hey everybody thanks for coming to the
training led growth podcast I'm Joe your
host I had a great conversation today
with Patrick Osbourne from HP Enterprise
HPE and he's a super smart really
interesting guy
gave a ton of insight around you know
how they run their business he runs he's
the VP and general manager over the
hyper-converged infrastructure and ton of
insight around customers how they sell
differentiators and obviously training
and how do they keep their customers
engaged he shared some really great
knowledge around what they're doing now
and how things have changed from when he
started in industry over 20 years ago
with Sun Microsystems all the way
through to where he is now at HPE how
pricing models have changed how they're
engaging with customers now how learning
and training how they're how they're
engaging with learning and training
earlier and earlier even when customers
were prospect still which I was super
excited about
as you know with training-led growth so
thanks for your interest shared some
really great wisdom and nuggets of
information and and thanks for watching
really appreciate it and you know like
and subscribe and comment and ask me
questions and I'll be sure to respond
hi welcome
to another edition of the
training led growth podcast I'm your
host Joe Moriarty thanks again for your
interest and looking here today I'm
joined by a very very special guest who
is a longtime friend but also is big in
industry he's been an IT his whole
career we got a ton of insight and
interesting stuff to talk about this is
Patrick Osborne Thank You Patrick
for joining well thanks for having me
excited for the podcast it's great
thanks buddy hey you know thank you so
much for joining so you've had an
amazing run of interesting jobs I would
say and so I want to talk to you and
introduce you just a little
about the history and where you came
from so living in the Boston area
graduated Boston College went to Sun
Microsystems out of school so that's
kind of the first big one moved on to
kind of a startup what I would consider
kind of start off kind of head a
business development for IBRIX which is
a really cool company I want to talk to
you about and now you've been with HP
specifically I think HP Enterprise for
about ten years
and currently the vice president and
general manager hyperconverged
infrastructure so pretty a pretty pretty
amazing background pretty good group of
customers - or companies I should say
yep absolutely it's been a good ride
20-plus years in in in high tech it's
been an exciting spots it's a good place
to be so in enterprise architecture
Enterprise Tech which I think we can
classify it as the whole time a lot of
this has been pretty the common thread
here looks like a lot of storage right a
lot of storage sales storage like
product management business developments
with IBRIX
product management with HP and now kind
of running a big division of in general
managing hyper-converged infrastructure
what I'm interested kind of right off
the top here is you've been at it 20 years
you've been in storage 20 years a lot has
changed what are some of the biggest
themes you've seen or what are some
of the biggest changes maybe just in
storage just start there and then we'll
go bigger picture what have you seen in
tech in terms of product and then go to
market in that time time in that kind of
timeframe
yeah I think you know one of the things
that I always kind of reminisce on is
that when I started it was all about
storage right how can you store your
bits and bytes and make sure that that's
available and then it slowly over time I
think the conversation has definitely
you know very quickly shifted to how do
I manage my data whether it's data
virtualization
you know how do I manage more data at
scale and then specifically definitely
over the last I'd say three four or five
years now what can I do with that data to
really affect things like digital
transformation certainly you know the
concepts around AI and analytics it's
not just a case of like how do I store
that data for the best price and protect
it but it's essentially like it's become
the fuel for most companies if you take
a look at a lot of the tech companies
that we deal with banks are now tech
companies retail is now tech companies
and you know they all rely on data and
you know one of the things is that it's
never stopped growing exponentially
since I started twenty plus years ago so
overall as an industry it started off
you know fairly small in terms of how do
I store things to just this huge
explosion of what can I do with this
data what can I do to shift my business
model to be extremely data-driven so
it's been exciting to watch and see and
play in a lot of these different areas
of the of this segment of the business
it definitely fuels a lot of the
innovation that we seen for customers
today so one of the interesting things
you just said there was you know gone
from bits and bytes right so you guys
when you started in your career it's
probably like how fast is it how many
bits and bytes how much how easy is it
to store how easy is it to get to
I mean all that stuff and then now
you're like alright what are the
insights I can get how quickly can I get
to those insights and use it so what do
you think as a as a provider of this
technology what do you think what do you
guys try to do in terms of like a role
how do you help your customers figure
that out do you play a big role man or
is that it how does it work yeah I mean
we have to play a big role in that you
know two things that come up you know be
the industry moved from when I started
in it was you know dollars per gigabyte
and speeds and feeds and you know how
class you can make these spindles run
but nowadays nobody really we have
those conversations they're foundational
for the product but really what people
want to talk about our business outcomes
so if I have a workload or a stack that
I'm going to put together how can you as
a vendor help me get to either the you
know the best dollar per workload or the
you know that how I can get that
workload out as fast as possible so
accelerating time to market and then the
other area that we see which definitely
kind of fits into your theme around
training-led growth is around
overall user experience and so
your experience with the product is
hard to define sometimes like it's
hard to put a metric around that but
it's one of the things that gravitates
the customer to your products and
offerings so you know being able to
establish communities and train people
on you know how to get the best
experience out of your product there's a
lot of threads around that but
essentially you know your ultimately if
you if you have a really good very easy to
the product that is that is definitely
tantamount these days that's a that's a
big satisfier for a customer so
engagement so trying to get the users
your customers your end so your buyer
when you're selling right you're selling
your products it's CIO CTO fortune 1,000
big big buyers big contracts right yeah
and so we've done a number of different
buyer course buyer personas some of them
are you know  infrastructure
datacenter architects and then you know
up to the CIOs and CTOs and then we have
a whole set of new personas too where
you've got line of business and
application owners now they are very
interested in the data and then there's
even like brand new buyer personas like
you know a lot of the larger companies
now have folks like chief data officer
and chief digital transformation
officer so being able to speak their
language and have a really good product
experience for those folks is it's it's
a new community that you have to build
around so also pricing models right have
changed quite a bit from when you first
started
kind of bigger probably enterprise
licensing seat bait I don't know
actually no it's probably well talk
me through it so when you first start
and you were selling the the old bits
and bytes to where you
it started off as capex right
so most capital expenditures you try to
put a solution in your data center and
sweat that asset as much as as much as
possible and now you know even you take
a look at Hewlett Packard Enterprise and
one of the big pivots that we're making
right now is providing all of our
products and solutions by the end of
2022 as a service right you can
consume it as a dollar per workload or
dollar per you know a some metric right
that really gets that's tied to your
business outcome and so now that you
know you've shift the folks who are
built and people will continue to buy on
a capex
you know type of of sales motion but now
many of our customers are asking for
things like give it to me as a service
metered give me a managed service
offering and I think one of the things
now that you know in our current
situation with the global pandemic
because we're able to do that we're able
to be very flexible with our buying
terms so you know helping customers
maintain liquidity deferring payments
you know things like that so it's a
model that's helpful for both us and the
customers so now I mean definitely more
of a recurring revenue model right
specifically when you're doing those
consumption-based or the stuff that I mean that was a big transition right
so when you're probably a lot for the
sales teams right absolutely
from selling probably massive big
upfront contracts to selling these
recurring revenue model contracts and
that's not in the I mean that was fairly
recently right where the you guys had
made that transition yeah and so you
know it's a it's definitely a work in
progress right so talk you know terms
like ARR and tcv you know much different
than you know what you got for her
normal hey I'm going to you know buy a
piece of equipment for you and get an
enterprise data center support contract
for five years and amortize that
equipment on a schedule so it's you know
it's a bit different but that's what the
customers want these
days and you know certainly the cloud
consumption experience has driven that
and we're you know trying to keep pace
with the customers needs it's a very
different so would you say it is easier
for customers to switch kind of
providers now or is that still be and
I'm asking because I'm kind of going
down this road because I want to talk
about product engagement more and
getting coming back to that but is it
easier now for customers to switch
providers if they needed to kind of
specifically in your world yes and no I
mean if you take a look at the
enterprise technology world for large
portfolio companies there's been quite a
bit of consolidation right so you got
some major players out there and so you
know people tend to be aligned with you
know certain vendors over time I'd say
that you know right now immediately two
things are becoming or there's two
things that are introducing more risk
into the equation right switching
vendors and certainly switching
architectures so you know essentially
doing something different so you know
right now getting you know working with
customers to to transform way to do
business
and get new logos it's you know that's
where you need to generate a lot of
calories and inputting a good community
together and really having a product
experience that is you know an order of
magnitude better or you know order a
magnitude cheaper or you know 10x
faster from a deployment perspective so
you got to be really good you have to
really focus on that product experience
to get someone to do to do something
different so in some cases it you know
there there is a little bit more there's
a little less friction in changing
vendors on the other hand a lot of that
change also requires you to do different
things as an organization and I've
always found that the organizational
changes and what you set up teens and
people are much harder to do then
actually change physical and products at
the end of the day mm-hmm yeah I and the
reason I was asking you kind of at that
questioning is because we live in
SaaS world monthly recurring revenue
manual recurring revenue and one of the
most important things we find for our
customers as well as ourselves is you
have to have the people super engaged
with your product you know invest it in
the product I love that you said community
like building community around the
product and the solution set that you've
got so how do you guys do that like how
do you and again i'm we call it the
training led growth podcast because we
think learning and training and ongoing
engagements super important for these
reasons and that people if they're using
it and they're super engaged and they
like your products and there's a
community around it they're less likely
to switch because they feel you know
invested in taking care of and so how do
you guys do that how do you think about
that with hyper-converged and what
you're doing yeah so one of the one of
the great thing is around the business
that that I managed today is that we
have a great what we call an insider's
group so we've developed a bit of a like
a red carpet type of engagement for our
top users and so it's great for them
they get to build their own community
right so they have other users you know
with that use the product and we can
have direct engage with them on things
like you know what kind of features do
they need what parts of the areas of a
product that they need to invest in do
we need to expand our ecosystem partners
and and things like that and then you
know it's a virtuous cycle in terms of
you know it's great they're in all sorts
of different fields and goals and
customer segments so they're always
happy to take reference calls right so
it's always great to build that type of
community that can engage with our
product managers we can use them for
references they we bring it to our you
know our either our physical shows or
our virtual events they're having that
virtual now right oh yeah they're all
gonna be virtual for the time to
come and but that's been okay and when
you talk about the virtual events we
we've moved a number of our
very very big engagements we have our we have
a big end user customer show every year
called HPE discover and that's going to
be virtual but what I found is some of
the things that we've that we've moved
from you know in person to virtual we're
getting a massive amount of engagement
right so you know we did a big event
for our biggest partners and you know
we had north of three four thousand
folks attend online virtually and that was great fast building
communities and so it's you know I think
for better or worse gonna be it'll be a
hybrid model going forward and people
definitely like to do that so the other
ways we try to engage community to is
it's outside of the insiders group some
of the key things that we've been doing
is around certainly around training and
certifications and one of my goals
this year with the team is to try to get
as much information in the public for
our customers to do two things one
continuing to engage with the product
of you know we run an agile method for
our software development and we want to
get those updates to ours as soon as
possible so they can get you know the
innovation so we want to do education
how they do that you know what's coming
up you know what are the benefits
they're gonna see
they're gonna be doing most of
their online before they even up to you
know one of our sales reps whether it's
an inside sales rep and user sales rep
and so landing them like guys so yeah
let me just follow up on that real
quick so you want them to engage with
content with learning with training
before they even talk to an inside or
outside sales rep yeah so if you take
for example the term hyper-converged
infrastructure so at the end of the day
you've got things that you install in
your data center servers networking
storage and that's a that's an
architecture that people have done for
quite some time and hyper-converged essentially
allows you to collapse all those layers
together and make it very easy to manage
but it's something different so what we
do is you know essentially
we put out information for customers to
do to educate themselves on what is this
right just not so much you know why our
product is better but why your workloads
and you know how what you can do to
unlock some of the resources that you
have in IT ocean if you move to this new
type of deployment this new type of
infrastructure
what does it buy you right what is it
why you would do it and then as you go
through the buyers journey then we can
start to talk about you know how the you
know the how how HPE does it why our
solution is differentiated but we find
that around those and even foreign
type of initiatives so customers that
are doing things like artificial
intelligence machine learning these are
you know relatively new subjects
providing any type of information
educate them on the market and how they
would approach these type of problems
it's been very it's been very handy
right it's agent early and then they say
well that's really interesting tell me
more tell me you know your point I love
it
I'm so happy you said that I mean
seriously because one of the things we
we try to exactly what we I think works
really well is when you give someone
knowledge you give them learning ahead
of time that's valuable
so someone goes out learns from HP
Enterprise says what the heck is
hyper-converged how am I going to do
this how is it going to benefit my
business like you're basically giving
people real information that they can
get to a decision maker you know get
them down the road to say no this is
this is stuff that I I want to buy I
want to engage with that's amazing I
love to hear that and it's a it's a
tenant of the training led growth
philosophy we have is that you can you
can give people that information and and
then after once they get to that buying... through the buying process make the
decision now you roll out the insider
group
you roll out the red carpet you say now
let's engage and and do some deeper
level training let's create some
expertise and
by the way i love what you said about
with the insiders group they then also
get to influence product management
right there i mean they're they're
basically saying like hey we're using
this your product now we like it i you
know maybe think about adding this
function or to solve my business problem
but that's awesome and that's and that's
been great so when you take a look at
you know some of the forces that really
influence IT world one of them is
definitely around open source right so
if you take some of the plays from from
open source right you you you're very
upfront and it's a community driven on
you know you know to take a look
at it from a product management
perspective people will upvote and
downvote features and if if you open
that up to you know your insiders or your customer community
they'll be very they'll be very the
market is very efficient in you know
pointing you in the direction that you
need to move in so one of the things I
was thinking about Oh
talk to me about so certification I
think is actually really important to
for two reasons and I'll ask you but you
know one is that obviously if you get
certified in some of your technologies
it's a it's a it's people aren't there
they they learn to use the product
really well they've gained some level of
expertise within the product which
probably makes them a happier user maybe
they're you know they're just more
engaged with you you do you guys measure
is that a key measurement for you guys
like how many how many engineer well the
other thing too I was gonna add is that
they also um it you know it's helpful
for their own careers too I mean if you
get if you get certified in certain
technologies it's a good thing because
you've attained some level of
expertise you know that it's marketable
but both so what else is that everything
that you guys look at you look at like
how many users are getting certified did
you measure that yes so we do have a
whole set of certifications at HPE
there's a couple different ones right we
have certifications that focus on the
end user right and that's you know from
an education standpoint that leads them
to have a
higher experience product right yeah
cuz you know at the end of the day well
you know quite a bit of complexity these
products and you want to make sure that
for some of you know certainly for
enterprise mission-critical type of
workloads that need to beat up all the
time gonna make sure you're using the
product correctly right and and you know
it's all things around deployment plans
reference architectures things like that
so we have those and then we do a lot of
certifications for our sellers both at
HPE and for partner community as well
too right so we incentivize which is not
actually a word we give our partners
incentives to you know maintain their
certifications on the products as well
as our own internal seller so they
understand the value prop they can you
know very clearly educate our customers
on you know why they would want to use
it how it's gonna you know benefit their
business and we have a know number of
technical certifications so you know
we're always trying to keep those up to
speed and we definitely track that part
of our engagement metric if
insentivize is not a word I've
got a whole I get a whole word I got a
remove from my vocabulary a lot of them
I'm incentivized to remove that
word from my vocabulary
what so back to the product just a
little bit here I love this by the way
it's a great I'm learning a ton about HPE
ui/ux
what how has that changed just in terms
of because you had a lot different user
group I mean the personas that you've
got now and your products that's a much
bigger right you got a whole lot more
people use them so and must is it must
have evolved over the years to become
yeah yeah so couple things that happen
right we um the the main the people that
we're targeting for our UX experience
those people I think are becoming
they're becoming more generalized right
so you want to have the people that I'd
say manage like deploy and manage the
products on a daily basis can no longer
afford to be experts in a very like a
narrow deep discipline
so the days of just having a dedicated
storage admin or a backup admin nowadays
it's really coming down to you know
you've got an overall infrastructure or
virtualization admin or you know a lot
of folks are reclassifying themselves as
their organization moves towards more of
a DevOps model so I think people don't
have the time to be super duper experts
in products so you really have to cut
down on the product experience from the
number of knobs and dials and things you
can do with it
what you need what we do is in the
underlying product experience using
things like AI ops and machine learning
to make those decisions for the
customers right before they reach those
breaking points on the product
experience is you know really what's
resonating with customers so we have a
we have a great suite of products and
essentially it's a SaaS platform for
customer experience and support
automation called infosite and really
what it does it's you know it's all of
our products essentially send millions
of points of telemetry back to HPE every
day and we're able to take the
collective product experience of all
those systems out there and do global
learning so that you know essentially
our product your product that you have
installed in your datacenter learns from
the experiences of everybody else in the
user population so that if we come you
know one person encounters a problem we
can go fix that and push that fix out
very quickly for everyone else so
there's a lot of cool things that are
going on in infrastructure management
that allows you to do that and then you
know what I'd also say is that the
consumption experience is changing is
you know different differently to write
the days of you know kind of hammering
out a configuration or RA for you know days
weeks and months with an end user sales
rep you know people really want to
understand no I have a workload I want
to get a dollar per workload for that
and outcome like how can you do that
for me in hours right so there's a lot of
different things that are going on in
the UX experience in some cases it's you
know it's definitely becoming simplified
because having that you know that
expertise that's in one specific domain
is changing right and we're trying to
essentially what IT groups are trying to
do is unlock a lot of those resources
and to go do other things differentiate
on the apps right differentiate on the
services that they're extending to their
you know their end user your customers
and then you know essentially becoming
very frictionless and how I consume the
products you said one thing in there
that I kind of wrote down which I was
thought was very interesting cannot be
experts in a narrow deep discipline it
that is so interesting to me because
there's a there's a very famous book too
that says the generalists about
how it's there the power of being a
generalist but in technology I think
that's really interesting because we
think about creating experts in a given
technology as a kind of a North Star
metric for us we actually look at that
we look at how many experts can we
create in a given topic or but what you
said is is super interesting because
maybe it's not it's I mean it's not
necessarily now deep in a very specific
like you said knob or you know
discipline it's kind of like we have to
actually create a broader kind of swath
of expertise across an architecture
maybe or a whole infrastructure and and
I actually think that that level of
expertise is valued probably more in an
organization do you agree with that yeah
and I would say that you know at the end
of the day you know IT is surveying the
business and has folks become as more
customers and more the market IT
companies
you're gonna see that you know more and
more as how does my how does my
discipline and the things that I'm
responsible for impact the overall
company as well as how does it impact at
a stack scale of the services that you
know that I'm working on you know or
that I'm extending to my end-user
customers and so you have to have a
pretty broad view though who are you
working on there's always gonna be room
for you know for specialties especially
new and emerging markets but a lot of
cases you know there's a lot of I'd say
compression in the in the hybrid IT
market on you know features and
functionality and you know things that
we're doing you know HPE versus one of
our competitors and so you know anything
that we can do to make that just you
know overall easier for our customers
this is really important so one one
one last question thank you so much
Patrick for the time but you know you
mentioned competition and you mention
people you're going against so as as the
vice president GM of a pretty big
business here how do you how do you
think about that how do you plan for
competition or how do you stay ahead
like what do you guys just at a high
level how do you guys think about
differentiating yeah so you know I
there's a couple of things that we do we
have you know there's many
different aspects of you know strategic
planning and whatnot
the I always challenge my team to you
know make sure that we are in growth
markets whether it's you know an actual
you know market itself that's growing or
you're pivoting your product or a
portion of it to take advantage of you
know some of the tailwind or new parts
of a market right so you know for
example you know HPE infrastructure
portfolio company right you know it's
it's it's it's been a HP has
been a business for 80 years you know at
this point right you know original
Silicon Valley startup so we've had to
reinvent ourselves numerous times and
you know right now what we're doing is
as a company is how can you consume
everything as a service right
how can you simplify the user experience
through you know some of these new
techniques around AI ops and predictive
analytics and ultimately at the end of
the day you know provide a very good
experience you know for our customers
and I think you know there's a lot of
product categories that are in different
phases like super mature and the mid
cycle they're you know very new but if
you know you're in one of those those
product cycles are not trying to find
the niche of you know where are the
growth aspects of the market and how you
can plan those and be you know a clear
number one or number two and that market
is something that you know we've always
from a strategic standpoint that's
always the guiding light yeah I love it
listening to your customers too right I
mean that's what you're saying I think
is that what what do they need what do
we how do we continue to service them I
do you mean a lot of technology in there
and then talk to me just about what does
HPE doing just to connect with customers
is service still just a big component of
what you guys kind of promote what you
do does that differentiate how do you
how do you think about that yeah I mean
service is a huge aspect of the business
that's actually one of our you know most
profitable parts of our business at HPE
and I think you know services is great
and we always have to find ways to you
know continue to automate service right
the the best you know support situation
is not to have a support situation and
so I do that the compress that you know
automated case closure on you know
anything around automation and
engineering that into the product is
great I'd say the other thing the other
thing that we've been doing to connect
with with customers and one of the
reasons why I've been at HP for such a
long time is that there's a big hallmark
value and HPE trust that our customers
place in us it's a very good it's a
fantastic place to work and it's got a
high moral compass in terms of the way
that we engage with our you know we
think globally and act locally and
certainly that reflects what our
customers and I think at the end of the
day IT can be very you know focused on
technology but there still is a people
an emotional an aspect of it and you can
you have to make sure that you're you
know continuing to connect with the
customers on that level showing that
you're a company out there because you
know when I started at Sun right I you
know my bright-eyed bushy-tailed I
wanted to go on the world and do great
things with technology for people mm-hmm
that's never changed and so like
being able to market that and extend
that and have that feeling to you know
our customers essentially saying that
you know we're here to do good you know
especially being times like this what
are we doing a respond to help customers
you know I mentioned before about
extending you know credit and liquidity
through HPE financial services and
things like that how can we help you
know first responders what can we do
very quickly shipping you know equipment
to you know to folks that are you know
in verticals that are essentially
essential services so anything that you
can do right now I think as a tech
company which as a segment has been you
know I think painted as being a little
bit ruthlessly capitalistic over the
last couple years the thing that's
definitely resounding with me is in HPE
is that we do build a community around
the tech we build it around you know the
business outcomes but you also build it
around you know some of the things I
mentioned before around Hallmark trust
being there for our customers I think
it's really important to to make sure
that you have a you know a little bit of
the human side of it as well yeah I love
it I love it that's why I asked because
I think that we talk a lot about
technology and automation and a lot of
this stuff but at the end of the day -
we you know having some human connection
and some empathy some some real
conversations with people I think is
what we all actually probably want more
these days I present yeah that's good
stuff one last question for you Patrick
is that Provincetown Massachusetts
behind you it is it is
our our president John F Kennedy who had
enough vision and forethought to you
know set aside a beautiful piece of land
here and the Cape Cod National Seashore
so it's the along the Long Point
Lighthouse out there and Provincetown a
great place to go fishing and spend a
few days with friends yeah I may have
been out there one time I don't know
it's a great spot hey Patrick this has
been a great great conversation thank
you so much for the time I'd love to do
it again sometime we'll get a little bit
deeper we'll get some feedback from our
our listeners and viewers and thank you
I really appreciate your insight and
I've definitely learned quite a bit here
so thanks for sharing your off thanks
for having us on the podcast keep it
going all right thank you my friend
we'll talk soon
