Hybrid Cloud Computing and Role of Sales Enablement in Cloud Environment

Jessica Ly: I'm here with Kelly Ducourty, who is the SVP of worldwide sales excellence at HPE. Hi Kelly.

Kelly Ducourty: Hello, thank you for having me here today.

Jessica Ly: Lovely to have you here. I would love to hear more about what you do at HPE because I know you've been there for 21 years, and you've taken on many roles, and you are now SVP, which is phenomenal.

Kelly Ducourty: Sure. So I'll tell you a little bit about it. So you might be wondering, Well, what is worldwide sales? Excellent, so my mission in life is really to focus on delivering excellent customer outcomes and really making sure that our sellers have the right portfolio and the right competencies in their hands to do so. I also host all of the global sales functions. So whether it be pre-sales or inside sales, what we call category management, which is really the connection between the product business units that we have and the field sellers that we have in the geographies. And amongst other things as well, I look after what we call sells incubation. So the incubation of either new companies that we acquire or new offerings that we're bringing to market as well. So quite a lot in there, very exciting.

Jessica Ly: It's a big impact, too, because there's a $28 billion revenue stream that you are impacting.

Kelly Ducourty: That's absolutely right.

Jessica Ly: And then a large number of like several 100 people reporting to you worldwide.

Kelly Ducourty: That is right. And you did say I've been there for 21 years, but it honestly doesn't feel like that long. So I was reflecting the other day on just the wonderful opportunities that I've had. Obviously, you can tell that I'm not American. So I'm British, living here in the Bay Area. But I've worked in so many countries with this company and so many different roles that it feels like a new experience all the time, which is quite exciting.

Jessica Ly: Well, let's talk about what's new than HPE has been around, it's been evolving, what are some of the trends that you're seeing.

Kelly Ducourty: So we're really focused on a few things. So one of them would be the As a Service environment. So delivering our Portfolio as a Service. And I'll talk a little bit more about that later. We have a huge focus around the edge, and the different workloads and the different solutions and use cases that happen at the edge. So whether it be, you know, autonomous driving, or different areas in terms of power plants, and so on, just as examples. And we're also focused very much on hybrid cloud, and really the investments that we make in research and development, and mainly around these three areas. So that's really our focus as a company these days.

Jessica Ly: Well, hybrid cloud has been around multi-cloud, hybrid cloud and all that. What is the customer base asking for? You know, what do you need to deliver in terms of the value to them.

Kelly Ducourty: So our customers are really asking for a lot of choices. That's definitely something that we are really focused on. As a company, we have embraced all types of clouds, actually, because we believe that the cloud is an experience and not a destination. And from that perspective, we're really focused on delivering a multi-cloud experience for our customers where they have as much choice as possible. And you will have seen that we have had quite a few announcements recently with some of our partners as well to offer our services and solutions through what we call HPE green lake, which is our As a Service offering.

Jessica Ly: I see. So you're talking about, like hardware-software together as one as a service.

Kelly Ducourty: Exactly right. Yeah.

Jessica Ly: That may involve your technology and partner’s technology.

Kelly Ducourty: That's exactly right. And the reason why we've done this is to really focus on delivering outcomes for our customers and providing them that choice. So not always assuming that the ultimate choice is going to be an HPE only solution, but really helping to bring together the ecosystem of partners that we work closely with to provide the right solution to the customer at the right time.

Jessica Ly: Right, like VMware, SAP HANA.

Kelly Ducourty: Yeah, we have solutions with all of those. We even have solutions with Nutanix and others Google Anthos recently, which is, you know, a really key announcement for us as well as we bring the public cloud environment closer to the on-prem private cloud environment team.

Jessica Ly: Yes. You mentioned that, and I thought it was very fascinating how there are now on-prem solutions from Google, for example.

Kelly Ducourty: Yeah, it is interesting, actually, because HPE has been embracing the concept of a hybrid cloud since the start, and I think a lot of analysts thought that the world would really move public much quicker than it has. And I think this is really linked to the fact that customers do want to have a choice to run their applications in the right environment for them to meet, whether it be regulatory requirements, latency requirements, and so on. So customers are really looking for a blend of on-prem and off Prem solutions. And you do start to see some of the public cloud providers, whether it be Amazon or Google, coming back to the data center as well to deliver some of those on-premise experiences. And that's obviously something that we've been doing for quite a while. So our consumption business has been going already for seven years. So we really feel that this is an area where we're extremely strong. And we're where we have the customer base to really work and partner with them on delivering those solutions.

Jessica Ly: So talking about the consumption, I know that out of the 28 billion, you have about 2 billion that is consumption revenue.

Kelly Ducourty: that is right, today. That's correct.

Jessica Ly: And is that an accelerated part of the business is in the consumption model.

Kelly Ducourty: Absolutely. So, in fact, our CEO has come forward publicly and said that by 2022, we would offer the full portfolio of Hewlett Packard Enterprise as a service. So that's really exciting. And despite this business growing extremely fast, it's going to be propelling even faster because that is the way that a lot of our customers want to consume their environments and consume their solutions. They want it delivered as a service in a very flexible way. And so, we will continue to grow and extend our Green Lake offerings, both for our own portfolio but also partnering with others as well.

Jessica Ly: Well 2022, that's three years from now, in that transition, what's the go-to market strategy, then.

Kelly Ducourty: Yeah, in fact, my team is working really heavily on this right now. So we are going to be doing a lot of hiring as well, which is exciting, a lot of enabling of our current sellers as well to ensure that everybody can really sell as a service. So this is a huge transformation for us. And at the same time, we will also be working on extensions to the portfolio. So we've been focusing on making the sales experience much more agile as well. So we can, we can really serve our customers very quickly, providing quotes in minutes, not hours, and really making sure that the experience is delivering them the outcome that they need. So yeah, it's very exciting stuff.

Jessica Ly: I think there's a lot of education going on for your sales team and the partners you're working with, right? So

Kelly Ducourty: that's right.

Jessica Ly: I can see how you have to give them the content multiple ways in different formats and actually test to make sure they have the right knowledge.

Kelly Ducourty: That's right, actually, you know, sales enablement is a very important part of this overall mission, making sure that our sellers are fully educated on the portfolio and can bring that message not only to our customers but also our partners as a very important extension of our Salesforce. So we did. We have a lot of ways that we do this, but we have a platform actually that where we actually ask the sellers to video themselves making some of the sales pitches and send them back to us. So we can really evaluate whether they're at the right level, whether they've understood the content, and whether we can score them appropriately. So the good thing as well is because it's mobile, it allows these silos to do it on the move, you know, people can't complain that they don't have enough time because they can do it on the train, if needed, as long as they're in a quiet place, or they can do it, you know, on the move at their customer sites, and so on. So that's really allowed us to be much more agile in some of that enablement type of environment.

Jessica Ly: Do you find it challenging when you are trying to educate folks in different countries? You know, there are cultural differences?

Kelly Ducourty: Yeah, definitely and actually, when we are asked, it's funny because when we deliver some of the same content, the way that we receive that back in the way that people pitches, you know, so very different depending on the country that they're focused in. Now, obviously, the sellers know their home market much better than we do back in the headquarters. And we have to do some translation for some of the geographies to make sure that it's fully understood in the market. And also just some of the ways that the customers receive the data from their sellers, you know, is different in the way that people approach that depending on the market that they're in. So we really make sure that a lot of the execution is actually happening in those home geographies and that we are as close to the customers as possible.

Jessica Ly: Okay. I want to shift to women in tech because I know that you've mentored others and you've had mentors yourself. Maybe if you have advice for those sales professionals out there watching, how do you advance your career?

Kelly Ducourty: Sure. So I've been lucky enough to have both several mentors but also several responses as well. And in fact, I saw a great mentor of mine last knight who continues to mentor me even though she's supposedly in retirement right now, but she's working on several boards. So I would say definitely seek out mentors for yourself. And you need to do this very proactively. So actually asking people, you know, would you be my mentor, would you be willing to spend an hour with me once a month or once a quarter, depending on the time that they actually have, that will be important. And I'd advise that you do that not only in your home, geography, but actually outside of your geography as well so that you get a different experience. So, you know, I had at one point in my career, a mentor who was based in Prague, a very successful gentleman who just had some very interesting experiences that I wanted to learn from, and I knew that he could really help me in my career moving forward, I'd also suggest to watch out for your sponsors and your mentor and a sponsor are quite different things. So a sponsor would be someone that would advocate for you when you're not there. And this is not something that you can proactively ask somebody to do. But you can. You can tend to spot a sponsor. And it's great to have a couple of sponsors in an environment. So if a talent meeting going on, you've actually got somebody who's willing to stand up for you and really talk about the types of things you could do, maybe for a new job. And the last one, I would say that is of particular importance is very open to new opportunities. Sometimes when somebody asks you to do something that's a bit out of your comfort zone, or maybe they're even asking you to move to a different area, either a country or a different business unit, it can seem scary, but really take the time to make sure that you are you seem at least to be open to new opportunities, and that you take the time to evaluate those before you put up your barrier and say, you know, no, you don't want to do it. So those would just be a couple of things that have certainly helped me in my career.

Jessica Ly: And I was wondering, who would you say are the phenomenal women in tech? Let you know.

Kelly Ducourty: Yeah, I mean, I actually know quite a lot. And it becomes quite a small world, as well. So we've got some phenomenal female executives in HPE that I'm lucky enough to work with. So our CIO, Archie Deskus, is obviously a female, amongst other things, as well as being just a very transformative CIO, our chief communication officer, Jennifer Temple, who's been with us for a little bit over a year, but who's been very transformative in terms of the culture at our company, and the way we communicate and so on. So she's somebody very interesting, but I also follow a lot of people on Twitter as well who I find impressive. So Gerri Elliott, Maria Martinez from Cisco, actually the new CIO at Cisco. Jackie Giesler is a former customer of mine but actually has become a friend over time. So she's literally just moved out here to the Bay Area. So that's great to catch up with her. So those would just be some examples. But there are a lot of others as well. I am lucky enough to have Sue Barsamian as one of my mentors, and she's very active in helping me coaching me. She's now on four boards here in the Silicon Valley. Some very big names in that regard. And yeah, she quite often is tripping me up to do certain things or helping me out. So it's great.

Jessica Ly: And you yourself are a role model and example for other women in tech. So thank you so much, Kelly, for being on the show. It's been a pleasure to have

Kelly Ducourty: No, thank you very much for having me. So yes, great to see you today.