 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 exclusive coverage of Hewlett Packard Enterprise HPE Discover 2016. This is SiliconANGLE Media's flagship program, theCUBE, where 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 is KC Choi, who is the VP of Global Solution Architecture and Engineering at HPE. Welcome back to theCUBE, great to see you. Hey, great seeing you guys. So, we're lean back on day thrift. Lean back a little bit or lean in, as Sheryl Sandberg would say, a lot of action. Accelerate, transform, disrupt, a lot of different themes. You know, transform the enterprise, but also be disruptive. We saw that one, two days of coverage, but this notion of acceleration is a big theme. Accelerate to the next transformation. Yeah, what is that all about? I mean, give us the down and dirty on what that actually means. Yeah, so John, you know, as you know, I lead our teams in the field that are really the technical solution architects that work with our customers and our channel partners in and they out. So, frankly, you know, the question we get a lot of times is there is a lot of stuff here, right? There are solutions or new product introductions, new partnerships that are happening all the time. The question we get a lot is how do we take that and where do we get started? So, Accelerate, for me, the way I interpreted and where our customers are looking at it is, how do I get traction with all this great stuff that you guys are talking about and how do I make it practical? Where are the starting points of some of these journeys that you talk about? Because some of these are pretty massive, right? When you talk about disruptive business models or digital disruption, these are pretty lofty topics. I mean, great outcomes at the end of it, but there's always a starting point, right? So that journey starts with that first step. So Accelerate in our context and a lot of what my teams do are really around where are those traction points? How do you begin to assess this journey? What are those quick return on investment areas? You know, where do you start to begin to look at undertaking some of these digital disruptions? So, yeah. You mentioned that these big events are great. It's a big tent event. A lot of activities, a lot of customers. But then, you know, when it's all said and done, right, rubber meets the road. Yeah. You got to take it out into the field. What's the hot things that you're walking away with? You're pulling out, you're tucking under your arm, you're running out to the market. Obviously, you have your existing stuff out there. But what's the new impactful stuff out of Discover this year that you're going to see as a big impact for your customers? I think, you know, we did a great job last year, you know, even back to last June, right? Discover back here last year. And then we certainly moved on to it with London. It's around the four transformation areas. I think we've had a year now with those under our belt around, you know, transforming to hybrid, empowering the data driven and so forth. I think for me, the key takeaways that we're going to see and already we've seen interest from the customers are really going to be around, you know, we did a heavy focus at this particular event around edge analytics and around what's happening with Internet of Things. Now this has been a lot of buzz, a lot of talk over the last couple of years. I think for the first time, what I'm seeing is some really tangible areas that we're starting to really distill down into, well, what do you need to put into place, right? What type of gear, what type of software, what type of partnerships need to come into place and how do you intermingle these things in a way where from a technology architect here versus just all the buzz, you start to do some really meaningful things. So you saw some things on the floor this year, really around whether it be around, you know, integrating pump technologies and moving to things like flow as a service or thrust as a service, which are kind of new terms that are starting to come out. So we're starting to see the practical applications of this, right? The Edge Line launched for us was a big one because it's a really new category that we're starting to see and observe out there, which is the early indicators are coming back around, hey, more and more of this stuff is going to get actuated where the action occurs, right? Whether it be at the switch. The edge of the network. The edge of the network. It's that massive collision between the industrial Internet and what's happening on the factory floor, what's happening in energy, what's happening in smart buildings with really the intelligence and the knowledge to do something about it. So it's creating, I think, a opportunity for us to talk with customers on how do you start setting the standards for that and how do you start setting the baseline for that? So I wanted to ask you, Casey, you're a team of solution architects. You've got this massive portfolio. It's got to be incredibly complex. It's changing all the time. You mentioned partnerships coming and you know, we heard a lot about Docker. You know, Cluster HQ was on recently, okay. So many options. So how do you do it? I presume you start with the business solution or the outcome and then work backwards toward the technology. But I wonder if you could describe that from a customer standpoint. How do you work with them? A lot of coffee and no sleep. No, we press our teams pretty hard. Yeah, there's a lot coming at us and you know, it's amplified by the fact that we've got this huge and great partner network out there that we rely on very heavily to deliver our solutions, right? And a lot of times, you know, first of all, I mean, we have smart people in the organization that truly want to learn it and want to embrace it. You know, the approach that we've taken, Dave, has been, you know, you can't do it with everybody in the organization, but you need to pick your champions. You need to pick your early use cases. You need to pick your champion customers, right? The ones that are going to go to battle with you around piloting these solutions, taking a little bit of risk and are wanting to, if you will be with us there in those early stages, you saw them featured quite a bit during the show, whether they be Boeing, for example, being one of our customers in this area. A lot of the work that we've done with General Electric and others that are starting to come into the picture here. So we try to start with small teams of really focused individuals, and we try to then learn as much as we can from that engagement. And then the key there is to scale. And you got to take those individuals, make sure that they're teaching and they're, you know, bringing forward these particular skill sets. And it's really about multiplying from that point on. So the SWAT teams or these initial teams are really important. Just a quick follow-up, if I may, John. So how do you see this move toward the edge affecting your skill set, you know, mix, your portfolio? How are you proactively changing that? Or are you proactively changing that? We're trying to do that through a couple of ways. We're certainly trying to bring in more in industrial expertise, you know, people that are more familiar with, I mean, let's face it, most of us kind of grew up in kind of the commercial space, right? So we're really familiar with the standards that exist in computer land, right? What's happening now is we're having to, you know, ingest skills really from the industrial internet. So these are folks that are, you know, very familiar with things like process automation. They're familiar with things like SCADA technologies, JSON, these new standards that are new for us in the computer space, but are, you know, have been well-established really in the industrial space. So we're starting to bring in some of that talent. We're cross-training some of our individuals. We're starting to get, again, real familiar with things like industry 4.0 and what's happening really in some of these sectors that are, you know, early adopters around this technology. And, you know, they're happening pretty much across the board, but the early ones are really in oil and energy, the energy sector oil and gas, manufacturing, smart manufacturing, and what we're also seeing in things like retail. So I'm trying to bring in those skill sets of talent. So we're seeing a trend. We were just at SAP, I mean, SAP Sapphire this past month, and it was kind of clear, again, another classic big enterprise commercial software company you guys partner heavily with and do great business with. But they had a traditional SAP ecosystem of developers. You know, all that stuff, the software stuff. Now they're seeing the consumerization where that systems of record data was opening up a whole new set of developers and use cases. And in particular, the system integrators, the global system integrators, the sensors, EY, Deloitte, PwC, et cetera, were kind of uniquely building new things. And I'll get your, the question I want to ask you is, as these solution architects discover new things. Right. New processes that are automated. You guys are building solutions for them. Are you guys replicating and codifying these solutions? How do you guys leverage some of these new discoveries? Because you're out in the front lines. I mean, you know, this unknown processes being automated with cloud. Is that on your radar that you guys actually going out? Is there all different deployments and solutions? Or is there recycling of the codification of these things? Well, I mean, direct answer to your question is, I mean, the nirvana piece, right, is if you can codify it and you can standardize it and you can cookie cutter it as much as you can. I mean, what we've seen is we try to standardize that as much as we can in terms of reference architectures, taking things that we know work well, especially from engagements that we've done to customers, right? So there's two ways you can do this. You can do it from a theoretical level and say these things should work. All things are perfect. The other way to do it, and I think probably a more perfect way to do it, is you learn from customer engagements. You learn from early engagements. You learn from the engineers that are doing the work. And you say, I want to codify that into cookbooks, into runbooks, into solutions reference architectures that we know work. We've done a number of these around some of these solution sets. In relation to SAP in particular, you bring up a really good point, John, in the fact that in the past, right, you used to train your teams really around the things that were really well known in the system of record ERP space, right? So you had ABAP and basis is kind of the main points here. But now as the world is transitioning more into, I mean, just look at HANA, for example, and what that's kind of instilled in the real time aspects of decision analytics within SAP. Now that world is very much pivoting around open source development languages and open source tools and so forth. So just as much as we've had changes in terms of the way that we architect, we've had changes in that field as well. It's interesting, Casey, I want to double click on that. Peter Burris who heads up research at SiliconANGLE Media's Wikibon team, we were pointing out at Sapphire, we kind of had the revelation that he pointed it out that in the old days, you had known processes and kind of unknown technology and then you use that technology to automate those processes, accounting, what not workflows. Now as we shift over, highlighted by the edge device and the IoT and many more, you have unknown processes and known technologies. So you have to be nimble enough to identify this new stuff coming in to automate it. So the question is, do you believe in that, do you agree with that premise? And if so, what does it take to be a leader, a transformation leader in the customer? Because you're out in the front lines, that's a transformation opportunity, but yet it's a competitive advantage for the customer to capture these unknown new processes that are developing in real time. Yeah, so first of all, I agree with it, right, in terms of the changes that are occurring there. Hey, listen, I don't think anyone's figured all of this out. The key piece here is take your frontline talent that is working with customers on these use cases and there are use cases that we think we know today, but honestly, as we talk with clients and we talk with customers, there are new ones that are being invented every day. Someone will come up with an idea and say, well, I can do that, right, or now I have the capability to do that. Or big data surfaces, new insights. Yeah, exactly. And you can come in and change your business overnight. Yeah, exactly. And they're happening in areas and industries that you wouldn't even imagine are early adopters, right, like healthcare as a good example or in pharma, which aren't necessarily the most aggressive in identifying and adopting some of this. Even there we're seeing this sort of adoption. So the key point for us really is no one's figured it out, but I do believe we're going to establish competitive advantages in taking the baseline information. This is things like what velocity are we talking about, right? What sort of things do we have to deal with from a latency perspective, especially as more and more of these technologies are actuating physical devices, right? So whether it be temperature controls or autonomous drive vehicles or something that has to do with a valve. As those things start to collide, we're starting to see some of the disciplines around performance, latency, all the things that you've got to engineer in because these things have to be precisely orchestrated and there's a lot of, you know, I don't want to overstress it, but there's some life and death sort of things starting to happen there, right? So that element of it is starting to happen. This is the analog physical and digital world's colliding and being instrumented with technology, right, which is causing some great opportunities, but also potentially, you know, death spirals. Yeah, yeah. So you've got to really understand the workload, right? Where is that workload? I mean, everyone talks hybrid, right? But hybrid already imagines the fact that things are going to be happening in different places. So when that starts to occur, that coordination of where the workload or the process is happening and then how does it coordinate with various parts of that sequence are really, really important. So you see that messaging over and over from us and I sometimes think that, you know, maybe folks are getting a little tired of it, but it's really important to get that, you know, right mix, you know, where should it go, optimizing that and then powering it the right way. So that's why we don't think there's a one-size-fits-all generic way of doing this. Well, that's why the composable because it's the building blocks, concepts, APIs, you mentioned those things that it makes a lot of sense. To your point about the process, you used to have to, the technology would be hardwired to the process, right? Now it's got to get a composite. The other piece is the data. You talk about analog. The amount of data now, the data curve is bending. It's not Moore's law anymore. It's greater than exponential. And we don't even know right now exactly how much is going to be coming in. We have estimates, right? So we can start to tag these things and understand it. But to your point, Dave, I really don't think that we have a real good handle yet because like I said, those use cases and the demands on that intelligent infrastructure or that sensor network, people are always finding new uses for it, right? And now, you know, people are getting, you know, it's easy to implement. You know, it's feature rich. So, you know, we're seeing initial things that are giving us some informing what we think those are. But I really believe that ability to kind of remain open around the APIs or the unexpected is really going to be key here because it's not as easy as sizing a system, a record like we did in the past where things are very, very well-structured. It's not like that at all. Lead, agility, key. Casey, thanks for coming on theCUBE. Really appreciate sharing the insights. Hey, great to see you guys again. Final question. I'll give you the last word for the folks watching or say your best friend says, hey, Casey, I missed HPE Discover this year. Was traveling, took my kids to Europe or had to go to graduation. Bottom line me, what happened at HPE Discover this year? Summarize the show. The word I would use is I think we disrupted a lot of things across a lot of different dimensions. Infra, you know, analytics, what's happening in IoT. We disrupted the disruption in some respects and I think that's the key word that I would take away from the event this year. We're theCUBE here disrupting media by broadcasting three days of wall-to-wall coverage. We are here live in Las Vegas with day three. I'm John Furrier, Dave Vellante. You're watching theCUBE. We'll be right back after this short break.