 Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE. Covering Discover 2016, Las Vegas. Brought to you by Hewlett Packard Enterprise. Now, here are your hosts, John Furrier and Dave Vellante. Okay, welcome back everyone. We are here live in Las Vegas for HPE Discover 2016 Hewlett Packard Enterprise. This is SiliconANGLE Media's theCUBE. It's our flagship program. We go out to the events and extract the signal from the noise. I'm John Furrier, my co-host Dave Vellante, our next guest, Alistair Wynn, who is the VP of Technology Services of the Compute Group within HPE Enterprise. Alistair, welcome back to theCUBE. Thank you. Great to be here. So, I just want to start the segment off here just quickly to define and clarify the HPE spinout of the other services group. Technical services, we have Scott Welleron, the chief of the group. And just draw the decisions. Take a quick second to explain the difference between kind of what's happened is the announcement of spinning out the outsourcing services group with CSC. Explain what's left over, why it's relevant, so on and so forth. Sure, no great question. I was expecting you to ask me that one. So enterprise services is really where customers choose us to operate and run their environments for themselves. So it's really where they applicating responsibility for IT. And that's been a very successful business clearly for us over a number of years. And technology services, we've reacted as a supplier to them quite frankly. We actually view them as a very important customer even though they're an internal entity currently. So really, from a technology services perspective, we're very much focused on the infrastructure itself, providing support, providing advice and guidance and technical consulting around the physical products themselves. And clearly enterprise services then take those and they add layers of value on top which they then present back to. ES, enterprise services, what's being spun out. Correct. That's more on the delivery end to end, traditional kind of SI kind of function. Correct, SI, managed services. You guys are doing technical services which is really the meat and potatoes of helping customers get to their destination of whatever outcome they're looking for. That's a solution around hybrid cloud. Also you're on the compute side. What's the most important thing going on there and why is that staying within HP Enterprise? So, I mean what we do exactly as you described is, I'd say it's more than meat and potatoes quite frankly. It's very, very strategically important. Meat on the bone, oh no, but important. It's extremely, extremely important. And you're right, from a technology services support perspective, historically we've had a reputation and we've added value in the data center specifically to help customers with availability and security of their environments. And I think what we're doing now with the emergence of hybrid is really helping customers move on that journey and to ensure that they have very consistent experience throughout that process. So we're really looking to empower them and especially around the placement of workloads and apps, we want to ensure that regardless of the environment or the platform that that app lands on, it's very clear that they have a support partner and a services partner to call on and that's our role. I mean I've always looked at the technology services component as the accelerant to achieve value as fast as possible and it's sort of, okay we're going to do this. How do we do it? You guys are who we call to get that done. Is that a fair assessment? It's absolutely, absolutely fair. So our role is absolutely to look at the business outcome that the customer is attempting to achieve, try and translate that back into the technology aspects that they may own or they need to buy or consume and yeah we're there to really partner with them to extract that value. What's the biggest challenge that you see with customers right now? Because as they look at app development, workloads are a big focus, yet the data center investments are there and the hybrid cloud is that integration point. Can you share some things that you guys are doing right now? I know the data center care and some other things you guys have done in the past have been pretty successful. What's the new thing? What's the new insight that you could share with the audience? Sure, absolutely. So I think we really regard IT operations as our principal customer and I would say in the discussions I have with IT operations really their principal challenge is meeting the needs of their developers. So creating an agile environment which meets their needs and meets the needs of the business. So it's all around the shift to hybrid shift to DevOps and actually what we've been doing is we've been spending a lot of time looking at the unique characteristics of the public cloud and looking at how can we apply some of those characteristics actually on premise to aid and help our IT operations colleagues and customers. So things like changing the consumption model from just being a capex straight purchase to a variable consumption model. Looking at how can we help customers avoid the complexities of capacity planning? So how can we take that away? And also how can we give them customers and IT operations in particular advice and guidance and help to really enable them to pull together the DevOps supply chain with all these tools and technologies that exist in order to really meet the needs of their customers. John and I talk all the time about cloud and everybody sort of thinks about cloud as a destination. It's where you put your data, it's where you put your apps but we talk about cloud as an operating model. Independent of where it is and I'm sure you guys sort of agree with that but I wonder if we could unpack that a little bit. So what does that mean to change the operating model from where we have been historically to where they want to go? What are customers telling you that? So I completely agree. And in fact, in much of the data we look at actually the principle destination for customers or consumption model is private cloud or a virtual private cloud. So clearly the principles of self-service and simplicity are really resonating with customers. Really, where our customers are looking for help is around automation and really trying to remove the human middleware that, I mean there's a lot of heavy lifting that has to happen in IT if you own and operate your own environment and historically a lot of that's really not added true value to the business. So it's about how do we automate that and ensure that customers can go from, the business can go from an idea to implementation as quickly as possible. So when customers go through a business case Alistair for automation, do they try to target, okay look we're spending X amount on IT labor that's not differentiating us from our competition. We want to cut that out through automation and we want to redeploy that to Y. Is that a part of the business case? Is it that explicit or is it more, there's just a better way we can sort of go to school on what the public cloud people are doing and apply that and see what the outcome is. Talk about that a little bit. So, no it's a great question. I would say that actually every customer that I've come in contact with is approaching in a slightly different way. Actually what you tend to see is the impetus for this happened because of a particular project or workload requirement. So rather than trying to transform everything at once customers are sort of looking at a particular use case and yes they'll absolutely do as you describe. I mean we'll sort of help to understand what's it going to take to run it in a traditional way. And many customers will actually explore private cloud and public cloud as potential sourcing options. And then based on I guess the unique business and IT context in which they're operating in because some are ready for cloud, some really aren't, some are much more advanced in their automation than others. They'll choose the optimal location to operate their workload. I think the other thing that customers are looking at is trying to make the workload portable. So it's not just about making a choice and then that's where it's going to reside forever. That's sort of the traditional way that we've operated. You buy a server and some storage, you run your app and that's where it sits forever. Now we want to be able to actually move the workload. We want to be able to optimally place it. And that may well reside in the public cloud for test and dev. You want to move it back on-premise for much of its life. And you might want to end up moving it back again as the app comes end of life. When I first heard the term dev ops about five years ago, I was, John and I were talking about explain that to me. And then you said something, John, at the time. It's, you know, Dave, it's really ops dev. So many ops people out there that need to transform. Are you seeing that transformation? How is that taking place from a skills perspective? And how does HPE Enterprises Technology Services evolve at skill sets to accommodate that? So I would completely agree. I think it certainly is ops dev. And I think the IT operations feel a sense of threat even from the public cloud. So it's about them really stepping up and be able to provide a service. Protecting turf. Well, protecting turf. But you know, what we see is, you know, developers, they'll just bypass, I mean. Yeah, of course. You'll see a lot of shadow IT. And that's not optimal workload placement. You know, that's just people being creative. So they're absolutely looking for our help and our guidance. And we have a service that we call infrastructure automation. I think we've talked to you previously about it where, where we provide advice, best practicing and guidance. We have a large team of people who are themselves developers, which is interesting. And we make those available as a service to our customers, principally operations teams that are looking, you know, they're really pulling together the supply chain of DevOps tools. Are they historically developer software engineers or are they more? Yes, they're absolutely software. I mean, within our group, as an example, we develop the software that connects our products back to HP for like data center IoT is what I'll call it. So yes, they're absolutely using these tools and products every day. And we give our customers access to them as part of this service. Alastair, talk about the change that cloud has impacted the enterprise, specifically around application development workloads. That's always been the conversation. Oh, the workloads run on this. And that's going to compute side, you're close to that kind of conversation because you want to compute close to the data. You want to move compute around all that causing around data and the app. So DevOps implies I'll see infrastructure as codes. The app developers don't have to do all that heavy lifting on the infrastructure side, which is you're involved in. How does that change the solution architect out there? Because at the end of the day, the guy in the customer environment that your customer is sitting there saying, I have an app I'm working on, but yet it's also a DevOps challenge because it's a horizontally integrated approach. What are some of the things you're seeing that's impacted that conversation? Is it the cloud? Is it DevOps? Because the app developers ultimately are going to drive the workload into the infrastructure where you're going to be adapted and agile on the same side. So talk about that dynamic and what's the, that's a real impact there. So yeah, that's an interesting question. I would say that from a developer perspective, what we're clearly seeing is the switch towards containers and microservices development. So the way that apps are being built is very different. And the fact that they're continuously changing and evolving is sort of new to the environment or to many IT operations teams for sure. And so the developer is really not particularly focused, I think, on the infrastructure destinations so much rather than the features and functions that the application or workload requires for it to be successful. We're certainly seeing a sort of a resurgence of bare metal deployments. So yeah, we went through this huge VMware virtualization wave and we're now starting to see containers really emerge and customers starting to deploy those onto bare metal. And of course, what we announced last time in London with Composable Infrastructure, we have technology there that actually enables an IT team to invest in one platform and actually be able to service all the requirements. Is there a theme that you're seeing out there that rises up to the top in your conversations? What's that theme that keeps on bubbling up with your customers in terms of, you know, really kind of moving to this agile environment? So I think the recurring theme is the need for speed. They still want all of the attributes that we've traditionally associated with mission critical IT, they want the availability and security and uptime, but they just want to move fast and in the digital economy, speed is everything. The need for speed move faster die, as we heard earlier. I guess my final question would be, take a minute if you can to talk to the folks out there watching or watch the video or watch the Cube Gym highlight about what's the most notable thing going on around technical service within HP right now at this HP Discover and how does that change or enhance or augment the pre-existing announcements that you guys have done in helping customers cross the bridge to the future? Sure, absolutely. So the one thing that we're introducing here at Discover is a service that we call campus care. So what I've talked to you about principally is activity residing in the data center and what we're doing is we're taking the principles of data center care and we're applying them to customers who are embracing a mobile first approach. So where they're actually gearing out their campuses with wireless technology. And again, they want one number to call, they want an assigned accounting that understands their business requirements and they want to do activities that continuously make the experience of their customers a better one. So that's a really exciting opportunity for us to actually move outside or beyond the data center into some other areas. And exciting things you guys have shown on the show floor. Anything notable, specific solutions you'd like to highlight? I think I would certainly recommend people go and check out the HC380, our new hyper-converged solution. So although it's a physical product, actually that's all about the experience. And for me, this is one of the first products that we've announced where we've not really talked about the speeds and feeds, it's all about the experience it creates. So it's a very simple intuitive device to use a bit like your iPhone. And it has a very high level of service content. So we're really trying to abstract the complexity away from our customers there. Here's the last word, what's the vibe of the show this year? You can encapsulate it down for the folks who couldn't make it, what's the vibe this year? So I think it's a huge level of excitement. I mean, this is, we brought HPE to the world in London six months ago. We've had two quarters now of very strong performance as a business, we're still very much focused around our transformation areas. And I think they're really, really coming to life here. So I think it's excitement and I think people can really get a sense now of what this new company is about. Alistair, thanks for sharing your insights here in theCUBE. We're live here at HPE Discover in Las Vegas. This is theCUBE. I'm John Furrier, Dave Vellante, my co-host. We'll be right back with more after this short break. You're watching theCUBE.