 Live from London, England, it's theCUBE. Covering Discover 2016 London, brought to you by Hewlett Packard Enterprise. Now, here's your host, Dave Vellante and Paul Gillin. Welcome back to sunny and chilly London, everybody. This is theCUBE, the worldwide leader in live tech coverage. Paul Gillin and I have been going wall to wall. This is our third day of HPE Discover 2016 kitty showers here. She's the director of Worldwide Workplace and Mobility Consulting at Hewlett Packard Enterprise. Kitty, welcome to theCUBE. Thank you, I'm really happy to be here. So as we were talking, we had this really interesting conversation about Hong Kong before you came on. So we didn't do much talking about what it is that you actually focus on at Hewlett Packard Enterprise. So you're in the consulting organization as part of the services group, tip of the spear, so tell us more about your role. Absolutely, so what we do in consulting, it's really about working with our customers in helping them to realize transformational outcomes. And so workplace and mobility is very much about the trend in the workplace and elsewhere, honestly, that mobility is driving. So a big part of mobility is really about the consumerization of IT. And the technology that is infusing our personal lives really coming into the workplace because all of us are actually bringing that technology to work. And how do you marry that experience up? How do you marry the experiences that your employees, your visitors, the general population are having in the personal side of their lives with their work experience, with their experience in interacting with your business? Now, HP doesn't have a mobile management platform. Is that right? That is correct. So what do you recommend? You partner for that, I presume, or is there a platform that you consult on particular platforms? Right, so from a consulting standpoint, we actually align around some of our key go-to-market alliances, but one of the things about consulting is that it is really all about that customer situation. We want to make sure that we are helping the client to achieve the outcome that they are looking for. And the technology is really an enabler. At the end of the day, it really is all about what you are doing with the technology as opposed to the technology itself. So you don't have a mobile management platform. You don't make mobile devices. You don't have a mobile OS. Why would I call HPE for mobility services? Because it really is all about the experience, right? So at the end of the day, what is important in terms of adoption of technology is the people who use it. And so ultimately, if you can get the user experience to fire, right? If you are focused on the things that are relevant to make that experience sing, to make that experience amazing, then that in and of itself is a great outcome. And we've been talking to- Can you give an example? We're also not in the software business anymore. So one of the things that we're showcasing here is Intelligent Spaces. And we have a demo on the floor, which is all about how you bring identity context, location context, and the collaboration technologies that you use in the workplace. And how if you orchestrate that experience and personalize it, what great outcomes that you can have. So I imagine you may have had experiences with conference rooms where you have to make the technology work for you as opposed to the technology, as opposed to you walking in and the technology and the space adapting to you. 100% of the time. Right? We've all had that experience. Where's that VGA cable? Yeah, exactly. Or the projector's upside down, right? And so the experience that we are demoing here, it's all about that experience. How do we make the technology take the background? How do we have the space be intelligent enough that it actually greets you when you walk in? That it actually changes status without you having to do anything. It actually calls you the space. And all you have to do to collaborate is go on your device that you typically want to use and press a button and you're in a collaboration with other people. So, Hewlett Packard Enterprise, should we think of it as a product company or a services company? Well, I'm a services, so. I think my answer would be absolutely as a services company. Really, okay, but so this is an emerging pattern. We've asked that question several times this week and it's consistently coming back. Service is not only from services people, which is interesting because people think of Hewlett Packard as a, Hewlett Packard Enterprise is a technology company which you are. But I wouldn't think of going to, for instance, a Dell EMC for some of the things that you're thinking about or talking about, workplace transformation. You want to brand yourselves as something different. Yes, absolutely. I think it really is, as I mentioned earlier, all about the outcomes. What you're trying to deliver for the elements of the customers and the people, what's changing for them in this digital revolution that we're in. I'm sure there's been a lot of talk about digital transformation and what that really means. And to me, a big part of that is more about marrying that digital, what we're doing with all of our devices and all the technology that we've got at our fingertips. And the generations to come, like my children and whatnot. I mean, they grow up in this technology revolution. But marrying that up with the things that matter. So, for example, talking about the internet of things, I was having a discussion with somebody yesterday or the day before about internet of things. And he posed a really interesting question that this person I was speaking with. He said, you know, some things you may not want to connect, right? Because perhaps there's no relevance. Perhaps you can't really glean any intelligence from that thing. And so then I thought, you know what? That's a really good point. So, is it really about the internet of everything or is it really about the internet of relevance? Now, that's, you just used the term that Cisco uses. Is that intentional? Actually, it just came to mind and it was something that, you know, I was just recently reading, right? So. They've abandoned that term, by the way. So, I think really. I don't know, Cisco. They're using internet of things now. Oh, have they? Okay, I didn't know that. So, what are they replacing it with? Internet of things. Internet of things. You look at their collateral that they've done. The trend is your friend. That was a John Chambers thing. I see. I see. Okay. So, I think it really is the relevance, right? So, at the end of the day, it really is about how you create relevance out of all the technology that we are inundated with. Well, I mean, there's a cost of connecting things and instrumenting things. Absolutely. And we were just talking about GE. The business case has to outweigh the expense. Absolutely. And so, people are still learning, I presume. Yes. That, what that framework is. Yep. What are you finding in terms of where's the money? So, I think for me, it really is about, you know, I think what the great thing about consulting is that we can do things in a custom manner, right? I think the utopia would be, right, from a economic benefit standpoint, it would be if you could find the intersection between customization, which is all about personalization to a certain extent, right? And the economics of mass, right? Or mass standardization, if you want to call it that, right? So, we can find the right point where we can have, right, I don't know what the right percentage is, is a 70%, 80% standardization so that you can get economies of scale with that customization or that personalization. That, to me, would be a wonderful marriage. I'm still struggling with why I would go to HPE for mobility services. So, maybe you can answer that by citing an example of a customer who's really doing something cool and why they chose you. Sure, so I think in, I'll use a workplace example because that's the other part of the business that we are in. So, we've been a very large partner of Microsoft's for many, many, many years, as I'm sure you are aware. In the workplace, we actually do a lot of work around their office productivity suite of technology, right? Because we don't actually have products in that space. And so, one of the things that we have done is worked with our clients to really transform their workplaces with respect to those office productivity environments over the years as the technology and the tool sets have evolved, right? And so this next revolution that we are in is really about those office productivity suites not only having a lot more capability and functionality but those suites are actually now embracing mobility as well as the cloud, right? So, customers are coming to us and asking us, well, how do I do this? You know, what's the right model for me? How do I go from where I am today to where I want to be, right? And the driver of that is both mobile and cloud. And so, that expertise that we have around the complexity of moving even something like email for a global account with many, many millions or hundreds of thousands of mailboxes can be quite daunting for a company. And email is mission critical, right? You can't afford to have it be done. So, what's the selling motion like and how has it changed? I mean, you can envision some sales rep in an account saying, we make great servers, you want to buy one? Right. That you're not going to drive consulting engagements that way. So, what's the conversation like? How are customers engaging with you? Right, so the way they're engaging with us and actually, it is evolving, right? So, one of the things that we've learned by doing the experience demo that I was talking about here on the floor is that helping people to actually experience something that is, the coming together, the integration of a number of different things, right? Helping them to actually go through an experience is a really great way to generate ideas about what they can do. They can actually see it. They can feel it in their environment. Because that is one of the challenges with services, right? Is that it's not tangible. And so, when you're at an event like this, you can show PowerPoint, you can talk about your vision, you can talk about your methodologies. But at the end of the day, people want to see something tangible. They want to see it in reality. And so, doing an experience demo like we've done to actually show what can be done by bringing different capabilities together from a technology standpoint is a really good way of illustrating what that could look like, right? So, I think the sales process is not really any different than a typical consultative sales process that we've gone through for decades, right? You know, you essentially- What are your problems? What are you trying to solve? You talk, you listen. What's the outcome you're looking for? You align, you bring your experience. You know, you learn from your customer's experiences and you bring that together. And an engagement is, how does it go? Is it workshops? Is it a, you know, what's the deliverable to describe that? What do I get? It's pretty much all of that, all of the above, right? We have transformation workshops that we actually are doing many teasers for here at the event. And the transformation workshops are fabulous. They're one-day offerings where we actually work with clients to help them to drive alignment between their different functional organizations, both within IT and with the business, right? Because in large companies, a lot of times the functional silos of IT don't necessarily speak to each other on a regular basis. And to actually bring them into a room and facilitate a conversation around a particular transformational topic is quite useful. We've been told by clients that it's actually very, very useful for them to actually take a day out and do that from their operational day-to-day activities. And a lot of this stuff touches on business process, obviously, and I was under the misconception that was kind of the ES group that was going through the spin merge, but you're obviously affecting business process and doing that kind of transformation at that level, not just technology. So I think that our focus is less about transforming business process. It really is more about how technology can enable the business of the client, right? And how we can actually marry up the technology with the things that the customer's trying to accomplish. But doesn't it naturally, when you introduce those technology enablers, doesn't it ever lead to a discussion of business process, and wow, we could do that differently? Or do you really see customers wanting to sort of lock into their existing business processes? So I think that they wouldn't necessarily, you know, they may actually have consultation with business consulting firms around business process. If, for example, as a bank, you wanted to open up multiple channels, right? You want to become omnichannel. And you want to think about which channel you may want to actually leverage more or less, right? And understand that. We don't do that necessarily, right? What we are is really about how do we actually help you to enable that business plan, the business plan that you actually have in place, right, that you are thinking of, the vision of the future, and how do we help you with technology? Now the one thing we do do is around management of change. I'm not sure if you're familiar with what we do in the management of change. It's come up a couple of times in the queue, but let's double click on it. So it's very relevant in workplace mobility in particular, especially because the technologies that we are rolling out in workplace touches everybody in an organization typically. So I'll use myself as an example, right? HPE just went to Office 365, and there are lots of great capabilities in Office 365 that because I'm not a technologist, right? Even though I work in technology company, I can't get maximum benefit out of. So if I as a user am not using everything that the company is rolling out for me, then that means the company's not getting as much out of their investment as they could, right? And so management of change is really about driving user adoption, and therefore increasing the value that you get out of your investments. Excellent. All right, well so what should we look for in the next 12, 15, 18 months from the organization? So we made an announcement yesterday around Intelligent Spaces, Intelligent Spaces Workplace, and I just like to talk about that a little bit because what we are seeing is customers are looking for dynamic spaces. So the cube farms of days old, right? We saw that at the keynote yesterday. Yeah, the cube farms of days old are kind of, people are really looking at how they can transform that because it really is about working on the move, it's about activity based work, it's about dynamic collaboration. And your physical spaces, the way you set those up and then the way you deliver technology to enable that is really changing in the workplace. So Intelligent Spaces Workplace is all about how we improve the user experience, whether they're an employee or a visitor, and also how we actually offer capabilities to IT and to facilities to better manage and operate those spaces. What are your thoughts on, you know, you see HP obviously a highly distributed company, a lot of people work out of their home office. Yes. You are seeing in some cases, Yahoo is an example of the trend, get back into the beehive. Right. There's some talk about IBM doing something similar. What's the trend there that you're seeing? So I think actually that it, I think companies will come and go, right, in terms of the trend, you know, back in the office, not in the office. In my opinion, it really comes down to what is the best way to collaborate in the context of your organization, right? I work in a global team, I am on the phone constantly, I work from home. We happen to collaborate extremely well, you know, as a global team, but we get together when we need to, from a physical perspective. What's really important though, is that whether you're in a physical meeting space, whether you are collaborating virtually, whether you are a combination of the two, that experience has to be stellar, right? You need to be able to do the work that you're actually tasked to do. And that's the consumerization of IT piece. Kiddie. Absolutely. Thanks very much for coming to the queue. It was great to meet you. Thank you. It was great to be here. All right, keep it right there, everybody. Paul and I will be back with our next guest. Right after this, this is HPE Discover 2016. We're live from London. Right back.