Live from Discover with HPE’s Fidelma Russo and Dallas Cowboys CIO, Matt Messick - Six Five On The Road

What happens when a tech titan and a legendary sports franchise converge at the epicenter of innovation? 🏈🤖

From HPE Discover Las Vegas 2025, join hosts, Patrick Moorhead and Daniel Newman, as they welcome Fidelma Russo, EVP & GM, Hybrid Cloud and CTO at Hewlett Packard Enterprise, and Matt Messick, CIO of the Dallas Cowboys. This session will unpack pivotal industry trends and illuminate the strategic alliance between HPE and the Dallas Cowboys. 

Key takeaways include:

🔹HPE's Strategic Compass: Discover how Fidelma Russo illuminates HPE's bold announcements and strategic positioning, directly addressing evolving customer needs.

🔹The Power of Partnership with the Dallas Cowboys: Gain an exclusive look from Matt Messick at how the Dallas Cowboys are leveraging their collaboration with HPE, specifically highlighting the transformative advantages of HPE GreenLake.

🔹AI's Impact on HPE: Hear Fidelma Russo's insights into the integration of AI within HPE and the significant benefits it brings to the forefront.

🔹Future Tech in Focus: Matt Messick shares his forward-thinking perspectives on industry trends and the far-reaching technological applications that will shape the Dallas Cowboys' future post-Discover.

Learn more at Hewlett Packard Enterprise.

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Disclaimer: Six Five On The Road is for information and entertainment purposes only. Over the course of this webcast, we may talk about companies that are publicly traded, and we may even reference that fact and their equity share price, but please do not take anything that we say as a recommendation about what you should do with your investment dollars. We are not investment advisors, and we ask that you do not treat us as such.

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Patrick Moorhead: The Six Five is On the Road here at HPE Discover 2025, and we are live here, Daniel. We just came from the keynote where CEO Antonio Neri pretty much laid out the three priorities for the future. Here it was networking, hybrid, cloud, and, of course, AI.

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Daniel Newman: Yeah, there was no. No big surprise in all that. What I will say is, first of all, the keynote. Keynote came up really well. The environment is great. Pat, you and I are professional event attenders. We really know that. We do hundreds of these a year. And the sphere is such an enormous yet engaging space. I love how they are able to do that. The physical space is great. The seating is comfortable. You can see the speaker. And I know. I know that people out there might be like, that's okay, but it's a big deal when you go to as many events as we do that you can actually see, you can hear, you can feel engaged. And I liked how they sort of intertwined a lot of video, whether it was St. Jude's Hospital, whether it was inter Miami to basically bring the real experience. It wasn't just a CEO with a big picture on the screen, Pat, but it was really an engaging and immersive experience.

Patrick Moorhead: That's right. And as we always say, nothing beats having in one discussion the tech company, their customer, and industry analysts. And with that, I want to dive right in here with the Dallas Cowboy. Matt, great to see you. And Fidelma, great to see you as well.

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Fidelma Russo: Good to be here.

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Matt Messick: Absolutely. Thanks for having us.

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Patrick Moorhead: Yes. By the way, you're my favorite team. Even though I'm in Austin, I watch the Cowboys all the time, and I can't wait for this season.

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Daniel Newman: Yeah, the Histrionics. He's in Austin from Cleveland, but actually a fan of the Cowboys. But. But, you know, I. I told you I moved my son and my family to Texas, and he's a big Cowboy fan. And I've actually started to defect from my Bears because they're so terrible. But actually, Cowboys bring such a great experience, so we'll talk more about that. But, Fidelma, let's. Let's start off with you. You had a ton of key announcements here. I could hit them across the board. You know, AI might have been the third pillar, Pat, but AI was immersed into all the different announcements. You're talking to customers, too, and in your role. So I would like you to kind of bring those things together. The big announcements, your conversations with customers. How are you feeling that HPE is more uniquely positioned than ever to help customers get through this next wave of transformation?

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Fidelma Russo: Well, I think what you're starting to see is the culmination of all of the investments we've made in innovation over the last probably five, six years. And so you probably saw little bits of it along the way. But I think that AI and the transformation that AI is having on our industry and also on customers' industries allows us to bring these threads together. So today, if you looked, we started with networking and because networking is core to how you access everything, but also in there we've really spent a lot of investment dollars on bringing the next generation of Aruba Central and that's really infused by AI. So now if we kind of go from there to the Greenlake intelligence piece, which works with Aruba Central, you know, that's all about how do I bring AI to IT operations and how do I simplify the lives. And then we go from there to storage, private cloud, virtualization and then kind of our AI factory story. But all of that when you talk to customers, what they're really grappling with is how do I really invest for the future and redesign my infrastructure to take advantage of Gen AI and, and do that in a cost effective way. And so what we've done is we provided the tools for you to re-architect your infrastructure, kind of modify your applications as you need and then also have investment dollars left over in order for you to invest in Gen AI. So it's not just an event where it's six months of work that's been going on. It's really a culmination of a number of years of innovation investment across the company.

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Patrick Moorhead: Yeah And one thing I really appreciate about what HPE brings, its consistency and years ago, right. Antonio got up on stage, said okay, everything is going to be as a service. We're going to launch every product there in Green Lake. Every quarter we check in with Antonio and get the read on how it's going. And I want to talk to you and the Dallas Cowboys, I believe you're using Greenlake to solve some of your problems, challenges. Can you talk a little bit about that? And then I've got a follow up at the end for you.

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Matt Messick: Well, yeah, I mean, absolutely. And what Fidelma is saying and like, and, and we're experiencing it. We, I mean we're on, we're on about year five or approaching year five of being a Greenlight customer. Okay. And I feel like a fairly early adopter and in riding that, oh, that wave of innovation. And then you said it perfectly. It's like today it felt like it was just this convergence of all of these technologies and the original idea of what Greenlake started out as. And so today was exciting. But for us and the Cowboys, if you look at like, how do we leverage the Greenlake platform? And it's because of our, yes, the Dallas Cowboys large brand football team. Right. But a lot of people don't realize we have so many other diverse businesses that create unpredictability. If I look back five years, it was very difficult. I was looking at Greenlake as, hey, this is a, I like the first presentation I got. I'm like all I was thinking of from a financial standpoint and allowing me to grow on demand by the diverse businesses we have. Like, you know, we have our, we've got, you know, esports, you've got real estate and construction, but we also have a medical imaging business and apparel. And, and I can go on and on. Right, right. And it's the idea of, I don't necessarily know and having to support all those businesses. I get a, you get a call from the owner and they say, we're going to, we're starting a new company, we're going in a different direction and you don't have time to start over and start buying infrastructure. So being able to flex and grow and then that's, that's basically how it's got us to where we are now. And then, now all of the excitement and then all the change that's happening.

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Patrick Moorhead: Yeah. It's really cool that you're one of the first people to adopt it. And I mean, the first time I heard it was, hey, the benefits of cloud, but on premises.

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Matt Messick: Right.

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Patrick Moorhead: There's a lot of value to that. And I can imagine Greenlake Intelligence coming up. You know, it was going through my head as this is, this has a strong core value proposition. I wonder if you could share some best practices or people who may not have adopted Greenlake yet. What are some words of wisdom that you might have for them?

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Matt Messick: I mean, look, it's, it's looking at your infrastructure and supporting your organization in a different way. I mean, even before Greenlake Intelligence and I'm so excited about, but it's like we have a very small team and like, as I described, everything that we do have to support. Right. I want my operation teams focused on the operational projects and bringing more, you know, to the organization now, especially with the adding business value. Yes. Business driven outcome.

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Patrick Moorhead: Yes.

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Matt Messick: I don't really need them doing updates, firmware updates and troubleshooting and doing all that like that, to me, that's like, that's one of the greatest things that Greenlake has brought to us is it's basically allowed us to streamline, to move forward faster. But looking at Greenlake and understanding all of the different options and then how that you can work with HPE to, to build it for you and then how like I'm just so excited about everything that we did learn today and how we're going to be able to move faster with our AI deployments and. But yeah, don't you have to look at things a little bit differently, especially from the operating model, because a lot of people just want to do things the way that they always operate. And I think that's one of the things that we've been talking a lot about this week is all this technology and everything that's coming out. We also have the human side of the change that's happening. And a lot of our team members, they don't want to necessarily change. And so it's part of our job. It's like we're bringing in this technology and then we're educating our team members and our employees to embrace it, to get the most out of it.

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Patrick Moorhead: Makes sense.

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Daniel Newman: That's interesting. Which by the way, I'm guessing a lot of what you heard about sort of Agentic and MCP is going to. Because in the past it was automation, it was a lot. And you could obviously build it within a framework and have a lot of things. But now that staff, that lean team you have, having those never sleeping people, focusing and making sure the network's up and running, to me that seems like a big value proposition. We'll hit on that a little bit more. But I want to take this back to Fidelma for a moment and I want to put you in the customer chair. You know, Pat, we get two customers. 

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Patrick Moorhead : How about this!

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Fidelma Russo: Okay?

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Daniel Newman: You as the CTO because you have the two gigs, right? You're running a hybrid cloud, massive gig. Antonio liked you so much that he said, I'll give you another job.

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Fidelma Russo: Well, actually it was the other way around. I started as a CTO and then I don't know if he liked me enough.

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Daniel Newman: But he liked you so much. Yeah. Give you a referral, though. Now you're doing two full time gigs. But seriously this year we've gotten a ton of this customer zero. Right? As we've been in our professional event, attending the rodeo that we like to do, we're hearing companies get on stage with people sitting in your seat that are building technology, but also talking about how they're using it. Of course, HPE has a large footprint of global company infrastructure all over the world. You're doing it to deliver to customers. You're also doing it to deliver to your employees and experiences. I'd love to understand kind of how you're thinking about it from your CTO, your first gig, how you're kind of thinking about it, how you're deploying in, how you're leading with HPE to deliver the same things Matt's talking about for the Dallas Cowboys.

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Fidelma Russo: Yeah, I mean, it's an interesting way of looking at it. I fundamentally believe this is a transformational technology and if you do not get on board and you do not start to kind of experiment and find where it works for you, you're going to get left behind. And so, you know, it's very different, I think, this year than this time last year. I think a lot has happened in the year. I think, you know, what we've done across the board, customer support, support bots and looking up documentation, you know, for issues in the field, which would take people, you know, good people who know where to look, and they've done it multiple times before. Probably, you know, an hour, you know, other people, probably new or on rotation, you know. We run 7 by 24 by 365. So the teams are swapping in and out. You know, that would take. That could take up to eight hours. And so now you get the answer in an instant and the teams can move ahead. So that's one area where we've been investing. The second one is legal, looking at contracts. We've got thousands and thousands of Greenlake contracts. We've written an AI tool in order for us to analyze those contracts and understand terms and conditions and everything, which again, saves people's time. We've done engineering across the board, we are double down on copilot on coding copilots. And so because fundamentally for a company like us, we have a lot of software engineers, but the productivity boost we can cash, you know, is so attractive. And also our engineers want to feel like they're working on the, you know, latest and greatest tools. It's important for their careers. So we, you know, invested there as well. And then across it in HPE IT, you know, they are actually, while we're a customer, they're our customer zero for our technology. They've taken private cloud AI, they've implemented it on prem to do chat in conjunction with the chat we run on Azure. So, you know, there's a lot of work going on across the company and we end up having conversations actually about some similar things because we are experiencing this transformation ourselves.

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Patrick Moorhead: That's interesting. So, Matt, there was a huge payload of new announcements that were made today. I mean, updates to private AI, updates to networking, storage and data fabric elements.

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Daniel Newman: Agents.

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Patrick Moorhead: Agents, Yep. We talked a little bit about Greenlake Intelligence. What are some of the ones that you're going to go back to immediately, not immediately. What's top of your mind when you go back and talk to your team?

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Matt Messick: Well, and I've already been spending time with Fidelma this week on this. I mean, listen, we're at. When I kind of talked about us being a green light customer for quite a while. We're in that phrase and we're in that space when it's time for what's next. And so we actually, we've got a short window, I'd say about, about six, seven months. And so what we're at right now is looking at all of the different technologies that we saw today. Like where I've been focused, with Fidelma and the team is around VME. Right. I mean, I mean, listen, yeah, we.

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Patrick Moorhead: Had that conversation yesterday at Sea Circle. Yes, a lot of that.

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Matt Messick: And I mean, I felt like at one point Antonio was talking to me directly, especially talking about the savings from the virtualization because. And then, I mean, this is exactly what I was telling Fidelma yesterday is it's like, yeah, as we're looking at those savings to where we can redivert those funds and invest in other areas and invest in, you know, like, it's like Zerto that we've, we've not leveraged Zerto before, but like starting to go like, like that's something that we need to look at. Right. And so, and then just everything that when you start talking about layering in the AI and allowing, you know, like I said, we have a small team and we do have to, you know, manage our finances really tight.

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Patrick Moorhead: Right.

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Matt Messick: And we're not going to be somebody that can go out and a lot of money and fail in some AI, you know, ventures.

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Patrick Moorhead: Yes.

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Matt Messick: So like, and, and what I've mentioned earlier is like that convergence of all of these different technologies coming together. I feel very fortunate. Yes. I never intended to rebuild and re-architect the entire infrastructure because of this virtualization situation that we're in. But I'm looking at that as a blessing because if I was doing that and If I was just business as usual, then I think we would miss out a lot on what our potential future and setting us up for the next five years makes sense.

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Daniel Newman: And it's really interesting because at the moment we're in, this AI pivot is basically forcing a sort of rearchitecting of the entire IT ecosystem of every enterprise.

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Matt Messick: Yes.

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Daniel Newman: So you get to kind of fix some of the things maybe that were on the old wish list that you'd done. You know, there was a lot of technical debt and it's like, we're going to turn this over. Building these quote unquote AI factories is going to change everything. So I'd like to maybe end this conversation with a question for both of you. And Matt, I'll start with you and Fidelma, I'll let you have the final word. But you know, there's many ways this technology can change and of course everybody likes to kind of AI wash things right now. I think there's a certain pragmatism of getting AI to work and do things that we need to do, like keeping your operations going 24/7, 365. That's very practical. Then there's next generation fan experiences and then there's things that we probably haven't even thought about yet that are going to create the next wave of opportunity. Like in your business, what do you see as the biggest opportunity for technology to sort of impact the organization and drive more meaningful outcomes going forward/

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Matt Messick: 100%. And we've been talking about a lot of things like focusing the AI on things like just business driven outcomes and like, and not just oh, hey, here's the technology. It's like we need to solve problems. Right. And then start small. It's what we've been hearing a lot of. But if you know so much of what I heard, what we heard, you know, this week, even around like the partnership that they've had with Deloitte and some of those financial systems and you know that CFO tool that.

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Patrick Moorhead: Yes.

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Matt Messick: I mean like I'm already thinking about how I can take something like that. Very simple too. It's not just the Cowboys organization. I can go to some of our smaller businesses and then help them and then prove that out and then make it, make, make it way to the big club. Right, right. So I'm looking at a lot of those things like I need out of the box easy tools that we can implement and make a huge impact and make those wins.

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Patrick Moorhead: Yes.

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Matt Messick: Family run business. But like being able, you know, to get those easy wins.

But now I. We're starting to see this vision of that next level of fan experience. Right. Of. Yes. You're in the stadium, you have your device, you have your app. You're doing everything through it digitally. Right. So we're looking to take that. That to an entirely new level of creating that customized experience delivery. On the fly quarter ends, you're seeing highlights, you're seeing all of these stats details. So we want to take that customer experience to a completely new level because we're competing. We're competing with all of the couches and the phones and all of this. I mean, we've got to step up our game. You know, it's that I'm starting to see the way of the convergence of all of the data.

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Patrick Moorhead: Yes.

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Matt Messick: That our fans are leveraging just while they're in their seats. And it's like, how can we take that. Right. And give every individual fan their own, like, custom, you know, feed whatever it is that they want.

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Daniel Newman: It's interesting. We met at the F1 race and that's another. You're also competing with every other sport, every other thing that people could be doing. Not just football, not just the couch, but literally another sport and those that might be creating more immersive, more engaging. So you got a lot to think about, Matt. We'll be back with you probably hopefully next year we'll have this conversation again, see what's happening. A year's a long time in this business. Fidelma what is on your mind to drive the future. Because like I said, two roles. Driving it for your customers, driving it for yourself. You can pick.

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Fidelma Russo: Oh, I can pick?

Daniel Newman: You can pick.

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Fidelma Russo: So I mean, I think what's important and incumbent on us, we've got phenomenal customers. And so it's kind of a bit of a say do ratio. You know, we've got to, you know, say what we're going to do and we've got to turn up and do it and iterate on the way. And that's kind of what drives us on the product side at HPE across the board, you know, Aruba, compute, AI, hybrid, cloud. And then from a CTO perspective, you know, I have HPE labs and we're continuously looking around the corner. I mean, I think we have to keep our eye on it. The world's changing so quickly and I think the adoption of this technology will be much faster. It has been much faster than we've seen before. The plus side of it is, you know, for those of us in the infrastructure game, we kind of got a new lease of life. Whoever knew we would be redesigning our infrastructure, you know, we were all kind of. Yeah, it's good, it's good, you know, but I think we have to also keep an eye on what's happening with Quantum, you know, what's happening as well in the world around sovereignty. And how do we make sure that, you know, our customers, we make it easy for them, and that's really what our job is. How do we use technology to make it easy for our customers to do their business, you know, because, you know, we are not in the. In the fan or stadium business, but our job is to make you look successful.

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Matt Messick: So I'm a fan.

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Fidelma Russo: You're a fan. You're a fan. You're a fan.

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Daniel Newman: You're going to make a fan out of Matt. Well, Fidelma, Matt, I want to thank you so much for spending some time with us here at HPE Discover. So let's keep in touch, have these conversations some more and have a wonderful rest of your event.

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Fidelma Russo: Great. Thank you.

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Matt Messick: Yes, thank you.

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Daniel Newman: Thank you everyone for joining us for this Six Five On The Road. We are at HPE Discover 2025 at our favorite place in Las Vegas. Stay with us. We have more coverage live and on demand. Subscribe and join us for all of it. We'll be back with more live coverage soon.

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