 We're back, this is Dave Vellante of Wikibon.org and this is theCUBE where we bring you the best guests that we can find. We're here live at HB Discover in Frankfurt. We try to extract the signal from the noise and we're going to focus right now on people. We've been talking a lot about technology. When you talk to CIOs and you ask them what their secret recipe is to success, they always talk about three things. People process and technology and people are the biggest investment that they make. And we're here with Susan Underhill and Patrick Eitenbickler who basically are involved. Susan's the vice president of HP's Expert One. We're going to talk about the skills gap, how CIOs and practitioners are transforming their skills and to meet the new challenges today that we see in this industry. Welcome Susan, welcome Patrick. Thanks for coming on theCUBE. Thanks for having us. So we heard Meg Whitman yesterday talk about this new style of computing. Really driven by cloud. She talked about the whole mobile, the big data. These are new things for IT practitioners. Susan, let's start with you. First of all, tell us about Expert One, what that's all about and then we'll get into it. Well why don't I start back with why we even have Expert One? Because I spend a lot of time traveling around the world meeting with our channel partners and our customers, listening to the challenges that they have in their business and consistently the largest challenge that we hear relative to deploying new skills or deploying new technologies as the skills gap. And I started talking about the skills gap a couple of years ago where we were seeing the aging of the workforce or the baby boomers getting closer to retirement and a lot of the skills leaving the IT workforce. And that combined with the student population not seeking degrees in technology. So you have that combined with the factors that Patrick talked about in a moment around the changes in technology and you start to see a really big skills gap develop. So Expert One has been developed, we have a number of different programs that we'll talk about while we're here together that address some of those things. So you noticed this, what was the timeframe where you really started to see this dissonance between the skills that were required and the skills that were in place? We're talking about two or three years ago, five years ago? From a technology perspective, the things that Patrick will cover over the past really significantly in the past to one to two years. But the looming skills gap that we've been talking about because of the other factors I mentioned, we've been talking about now for five or six years. So you could see it coming, we're talking about the fiscal cliff a lot in the United States. It's like the skills gap cliff. Okay, so you sort of, this was relatively recent from a skills standpoint but you've seen this trend coming. So how did you respond? So when I was here six months ago, we talked about converged infrastructure and we had just completed a white paper with IDC where we basically compared the kinds of IT labor resources required in a traditional environment where we look at a networking specialist, storage specialist, server specialist skills in one particular silo of IT that then moves to convergence where you need skills to run a service catalog, to build a hybrid cloud, completely different skillset. So up until the non-converged time, yeah, they had the skills, once it converged there's very few people that have those skills. And that's where that skills gap comes in because now CIOs, VPs of IT that go out to the market and say, I want somebody to run an HP cloud system, vCloud director, Microsoft systems and orchestrator, they can't find the people that have the experience to make that happen. Okay, so talk about expert one, what it is and how it adds value to your customers. Okay, so historically, vendor training and certification programs have been very product oriented. They were designed initially to address the gaps and as a new product or technology came out that you would train and certify on that. And the HP certified professional program did exactly the same thing from an HP perspective. But as all the things that Patrick have talked about, driven us to look at how we develop skills in both our own workforce and our channel and in the IT departments of our customers in a different way. So we are starting to design our learning solutions to address the new technology arena. So when we look at the core of expert one, we talk about optimal skills to accelerate business performance. So it's all about business performance. We want to help customers have their IT, innovate, help the business move forward. We want to help partners sell more, win more. We want to help students get a job right after they get out of college because they have better skills. And we want to have HP employees, sales and pre-sales employees be more successful in their careers, be more successful for HP. And we do that through optimal skilling. And optimal skilling means they have the skills for their particular job role to be successful. And when we talk about those job roles, there's actually three that we focus on. There's the architect role, whether it's pre-sales or an architect in a customer environment. There's the integrator role that's more about installation, implementation, as well as service and support. And there's the administrator role so once something is implemented that they can make the most out of technology really get the value of their technology investment. So you mentioned converged infrastructure before. I wonder if we could talk about that as an example. Sometimes you use an example and it just resonates better with people. So you're right, you had a situation where you've got silos of server storage and networking expertise. You've got all this data locked inside those professionals heads. And now you say, okay, we're going to converge the infrastructure. Might be on different buying cycles. It might be different vendors. And I was saying, okay, we're going to bring this lock in and you guys are going to now manage it as a cloud infrastructure essentially. So what happens in that case and how were you able to affect change in that example? Right, so while we have always had and continue to have networking storage and server certifications, we also have now our conversion infrastructure and cloud certification. Like we just said, there's a cloud architect role, cloud integrator, cloud administrator. And then actually our highest level certification is a converged infrastructure master architect which means they actually have to have 10 years of industry experience. They have to obviously train for the particular exam, but then it is a board level exam, so in front of the board, where they get a business problem that they then create a presentation to address that business challenge through technology, through an architecture, and they have to present that to the board. So just like in the real world, where an architect or IT needs to stand up in front of the board of a company to present a technology solution to a business problem to help innovate, to help make them more competitive. This is the skill set that I'm hearing primarily when we're talking to CIOs that they're lacking and they're looking for. And the role of expert one is to what? Actually take them through that training cycle, that education cycle, can you describe that a little bit? It's to provide the skills necessary for the job role, to validate the skills through certification and then to provide an enablement community for them to have a long-term relationship. So you obviously, in that example of the cloud architect, you just can't take somebody off the street and say, hey, okay, we're going to make you a cloud architect overnight. No, you've got to have a certain set of skills. Now, assuming you've got those requisite levels of technical talent, business experience, et cetera, how long does it take somebody to go through the program and it's probably variable, but maybe you can give us some examples. Yeah, for entry level certifications, it may take a week of worth of training and some reading. For the highest level certification, it would be a couple months of in-class training plus the certification and the certifications are done in a testing center to make sure it's the right person that has the skills that are actually being tested. Specifically for the master CI architect, there is a process that you go through to actually apply to go through the training and take the exam. So there's a set of criteria. The interesting thing is that it doesn't have any prerequisites for prior HP certifications because we recognize that the kind of person is not necessarily the very technical type of person that we would have trained in a particular product in the past. So you mentioned before, Susan, that traditionally this type of education was very product focused. You might have as an example that Patrick and I know well EVA training. That's right. That's our EVA certification, right? Okay, great. And you probably still do that, right? I mean, HP provides that level of product training. I even get store serve or whatever it is. Is Expert One a separate sort of training organization that is focused on these higher level skill sets? Is it part and integrated as part of the current curriculum? Can you describe that a little bit? So I think about Expert One as the external brand, if you will, of learning and knowledge and skill we're designing it in a way that as somebody who goes through one of our programs actually has the technical expertise, the business acumen and the hands-on experience to do the job. Again, taking it further and beyond what the traditional training certification programs look like today. Right, okay. And the education is provided by whom? Is it provided by HP? HP partners who actually does that? So HP develops the content and the curriculum and the exams and the competency requirements and then the actual training is delivered in many modalities. Instructor-led training can be delivered through a broad learning channel that we have our HP Education Services Organization as well. So all partners in delivery of our content. So partners can deliver it. They obviously have to be qualified to do that. Right. And do you have online certifications? Yeah, we sure do. And how about collaboration with universities globally? Is that something that you're doing? That's a great question. So that's something that we've really spent a lot of time on recently. We launched a new program called HP Institute in February this year. We've reached over 1,200 institutions in 86 countries to date rolling around the world launching this program. We're really approaching learning in academia differently. So what we're hearing from the employers who are looking for people the higher that have skill is that the students that are leaving the universities with technical degrees are lacking the business acumen or expertise to actually be effective or highly effective in the job when they get started. So we designed a new level of certification, the ATA, the accredited technical associate, to address that particular area. So the content for the curriculum has been developed at concepts of connected devices, designing and deploying connected devices, designing and deploying network solutions and designing and deploying servers and storage in a way where you're taking the technology, the business requirements or business acumen and hands-on experience. So the students that are graduating from university that have this certification are really job ready. The HP Institute is the program that we put around that to bring employers to the table. So right now we have 100% of the certified professionals employed that have received the certification. And actually going back to the skills gap we talked about earlier, by having all those students come out of the academic institutions, there's a pool of skilled individuals then that are ready to get more certifications or get ready to get into the workforce with both lab skills, the hands-on experience, the business experience and the technical experience. It's a great pool to draw from. How do you measure success? What are the metrics that you're looking at, your management is looking at and that you're monitoring to determine how you're doing? I think we have a lot of different metrics and a lot of different drivers. For me, having what I like to call a marketplace of skills so that our customers and partners can easily source the skill they need to drive their business results. The biggest challenge they have to driving innovation in their business and shifting the spend from operations into innovation is having the talent to do so. The new technologies are not a large community of people that have this expertise and making it easily available at a reasonable cost and highly effective is really what we're driving for. And let's see, so this, the new curriculum really started in what timeframe? We launched the ATA, which is the program that's being run through academic institutions. It was designed for academia and we're also rolling it out in commercial training companies as well. And that becomes the foundation of learning for students and then they have the career certifications, the ASC and master ASC level credentials that they can move into as they want to pursue a career leveraging HP. So do you have objectives in terms of the numbers of people that you want to run through these programs or are you still sort of trying to figure that out? Everybody. I actually, I feel like HP is in a unique position today to be able to, with our open industry standard approach to technology solutions, that we are the vendor to partner with in terms of technical and business acumen around these solutions. You mentioned something else that triggered something in my head. Everybody talks about this 70-30 problem. In other words, that 70% of the spend is on keeping the lights on, 30% on innovation. And you mentioned something about innovation before. You're obviously trying to change that mix. And I don't know, I don't really know how you measure that, but you probably can, you can categorize things. Do you feel like you can have an effect on flipping that? Maybe you're not even flipping it. Maybe getting it to 50-50. Is it a skills problem primarily? Well, I certainly think that skill is part of that. How you implement your operational efficiencies is going to be another part of that. But technology is certainly the platform for that. Absolutely. I think most IT individuals, because of the pressure and all the demands and all the trouble tickets that come to them, they're in the weeds. They just try to keep the lights on, meet the SLA for the day. Once they get out of the weeds, actually go to training and get certifications, get the bigger picture, they're actually able to raise themselves up above the trees and then make recommendations at a more strategic level to flip that around from 70-30 to 30-70. Meg Whitman yesterday laid out this vision of a new form of computing, and she talked about cloud, mobile, and big data. It seems like your current curriculum is really focused on the cloud piece. Do you see it evolving? And maybe I'm just missing some other pieces, but do you see it evolving into those other areas? Big data, everybody talks about the data science skills gap. Is that something that you're trying to fill in? How are you trying to align with Meg's vision? Is that an appropriate way to think about the direction that you're headed? We actually think that that's why people are computing, so we're absolutely aligning to support that from a skills perspective. I also think that security and big data are all part of the cloud solution, and those capabilities are being embedded in our curriculum and our certifications now. No, exactly to that point. Traditionally, our highest level certifications were very technology-focused and storage networking and so on, and going forward, we look at alternatives as well that our solutions focused like a big data marketing master architect to really address that need in the market. Well, this is a big problem, and so congratulations on identifying it, and good luck with getting this off the ground. We need big solutions to these problems. We need large companies with resources and have a big partnership network and can affect partnerships with universities and others to actually attack this issue. So congratulations and good refreshing change from all the geek speak that we've been having this week. Susan and Patrick, thanks very much for coming in the queue. All right, keep it right there, everybody, we'll be right back with our next guest. This is Dave Vellante. We're live from HP Discover in Frankfurt. This is theCUBE.