 From London, England, extracting the signal from the noise. It's theCUBE, Cover, Discover 2015. Brought to you by Hewlett Packard Enterprise. Now your hosts, John Furrier and Dave Vellante. Okay, welcome back everyone. We are live here in London, England for HPE Discover. This is SiliconANGLES theCUBE, our flagship program. When we go out to the events and extract the signal from the noise, I'm John Furrier. I'm my co-host Dave Vellante. Our next guest is Donac Weil, Vice President of Global Product Line Management at HPE Networking, Aruba. Welcome back to theCUBE. Thank you. Good to see you. So day three, things are rocking, it's pretty clear. The storylines, the four pillar areas, our transformation areas are out. HPE Networking, you know, we love talking to networking because one, you guys have been on theCUBE all the time. Networking is where all the action is, SDN is evolving. Some say not baked, some say it's evolving fast. You got OpenStack in the club, big networking component. You got Aruba just really crushing it on the wireless side. You leave by a stadium, great case study on stage. Wireless, wired, coming together. That's right. At the edges, wireless, wired in the network. Yeah. Give us the update. Well, I mean, really what we've been looking at is, you know, as we integrate what was HPE Networking with Aruba, creating a new networking organization. A lot of the focus with the Aruba acquisition was around and the strategy was around bringing together the wired network and integrating the wireless network together and creating an access layer. Because, you know, as we move forward, wireless becomes a primary form of connectivity in the enterprise, and then in the future, what you're going to get, you're going to get all these IoT devices, headless devices, some of which are still going to connect in a wired manner. You don't want to be having two different operational models for that. And so you want a sort of single policy management and security model. You want a single sort of analytics model. You want, you know, the visibility, the troubleshooting, everything, all to be a single model. So you develop an access layer. And then it doesn't really matter what the connection medium is. Because you're going to be a policy-driven access control and security. So, you know, if I expect something to be a sensor and suddenly it starts asking for patient records, I know there's a problem there because, you know, the policy was it's a sensor. So once the integration is done from a headcount standpoint, a selling motion standpoint, is that sort of job one from a development perspective? Is creating that single policy model, security model, analytics model? And has any of that work been pre-done with your earlier relationship? Talk about that a little bit. So, you know, yes, what we're starting with is we're starting by taking the, so the great thing about Aruba is they were not just about wireless. Aruba is all about mobility. And it's about, you know, all the software pieces that go around wireless, like, you know, policy and security, et cetera. There's a lot of software IP. Yeah, there's a lot of software IP. And so, job one really is taking our switching infrastructure and bringing that under, for instance, the management layer, clear pass, which is the security and policy layer, under, you know, other tools, the analytics tools, our location tools, and bringing this all together and sort of truly knitting together and integrating the wired and the wireless together. So that's really job one. So as, you know, we're really bringing to market an end-to-end story in the campus. And that sort of single view of policy, security, analytics comes as part of that? Is that right? Yeah, that's right, yeah. It's just bringing it all under the same tool set. Dominic, can you talk about the rationale for the Aruba acquisition in terms of both the organizational and the market implications? Yeah, I mean, so when we looked at, you know, the strategy, you know, quite a while back now, what we recognized was that there was a significant change about to happen in the market. The advent of 11AC Wave 2 with multi-gigabit wireless was really going to be the first time that enterprises started to adopt wireless as a primary connectivity medium. And what enterprise is needed, while we already had a, you know, a very good wireless connectivity solution, what we didn't have was a mobility experience. And to actually go, you know, build that is a very, very difficult thing to do. And so, you know, the reason really for, you know, Well, if you didn't have the wireless asset, your access method kind of is decoupled from the actual ability. Yeah, it's more of a traditional overlay. So you take the wired network and you overlay wireless on it and they're kind of disconnected. So, you know, the idea was, well, you know, Aruba is, you know, was and is the leading mobility company and bringing all that software IP together with us as the number two switching vendor and creating a new entity that could integrate that as a solution and create what we call the mobile first infrastructure and the mobile first, you know, vision was what we set out to do. And we, you know, we're actually executing on that fairly quickly. You know, the product roadmap is defined. We, you know, we're completing some of those things that, you know, right now. So the first stages are already happening. There's a lot more work to do. You know, there's so much opportunity in, you know, into the advent of IoT and wireless, so much going on. So if I were to say it fundamentally changes the strategy of HP networking, is that a fair thing to say? Because essentially I would have described it previously as okay, you're a good alternative to the number one, you know, player, as opposed to now you're trying to change the game. Can you talk about that a little bit more? Yeah, absolutely. I mean, again, the idea was, and I think you characterize it very well. Yeah, we were a great alternative to Cisco and we did very well, growth was great. But, you know, what we wanted to be was we wanted to be a leader and, you know, we are a leader in terms of innovation. Because, you know, if you're on the cutting and bleeding edge of innovation and you're really solving customer problems, I mean today, most IT shops now are finding that line of business is actually defining what they need to do and that they are in partnership with line of business and they're creating true business outcomes and value for the customer. You can't do that if you're just kind of following along in the industry. You have to be on the bleeding edge of innovation. And there's so much to do in that, sort of, you know, my logo. There's big data in there too. I mean, I think Dominic, the wireless overlay issue is a huge deal. Eliminating the overlay, huge BFD, in my opinion. So that's going to be a big opportunity with all the campus upgrades and all the trends, all the refreshes. And so, I'm excited to track that. I want to go a little deeper into the core now and get into SDN. So take me through the SDN vision because there are things going right along and you've got services like infrastructure, policy-based, fill in the blank. Now, SDN, what does that fit in? So, software defined network, I mean, first of all, everybody's got a different idea of what SDN is. So, you know, my definition of SDN is it's not a feature, it's not a product. It's really a framework. It's a different way of looking at the network. So it really looks at the network as a system and defines a new control surface for it, which is programmatic. That to me is a simple explanation of what SDN is. So, you know, it manifests itself in many, many different ways. And- That's kind of like hybrid cloud. There's no one product skew. Right. It's built into how you deploy and manage. It is, and it's really all about, it's about automation and it's about making things dynamic. So, you know, networking has been static set and forget for 25 years. I love that phrase. SDN allows you to make the network dynamic and responsive and agile. So, you know, you can automate a lot more things. You can derive and pull out more of the value that already exists in the network. So in the context, for instance, of, you know, of mobility, there's already a lot of context information that the network holds. It already understands who the end user is. It understands where that user is. It understands what that user wants to do. So bringing that context out in a software defined manner and being able to bring all that context together, it makes the job of defining policy and role-based controls much easier. So is that an efficiency benefit value? Is it a performance benefit? Is it the above? It's security, it's efficiency, but most of all, you know, what we're seeing customers get excited about, it's enabling them to play a role themselves in generating new lines of business, new revenue streams and being able to bring a much better experience to their user base while reducing the overhead, the operational overhead that it takes to, you know, deliver these things. So Dave asked all the guests, Scott Weller, we were talking about, we're not going to tell you what we said so you can get your answer. IoT is a big, big deal. And in general, networking is great. So I got to ask you first, in generally speaking, before we get into IoT, what's the number one action item that you would say to a CXO-CIO in terms of, okay, the new normal in networking is, and to end, the overlays are challenging when they make sense, they make sense, you can actually get pure end to end for policy to the true edge. You can do some good things. So here's your action item, go do something. What are the three things that CIOs need to do? If they buy into, okay, I love the wireless front end. I love getting into the core to get some sort of network benefits around SD and all that good stuff. At the end of the day, I want to have the composable infrastructure and infrastructure as code and make a boatload of money from my apps and my teams are happy. What's my action item for networking? I mean, so, you know, within the IoT framework, you know, with networking, I mean, I would say the number one thing is understand what the use case is that you want to do. I mean, what is the business value that you want to derive? That is actually, people tend to jump the gun and try and sort of get to the implementation before they're understanding what business value they're deriving. You know, a great example of this is, you know, what we've done in terms of sensor networks, in terms of wayfinding and indoor GPS using BLE sensors. So, you know, we deployed this at the Niner Stadium, but, you know, we've been talking to a lot of customers about this capability. So, the 1.0 version of this was to use BLE sensors to be able to say, okay, I can get very accurate information about where a user is and I can get them to subscribe to a service, use an app and provide a digital map to help them find their way around in certain circumstances. So, at the Niner Stadium, I can tell them where the nearest bathroom is, where the shortest line is. I can help them to order food from their seat and have it delivered right there so they don't miss the game. So, you know, it's... By the way, that's not fantasy because John Paul, who runs a venue next, gave me a great tour and I was using the app. I had six second video replays from every camera angle and I go, I'm going to test the, I haven't bought a hat, less than six minutes. Had the food, it really is awesome. It's incredible. They know where people are parking, they can resell parking spots. I mean, it's pretty badass. It's absolutely incredible. But, you know, that's kind of, that was one dot-o of mobile engagement. Two dot-o for mobile engagement is what we just announced yesterday, which is we recognize that, you know, one dot-o you had to have in a Ruba wireless LAN infrastructure. But we recognize there was many customers who haven't yet depreciated their equipment, you know, their wireless equipment, and it's a big effort for them to sort of rip and replace everything. But they really want, they have use cases in the healthcare, you know, retail spaces, you know, there's all sorts of use cases where they can derive real business value and outcomes, and they want that, but they have to wait. So what we did was we did mobileengagement2.o and we've introduced a set of new sensors now that combine sensor and wifi, BLE and wifi, that can now communicate with any third party wireless infrastructure and allow people to use that sensor network as an overlay. We've also introduced- Is there APIs built in for the data as well? Yeah, there is. So we've introduced business analytics as well so as you can actually look at and monitor what is going on within that sensor network, dwell times, battery lives, all those kinds of things to make the operational issues easier. And we've also expanded the partner program. So there are APIs there for partners like VenuNext to come in and integrate and be best of breed and unlock that value. And so, you know, I expect that we'll have, you know, different verticals now, we'll have different SIs coming in one thing. This is why your point about knowing your business values, Key and Scott Weller again, you know, we love this services-led infrastructure and it sounds almost like a cliche, and we've heard that so many times, but more than ever, every company's different. Yeah, absolutely. VenuNext at Levi Stadium versus VenuNext in, you know, Live Nation is a completely different animal. They resell services, so, okay. So IoT now, back to IoT. What's your advice to customers on IoT and how would you define the true edge of the network? So I think the, you know, the edge of the network is whatever you make it. You know, I know it's a fairly crappy answer, but it is true, it's whatever you make it. As I said, you know, the lines are blurring. You know, there is no longer that hard perimeter anymore. It's permeable, people can bring, you know, their own devices, they can bring, you know, laptops and things that they'll call their own. And then sensors, sensors can be fixed, they can be mobile, they can be, you know, many different things as well. So if you have a sea of sensors that are a combination of, you know, fixed and mobile, that, I mean, you're doing many, many different things, you want to be able to, most importantly, you want to be able to manage that sea of sensors. You want to have the visibility, you want to be able to troubleshoot it, and then you want to be able to, you know, sort through the data. So there's, you know, a few different levels that you go through here, but the network facilitates all of that. And so, what makes- So the key word is network. Right. So the edge of the network is where the network goes, it stops. I mean, a sensor on its own without a network is an island. It does nothing for you, you know, what it has a very defined perimeter of what it can do for you, a personalized perimeter. Once you network sensors, that's where the power comes from. So, you know, once you're bringing all these things together, what you want to do then is you want to reduce the operational complexity of managing that sea of sensors. And the way to do that is to have a single umbrella of policy management, a single umbrella of security, a single umbrella of troubleshooting. And that is kind of what we bring to the table. That's exactly what we're bringing to the table by just defining an access line. So when you say the edge of the network is whatever you make it, and you said, okay, that's not a great answer, but in fact, it's true. It's whatever assets you have there that are connected. And that might be all the way out to the windmill. That's right. Or maybe not. Right. Where's the trouble spots for a CIO? There's two realities now. There's the, okay, buying into the hype and vision that everything will be connected, which it will be at some point, but the phase one is a little hanging fruit. Yeah. So is the edge of the network, where's the gotchas with the blind spots for the CXOs? Is it where there's no power, no internet? I mean, there's always that, is there problems there we're seeing? We were speculating earlier, that's our view of if there's battery issues, no power and network. Well, I think that... How do you deal with those two huge problems? Well, I think that, to me, the biggest problem is that people believe that IoT is a new thing. It isn't. It's been around for 20 and more years. If you look at HVAC systems and lighting systems, building control systems, in global real estate organizations, they've been doing this for years, but they're on many, many different older standards. They have different power requirements. All of these things are already plumbed into buildings and some of them are not able to or appropriate to connect through IP. So, as we deploy new sensors, the new world of IP-based sensors, we have to find a way to bring the old world and the new world together. And so, from the old world, what you want to be doing is aggregating all those sensors onto a IP gateway, as it were, bring it in into the IP world without actually having to physically change anything. Because ripping the guts out of a building is, in all of these manufacturing buildings and things throughout the world is not going to happen. So you've got to accept that there is an old world of IoT out there that you have to integrate with and into. And that's one of the biggest challenges. The biggest challenges for people is to actually recognize that, understand what the cost there is, and figure out how to bring the old world and the new world into it. It isn't a fair two, the data model is different today. The data model is great. The ability to actually deal with distributed data in a way that you can get meaningful insights out of it and act on it. Yeah, I mean they have unique protocols and there's all sorts of differences here. Power is one big problem. It's, how are you going to power all these things? How are you? Battery? Well, yeah, I mean, so yes. I mean, what we did with our sort of mobility engagement sensors, our location sensors, is we chose to use BLEs as Bluetooth Low Energy that runs off a battery. It's completely independent. You don't need to hook up any power. So it enables you to put those sensors anywhere. They just stick up. Battery life estimated? Battery life is beyond a year, it's two years or so and so they're very low energy. They can go on for a while. Well, now we brought in this analytics capability to that network. I can monitor all the batteries. I can have alarms on the batteries. I can plan for and set thresholds and say, when a battery hits 20%, tell me so as I can forward plan three months. Put it into the rollout plan. Yeah, the truck roll. Yeah, so you can now manage this in a meaningful way which you couldn't before. But they got to build that into their operational cost model. You do, you do. But the benefit you get in terms of the return on investment in terms of the services that you can enable. I mean, things like booking meeting rooms. I mean, at any organization, we talk about customers, every customer just nods and says, oh yeah, getting a meeting room is terrible. We work with a company called Robin who do a sort of console outside all the meeting rooms and have a sort of backend system that allows you to do sort of dynamic just in time meeting room booking. So it's like meeting rooms for Uber for meeting rooms. So you look on your mobile device at the app and you say, hey, I need a meeting room for five people. It shows you all the meeting rooms that are available near you. You say, I want one. Here are the constituents I want to bring to this meeting in 10 minutes. They get an invite, but they also get a GPS indoor map that shows them how to get to that meeting room. And you turn up, if it's occupied, hey, I'll just pick another meeting room. It's that easy. Cancel less like Uber. So the things that the rooms don't come to you, you go to the rooms. But that brings up a good point. This is the value. Understanding the cost benefit, not doing IoT for IoT's sake, but understanding, hey, there's value there. It's worth doing it versus the blind ambition of saying, hey, we're not doing it, right? I mean, Levi's stadium's different than? It is, it is. Stadiums that don't have what they have. I've spoken to a lot of healthcare companies here, just coincidentally. And there's sort of a pattern emerging. There is some risk, right? So in a hospital environment, there's probably some things that you don't want to wireless enable, that you want to make sure stay wired. Actually, some hospitals were saying, all their surgery facilities are wireless already, but some hospitals don't want to do that yet. They have a different risk sort of. Is it RF or is it just? Just fear. Is it fear or is it RF interference? Well, it's RF interference, but it really is fear. They haven't had the experience to gain the confidence in the technology. But in your office areas and in your guest areas and your outpatient areas and everything, what you want to be able to do and what they do want to do is use location technologies to be able to provide a much better service to the patients and make it easier for their nurses and doctors to work and make them more efficient. The return on that is huge and is easily calculated. Yeah, I mean, they could do triage on patients while they wait. So because we define, yeah, I mean, we define an access layer. You can have a combination of wired and wireless and you can bring this all under the same policy. It's a huge big data opportunity and that's a nuance of this. It's not the purchase price of the access points anymore. It's the overall solution. I mean, you look at the RFPs for wireless bids. Well, there's big deals like you live by, but these small in comparison to the value. It is, I mean. It's the number one requested feature by consumers. Better Wi-Fi. Better Wi-Fi, yeah, absolutely. Hands down. Yeah, and you know, and once you can, I mean, you know, let's face it, I mean, we're addicted to data, right? I mean, the whole world is addicted to data. I mean, this is why we're buying so much storage, which is a wonderful thing. But, you know, sorting through all that and actually deriving the value out of that data, doing that in an intelligent way, but bringing the context that enables you to really sort of pinpoint the value that you want. You know, think the user ID, which we never done before in networking. A user has always been identified by the port they plug into. It's never about the user identity. Personal area of Bluetooth, networks, you're going to see all the devices connected. It's funny, I'm going to wrap it up, I want to tell you a quick story. So I went over to a friend's house to have some cocktails and dinner, and he was walking with me, giving me a tour around his house. He's like, RJ45, I wired the whole house with fiber. I used two ports. And he's like, so this is back, you know, this is back 15 years ago, you know, at the walls. I'm wiring everything for fiber. I'm never going to have a bandwidth problem. This is during the dial-up internet days, right? And guess what? He doesn't use any of it. So at the point, everyone's going wireless. Campus is the same way. Yeah, well, I'll tell you a funny story. My whole house is wired as well, aren't you? Yeah, but this is the trend, right? I mean, so now the networking of the networking becomes the back to the problem. Again, the overlay is a big deal. I think you guys have great differentiator with Aruba. Yeah, but also, you know, let's not forget that, you know, we're also in the cloud business. We're in the data center business. So, you know, we have our mobile first architecture and our cloud first architecture. So we're participating with the HP synergy team and working on the, you know, the fabrics there and bringing networking value, continuing to bring networking value into, you know, the cloud arena. So wireless is the big bed of networking, leveraging the existing assets, which has always been strong with that networking with HP, with wireless. We like Composable. We think Composable is going to be a big payoff, like converged infrastructure. We were here when converged infrastructure was announced. And we were like, well, converged infrastructure. Remember that? They were like, a lot of people were like, skeptical about it. Now look at it, right? So Composable's same thing. Well, Composable is, you know, Converged was generation one. Hyperconverged generation two. Composable, generation three. Evolutionary or revolutionary? I think both, actually. I mean, you know, my opinion is that actually, Composable will subsume everything that went before in the fullness of time. But I do think it is revolutionary. Yeah, I mean, you know, just having that ability to have a simple, you know, fluid pool of resources and a template-driven ability to just, you know, deploy applications in seconds just with, you know, with one click. I mean, you know, the operational model has just been turned on its head. You know, and also being able to have that really granular sort of like ability to sort of say, hey, this is, you know, the type of storage I want, the type of compute I want. You know, that is quite revolutionary. You know, we're really proud to be, you know, to be working with the Composable team. It's a great road to cloud native, too, for if you're existing legacy stuff. You don't have to rip and replace, you can take a small road. Yeah, that's right. Okay, we are here, live in theCUBE, talking to networking, talking to Ruba, talking big data, talking to IoT. Be right back with more big data on theCUBE here. Dominic, thanks for your insight. Thank you. Here inside theCUBE, delivering the value in the data. It's all in the content here on theCUBE. Be right back with more from HPE Discover, live in London after the short break.