CRN In Depth: Four CEO Conversations At Xchange Best of Breed 2024

CRN's Jennifer Follett and Steven Burke sat down with the CEOs of HPE, Cohesity, Crowdstrike and Cisco Systems this week at CRN parent The Channel Company's Best of Breed conference in Atlanta. The two executive editors shared highlights from their conversations with the tech titan's leaders.

(This is a transcript of the video above)

JF: This is Jennifer Follett with CRN and I'm bringing you CRN in Depth where we look at a story that's breaking right now on CRN.com. I'm here with Steve Burke.

Steve, we just got back from the Best of Breed Xchange Conference; an amazing event where you and I had a chance to sit on stage and interview four of the industry's premier CEOs.

I thought maybe we could start with our first CEO which was Antonio Neri and just each one of us talk about what we felt like were the real strong takeaways.

So Antonio Neri, CEO of Hewlett Packard Enterprise; for my money he came out really strong talking about this networking opportunity that's going to come once the acquisition of Juniper is complete.

Antonio talked about the strength that Juniper would bring in service providers in campus and branch office saying it would be a third of the company's revenues and potentially half of its profits. Huge opportunity for channel partners.

What was your big takeaway Steve?

SB: For me the big take away is Antonio's vision is really coming to fruition, and HP has a lot of Windows. It's back as it acquires Juniper and as you look at it as Antonio said this is the first time.

In the history of HP and HPE that the company has had the full intellectual property stack from silicon to infrastructure to software and services to provide a modern AI networking fabric and really, you can see the wind that HPE's back here as they try to take share from Cisco all of it coming together under that GreenLake Cloud service platform with Aruba Central which will be integrated with the Juniper data center products.

So, it's a really great time for HPE and HPE CEO Antonio Neri.

And one last thing I'd just like to mention that I think a number of people brought up, which is Antonio's call to action that everybody needs a minor in AI.

JF: We then had Sanjay Poonen of Cohesity huge strong channel legacy that he had from SAP and VMware.

The partners really love this guy. And everyone I think was really taken by his commentary.

But for me perhaps in particular, the strength that that Cohesity gains as an AI storage company now with the launch of its Gaia platform.

This is really enabling Cohesity to bring usefulness to all this data that's been stored maybe previously in vaults or in backup tapes.

Sanjay says now we can take all this data which really -- the bulk of a company's data usually has been in storage and bring it to an AI bot that can now look for things like, a legal firm with tons and tons of contracts, give me an idea of what our usual contract terms are over the years. Things like that can now suddenly become really useful and helpful and is a huge opportunity for channel partners to bring that out to market.

SB: To me, the biggest takeaway from Sanjay's speaking with us was this acquisition of Veritas which is classic Sanjay Poonen. He's changing, reshaping the landscape of storage, backup and recovery with this acquisition of Veritas, which is expected to close by the end of this year.

The acquisition will make Cohesity number one in backup and recovery a $2 billion company. So as Sanjay said, it gives them global scale.

But I love what he said about this is like taking Veritas as the BMW and Cohesity, which is the Tesla and bringing them together to have that speed and innovation and really ramp up innovation.

And one of the exciting things about this deal is that it's going to double the R&D team now with Cohesity acquiring Veritas.

JF: We had George Kurtz of CrowdStrike; of course, the incident July 19th was on a lot of people's minds where a faulty CrowdStrike outage created havoc for a lot of Windows users.

Right off the top, George was very gracious and thankful to the channel community for the help that solution providers gave in getting customers up and running as quickly as possible after that incident.

He talked about how the channel partners really went above and beyond and he had lots of evidence that he had seen of that interaction and was very grateful for it.

The other piece of that, or another extension of that was he felt like it was going to make CrowdStrike and its partners stronger together, that they had kind of, let's say, gone through the trenches together and that they'd come out stronger on the other side.

He also talked about the relationship with Microsoft and how that has evolved as a result of the incident and there's a much stronger relationship there.

CrowdStrike had their Falcon event, and the CEO of Microsoft joined him via teleconference and talked about the way that they would work, together going forward and we asked George, is that going to make Windows a stronger, more resilient platform and he said yes, he felt like it would and that was the goal.

One other thing that he mentioned, you were actually talking to him about the threat landscape that really struck me was where he talked about how CrowdStrike has discovered that there have been incidents, I think he said about a hundred different North Korean operatives that have infiltrated IT departments and are using that as a way in to gain access to systems and to data --huge security problem.

I just I just thought that it was really interesting that that's going on and that CrowdStrike was able to find that and give some companies a heads up like hey someone's in here doing something they shouldn't be doing.

SB: It's amazing they were able to discover that and go to these companies and get it dealt with.

For me the big take away was a a big topic at the Best of Breed conference was security and security operations center, SOC innovations with more strategic service providers becoming MSSPs.

And one of the things that George talked about that's a breakthrough is Charlotte AI with the CrowdStrike next gen SIM really taking SOC innovation to a new level and taking some tasks that used to take 8 hours and reducing it down to 10 minutes of work, which as he talked about, just amazing.

So this Next Gen SOC thing is a really big deal. It's great to see him address that.

The second thing is, George talked about and then a call to action is that every partner should be playing in these marketplaces.

George talked about the power of those marketplaces reducing friction, including the AWS marketplace where they do more than a billion dollars.

But also, he talked about the Falcon Flex licensing model, which is again aimed at almost like the marketplaces do you commit the credits and the more credits you get the bigger your discount and in Falcon Flex, which they announced a while back, they've already doing a $700 million in Falcon Flex deals.

It's speeding up procurement.

As George said, the only ones that like procurement are the procurement officers.

So that was really exciting, and they just announced at the Falcon conference, a new financial services subsidiary. Again, really important for partners.

It's providing financing on those Falcon Flex licensing deals.

JF: And then we closed it out with Chuck Robbins of Cisco.

When we had Antonio first up, Antonio had made some comments around how he felt like perhaps Cisco had forgotten that it was a networking company at its core.

Chuck came out pretty feisty. He had read our coverage of that and he took umbrage with it. Something to the effect of: we've forgotten more about networking than they'll ever even know.

He's got the Splunk acquisition that closed earlier this year. So really strong story there. He talked about how you're going to bring the networking and the observability and the security pieces all together.

Felt like there was a much stronger security story there than what HP is going to be able to offer.

With Juniper and he talked about how there's going to be this massive or in the midst of this massive need for infrastructure refresh coming because of AI and how the opportunity there to bring in this combination of networking security/observability is going to be really strong play for Cisco.

SB: For me, the big takeaway is there's been no better company providing bigger incentives to really make these big transitions for the channel than Cisco, it's kind of in their DNA and kind of at their core.

So, to hear Chuck talk a little bit about former Splunk CEO Gary Steele coming in.

And now as president of go to market and looking at evolving the partner program and really making sure that the partners and the Cisco sales force are aligned with a new incentives to really make this.

Splunk and Cisco networking, AI, security, observability transition was a big deal.

We're going to be seeing in the next few weeks at the Cisco partner conference, Cisco is going to provide some details on this.

So, we'll be looking for that complete; sounds like a new incentive structure for partners and the Cisco sales teams to stay aligned and also again this talk about the service provider model and the strategic service provider model.

Chuck talked about more Cisco strategic service providers becoming MSSPs and really Cisco modernizing again, the SOC with this new model and that customers want to buy in a service provider model.

JF: So those were some of the key highlights that came out of the Xchange Best of Breed conference in Atlanta this week.There's a lot more coverage on CRN.com. Steve, thanks for joining me and sharing your insights.

This is CRN In Depth.