How does recurring revenue play in this new ecosystem model?

Everybody is starting to move to ARR [annualized recurring revenue]. Recurring revenue is driving higher valuations. You have seen, particularly in the U.S., the [number] of acquisitions. There have been 300-plus acquisitions [in the channel].

You see big private equity companies buying up partners, aggregating partners and pulling them together, grabbing the expertise of the different partners and the breadth of customers and creating uber partners. You also have some of big partners acquiring some of the smaller ones because recurring revenue changes the valuation. We are starting to see a lot more of that.

When we talk about where we are heading in our strategy, it is how do we embrace all those different business models and how do they all have a home.
What are the three pillars of the HPE ecosystem initiative?

It is own your journey, partner as one team and drive a better experience. We are aligning what we do with those three areas. So own your journey is recognizing that customers are evolving at different paces, therefore the partners that are selling to them are also evolving at different paces.

We want to make sure that we are leading the charge in helping the ones that are ready to evolve today and we also have a home for those that still have customers that are focused more on our core offerings. So we are trying to double down on the ones that are ready today without leaving the rest behind. And when they are ready—because their customers will dictate the pace at which they evolve—we are ready for them.

We are even accelerating some of that with some of the offerings. We have legacy GreenLake, as you think about it. But there are also the core products that are now being managed cloud-natively like with Compute Ops Manager or the Data Services Cloud Console.

So we are starting to bifurcate between the product and the functionality. Now the functionality is being more cloud-enabled. So people are getting on to the platform by virtue of just buying core products from us that just happen to have a subscription that comes with them.

The partners that are ready for that journey have leadership and executives that are sponsoring it. There is an owner to it. We are talking to the right people extending the cloud message, going to hybrid.

So [some partners] sell public cloud. Great. What about the other 70 [percent to] 80 percent of the workloads? What are you doing to go after those? We have a way for you go to after that. We are investing dollars specifically in helping partners build out and drive practices.