 From London, England, extracting the signal from the noise. It's theCUBE, Covered, Discover 2015. Brought to you by Hewlett Packard Enterprise. Now your hosts, John Furrier and Dave Vellante. Okay, welcome back everyone. We are here live in London at HPE Discover. That's HPE Enterprise, the new formed entity as part of the split, fully official as of November 1st. This is theCUBE's exclusive special coverage of HPE Discover in London. I'm John Furrier, the founder of Silicon National. My co-host Dave Vellante, it's our flagship program theCUBE where we go out for the events and extract the signal from the noise. We're here with Rick Lewis, SVP and General Manager of the Converged Data Center Infrastructure Group at HPE. Runs the show on the new stuff. Congratulations, welcome back to theCUBE. Good to see you. Thank you, it's great to see you guys again. So there's always good innovation. Obviously the big splashy announcements, you know, that's more business driven. We saw with Azure and the announcement, really more of a partnership thing where it's a future direction, a lot of press around that. But the other most notable press is what's going on in your group. Really defining a real stake in the ground around next generation modern infrastructure, a new era as you guys call it. And it really is about what DevOps brings to applications in the data center and beyond. So I got to ask you, you got your new announcement around this synergy, composable, very cloud like. What's the game changing aspect of this key announcement? I think the simplest way to say it is it's your infrastructures code. Cloud developers have this thing they say, you know, we love the fact that this infrastructure is infrastructure's code. We just log on and we say, I need this much compute, I need this much storage, et cetera. But that's off in a public cloud somewhere. There are applications that for data access, you want to share data between different applications or for security and compliance or for performance or even for cost. Some of those applications don't belong in the public cloud, some do. For those that don't belong in the public cloud, I'd like to be able to have that same development model, which is my infrastructure except experienced as code. My infrastructure as code would mean I could use it for my traditional applications as well as my new mobile cloud applications. Seamlessly I can flex resources. It's a beautiful thing. We're really proud of HPE Synergy. One of the things that we were pointing out earlier in an interview with K.C. Choi was the evolution, the progression just in the past five years and even 10, how we've gone from service-oriented architectures, web services and just even recently just microservices growth, cloud, how things have changed. And a new era of talent and workforce is on the doorstep and proliferating enterprises. And they've never actually loaded Linux on a machine. They don't even know what it means to actually unpack a box of software and load updates and patches. This is the new ethos of DevOps. So agility, rapid iteration, these are terms that have been kicked around certainly in the queue for the past few years. This is the DevOps ethos now going mainstream. The core thing is real time. They want API access. They want asynchronous inputs, outputs. They want edge of the networks, but it's not just physical, it's virtual. And virtualization has changed the game. So what post virtualization, what's the big enabler now? Because you're seeing the infrastructure code as something that people want. Yeah, yeah. Operationally it's inefficient. Business models are changing with applications. But what is the enabler beyond virtualization right now? So what's interesting is we took a new approach with this infrastructure and we built it out of three key elements, if you will. The first is a fluid pool of resources, compute storage and fabric all in the same infrastructure that can be flexibly assigned to any given workload. And you mentioned virtualization. They can be assigned in a virtualized workload. They can be assigned in a bare metal workload. They can be assigned in a container workload. So you don't have to be in the virtualization paradigm. That's a great paradigm, but we have customers who still buy our convert systems to do bare metal software running and they want that same degree of flexibility in assigning resources, et cetera. So first thing, fluid pool of resources. Second thing is really around a software API, a set of software intelligence wrapped with an API that hides all the complexity of what's going on underneath that hardware and makes those resources available. Is that like orchestration stuff and like figuration? It's really like software defined storage, software defined networking, software defined management all bundled together to operate on this fluid pool of resources. And the last is that unified API, which is what gives you access to all this infrastructure as code. And in most cases, you can deploy infrastructure to go do a different workload in a single line of code with our composer that's native inside the box. So one view composer sort of fits in here. That's absolutely right. So we built upon our HPE OneView technology, except in this platform, it's embodied on a specific device called the HPE OneView composer that sticks into the box. And you've got decades of experience around open view. So how does open view and one view relate? Interestingly enough, a lot of those resources, some of them are from right where I live, which is Fort Collins, Colorado, ended up going from open view at one point into one view. And it's all about simplicity of the management experience of cross complex, hardware and software. In this case, we've taken a lot of complexity out. So you've built on top of that experience. And so if I were to say, what's the secret sauce? You'd point to those three things. I'd say the fluid pools, the software defined intelligence, and the unified API. That's the secret sauce that's underneath here. All of that put together, it boots up ready to run workloads immediately and flexes resources dynamically to meet the needs of the application. So why is this not another, help people understand it, it's not another converged infrastructure. You got hyper converged, how are you different? Great question, there's a whole lot of things. So there's kind of traditional infrastructure that people bought that's really siloed. You buy it and I've got my compute over here. I need a set of guys to merge that with the sand storage. I need another set of guys to work on networking and a whole bunch of complexity. Converged to some of that complexity out, it took those complicated things, a big compute farm, storage, sand, and some networking, bundled those together. And we test out the complexity and deliver it to a customer so that they can just use it, right? So it's simple to the customer, but we had to do a bunch of work to test the complexity out of it. Hyperconverged was another step in the right direction because it made that a little bit simpler. It took a building block approach and said, look, we'll put a simple user interface on this and allow people to deploy directly to use a workload. And if they add more capacity, then it immediately becomes present to be able to go on most workloads. But both of those paradigms that converged and hyperconverged, those steps in the right direction to remove complexity are not dynamic in nature, meaning those resources, a converged system set out to run a certain number of VMs, you put it in place, that's what it does. Don't mess with it, don't change it, don't upgrade firmware because we need to retest all that. This composable infrastructure is dynamic. As you add components, the HPE OneView composer notices, hey, he added more storage, I can now apply that to workloads. And when that workload stops running, I can return those to the pool dynamically. Doesn't matter what slot they're plugged in, doesn't matter any of that. It's just truly composable in one nature. It's policy-based, exactly right. That's an awesome thing. So I got to ask you about the synergy thing. I'm reading the line here from the announcement. HPE Synergy provides a single infrastructure for all applications and operational models from traditional to cloud. So with that being said, great messaging, I love that. But I want to ask you a specific question. Talk about the difference in cloud-native and traditional IT because this is interesting what you guys are doing. You're basically having an architecture, not a solution, an architecture with composability, which is programmability or service management, or microservices, whatever, making it programmable, which is cool. You're not forcing a solution down someone's throat. It's an architecture. They're different animals, cloud-native and traditional. Can you talk about the differences in the new ones? Absolutely. So first thing we got to talk about is what's the difference between a traditional app and a cloud-native app? Traditional apps are your things like ERP, database. They're really meant to run the business. They're typically behind the scenes and as long as they stay up and running, everybody's happy. The definition of success for a CIO on a traditional app is, I never want to have anybody hear about that stuff running, right? The definition of renegotiation, that's another animal. Exactly. Cloud-native apps are written to empower the business. They're at the forefront where IT is driving the business. So the CIO there is being relevant to how the business generates profit and growth. And so that's things like airline check-in applications and financial transactions. The face to the customer of the company becomes the app itself. So it's absolutely key. The unique thing is those traditional apps don't change very often. Those cloud-native apps, they change all the time because you want to run promotions, you want a new app, somebody's on their phone and they say, why doesn't it do this? I want to roll that out. So multiple times per week, it demands flexibility and demands. You're shipping code at a higher frequency than over here. Exactly, exactly. So if you're going to support that environment, some analysts have said, even conventional wisdom has said, well, then you have to do that in a public cloud because then you don't have to go procure infrastructure and deploy it and get it configured and set up. You know, in some studies we say it takes 28 days from when you have infrastructure to get it ready to run a specific workload. You can't do that if you're dropping out a cloud-native app all the time. And so what you need is infrastructure that instantly deploys, manages itself and has workload templates that immediately can say, put this in a Docker container and run it and boom, it's running. And a lot of people point to some successes in the market. We're in kind of the first generation of cloud-native. You're seeing startups that are turning into unicorns. You know, certainly they have no legacy. They have a clean sheet of paper. So they built cloud-native where data is at the center of the value proposition, using data in real time, these kinds of things. Then they kind of bolt on ERP as they grow in CRM. So it's the other way around. So what does it mean for the CIO that has that legacy? What's that architecture enable him to do? What are some things that you see happening? Some successes you've seen? The beauty of a CIO who has, and quite honestly, what will sell the infrastructure to do for the near term, 80 to 90%, people are going to use it for traditional. But what it's given them is future proof. I don't have to assume, okay well this is my traditional infrastructure and if I want to move my operation into cloud-native, if I want to hire developers and have them have a way to use our infrastructure, I don't have to think that's a different paradigm and that I'm going to have to go out and buy new infrastructure. This stuff works for that from the get-go and it's not a feature that we're going to add later. Immediately they can transition to that environment. So we actually think it'll accelerate the move to cloud-native applications and in-house app development. Rick, what does a solution like Synergy do to things like a standalone blade server or a standalone storage array? Are they going to sort of go the way of the past or is there still demand from the channel to configure those types of independent pieces? There are customers with different preferences for what they want to do. For some, they'll always feel like I just want to get a stack of compute, a stack of storage and a stack of networking and I want to have my guys put that together because I want to be in control of that. And we're the number one player in one of those spaces which is the server platform and we'll still continue to sell a ton of that infrastructure and that's A-OK. But there's a segment of the market and in fact it's the growing part of the market. We think compound growth of about 15% per year for the converged space. This is converged on steroids, right? This is being able to do that in a way that is dynamic and flexible and for that segment of the market we think this is what they're going to buy in the long run. Does that dynamism at all change the security model? Can you talk about the security model and how it's affected by this approach? Sure. One of the nice things is when you're in control of all of the pieces of infrastructure and more in control of the layers of the software definiteness that's in the stack, you can control more of the security. You can reduce the risk. So we think that there is reduced security benefit from going in this direction as well. Still we'll have customers that go their own route. We have plenty of tools we sell for security on that. It's all, you can do it either way. It just depends on a customer's consumption preference and whether they're really oriented towards implementing infrastructure and having that expertise to build in-house or whether they're just saying I want to run some workloads. Just give me hardware. I don't want to deal with any of them as you take care of it for me. I want it to be flexible like a public cloud. Send me some infrastructure. This is perfect for you. So great news of the day. I want to talk about the organization that you're running on HPE. You've been operating as a split company, I know prior to November 1st, but now that the official split I know she's wearing your bling-bling there, your flair as they say. It looks like a little Star Trek, beam me up, Scotty, transporter thing. But talk about the organization. I mean, we see DevOps all over the sessions over there. We see Docker here. What is the internal scene like? Share with the folks out there what's going on here because it just seems like a, almost like the weights are off everyone's shoulders. They're not carrying these big rocks around. It's like a relief. But also there's a swagger. Talk about, can you share some insight into the color around what you're doing and cool things you're developing? I'm a good person to ask that question. I've been wearing essentially the same badge with the same rough logo with the HPE on it for 28 years straight out of college. So I'm a good person to ask because you'd say, well, don't you feel like you lost something, anything? Loved every bit of HPE. It's been a fantastic ride. Really excited about Hewlett Packard Enterprise. And the reason is because I would say the personal systems environment has gone through a massive transformation, right? Mobile devices and tablets and all that kind of thing. I think we're at the forefront of the similar thing in enterprises. And it has to do with being able to be dynamic, to be flexible, to really change what data centers look like from the way they looked 10 years ago into a new model. And I think composable infrastructure's on the forefront of that. And I love the fact that I'm part of a company that can really focus in on this is how it's changing and how it's changing is transforming to a hybrid infrastructure at the core. And you're in Fort Collins. Is that where the main group is in Fort Collins? I have people in Fort Collins, Palo Alto, Houston, Bangalore, we're all over the place. The Geek fact is pretty high at Fort Collins. Yeah, the Geek fact is pretty high. I mean, really, Fort Collins, you have a lot of guys that have a lot of stuff with hardware and software. Hardware, software, HPE OneView, lots of resource there. We're globally distributed, but we have a lot of talent. And I always say, I think I work with the smartest people on the planet. So with the new HPE balance sheet, have you created a new shopping list for Meg? You know, not exactly, but it certainly gives us new alternatives and ideas that we can float. And one thing that's great about Meg and the EC is they're open to all ideas on how we improve the environment for customers. And they're big fans of innovation. I can't tell you how nice it is to have a CEO that's a huge fan of innovation and wants innovation reviews. Meg's coming to Fort Collins to review our project and our business just to see, show me more about the technology. So, big fan and it's great to be part of. So on that, on Jay's point, there's organic growth which you guys are doing in turn last year. A lot of talent. Absolutely. The inorganic is an interesting opportunity. Wikibon and SiliconANGLE and the CUBE team are looking at it. Grace Lee, our analyst at Wikibon, is looking at the DevOps market and cloud native in this particular. And you see the market, certainly the capital market is still flush now. Start of the bloom is coming off the road. So there's going to be a lot of buying opportunities for you guys. Certainly there's an area that's got a lot of white space. So have you guys identified any white space area that you like, that you're doing inorganic and organic in that you could share? I don't have a specific area that I can share but certainly we're going to look at all alternatives to make sure that we're a leading player in this new emerging market. But you're guns blaring, you're full throttle, straight barrel. We're moving fast. And we have such great innovation inside of HP that we have a few tricks up our sleeve that we haven't let go yet and watch this space. Okay, so I got to talk about the developers because in the developer market now, cloud native is pretty clear what the trend is there. They want to agile certain tools and certain infrastructures code. We've seen some track record of some patterns that are repeatable certainly in the DevOps side. When you bring in traditional IT, they call it cloud ops, it's a different makeup. DevOps is kind of coming in, some people are afraid of it, it's more engineering, it's not so much coding. How do you talk to customers when they talk to you about this? And what's the conversation like? I mean, translating DevOps to IT is not easy, mindset-wise, and too, talent gap. Yeah, so for us, what we're really focused on is enabling DevOps. Meaning to me, and from our point of view, DevOps is really about reducing the amount of separation between the operations side of the house and dealing with a whole bunch of infrastructure issues and how hard it is to update firmware and those kind of things. And the development side of the house that really, frankly, doesn't want to deal with infrastructure just wants to develop. And so we have specific features in synergy around simple firmware updates that blast out from an image streamer. Our goal is to bring DevOps together, enable it in your infrastructure that's on-premise. And so figuring out exactly who's going to use that, you can still have an operations team and a dev team that use that infrastructure, or you could put this infrastructure just in with your developers, and it's easy to figure out. We have demos on the show floor that show here's how you point and click to deploy applications here. Here's how to set up a test dev environment instantly with the infrastructure the minute you get it. Here are templates that drive all those behaviors. So that's what we're about. It's interesting, we talk about this all the time in our research and media meetings, production meetings around the cloud. And Bill Hilf was on earlier, and I wish I had more time but we could be cutting it over to the key notes. I asked him on the closing question and I'll ask you the same. Cloud certainly looks like, we predicted this, turns out it's looking like it's going to happen, that the cloud will take a long tail distribution, depending on how fat the torso and the neck is on the probability distribution, but that long tail, you're going to have the big three or four public cloud guys, and then a series of private clouds. Where you can envision a Bank of America, or Fidelity, or Wells Fargo, or a big insurance company, or any company that's large, will probably have their own cloud, or a mixture of hybrid here and there. How do you see that vision? What's your take on that? Because that would indicate that's, you're going to be in a good spot for a TAM, your total just market's going to be significantly bigger, because it's not so much public cloud solution as it is creating these converged clouds, if you will. So what's your vision on this? Pretty much every customer we talk to, their view about it, even though there's tons of energy around the cloud, is not that it's going to be a cloud or no. Hybrid infrastructure is what they tell us all the time. It's going to be a hybrid world. The mix will change over time, but it's going to be a hybrid world. And if you look at the super growth in cloud land right now, private cloud is growing faster than public cloud, and we take that very seriously. So we want our solutions not to avoid the cloud, not to stay away from that. We want people to enable to put the workload in the right spot. If it needs to be in the public cloud, which some things perfectly belong there, and you heard about some of our partnerships today, it should go there. If you want to enable a private cloud, we're going to make that the easiest thing that you could possibly do. And if you want traditional architecture, we're going to do that as well. So we're really about enabling customers to be their trusted advisor for how to implement a hybrid infrastructure, which includes all. Final question, and we're going to wrap up on time here, but I want to get your take on, you were part of the keynote team up on the big stage. So Meg and the whole senior leadership's up there. It was an honor. I want to share with the prep, the preparation, obviously the messaging is pretty tight. But as you go out on the stage to present the new HP, what was it like, and what's your feedback? Have you gotten used to it? Yeah, oh, I just winged it. No, I didn't. We spent a few rehearsals and things like that. But honestly, what were you trying to convey? Did you get it across? And what was the feedback? I think the real key message is, we have something new here that's a game changer. And what it's about is your infrastructure's code. That's the key message. What does that mean? It works well for traditional and it works well for the idea economy style apps where the IT is at the forefront of generating profit and revenue for the business. And we think we're the only people who have composable infrastructure. They're competitors that'll say they have composability and things like that. But really there are three key things that I tried to make sure came across that really tell me when you have composable infrastructure. The first is you have to have flexible fluid pools of resources, meaning compute, storage, and fabric, all in one domain that you can allocate appropriately. Why? Because an application needs compute, storage, and fabric to be able to run. So if you can only do one of those and you don't have storage, you're not a composable infrastructure, exactly right. And the second thing is you really have to be able to deploy in any environment. You can't just say, well, we have composability as long as you use a virtualization paradigm, because for a lot of our customers, there are applications, particularly in the traditional space, that want to run on bare metal and they want that same deployment experience that's super simple. And the final thing is, it has to have a unified API. If you have a different API for your storage and your compute, or you have a hierarchy of managers of managers that you have to interface to get all this infrastructure is working, it's not composable, it's not being managed as a unit. Exactly, so there'll be a lot of people saying, we have composability. We believe we have the world's only true composable infrastructure. Congratulations, as we say, that's the DevOps ethos, bringing that infrastructure as code, enabling rapid deployment of innovation and growth for new opportunities, revenue growth for enterprises. Thanks for sharing that great insight on theCUBE. We appreciate it. This is theCUBE, we're data-driven media. We get all the data, share that with you, right from the senior execs at HP. Rick Lewis, Senior Vice President General Manager, Converged Data Center Group within HP Enterprise. We'll be right back with more here on theCUBE. I'm John Furrier with Dave Vellante. We'll be right back.