80 percent of all the data in an enterprise today. This is for large enterprises trying to figure out the next great thing to make them more operationally efficient, and to give them better access to data.

Aron
Companies like HPE are doing exactly the same thing, looking to figure out how to bring new conversations to their customers and partners. We are a software-defined platform. The company was founded by Dr. Mohit Aron, who has spent his entire 20-plus-year career working on distributed file systems. He is one of the key architects of the Google File System and co-founder of Nutanix. The hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI) movement, really, was his brainchild.

He started Cohesity five years ago because he realized there was a new, better way to manage large sets of data. Not only in the data protection space, but for file services, test dev, and analytics. The company has been selling the product for more than two and a half years now, and we’ve been a partner with Paul and the HPE Pathfinder team for more than three years now. It’s been a quite successful partnership between the two companies.

Gardner: As I mentioned in my set-up, Rob, speed-to-value is the name of the game for businesses today. How have HPE and Cohesity together been able to help each other be faster to market for your customers?

One plus one equals three

Salmon: The partnership is complimentary. What HPE brings to Cohesity is experience and reach. We get a lot of value by working with Paul, his team, and the entire executive team at HPE to bring our product and solutions to market.

Salmon
When we think about the combination between the products from HPE and Cohesity, one-plus-one-equals-three-plus. That’s what customers are seeing as well. The largest customers we have in the world running Cohesity solutions run on HPE’s platform.

HPE brings credibility to a company of our size, in all areas of the world, and with large customers. We just could not do that on our own.

Gardner: And how does working with HPE specifically get you into these markets faster?

Salmon: In fact, we just announced an original equipment manufacturer (OEM) relationship with HPE whereby they are selling our solutions. We’re very excited about it.

I can give you a great example. I met with one of the largest healthcare providers in the world a year ago. They loved hearing about the solution. The question they had was, “Rob, how are you going to handle us? How will you support us?” And they said, “You are going to let us know, I’m sure.”

They immediately introduced me to the general manager of their account at HPE. We took that support question right off the table. Everything has been done through HPE. It’s our solution, wrapped around the broad support services and hardware capabilities of HPE. That made for a total solution for our customers, because that’s ultimately what these kinds of customers are looking for.

They are not just looking for great, new innovative solutions. They are looking for how they can roll that out at scale in their environments and be assured it’s going to work all the time.

Gardner: Paul, HPE has had huge market success in storage over the past several years, being on the forefront of flash and of bringing intelligence to how storage is managed on a holistic basis. How does the rest of storage, the so-called secondary level, fit into that? Where do you see this secondary storage market’s potential?

Glaser: HPE’s internal product strategy has been around the primary storage capability. You mentioned flash, so such brands as 3PAR and Nimble Storage. That’s where HPE has a lot of its own intellectual property today.

https://www.hpe.com/us/en/home.html
On the secondary storage side, we’ve looked to partners to round out our portfolio, and we will continue to do so going forward. Cohesity has become an important part of that partner portfolio for us.

But we think about more than just secondary storage from Cohesity. It’s really about data management. What does the data management lifecycle of the future look like? How do you get more insights on where your data is? How do you better utilize that?

Cohesity and that ecosystem will be an important part of how we think about rounding out our portfolio and addressing what is a tens of billions of dollars market opportunity for both companies.

Gardner: Rob, let’s dig into that total data management and lifecycle value. What are the drivers in the market making a holistic total approach to data necessary?

Cohesity makes data searchable, usable 

Salmon: When you look at the sheer size of the datasets that enterprises are dealing with today, there is an enormous data management copy problem. You have islands of infrastructures set up for different use cases for secondary data and storage. Oftentimes the end users don’t know where to look, and it may be in the wrong place. After a time, the data has to be moved.

The Cohesity platform indexes the data on ingest. We therefore have Google-like search capabilities across the entire platform, regardless of the use-case and how you want to use the data.

https://www.cohesity.com/

When we think about the legacy storage solutions out there for data protection, for example, all you can do is protect the data. You can’t do anything else. You can’t glean any insights from that data. Because of our indexing on ingest, we are able to provide insights into the data and metadata in ways unlike customers and enterprises have ever seen before. As we think about the opportunity, the larger the datasets that are run on the Cohesity platform and solution, the more insight customers can have into their data.

And it’s not just about our own applications. We recently introduced a marketplace where applications such as Splunk reside and can sit on top and access the data in the Cohesity platform. It’s about bringing compute, storage, networking, and the applications all together to where the data is, versus moving data to the compute and to the applications.

Gardner: It sounds like a solution tailor-made for many of the new requirements we’re seeing at the edge. That means massive amounts of data generated from the Internet of things (IoT) and the industrial Internet of things (IIoT). What are you doing with secondary storage and data management that aligns with the many things HPE is doing at the edge?

Seamless at the edge

Salmon: When you think about both the edge and the public cloud, the beauty of a next-generation solution like Cohesity is we are not redesigning something to take advantage of the edge or the public clouds. We can run a virtual edition of our software at the edge, and in public cloud. We have a multiple-cloud offering today.

https://www.cohesity.com/

So, from the edge all the way to on-premises and into public clouds it’s a seamless look at all of your data. You have access and visibility to all of the data without moving the data around.

Gardner: Paul, it sounds like there’s another level of alignment here, and it’s around HPE’s product strategies. With HPE InfoSight, OneView -- managing core-to-edge issues across multiple clouds as well as a hybrid cloud -- this all sounds quite well-positioned. Tell us more about the product strategy synergy between HPE and Cohesity.

Glaser: Dana, I think you hit it spot-on. HPE CEO Antonio Neri talks about a strategy for HPE that’s edge-centric, cloud-enabled, and data-driven. As we think about building our infrastructure capabilities -- both for on-premise data centers and extending out to the edge -- we are looking for partners that can help provide that software layer, in this case the data management capability, that extends our product portfolio across that hybrid cloud experience for our customers.


As you think about a product strategy for HPE, you really step up to the macro strategy, which is, how do we provide a solution for our customers that allows us to span from the edge all the way to the core data center? We look at partners that have similar capabilities and similar visions. We work through the OEMs and other types of partnership arrangements to embed that down into the product portfolio.

Gardner: Rob, anything to offer additionally on the alignment between Cohesity and HPE, particularly when it comes to the data lifecycle management?

Salmon: The partnership started with Pathfinder, and we are absolutely thrilled with the partnership we have with HPE’s Pathfinder group. But when we did the recent OEM partnership with HPE, it was actually with HPE’s storage business unit. That’s really interesting because as you think about competing or not, we are working directly with HPE’s storage group. This is very complementary to what they are doing.
When we did the recent OEM partnership with HPE, it was actually with HPE's storage business unit. That's really interesting because as you think about competing or not, we are working directly with HPE storage. This is very complementary to what they are doing.

We understand our swim lane. They understand our swim lane. And yet this gives HPE a far broader portfolio into environments where they are looking at what the competitors are doing. They are saying, “We now have a better solution for what we are up to in this particular area by working with Cohesity.”

We are excited not just to work with the Pathfinder group but by the opportunity we have with Antonio Neri’s entire team. We have been welcomed into the HPE family quite well over the last three years, and we are just getting started with the opportunity as we see it.

Gardner: Another area that is top-of-mind for businesses is not just the technology strategy, but the economics of IT and how it’s shifted given the cloud, Software as a Service (SaaS), and pay-on-demand models. Is there something about what HPE is doing with its GreenLake Flex Capacity approach that is attractive to Cohesity? Do you see the reception in your global market improved because of the opportunity to finance, acquire, and consume IT in a variety of different ways?

Flexibility increases startups’ strength 

Salmon: Without question! Large enterprises want to buy it the way they want to buy it, whether it be for personalized licenses or a subscription model. They want to dictate how it will be used in their environments. By working with HPE and GreenLake, we are able to offer the flexible options required to win in this market today.

Gardner: Paul, any thoughts about the economics of consuming IT and how Pathfinder might be attractive to more startups because of that?

Glaser: There are two points Rob touched on that are important. One, working with HPE as a large company, it’s a journey. As a startup you are looking for that introduction or that leg up that gives you visibility across the global HPE organization. That’s what Pathfinder provides. So, you start working directly with the Pathfinder organization, but then you have the ability to spread out across HPE.

http://www.hewlettpackardpathfinder.com/

For Cohesity, it’s led to the OEM agreement with the storage business unit. It is the ability to leverage different consumption models utilizing GreenLake, and some of our flexible pricing and flexible consumption offers.

The second point is Amazon Web Services has conditioned customers to think about pay-per-use. Customers are asking for that, and they are looking for flexibility. As a startup, that sometimes is hard to figure out -- how to economically provide that capability. Being able to partner with HPE and Pathfinder, to utilizing GreenLake or some of our other tools, it really provides them a leg up in terms of the conversation with customers. It helps them trust that the solution will be there and that somebody will be there to stand behind it over the coming years.

Gardner: Before we close out, I would like to peek in the crystal ball for the future. When you think about the alignment between Cohesity and HPE, and when we look at what we can anticipate -- an explosion of activity at the edge and rapidly growing public cloud market -- there is a gorilla in the room. It’s the new role for inference and artificial intelligence (AI), to bring more data-driven analytics to more places more rapidly.

Any thoughts about where the relationship between HPE and Cohesity will go on an AI tangent product strategy?

AI enhances data partnership 

Salmon: You touched earlier, Dana, on HPE InfoSight, and we are really excited about the opportunity to partner even closer with HPE on it. That’s an incredibly successful product in its own right. The opportunity for us to work closer and do some things together around InfoSight is exciting.

On the Cohesity side, we talk a lot about not just AI but machine learning (ML) and where we can go proactively to give customers insights into not only the data, but also the environment itself. It can be very predictive. We are working incredibly hard on that right now. And again, I think this is an area that is really just getting started in terms of what we are going to be able to do over a long period of time.

Gardner: Paul, anything to offer on the AI future?

Glaser: Rob touched on the immediate opportunity for the two companies to work together, which is around HPE InfoSight and marrying our capabilities in terms of predictability and ML around IT infrastructure and creative solutions around that.

As you extend the vision to being edge-centric, as you look into the future where applications become more edge-centric and compute is going to move toward the data at the edge, the lifecycle of what that data looks like from a data management perspective at the edge -- and where it ultimately resides -- is going to become an interesting opportunity. Some of the AI capabilities can provide insight on where the best place is for that computation, and for that data, to live. I think that will be interesting down the road.
As you extend the vision to being edge-centric, compute is going to move toward the data at the edge. The lifecycle of what that data looks like from a data management perspective at the edge is an interesting opportunity.

Gardner: Rob, for other startups that might be interested in working with a big vendor like HPE through a program like Pathfinder, any advice that you can offer?

Salmon: As a startup, you know you are good at something, and it’s typically around the technology itself. You may have a founder like Mohit Aron, who is absolutely brilliant in his own right in terms of what he has already done in the industry and what we are going to continue to do. But you have got to do all the building around that brilliance and that technology and turn it into a true solution.

And again, back to this notion of solution, the solution needs global scale, it’s giving the support to costumers, not just one experience with you, but what they are expecting to experience from the enterprises that support them. You can learn a lot from working with large enterprises. They may not be the ones to tell you exactly how you are going to code your product; we have got that figured out with the brilliance of a Mohit and the engineering team around him. But as we think about getting to scale, and scaling the operation in terms of what we are doing, leaning on someone like the Pathfinder group at HPE has helped us an awful lot.

Salmon: The other great thing about working with the Pathfinder group is, as Paul touched on earlier, they work with other portfolio companies. They are working with companies that may be in a little different space than we are, but they are seeing a similar challenge as we are.

https://www.cohesity.com/
How do you grow? How do you open up a market? How do you look at bringing the product to market in different ways? We talked about consumption pricing and the new consumption models. Since they are experiencing that with others, and what they have already done at HPE, we can benefit from that experience. So leveraging a large enterprise like an HPE and the Pathfinder group, for what they know and what they are good at, has been invaluable to Cohesity.

Gardner: Paul, for those organizations that might want to get involved with Pathfinder, where should they go and what would you guide them to in terms of becoming a potential fit?

Glaser: I’d just point them to hewlettpackardpathfinder.com. You can find information on the program there, contact information, portfolio companies, and that type of thing.

We also put out a set of perspectives that talk about some of our investment theses and you can see our areas of interest. So at a high level, we look for companies that are aligned to HPE’s core strategies, which is going to be around building up the hybrid IT business as well as the intelligent edge.

So we have those specific swim lanes from a strategic perspective. And then second is we are looking for folks who have demonstrated success from a product perspective, and so whether that’s a couple of initial customer wins and then needing help to scale that business, those are the types of opportunities that we are looking for.

Gardner: I’m afraid we will have to leave it there. We have been discussing how the best of startup culture and innovation can be married to the global reach, maturity, and solutions perspective of a major IT supplier. And we learned about the increasingly deep and beneficial relationship between an upstart in the data management space, Cohesity, and the venerable IT vendor, HPE.

So please join me now in thanking our guests, Rob Salmon, President and COO at Cohesity. Thank you so much, Rob.

Salmon: Thank you, Dana.

Gardner: And a big thank you to Paul Glaser, Vice President and Head of the Pathfinder Program at HPE. Thank you, sir.

Glaser: Thank you, Dana. Appreciate your time.

Gardner: And a big thank you to our audience as well for joining this BriefingsDirect Voice of the Customer digital transformation success story. I’m Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst at Interarbor Solutions, your host for this ongoing series of Hewlett Packard Enterprise-sponsored interviews.


Thanks again for listening. Please pass this along to your IT community, and don’t forget to come back next time. For more information on Cohesity-HPE joint solutions, refer to www.cohesity.com/hpe.

Listen to the podcast. Find it on iTunes. Download the transcript. Sponsor: Hewlett Packard Enterprise.

Transcript of a discussion on how edge-centric data and compute require a management lifecycle capability at the edge and how a tag team of startup and global vendor are building such a solution. Copyright Interarbor Solutions, LLC, 2005-2019. All rights reserved.

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