 Cube SiliconANGLE's production of HP Discover here in Barcelona, this is day two, we're live, we're going to go wall to wall, day, John Furrier and I. And our team here, Kevin Garrison is here, he is focused on the channel for HP's Converged Infrastructure Group. Kevin, welcome to theCUBE. Thank you, glad to be here. So, relatively new to HP with, we're just talking off camera, we've kind of known each other for a long time and kind of reconnecting after a while but why don't you tell us about your role at HP and then we'll get into the discussion around what you guys have done with Sharks and your new products. Okay, great. So, I own both of essentially what we call the convert systems route to market or go to market. And so, what that means is what are the channels both direct and indirect and who are the sellers, who are the buyers and what do we need to do to get there successfully. In addition, within HP, I also own responsibility for building out the RV, the regional business unit structure as well. So, those extended organizations from RV who roll into me to provide that interlock and cadence between corporate and the field. So, you were brought in, if I understand it correctly, to really emphasize and sharpen the channel focus. Is that fair? Oh, definitely. Okay, so talk about sort of the state of the channel pre and post Kevin Garrison and then the state of the channel pre and post the new product announcements and what your main objectives are with the channel. What are you talking to the channel about? What are the key messages and what are they feeding back to you? Right, right. So, as we were talking about before Sharks or what we now call convert system for virtualization and in other extended components of that family are just announced this week. So, the state of the channel before was, what is it? The state of the channel now is, be honest with it, the best quote I've had is, it's about time. HP has the best blades, you know, equal to or better storage infrastructure than anybody in the industry. Why haven't you guys done this? So, for them, it's an element of excitement. So, now the element and where I've been brought in is, you know, how do we create a profitability model and a cadence and value proposition for the partner such that they want to engage and sell, right? And so, I think we've been able to do that. Actually make a very, very compelling value problem. So, it's worth reviewing. Talk about what Sharks is specifically. So, Sharks is essentially is taking existing componentry, best of breed, HP server and blade technology, 3-par and other storage technology and the connectivity products provided by HP networking and delivering those as an integrated solution and package. And there's kind of three axes that create strong differentiation for them. One is the systems themselves are workload optimized, right? And that means for a given workload of VMs, for example, or for say exchange mailboxes, what is this required infrastructure required and how can we optimize that to deliver maximum performance capabilities for the costs associated with that. So, the other axes are real around integrated management, one view being a key component of that and you'll see some really interesting things coming out over the next six months in particular about how that really comes together as just a tremendous solution. And then lastly and probably and you know, most importantly is the fact that we have provided an extremely unique integrated customer support experience. So, to the extent customers are used to buying multiple different products, whether from HP or HP and others, is there was always this issue that I'm going to have to call one person and hope that they're the person that are going to help me solve my problem, even within HP, right? Because I don't know if it's a storage problem, server problem or network problem, so I can bounce around. With the Sharks platform or Convert Systems for Virtualization, it's one person and one phone call and they own that problem end to end. And that is only available with Convert Systems platforms and that has huge value to the customer and even to the partner. So, okay, just to clarify, so we got HP blades, it's three-part storage and it's HP networking, it's one view and the hypervisor is? Actually, Microsoft Hyper-V or VMware or none. Hyper-V, VMware or do it yourself? Pick your own and drop it on. Okay, so somebody who wants to drop in Citrix or some open source hypervisor or whatever. Or an Oracle database, for that matter. OVM, whatever you want to do. Yeah. Okay, and then, so that's the package. It's the server, the storage, the networking, one view comes packaged or, right? Actually, in the first iteration we're actually going with Insight Control because Insight Control has management capability for all three today. Today, one view really stands out in its server and rack mount and virtual connect integration capabilities, right? And the orchestration at a physical server level that comes along with that. In the not too distant future, and we've already been talking about this as a company, is you'll see storage integrated into that, networking integrated into that. So, from a single management view, you have the ability to not only manage the entire environment, but also easily simplify the configs. And there's some great, one view in particular has some great, customer references us the power of that, that that has on them and we're bringing that into Converged Systems as well. Actually, one view development organization is part of Converged Systems. Right, okay. And then, hypervisor choice, VMware, Hyper-V or none. And then the channel will add whatever apps, whatever database, a backup, right? You're not configuring with a backup, right? That's right, okay, got it. So now we've sort of established what Sharks is, and now talk about the simplification process. How have you simplified the ordering process? Let's keep it as simple as that for the channel. Okay, so if you look at historically with HP and let's just talk HP products, as a partner, and by the way, I just joined HP as I was previously Vice President of Sales for Lillian and HP Platinum partner in the Western United States. And what you find, if you're trying to do the design and architecture work associated with a new infrastructure, virtual infrastructure deployment, it takes quite a bit of time, right? I have to engage a network guy, I have to engage a server guy, I have to engage a storage guy in multiple calls, sizing calls or planning calls is what I would call them. So with Sharks, essentially all of that pre-integration work has been done for you. And if you think about it from a partner perspective, that's not billable hours they're losing. Those are expense dollars that they're saving because those guys can be redeployed to other uses. So all of that is done, the system arrives, right? And essentially what we commit is it takes 20 minutes to order, so it's literally five clicks within the HP ordering system for a partner. So 20 minutes to configure and quote, which is unbelievable from an HP perspective, and then from the date of receipt of order to delivery and operation, meaning plug it in, connect the network and go, 20 days, right? And so again, think about what that means from a partner perspective, because normally I've made the sale and now I have to wait until everything shows up. I also have to assume or hope that I did it correctly because in that example where I'm doing those three heavy lifting components and trying to figure it all out, it's standard quoted HP would be something like 26 pages long and over 300 line items, right? And trying to diagnose, do I have exactly the right things are very, very difficult. So what we've done is essentially break this into a single skew when it manifests itself in terms of a quote. So we went from 26 pages to one and all of the cabling and configuration attributes are done for you. So in theory, errors go to zero and implementation time should therefore be significantly accelerated from a partner perspective. So we think that's a great story. It is about time. I can see why the channel was saying that. Okay, so you came right out of the channel. You were adopting reselling, you converted systems from HP and you said the new process is essentially 20 days before I want to buy something to it's up and running. What was the old process roughly from your experience? From my experience anywhere from 45 to 60 days. So we think we're saving at least half the time if not three X the time just to get it on site. And the fact that if you look at the delivery timeframe or assume that you did the right orders and configurations and maybe my previous role and we were making more mistakes than average, I don't think so. But those kind of small little gotchas, right? Oh, I got the wrong disk drives or I got the wrong network cable or it was copper versus optical, who knows? Those problems added significantly more time and where it hurts you is not just the time but it's I have to send another guy out to do something associated with installation or I had to get one of my most senior and most expensive guys involved to try and debug what those problems were. So now it's all been done for them. Yeah, so you have the elapsed time being cut down by a half to as much as a third the previous and then you're freeing up hours which are, like you said, they're not billable today or previously they were pre-sales freebies that were taken away from billable hours, presumably, that weren't really adding value other than to get the sale, which the customer is, okay, I want to buy. So everything you have to do to get me where I can buy is irrelevant to me on other value ads. So how do you see this channel sort of leveraging that time? So put yourself back into your platinum partner of HP. How are you going to use as a channel partner that time that's just got freed up? How are you going to apply it? How am I going to apply that? So I'll put mine as an executive in a previous channel partner. For me, one of our biggest challenges was just managing the bench of technical resources between pre-sales and post-sales activity and making sure I had the right person in the right time. So from an efficiency perspective, it's tremendous. The other thing is there's, if you look at sharks specifically, there's two ways you can buy and convert systems in the infrastructure. There's either fixed configurations, that's the 300 and the 700, or for the extent that the customer says, look, I want it my way, right, and designed exactly to my specifications, we have another option called the 700X that provides that facility. So you can either fix configurations for known workload or exact flexible configurations to yours, but both wrapped in the total integrated customer support and system management experience that we provide. So tremendous value there. So from a partner perspective, what we're talking to partners about is you need to be talking about what all cut characterizes all three methods of acquiring and deploying infrastructure from into a customer's data center. One is with sharks with fixed configurations that are defined for known workload. Second is flexible, do it their way, but the same wrapper. And the third is do it the way you've always done it. Integration of best of brief components, right? HB blades, HB three bar storage, whatever it happens to be. But customers have a choice and what are they looking to do from an investment perspective with their knowledge? Do they want to do planning, design, and architecture as an end user or do they want to do add value to the business? So we're trying to work with the partners to help them understand it's a change in the sales methodology. It's not about speeds and feeds and products, what's operational value that I deliver by virtue of having an integrated platform? What is the business value that you can create by redirecting and redeploying your resources to things that have real value to you and your business, rather than to have the right things racked, stacked, and integrated and spending all the time later tuning those crazy things, right? So, let's see, it must have been about two and a half years ago. We sometimes do market forecasts, but we only do them when they're not available from like an IDC or Gartner. We think there's an opportunity to help the market understand and shape and then those guys, you know, because they have a lot more territory to cover and they have to argue about who owns it and all that stuff, so we can just go do it. So, two years ago, more than that, two and a half years ago myself, David Floyer, Stuart Miniman, we did a forecast of this, it was very basic, but we basically looked at the total available market which we pegged at about 400 to 500 billion. I mean, it was a big, big market. And then we said, all right, what percent of that is going to be converged infrastructure and what percent of that is going to be single skew versus sort of, quote unquote, reference architecture? And we came up with, within the next five years, probably 75, 80% of this market is going to be converged. It just made so much sense. And it was predominated by reference architecture, but single skew is going to be growing faster, right? So, and I think that market is really, or that forecast has really played itself out. When you see the Gartner forecast and the IDC forecast, they pretty much confirm that. And they definitely, in deference to them, they get more detailed than we did at the time. I was kind of a back of the napkin. But so, the competitive landscape is essentially, you got you guys, you got VCE and you got NetApp, really the big players here. So from a channel perspective, what's the HP difference? Well, one, I would argue that we actually have a channel program and a partnership and a relationship. VCE, that's not their legacy, right? So I think, from that perspective, it's huge because there's an incremental opportunity to partners that really they have not been able to address leveraging the VCE platform in particular. Yeah, I think I neglected EMC with V specs, right? I mean, we got to include those guys as well. So I agree, I don't see VCE as a big channel play. I mean, you've got products that sort of appeal to the lower end of the market, but from a standpoint of, I don't connect to that. I see FlexPod and EMC as more affinity and obviously HP. So, okay, so that's one. What else? So one is that, the other one is, if you look at the portfolio products themselves, one, we've developed an entry point product that actually when Tom brought me to HP, he told me it was here and it's actually here. So in terms of the addressable market and the mid-market in particular, we think we actually stand alone. As a matter of fact, the product that we will sell and offer through our partners delivers two and a half times the performance of the equivalent VCE platform at 25 less cost, right? So two and a half times performance, less cost. Okay, tell me why we can't do this and when you have best of great storage and server technology built in it as an integrated platform. So that's another one that's just absolutely huge from a partner's perspective. And then I think the other one is getting back to my earlier comment around the integrated support experience. Because if you're talking VCE or EMC VSpec or you're talking about NetApp with FlexPod with Cisco or Cisco with anybody, HDS is now playing with them in that particular game is at the end of the day, you're going to make one phone call but what's to say that Cisco or NetApp or EMC have to answer to the particular problem. So what happens is you have back-end network, something called TSA-Net where they're quote communicating trying to hide all the complexity from the partner but they're still bouncing going on and the customer takes time and sometimes you don't get dispute resolution done correctly. So with HP, what we've done is one, there's only one phone call. And as a matter of fact, it's not just one phone call, it's one person who owns end-to-end problem resolution associated with that. So I think as an value proposition to the customer and ultimately to the partner because it's all about simplicity. How easy is this thing to configure? How easy is it to order? How quickly can I get it shipped and delivered? And how easy is it to implement and ultimately support? I think we've got an unbeatable store. Right and so the other question I have is I often asked from when I talked to guys doing direct sales, how are customers organizing to take advantage of converged infrastructure because you typically got silos of storage server and networking and sort of different groups and now they got to come together and that's always a complex organizational challenge. Similar question for the channel. What's the channel makeup look like? As you've got to have, for example, you got to have a bunch of HP resellers that are also selling, let's say hypothetically, a NetApp reseller, right? Is that changing? Are channel partners converging or is it sort of are you battling for every inch of that channel mind share? No, I think every day we have to earn the business with our partners and at different times we'll have the best in the market and other times maybe not. There's a leapfrogging effect and so we have to remember every day we're talking with them that there's a reason that they want to talk to us and we need to make sure we articulate that. I think Sharks in particular helps us do that because think about the partner who is blade or server centric with HP but doesn't necessarily own the storage footprint in an account. Maybe it's EMC, maybe it's NetApp, Patachi, who knows. We're creating a vehicle for them to essentially start to compete for that business but to do it indirectly, right? I don't have to go head to head against Symmetrics or VNX or whatever. I can basically sell the value proposition of a convert system solution which is very distinct and unique and something that quite frankly I don't think they can compete with. At least not versus what we've done. So that's a huge, you know, I look at the modeling benefit to a partner one, if they start to win that and they're server only today with their customers I double the services, revenue, benefit and margin opportunity to them off the back end. That alone. I cut their sales cycles down by, we estimate by at least a third. Implementation cycles by at least a third by virtue of what we've done. So the value proposition and incentive for them and they've responded back saying, you're right, it's great. So Kevin, last question. So when you were in the channel in the context of converged infrastructure what was your, you know, biggest issue or your biggest concern, your top priority and how are you now on the other side? You know, the selling side, HP how are you addressing those concerns? Yeah. So one it's, you know, the reliability of the solution right as an integrated solution is this thing going to work and the answer is absolutely very, very confident about that. The other things for us is, you know simplicity of configuration and ordering with HP in particular, it's historically been difficult and we've made, you know, huge changes in the way HP does business in this way. I mean, it's revolutionizing the company in many, many respects. That's a big one. Things like how, you know, exception pricing to the extent we have to go beyond normal discounts how fast can that process work? And so we're taking it with converged systems and now HP overall from on average five days to less than one day, right? And now we're becoming extremely competitive with other players in the industry. So those were big things that were, you know to some extent obstacles to us getting business done efficiently and effectively. The other thing is finding the next deal the next customer was, you know tremendously important for us. And so one of the things HP is doing and convert system is part of is really increasing the amount of demand gen and sharing of benefits to partners. And for convert systems in particular we've developed a program called Channel First. And the emphasis of Channel First is that this product is designed for the channel, right? To the extent that I wish I could we would make this an exclusive but we have contractual relationship and some global accounts that have a direct purchasing relationship. But for everything else, it's Channel First. And we're going to do everything we can and have agreement from the top of HP region sales management to try and ask the questions like why, there's a direct deal why are we doing it that way? Why can't we use a partner in this business? And this whole program that is being launched in combination with convert system Channel First is the means by which we're going to drive that behavior across HP. And that for me and my previous job is huge. Awesome, Kevin Garrison, thanks very much for coming on theCUBE. They brought the perfect guy in for this job in my opinion, right? So congratulations on the new role and good luck going forward in this absolutely huge market. HP's growth in this market is high double digits so it's a really exciting place to be. Thanks for coming on. All right, keep it right there everybody. John Furrier and I will be back with our next guest. We're live. This is theCUBE from HP Discover in Barcelona. We'll be right back.