 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 hosts, Dave Vellante and Jeff Frick. Hi everybody, welcome back to HP Discover 2015, Dave Vellante and Jeff Frick. Alistair Winters here, he's with the Technology Support Group at HP. Cube alum, Alistair, good to see you again. Great to be here, thanks for having me. So we were talking, last time we talked was in Barcelona. That's right. We heard Meg Whitman on day one, get up, announce these four new foundational transformational areas, which are kind of in your wheelhouse. They've been sort of living that. But what does that shift from sort of this product-centric message to this solutions transformational-centric message mean for you and your customers? Well, as a long-term services guy in a product-oriented company, this is manner from heaven for me. It's absolutely great to see Meg and the company align around these transformation areas. And actually, I mean, quite honestly, we've been doing many of these transformations for many years with our customers. So really, we're coming out and pivoting our business around those, which is great. So really, for me, it's a continuation of the work that we've done. And it just means we get more focus, more resource, more pressure, of course, too. But really, really exciting as a service is professional inside of HP. So I wonder if you could help us sort of understand the customer discussion. You've got everybody talking about Uber and Airbnb and all this sort of new stuff, and it's cool, right? Yep. And it's transformational, it's exciting. It's the digital economy. It's the idea economy. We love it. All your revenue is coming from the old stuff. So you have to provide a bridge for HP. You can't over-rotate into the new stuff because your customers can't move that fast. So what's that conversation like in your customer base and how are you helping? So I think we're ideally positioned, actually, to help our customers, because as you say, we have long-term relationships through our support arrangements with our customers. And actually, we've been gearing up for this over the past three years. We sort of, in our services organization, realized that this transformation, all these continuous transitions were happening inside of our customers' environments. It's original IT was very much built to be static, and that was sort of your classic support arrangement. It was stable, it was highly available, and you didn't touch it unless you really had to. But it's very clear with the new style of business and actually the pressure on the IT coming from the outside through cloud and commercially available apps that you could get on your mobile phone that they had to change. So with solutions like data center care as an example, really what we've done is we've ensured the customer had the opportunity to optimize what they have. And it's not just about supporting a static environment and turning up when something breaks. It's really about helping them to get the most from what they have. And they're really trying to work out what's the right path for them. What are the pragmatic steps for them to take on this journey? And every customer is different. They're at different stages. All of those four transformation areas that Meg talked about are relevant to them, but probably one or two of them will be the starting point for the customer. So really, we're the trusted advisor. We're in this relationship for the long term. We don't just disappear when the product is sold. And we have a great opportunity to really help customers navigate this complex path towards this new style of business. So in thinking about those four transformational areas, where do you spend your most time? Is it across the board? Is it a particular security problem? Is it the hybrid IT piece? I mean, I would think the hybrid IT piece is getting hot right now for you, but I wonder if you could take us through that. Yes, so I would say all four of those transformational areas are interconnected and really you can't isolate one from any of the others. But in my daily work, I'm aligned to our HBServer business and our Converge Data Center infrastructure business. So it's all about that hybrid transformation. That's really where myself and my team play. And as I say, it's all about optimizing what they have. And there are many transformational activities a customer can undertake with their existing infrastructure. You can software define a legacy infrastructure. And then as new technology is introduced, then we're able to sort of amp up the experience. And also tune our support service accordingly. And I know that we've been talking about composable infrastructure this week, which is very exciting. I was in Rick Lewis's keynote and I worked with Rick and his team. But I would actually say that we've had composable services for three years. That's data center care. We turned it into a very modular, very configurable solution that enabled us to flex and adjust as customers' needs changed. And so really in that sort of hybrid infrastructure. So what was the big change there, Alistair? Prior to the sort of flexible solutions and the services that was it sort of an all you could eat, use it or lose it type of approach package? Yeah, so I would say sort of historically we've had a sort of a one size fits all approach. We really didn't tune or adjust for the industry I mean IT basically had one operating model that we aligned to. And we really had two services. We had a remediation service so we turned it when something broke and we sort of evolved that into a proactive service so using our knowledge and experience to avoid problems before they occurred. And that was a very successful business for us and it's still very, very successful. But we realized that actually there was something more that the customers needed. They wanted help on this journey. And also we started building and constructing solutions and solutions require a different support experience quite honestly. No longer is it good enough just to support an individual device as a discrete element. You have to understand it in the context of the operating model, how the interconnections work. And that's what we built with data center care. And really what we're doing now is we're taking that model, that composable support model and we're starting to flex and adjust it as we work with our customers as they evolve to this new style of business. And a great example I'll give you is with service providers. So we're working very closely with our service provider customers. Very much these are the pioneers of dev ops and the new style of business. We've worked very closely with our tier one customers and built very customized support models with them. And it's very clear that many of the operating practices these guys have developed are now starting to permeate into the rest of IT. So through tier two and tier three service providers and also enterprise service providers as financial institutions and telcos start to adopt these principles, the knowledge that we've gained by working with these guys, we can tune and adjust the experience to meet their requirements. So customers tend to be organized in stove pipes and vendors tend to organize the way the customers are. You got server group, you got a storage group, you got a networking group and then we got this converged infrastructure group and we got the cloud group. And then we got services that are going to rationalize all that. That's kind of what you've been doing throughout your career. So are you seeing customers begin to reorganize? That's a long sort of shift. It's a culture shift and it creates friction, it creates headwinds, it creates consternation. What are you seeing in the customer base with regard to those reorganizations? Yes, absolutely. I mean, these reorganizations are definitely happening and I mean, I think different customers are approaching it in different ways and actually need different help based on the point in the transformation they're at. I mean, I've seen various models where customers have sort of built a Skunkworks DevOps team completely separated from the rest of sort of the traditional infrastructure. And others that are really trying to evolve the whole organization and transition it piece by piece, step by step. And I think both models are perfectly viable and customers clearly have a choice. And really, our role is to help encourage, advise and really try and push them in the right direction and give them access to the experts that we have really to augment the resources that they have. And for me, we get very focused on the technology and there's lots of great technology that we have to offer. But it's also about people, it's about processes and really when you get those three things working in harmony, operating together, then you get the business results and the business outcomes that you need. So, we're in those accounts every day and we feel it's our responsibility really to help them in that journey. I think a real challenge for you is if you have to sell a cultural shift every time, that's a problem. You can't wait around, at the same time you can't wait around for that culture to shift. So, how do you see that playing out for your business? Well, so actually I think one of the big sort of profound changes that's going on that we see is this DevOps continuous delivery. I mean, it's really re-architecting the way IT has been delivered and the role of IT operations. And that really is a culture shift. It's almost like a lifestyle choice that you have to make and really that starts at probably a different level in the organization than typically we will have engaged in. So, our customer classically has been IT ops. We help the customer run and manage and operate their environment. But what we're seeing now is that the culture shift is being sponsored higher up in the organization. It's coming from the CIO or even the CFO as they try and balance, okay, I have this cost of maintenance, cost of running, but I also want to liberate that money to do innovation. I need to see more apps and more business outcomes. So, really it's coming top down. And it's really how do we partner with the CFO and those sort of new stakeholders that we're working with, so DevOps or the dev in DevOps and the CFO to come up with a transition plan that moves them at a pace that's workable for their business. Well, a lot of questions. Well, I was just saying, down in the engine room, right? I mean, it's a very different ask for the guys that are operating this thing. I mean, as you said, keep it stable, keep it light, keep it running. It's very different than we're pushing code, new code every day. I mean, in your experience with the customers, with those guys in the engine room, is that, are they excited about it? Are they pissed about it? Are they, this is not what I signed up for, or is it really an opportunity for them to say, well, now I can start to do other things more value add? I mean, when you're working with the guys that are actually executing this stuff that didn't make the top down decision, they're the ones that got the marching orders. How are those conversations? What's the mood down there? That's a great question. And I would say it's all of the above. I mean, you tend to see all of those modes as any sort of change occurs. Actually, I think, after this is sort of explained, actually the folks there were very excited about the opportunity. I mean, it's no fun having to manually patch servers, having to manually update operating systems. I mean, these guys are running many instances of virtual machine. I mean, this is tough, difficult monotonous work. And the more that we can automate, make this a much more optimized experience for them, it frees them up to do exciting work that actually adds value to the business. And really what we're trying to do through the combination of our products and our services is really trying to abstract that complexity away from the customer and say, look, we can provide you with a very stable environment and that abstraction layer, we can sort of flex up and down depending on where they want us to operate. I mean, we have this flexible capacity service which essentially provides an infrastructure that they can plug and play if they want. So I would say the mood is, people respond differently. Many people have built a career doing IT operations work and you have to be somewhat of a scientist to be able to be down in the code doing this work. But I think the mood is exciting and people see the opportunity to add value to the business. And then how's it impacting the chain cycle and the new purchasing and swapping out old gear? Are they saying, wow, this is really an opportunity that we want to accelerate that? David and I were talking before we got on there, it's one thing to build a nice new app like Uber and start from scratch, but it's another one, you've got all these existing critical applications. At the same time, there are opportunities to potentially put some flash in here to do smaller process improvements. Are they seeing big data flash cloud as an opportunity to change the refresh cycle within their existing infrastructure? So I think it really depends on the customer scenario and the application that they're managing. I mean, for me, the one consistent thing you hear from every customer is the velocity of change is just increasing exponentially. And the vectors as well, right? And there are many vectors that they have to deal with. And really what they're looking for is, as I indicated before, is how do I get the most out of what I've got while I plan to really start to bring in some of these new technologies, which just increase my ability or my frequency of change and also provide the business with much more flexibility both in terms of being able to spin up and spin down apps and be able to scale out and scale in based on demand. I mean, these are all the vectors that they're trying to wrestle with. And for me, we are able to offer that experience with more traditional technology with a software layer, with an API, with a one view type experience. But as you start to roll in some of this new gear, that experience just gets better and better. And actually from a support perspective, if you take something like flexible capacity which is our service, which changes sort of a capex. You buy the gear, you run the gear to pay as you go. When you think about composable infrastructure, our ability to flex in and flex out the compute, the storage, the networking capability there to really very finitely offer the customer a pay-per-use experience like they've never had before is really exciting for us. So Quentin Hardy, a New York Times journalist, blogger, took a cheap shot at Meg yesterday basically saying that Meg said it's no, not yesterday, I guess yesterday, she said Monday or Tuesday, it's never been easier to put ideas into action. And then she said something effective and HP's going to be there with the products and the service organization to help you do that. And he said, well, how easy is it if I need a services organization? Like all of a sudden, IT is easy. So, okay, he's a blogger, fine, controversial, wants to be, you know, skeptic, get that. But this stuff is not easy. To go and compete with these disruptors or find new opportunities or enter the digital economy, it's not easy. But at the same time, people don't want to just say, okay, I want to spend millions and millions of dollars on services. So, what do you say to that? How is the service delivery changing to support that new model, which has to be agile, has to be fast, has to be efficient, and has to drive ROI? So how would you respond to, you know, high level to that criticism? So, I mean, for me, what's important is that we, you know, we keep pace with the experience requirements that our customers have. And, you know, as we've discussed, you know, we've seen the shift rooms or, you know, very much remediation. We're onsite fixing things that are broken, really moving far more to your advising and really helping customers, you know, plot the course and ensure that they're getting the most from their IT assets. I mean, IT isn't easy, I know. But what I would say is, you know, there are more and more, you know, sourcing options and choices that an IT team, collectively, you know, dev and ops have in terms of, you know, the way that they can, you know, move and flex to meet the needs of their business. And really, it's about, you know, how do you combine, you know, public with private? How do you think about, you know, onsite-owned and operated versus, you know, flexible capacity? So it's all about, I think, exposing, you know, those options and how you can combine and mix those together. And I think, you know, it really all boils down to really the portability of application. And once you have an app that's, you know, portable, you know, these are very, you know, these are very accessible choices that a customer can make. So for me, you know, as a support professional, it's really trying to get the IT organization inside of a customer, really to focus on what truly matters. And for me to really help them by taking away some of the more manual, boring stuff that, you know, is occupying a lot of their time, because, you know, that's stuff that we can do really well. Free them up to focus on the priorities. And that, I think, will stimulate, you know, the business to deliver that on their business. And am I right that you can automate a lot of that stuff? In other words, so I was going to ask you, are you in the business of teaching people to fish or fishing for them? And I guess you're really in the business of fishing for them, but doing it in a way that's more efficient than they could do it themselves and automating whatever you can and continuing to move up, allowing them to move up the stack and move up the stack with them and eliminating all that non-differentiated stuff. Absolutely, I think a really good example of that is our, we call it our connected product strategy. So for many years, we've had a connected experience. And actually, with the introduction of Gen 8 and Gen 9 and our three-part storage products, we have really the ability to monitor, you know, those products remotely through the internet. And if you look inside of a server, there are many sensors. I mean, we talk about the internet of things. Well, I mean, our products have sensors throughout them that allow us to extract and monitor the telemetry. And that's how we can be so proactive. I mean, we actually sense when something is likely to happen and react before it becomes a problem in an environment. So, you know, we're working really hard to ensure that our products are connected and we start to really look at them as an ecosystem to do exactly what you say. Because, you know, customers do not have to pick up the phone and call us. They don't have to email logs. I mean, that's really, really old tech. You know, we can automate that completely. And actually, we've actually worked very actively with customers to build a business case that says, look, you're really missing out on this. And it's very, very compelling. So, you're absolutely right. Automation is the key. All right, we're out of time. We have to leave it there. It always goes so fast when we're talking about the services angle because we cover so much and touch the organizations that you serve. So, Alistar, thanks very much coming on the queue. It's great to see you again. Thank you. All right, keep right there. Everybody, Jeff Frick and I will be right back. Check out hpdiscover.social. And we'll talk about it when we get back.