 Live from the Sands Convention Center, Las Vegas, Nevada, extracting the signal from the noise. It's theCUBE covering HP Discover 2015. Brought to you by HP, and now your host, Dave Vellante. Back to HP Discover, everybody, this is Dave Vellante, and this is theCUBE. theCUBE goes out to the events. We extract the signal from the noise. Check out hpdiscover.social for all the social buzz. We're bringing that this year to HP Discover. Bill Hilf is here. He's the Senior Vice President of HP Cloud, and he's joined by Gonzalo Uquilis, who is the Senior Vice President and GM of Senase, who is a utility out of Ecuador, right? So welcome to theCUBE. Thank you. Thank you again, Bill, and thanks for coming on, Gonzalo. So Bill, let's start with you. Healy on a lot of buzz on the show. You guys have a keynote going on. You're taking over the Twitter sphere, all kinds of action and some announcements. So give us the update on Healy. We had a great event the other night. Five, 600 customers line out the door. A lot of excitement right now with Healy on. Yeah, it's good to be here again. I love coming on to CUBE. It's actually one of my favorite things to do here at Discover. Awesome. So it's good to see you guys again. So interestingly, personally, this is my two-year anniversary today at HP. And so it's great to kind of reflect back and see how much progress we've made as a company, but I also personally am looking back saying, wow, so far in this period of time. And so Healy on is our, for those that don't know, it's the name of our overall cloud portfolio. So includes our different software technologies, our hardware systems, our services. And it is basically how do we provide enterprises in cloud capabilities, not just for the new, but also how do we help them make the journey from their traditional to the cloud native? So at this event this week, our big announcement is Healy on cloud system nine. And that's, cloud systems are flagship private cloud solution that customers use to out of the box, build and get up and running a cloud environment for infrastructure or platform services. And so this is our bread and butter solution. We have thousands of customers around the world. And the big parts of that announcement this week are, we're shipping our full Healy on platform inside cloud system for the first time. That's Healy on OpenStack and our Healy on Cloud Foundry development platform that gives customers the ability to build both infrastructure as well as cloud native applications in the same environment. We're also building in support for Healy on Eucalyptus so customers can run AWS workloads on premise. And as I mentioned in the keynote on our main stage is probably the number one customer requirement that we're meeting with this release is customers are asking us for end-to-end IT management. Not just cloud, not just traditional, how they bridge it all together. How do you orchestrate and automate over everything that they have? Because that's what they look to HP for. They look to us for full IT, not just a sliced up portfolio. So our tools with cloud service automation that ship with cloud system are really critical in doing that. So people should think of your group as a solutions group that I'm going to go to. If I have a cloud problem and I want a solution to that problem, I call you. And the different groups, the server group, the storage group, they're essentially arms dealers to you. Is that right when you build solutions out of those? Basically, we're measured through our attach to everything in HP and we're an overlay group to all the other business units themselves. So a good way to describe it is someone asked me, they said, Bill, do you have a public cloud sales team or a private cloud sales team or a VPC? We have a cloud sales team. So we sit down with the customer and say, what are you trying to solve? What are you trying to do? And then there's multiple pieces of our portfolio that we bring to bear into that. So Gonzalo, I wonder if we could turn our attention to Sena Say. So talk about Sena Say as an organization and what's your role there? Well, Sena Say is an independent system operator. We are in charge of handling the whole electricity network, country-wide in Ecuador. So we are responsible to provide a very special public service that's electricity. So in order to do so, we have to take advantage of best IT solutions like Cloud Helium, for instance, in order to improve our processes, the agility to reduce the cost, to reduce the time to deploy apps. So that's the main concern. So interesting business. So let's talk about your business a little bit if we may. So very capital intensive. You try to avoid making those capital expenditures if you can't. Be more efficient, so you can avoid that. You can't go down. You have to be responsive when there was a problem, natural disaster, accidents, and so forth. What are the pressures in your business? I mean, I'm speaking from a US perspective, but maybe you can help us sort of localize what's going on in your business and your part of the world. Well, in Ecuador, the provision of electricity besides the technical complexity has two important components. Political components and social components. That makes special this kind of service provision in Ecuador. And besides the business challenges in Ecuador, we are part of the electricity interconnection. So we will have a whole market starting with Colombia down to Chile. So electrical, regional interconnection imposes a big challenge for Senace. We would like in the future to become a regional operator, not just operator of Ecuador, but the electricity operator of the region. So that's one of the challenges that we have to face. Well, you have to get permission to do that, obviously, right? You can't just drive in and say, okay, we're going to start a business in Chile. We have to show that we have the best standards, the best people, the best end-to-end solutions, and be able to provide world-class services. So there's pricing, which is regulated, right? So you have to be very efficient. There's safety, and then the social responsibility, of course, it's coal, a lot of this is coal-fired. So you have to balance that. The important thing is that in Ecuador, we are deploying eight new hydro stations for the year 2016. The demand of electricity in Ecuador will be supplied 95% by hydro electricity. And what is it today? 50, about 50%. So still pretty significant hydro. 95% will be hydro. So we will be able to export green energy to Colombia and Peru. And besides that also, the government is replacing gas for cooking instead of using electricity. So we are deploying 3.5 million induction stoves to replace gas and using electricity. So it poses a very big challenge to handle the electricity network. So then we have to have some sort of partnership, like HP will have been working with HP 25 years ago. I see, so you're replacing LNG with electricity and the source of LNG is United States probably, right? Yes, exactly. But you know, to connect 3.5 million stoves to the grid, it poses a very high challenges of operating that complex system. Okay, so you have a lot going on in your business. So now let's connect it back to your IT infrastructure. So you've got HP, maybe take us through sort of what your infrastructure looks like. You know, when you are an independent system operator, you have two dimensions, IT and OT. Because we are in charge of operating the network. You have to supervise generation, transmission, distribution, transmission lines, and issue commands over that infrastructure. So one of the challenges is conversions between IT and OT and to use the best of cloud, big data, BI in order to have this predictable, predictive BI in order to foresee future problems in the management of the network. So we have to put three important things, cloud, BI, big data because we got a lot of information, real-time information from the system. So the challenge is that we have to deal with real-time operation. You know, electricity is different from other industries because you have to generate electricity at the same time when the demand comes. So the challenge is real-time operation using cloud, BI, and big data. So how are you using your analytics to predict essentially where demand is going to be and make sure that you can deliver that demand? Is that right or? For instance, we sample information from the substations and generation 60 times every second. 60 times every second. So you can imagine the quantity, the volume of information. And then we can process that information to identify parallels of possible and stability of the system. We work interconnected Ecuador and Colombia grids. So if we see some behavior that doesn't fit the standard way of doing things, we can predict if we don't take preventive actions, we will have a blackout in the future. Mm-hmm. Okay, now talk more about your cloud. What does your cloud look like and what do you do with it? We have deployed a private cloud, helium, and we have started, of course, with the infrastructure as a service. We have reduced the time of attending those requirements before it took several weeks. And now we have deployed that in a couple of days. But of course, we are, in the near future, we will use pass as a service in order to develop applications that are specific to the utilities. And of course, in the end, we will have an hybrid cloud to connect to the public cloud where we'll have a holistic management of all the IT resources. So Bill, if you want a client visit with Gonzalo, what would you ask him? What would you want to know from him? Yeah, so the pattern that Gonzalo described of starting with a private cloud and extending out to build a hybrid infrastructure is right in line with our strategy and what the pattern that we see from lots of customers like what they're doing in Ecuador because the business criticality of that workload, providing energy, the regulation, the political environment, you know, those are issues that HP deals with very well. That's right in our wheelhouse of what we're doing. So we often use the phrase, you know, getting to a hybrid cloud through the private cloud. And so that is exactly what Gonzalo is doing in his environment. So the types of things I would look at is and talk to him about are, they're using infrastructure as a service today. What sort of hybrid technologies does he need in the future? What sort of types of applications do they want to build, particularly in things like big data? Do they want to do, you know, analytical applications over and reason over that data that they're collecting from all the different environments? And what application environment do they want to build those in? To make sure that we and the product side are building the right tools and connectors and capabilities that he needs as he expands out. So where is your application portfolio going Gonzalo? We talked about, you got systems of record. Exactly. Now you're talking about business intelligence and big data and systems of intelligence, essentially. Is that where your application emphasis is going? Real time applications imposes two very demanding requirements. Cyber security and performance. Cyber security and performance. So we have deployed in the private cloud several corporate applications. And as mentioned in the keynote, we have to move the apps from the traditional IT to the cloud. But we have to prioritize the different apps where we can fit them, rehost to put our native applications in the cloud. So it's a journey. It's a path. We have to know exactly how many apps, what are the characteristics, and then decide how to move from the traditional IT to the cloud. So we have developed a complete program, a time schedule, and we feel that in the following two years we will be able to move most of our apps that are currently running using traditional IT to the cloud. A lot of what we do with our customers is that application portfolio assessment. So we sit down and say, let's look at the entire app portfolio and essentially tag which types of applications need to be moved as is, sort of lift and shift versus which types of applications could be refactored entirely into a new model. We're doing this inside HP IT. As we separate the companies, we're building a lot of our new IT systems on Helion and doing that same assessment and rebuilding applications to the new platform to cloud native styles. But for most customers, they have to have a range of capabilities. Some is just running a virtual machine, some is running in a true Paz or SaaS like environment and all sorts of shades of gray in between. So what we do that most successful engagements we have is deeply understand the portfolio of applications and help the customers understand what's ready, what's not and then what are the options along the way. So that's part of your services organization. Yeah, it's part of our assessment that we do through services and there's two parts of this, two sides of one coin. There's the assessment and making sure that we have a cloud platform that meets a broad set of those needs and that's what the Helion platform really is. Everything from infrastructure to full platform as a service. Yeah, so I mean that's the lifeblood of any IT is their application portfolio. And you have to care for that very carefully so you're identifying apps that can move, should move, maybe shouldn't, you just leave them alone. Okay, so that's part of it. So Gonzalo, I have the same question I asked Bill but in reverse, so you've got the top HP executive, he's got all the resources of HP at his disposal. What would you ask Bill when he comes to visit you? You know, we just had a meeting with the people from HP Ecuador in order to decide and to agree upon which are the next steps to go through this path to the cloud. And I think one of the principal topics and issues is to have the people at HP Ecuador, at the channel and also the customer will prepare to go through this path together. That's the only way to guarantee the success. We cannot go along, it's not HP, it's not just the distribution channel in Ecuador, we have to put all the effort together in order to be successful with the project. You're looking for a partnership. Yes, exactly. And a big part of that initiative. You have to invest, you have to invest for that partnership because it's a long-term relationship. Where do you want that investment to be? Is it people, time, transfer of knowledge? Education, that's a very specific topic. You have well-prepared people with the proper attitude that you diminish the risks of an accessible project. How much of the relationship gets into, beyond the technology, into the people and process side where the really hard stuff comes in. How do you work together in that regard? Yeah, education is something we hear all the time as people are trying to understand that journey to the cloud, that transition to the cloud. Because it's one thing to have the technologies. It's quite another to have an existing IT group or development group says, I don't know what to do with it. I don't know how do I even begin to make that transition. And then from a management point of view, how do I organize for this? What's a DevOps org chart look like? I get that question all the time. It's sort of a silly question a little bit because you wouldn't have a DevOps org chart. But what they're really asking for is, as I make that move, how does the org and my people move with it? And what's the right speed and cadence to do it? And what type of group should do it? So we hear the education question a lot and the training a lot. And the way that we address that is, we have a set of service offerings and content, of course, depending on the customer needs. Sometimes we actually do full education classrooms on site with customers and walk them through training side by side. We have some scenarios where if a large service provider wants to learn how to operate Helion, we'll bring them to our knock, our network where we run our public cloud. And they sit side by side with our operators to see how we run a live service. So it depends on where the customer's at and what they sort of need, but it is very much a common requirement right now. So, Gonzalo, what about the DevOps situation? What are you doing in regard to DevOps? Or sometimes I like to call it ops dev. There's a lot of times what people are doing is they're training their operations people to be more dev-like. That's probably the more common situation that we see. What's happening in your operation? I think that one of the key points to assure the success of these kind of projects is to involve the strategic personnel at the business. So cloud is not just an IT innovation project. We have to use EA enterprise architecture in order to check the goals of the business and then how the cloud change business. Not just the business, it's changing the way of living. Especially in the utility sector, for instance, we are using smart grids. That's mean electrical vehicles, smart home appliance. So we have to put everything, cloud, internet of everything, communications. So we have to have an holistic view of the way of living, the business, and then the IT to put everything together. So let's talk, I was going to ask you about the internet of things and what you're doing there. Smart grid you mentioned. Smart cities. Smart cities infrastructure for electric cars. Yes. All right, and that's a lot of data. Yes, all right. So maybe you could talk about that a little bit and how that's, so to give us a roadmap as to where you're going there. Well, in Ecuador we are deploying a smart grid program but in order to deploy all these initiatives, like smart homes, like electrical vehicles, you have to have a very strong electricity network. You have to have a very good communication platform. You have to have the cloud in order to use all those IT resources to have better way of living, better public services, better electricity, better water supply, better waste management, better security, better, improve the safety. So it has to have a holistic view and the focus is people. People, business, and IT. Now how about new apps? We talk about the cloud native apps, mobile apps, OpenStack, what are you doing in that regard? Is that a sort of separate initiative as you sort of slowly migrating existing apps into that new world? How are you bridging and what are you doing in terms of the new sort of application development paradigm? We are slow moving to the cloud because we have to be very careful with cybersecurity. Cyber security will have to be very careful because we are not just IT, we are OT people. We are in charge of managing the infrastructure of the grid. But we have, as I said, a time schedule, a program to move those apps from the traditional IT to the cloud. We feel that in the following two years, we will be able to have those apps running within the cloud. Yeah, because your customers want you to go there, but you have to be careful getting there. Yes, exactly. Otherwise, maybe we will be exposed to some cybersecurity problems. So this is an interesting example, Bill. We're almost out of time. I'll give you the last word. We're always talking about the digital economy. You guys are calling it the idea economy. Every business is going through some kind of digital transformation. Your industry is amazing what's going on there with data and digitization. So, Bill, I'll give you the last word. Where do you want to take customers like Gonzalo over the next three to five years? Well, instead of saying Gonzalo, they're the type of customers that we work great with because they are solving a large business. I mean, it's energy for a country. This is a utility. It's not a website for reserving a rental on the beach. I love that service, by the way, but this is a different level of criticality and this is where HP shines. Where we can come in and help a customer be aggressive in their goals, but without putting their business at risk. And so we can come in and help with the assessments, but also with the technology to help them get there in a fast, but logical and pragmatic way. So when we look at these transitions, we start with what are the business outcomes we're trying to drive, right? It's not just, can I get a better VM for cheaper? Can I spin up object storage? Or do I have a Node.js framework for our NAPS? We don't start there. We start with what are you trying to achieve with CENSA in Ecuador and your target markets? And then we work back from those business goals to say, okay, what are the technologies and solutions that can help you reach that as fast as possible? So one of the learnings I've had over dealing with many, many customers with cloud computing is really identify the TCO, the ROI, whatever metric you want. Identify the value at the workload level, not at the cloud level. Don't say like, should I go to the cloud? That doesn't make any sense. Ask the question, if I want to go and get better analytics from my substations, what's the improvement you want to see? Do you want to have more insight or 30% cost savings or higher performance? Like measure as discreet as possible for that given workload. You can then make the decision, should I use these technologies or not? And when? Right, because in some cases, infrastructure as a service might be all they need for a while. In other cases, you might need to write a new app. But until you have that discreet understanding, it's very hard to do. And that's what we specialize in. We can go into industries and verticals like utilities or financial services or federal customers, whatever it may be, and deeply understand the context of their business problem. Sound advice, Bill. Envision the business result. Start there, don't start with the technology. Gonzalo, great story. Thank you very much for sharing that with our audience. All right, we're extracting the data. You want more data, go to wikibon.com, check out all the free research. Siliconangle.com's got the news. Siliconangle.tv, we have videos like this up very, very quickly. Huge video archive, check out crowdchat.net slash HP Discover. We got all kinds of crowd chats going on. And also HP Discover.social, it's a stream of social data from HP Discover. This is theCUBE, everybody. We'll be right back right after this.