 From London, England. Extracting the signal from the noise. It's theCUBE. Cover, Discover 2015. Brought to you by Enterprise. Now your hosts, John Furrier and Dave Vellante. Okay, welcome back everyone. We are here live in London, England for HP Enterprise Discover. Hashtag HPE Discover for live coverage of theCUBE, our flagship program from SiliconANGLE. 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 Alistair Winner, VP of Technology Services Support with HP Enterprise. CUBE alum, fifth time, this is the sixth time on theCUBE. Actually filling in for Scott Weller this time, but that's okay because you know the drill. I do. Welcome back. We're glad to be here. So your first official CUBE as part of the HPE. Correct. The official HPE. Official. What's it like? What's the new vibe? I mean obviously the official date was November 1st. You were acting as a merge company, or a split company prior. But I mean that's all. When you're split, you're split. You're now on your own. What's it like? Give us an update. What's the vibe internally like? What's the customer scene like for you guys? It's really, really exciting, quite frankly. So we've had a year of anticipation and finally it's happened. And it's really forcing us to focus on the priorities for our business. So we get a lot more visibility and time with Meg and the executive team. Our focus is very, very clear on the full transformation areas. And it's just really exciting. Really exciting. And how about the customer environment? Last time we talked, we were talking about the transition from reference architectures of old to reference architectures of new. And we heard from Martin that the dated disruption is happening. You got hybrid cloud happening big time. So a lot of these things are coming home to really be mainstream. All these big hyped up trends. Certainly hybrid cloud. What's the conversations like there with your customers? So you're absolutely right. I mean, we announced the four transformation areas in Las Vegas and we've had six months really to test those with our customers. And it's very clear that they really hit the mark. Very, very clear that they're hitting the sweet spot there. And if you look at hybrid as an example, I think it's been clear that customers really aspire to move in that direction. But they lack some confidence. They're looking for partners that can credibly help them move in that direction while maintaining stability and availability. So really, we've had the opportunity using the transformation areas to construct the solution set inside of Hewlett-Packard's enterprise. It's really been the rallying cry, quite frankly, for our business. It's sort of forced our individual business units to start working together to look at use cases around those transformation areas that we can now start to engage our customers here in Discover. So one of the things we're hearing here at the show is you guys are unpacking the transformation areas that was announced in Vegas. What are you guys announcing at the show? What new products you have? Anything new? Share with us some data? Well, what we're doing here is taking our customers through the transformation area journeys. So rather than previously where we've really just shown the products that we've had here, what we're doing is we're exploring the journey that a customer can take to, for example, hybrid IT. So the floor is laid out such that we sort of walk a customer through that journey. In terms of announcements, I guess the big announcement here in my area of focus has been HPE Synergy, which is our new Composable Infrastructure. It's occupying a significant piece of real estate on the floor. And that's a solution that I've had the privilege of working on in conjunction with my product colleagues. So we're really excited that we can have that. So we saw that announcement. What is the synergy thing? Because that's really kind of a big deal. That's the big news this morning. So it's a new architecture. So we're introducing a new architecture when HPE has a history of introducing new technology architectures to the market. So it's very fitting, actually, that as we launch the new company, we actually launch a new architecture. And it's really designed to try and bridge the two modes of IT that we see operating today. So traditional systems of record and the new style, which are more systems of engagement or innovation. So it's a truly converged system. It's not something that you sort of build in a factory from separate components. It's a truly integrated system. And out of the box, it's infrastructure as code. So it's a truly software-defined system. So thinking about that sort of new hybrid, you guys call it the new style of IT. You mentioned systems of record, systems of engagement. How are those worlds being serviced? How are they coming together? And what's the architecture underneath them? And how does it evolve? So I think it's a great question. And really, that's the challenge that our customers are wrestling with, because typically traditional IT systems, it's all been about costs. You're getting the cost out, running it as efficiently as you can. Whereas systems of engagement, it's all about bringing innovation and it's about constant change. So the great thing about Synergy is it can cope with both modes. It's very, very flexible in its architecture. And the way we bridge that, those two worlds is through software-defined and infrastructure as code. And regardless of whether you're running a monolithic app when you're updating it once a year, or you're running a cloud-native app in a container with microservices that you're updating three times a day, you can still benefit from automation and orchestration that that platform provides. Now, so how does solutions like Synergy change the service model? We've touched on this in the past a little bit. And it's here now. It's changing dramatically. Both within HP, within your customers, in the channel. Can you talk about that a little bit? Yes, absolutely. So you're absolutely right. I guess, classically in traditional IT, we were the support organization. We turned up when things failed or we would try to prevent failures from happening. With the new style and with products like Synergy, although clearly we will still offer those types of services, our focus is more around what I call customer success. So it's about how do we help a customer really maximize the value from that investment? So, for example, with solutions like our infrastructure automation solution, we're offering almost like a guru bar experience to customers. Not that they call up because something's broken, but because they want some help or advice or guidance. So we're really trying to move our focus away from being just the break fix guys and really turn to look at customer success and customer value. So that's, essentially, if I interpret it right, sharing, transferring knowledge to your customers as to how they can provide services to their organization. Yes, there's really strategies around doing that, ways to exploit the architecture and the infrastructure. Yes, exactly, and we can do that in a number of ways. I mean, our consulting organization has a very structured process to really get customers started. But once they're in a continuous delivery or DevOps mode, they're still looking for advice and guidance. And yes, there are communities that can provide that. But also customers are turning to us and they like it because we offer one number to call. It's very, very simple, very easy engagement model. Now how about data center care? We were around when you guys announced that a couple of years ago. Trying to remember the exact date timeframe. It's about three years. Yeah, okay. About three years. And that's been evolving. Recently, you made some moves to target service providers with data center care, extending that offering. Can you talk about that a little bit? Yeah, absolutely. I mean, we talked about that in the past. There's a couple of sessions where I've joined you. And we realized that customers that were running hyperscale environments had a different set of service expectations and leads to a classic enterprise. They were far more self-sufficient on hardware. The impact of a failure of a compute node was very, very low. In fact, not a problem at all. So we took the time to learn from our sort of custom engagements with tier one service providers. And we created a service, a tailored service that we call data center care for hyperscale. So it has the same basic value proposition. It's still one number to call. We're there to help respond to problems when they happen and to prevent problems from occurring. But the experience dials have been tuned and changed to really meet the requirements of someone that's running IT at scale, you know, homogeneous IT at scale, software defined and we launched it a couple of weeks ago. We've had very, very, very strong interest in that. So what are the hyperscale guys want? Do they not want the guy at the genius bar? Do they want somebody to sort of go fetch stuff for them? Or do they want like the super genius? Well, actually they do want the super genius but they're only going to call the super genius when they have a really big problem. Narly. I mean, these guys know their infrastructure as well as we do, quite frankly. And in many cases, we've actually designed the infrastructure with them. So technically they get it. But if there's something wrong, because it's a homogeneous environment at scale, it's going to be wrong everywhere. So they want to sort of parachute in the experts. So the number of incidents they place with us is much, much lower. But when they call, they really, really need our help. And you segment the service provider market, let's say tier one, tier two, tier three, right? It's a sort of fair, common, you know, model. And when we talk about tier one, hyperscale guys, are we talking about just a handful of people? Or is it a broader set than, you know, three companies? I mean, how do you define tier one? So tier one, I mean, so we have our own definition. Actually there's 14 or 15, I think, that we referenced this year. Some of them aren't addressable to us because they self-build. But it's really based on the, you know, the volume of service, or compute nodes that they buy. But actually I would say, you know, when you look at the tier twos and the tier threes, they're looking at the tier ones really at, you know, that's the best in class, that's the experience that they want to create, that's the way they want to operate. But clearly, many of them don't have the, you know, the expertise or the scale to design their own service. So they're looking to us, you know, to design. And they want our help to operate that environment. So talk about the vibe at the show and the products and the stories that are being told here. And what is the top storyline? When you go to a customer, what's the narrative? It allows you to hybrid cloud the four transformation areas, but what's the bottom line for them? Are they in starter mode? Are they in, hey, we don't even know what the reference architecture is. It seems like a moving train right now, the hybrid cloud, because it's advancing so fast. And certainly the news of the Azure cloud relationship, you have a lot of software enabling. What's the core message to your customers when you say, hey, what are you guys doing with cloud? Are you going to, what cloud are you? What are you, how do you answer that question? How do you go, well, here's where we are. Well, I guess, I mean, our charter and really the real focus of transformation to hybrid is about getting the right mix. And you'll see this across the floor. Integration, right? It's about finding the right mix for the customer. And every customer has a different set of needs. And really what we're presenting is a series of steps that a customer can jump into or out of as they see fit. So no longer are we just saying, well, here are all of our products. You come and select the ones that you... Well, you can go end to end on HP if you want to go all HP, but you might have a customer saying, hey, I got three cloud providers. Or I have... Well, exactly, exactly. And I mean, a really good example of this is with our flexible capacity offer, which is part of data center care. You know, that's been a way that we've been able to really present a customer with a cloud-like experience, but on-premise. So they select their hardware configuration and we basically sell it to them as a service. How's that been going? Good. That's been going really, really well. Really, really well. You don't have the latency or security issues of the public cloud, but with our partnership with Azure, we're adding the ability for a customer not only to extend their IT on a page, you go based on-prem, but also through cloud provider-like. Dave and I were talking on the intro, this package, just more in our editorial, was HP's been good at partnering from day one, but also has been a great fast follower. Yes. And integration seems to be the core value right now because customers don't want the rip and replace or throw everything out with the bathwater kind of thing. Yes, I agree. Is that kind of the feeling? It is, and really we're trying to sort of abstract the complexity away, hide the seams away, and a customer will decide to what extent are they interested in managing that complexity themselves or whether they want to partner, and certainly Heeler Packard Enterprise is the place that we have- Alistair, put the bumper sticker on HP Discover this year. What does it say on there? Don't say accelerated next because that's the official tagline. I want some original CUBE alumni thinking here. What's the theme this year, in your words? What's on the bumper sticker this year? Well, for me, I really believe that right mix is the key here. So for hybrid IT, right mix, it's our job to really find that combination for our customers. So that's what I put on my bumper sticker. Great, thanks for coming on. Thanks for sharing your insight. I really appreciate it. You're very welcome. Obviously delivering and putting the solutions together. Really the key growth market right now. Thanks for sharing. I'm John Furrier with Dave Vellante. This is the CUBE. We'll be right back with more live coverage from London after this short break.