 Okay, we're back. This is Dave Vellante, and we're live from HP Discover. This is day two for theCUBE, day three for HP Discover. Yesterday we heard Meg Whitman give her great keynote today. Dave Donatelli was up on stage. We had Dave Donatelli yesterday on theCUBE. A lot of action on cloud. Meg Whitman gave a lot of love to cloud. I was happy to see that. It was really a good, strong enterprise message. And we're here with Pete Johnson, who works in the cloud organization. Developer experience is really your main focus. It's, you're the public cloud side of HP's cloud strategy. So it makes sense that you're trying to reach out to developers. I set off camera, that's where all the action is. Well, certainly that's where all the action was at the beginning of cloud, right? It was the developer audience that really was going after that. But so first of all, welcome to theCUBE. Thanks. Thanks for coming on. So yeah, so let's start with HP's cloud strategy. A lot of people don't really haven't, you know, heard about it, don't fully understand it. So why don't we start with that? What is HP's cloud strategy? So the idea and what we've, the tagline we've given into it is converge cloud. And fundamentally what it's about is choice. So the diagram that typically gets put up on the far left is like the dedicated, traditional, on-premise hosted experience. And you might be running some private cloud software on that to help increase your utility that you have there. In the middle you might have what we call the manage cloud, where it's not on your premise, it's in an HP Trade Data Center somewhere, and you might have some private cloud there to help with your deployments and utility there. And on the far right is typically we see us, the public cloud, where if you're a smaller house or an SMB or an individual developer, you might be exclusively on that HP cloud, but for bigger businesses that already have private cloud in either of those other two situations, you might need to burst in certain situations to public cloud to get some temporary capacity for your compute. Okay, so now you guys launched the converge cloud when? The converge cloud message has been about a month or two old. Yeah, okay. So talk about the go to market for that. How do you engage with customers and where do you guys fit? Well, the public cloud part of it, there's kind of two parts to that. We're talking off camera about this a little bit. The two pawns that public cloud tries to keep in, we want to try to impress the IT manager while also impressing the kid in the Stanford dorm who's inventing the next four square. So, we have a presence here at Discover to try to impress that traditional IT guy who is going to fit more in that converge cloud with the bursting kind of scenario. We have a presence at South by Southwest as well. We're trying to engage with those individual developers. So Amazon got it all started. I don't know what was it, 2004, 2006, somewhere in there, with EC2 and then S3 for their object store. So a lot of people say, okay, that's great. Developers, no problem, spin it up. It's easy for a developer, it's fast. But a lot of people aren't developers, number one, number two. A lot of enterprises that we talk to say, well, that's great, but the SLAs aren't what we want. Sure. They have other concerns like, can we go in and audit Amazon? Metrics, SLAs. What's a security incident? Can we get them to report based on our corporate edicts? How frequently they report? What about geographic placement of data? Can we control that? And you know the answer. The answer, if you're an Amazon customer is, well, here's the agreement. If you want it, use it. If you have a problem, email us and good luck. And that's cool. That worked, it's growing like crazy. But it's not appropriate for many enterprises. I presume that your strategy is to fill that void, is that right? You just did a great commercial for what we're about, basically, yeah. I mean, as a company, we've been building data centers as long as there's been such a thing as data centers. We've been working with Global 2000 accounts for many, many years. We understand what their needs are, their needs, and a lot of times are very similar to what our own internal needs are. And it's exactly the script that you just wrote up. We feel like there's plenty of space out there to play in the public cloud and that there's some things missing in that ecosystem today that we can fill based on our experience with those enterprise accounts. Okay, so obviously the other thing I want us to pay as we go, I want to pay by the drink. I don't want upfront capex. I don't want to pay maintenance, big licenses. I want to be locked in. You're obviously addressing that problem. So yeah, like the lock-in is actually a pretty big one for us. And one of the reasons why we chose OpenStack for our underlying software infrastructure. So if you're not familiar with OpenStack, it's an open-source software initiative initially founded by NASA and friends at Rackspace. But now includes many dozens of companies. HP is the Dell, obviously. We're the third largest contributor right now in terms of number of developers to OpenStack. Very involved in the roadmap process. In terms of HP's contribution to the open-source platform. In terms of number of heads, yes. So you're active contributors there. We are active contributors and committers, very active. The way that OpenStack releases work, as you may know, is those happen every six months to kick off a new development cycle. There's always a conference. The one recently last month in San Francisco for the full summer release that's in development now that we're actively contributing to. So one of the challenges that I think people have is squinting through the marketing, right? So Larry Ellison says the Oracle Public Cloud is open, right? And he does a very compelling narrative on why they're more open than Salesforce, you know? And you're sort of left scratching your head, saying, wow, everybody's open, I guess. So what is really open? So why is HP more open than the other guy? Well, the key part of the OpenStack play as it relates to us is something that Donatelli talked about in the keynote this morning. Nobody's out there saying, please lock me in. I want to start using you and I never want you to let me go. Jack up my maintenance and that. I mean, for Public Cloud, really, where your experience begins is at that REST API. Most people never see that. I've worked with that every day, given the job that I'm doing. But the OpenStack APIs are the same across all OpenStack vendors. So in that case, if you build your infrastructure and your software tools based on that API, you start off with us, you might choose to go somewhere else for a while and maybe come back, but because all the APIs are the same, you're not going to be locked into that. So to us, that's what that Open really means. Peter, is OpenStack ready for primetime? Well, we certainly, it's certainly getting there. There are parts of it that are more advanced than others, obviously. But yeah, we're placing major resources on that ourselves and we like where it's going. So when you're Open Cloud, your Public Cloud, what are you doing for an object store? Is it Swift? It is Swift, yes. So what if, I don't even know if I can do this, but let's say, for whatever reason, I don't want to use Swift. I want to use Nevonix or some other object store. Can I do that? Well, from a REST API perspective, that kind of veers away from what we see as being open. But what you would be able to do is go to any other vendor, like our friends at Rockspace, that are also using OpenStack. That REST API for Swift, the REST API for Swift is the REST API for Swift, regardless of who the vendor is. So that's what I mean by Open. Now there are, we don't happen to have compatibility API for Swift, but on the Nova, for the compute part of that, there is an EC2 compatibility API to help ease that burden of folks moving back and forth for that as well. Right, so, but OpenStack is the fundamental strategy. But OpenStack is the fundamental strategy of what we're doing, folks, yes. And I guess, Rackspace was sort of a controlling entity for a while, and now it's handed it to the community about six months ago, and that was a big move. Yeah, it was a very big move, and I think the benefit that they've received out of it is now they have a much bigger community of folks that are actively contributing to it. So you see a much bigger diversity in the number of projects that are being worked on, and a much larger number of areas, like things like network as a service, load balance as a service, other things that the initial OpenStack offering didn't have. And the developer community is gaga over OpenStack, you have to say. I mean, when you go to these OpenStack events, the developer community is there in force, they get their t-shirts on, and you know, there's this real momentum, and that's obviously developers are a leading indicator of adoption. So that's a key point of it. So what specifically is HP doing to reach out to developers? What's that, you know, what are you doing to foster that whole developer experience? So part of that, and what the team I'm on focuses on, is making that experience for developers what they would want. Big part of our team that sits basically on top of those REST APIs to create the customer experience. So for us, what my team works on is the web experience, the command line interfaces, the language bindings. The hiring we did for that, is we brought a ton of people from the outside that were working at smaller shops, doing their own thing on rails, with PHP and so forth, and brought them in and said, build this to impress your friends. Build this for what it is you would want it to be. If you go to hpcloud.com today, you're going to find an experience that's very different than what you see on other HP properties. That's very intentional, that we're trying to focus that in a way that's very easy to consume for that front end developer who might be running his own shop or hanging out a shingle. What's the URL? It's hpcloud.com. HPcloud.com, I don't have a key in it if you can go there, but I'm going to go there now and see. So you're saying it's a different experience from the standpoint of? It is, it looks very different from what you'd find on hp.com. It's complementary to what you would find on hp.com, but has a very different look and feel, and that's intentional. Yeah, it's got an HP logo, and that's about it, right? I mean, this is our product to most people. I mean, we don't ship something a box, put something a box and ship it to your home. When you use our product, this is your first entry into it. Using this and the command line interfaces, and like I said, the language bindings that you use to access the various services. Okay, so you've got a public beta, you can go sign up for that. You've got HP compute, a cloud compute, you've got the object store, you got a CDN, you got block storage. Okay, so, yeah, so there's an elastic block service analog within SWIFT, I mean, within OpenStack? Within OpenStack, yeah. What is that called? Right now, it's formally part of NOVA. They're talking about splitting it out as a separate project, at least that was a heated debate at the last OpenStack discussion. Yeah, and I know some of the SSD guys that was talking to SolidFire guys, I don't know if you know them, they're a startup in the SSD space. They were obviously one of the ones pushing for that, and wanting to contribute. Of course, they're startups, they don't have a lot of resources for that. Sure, but yeah, there's healthy debate about that at the first ones. Why wouldn't you break that out of NOVA? What was the essence of that debate? I mean, I don't want to get too academic about it, but I'm just trying to understand the merits. My job starts at that REST API, I'm not to... You don't care. I'm not super involved in some of those underlying things. We have people that can answer that question. But as a person providing an offering, I would think you'd want that. I mean, I guess you do have it, okay? Yeah, we do have it, it's a matter of, is you formally part of the NOVA project or does it spin off as a... So you package it as a separate offering, so you can price it out separately. That's really all you care about, right? Okay, and there may be some capabilities if it is separated out. And you've got relational database from MySQL and identity services, what's the security in the cloud? So identity services that's based on the OpenStack Keystone project, which is itself a separate thing. And that's the authentication and authorization that ties together all the other services. Early in the days of OpenStack, because the compute and the object storage came from different places, you had to authenticate separately with each service. Keystone makes it so that you log in to Keystone and then all the other services you can then begin to work with. So I would expect, so this is great, it is a much different website. It's nice, it's clean, it's also early. You can tell it's early and I would expect that the amount of function that you're going to deliver here is going to explode in the next 18 months. Talk about that a little bit, what can we expect? Well yeah, so you've probably seen the partner slides that we have that show the very rich set of partner ecosystem that we've developed. We feel like in this marketplace to let both enterprises and small businesses pick what it is they want out of a cloud system, you can't do it by yourself. You have to do it with your partners. So that plus the different infrastructures and service offerings we all have, the different platform as a service offerings we'll have, they'll all get incorporated into the website and in a marketplace offering that we're going to talk about later in the year. But yeah, so I mean we have some information architecture stuff to still work on as we go from having six services to 26 services. But what we strive for is a clean looking feel like what you're looking at there on your laptop, something that speaks to developers who care about that kind of stuff, right? Are you hearing a lot about DevOps from your developer community? The whole concept of bringing operations and development together? Yeah, we hear some of that. I would expect to hear more as this market continues to mature though. Yeah, I would think so. I mean that seems to be, you know, it's like the web giants lead the enterprise right by five or seven years, whatever it is. Absolutely, yeah. They're all sort of hopping on the DevOps bandwagon and showing hyper productivity results, you know? And so, good. So okay, you announced three months ago you said, so where are you in terms of delivery? Are you actually delivering today? So we started a private beta with the public cloud last summer. We just announced public beta earlier this month. And two of the services, the MySQL's a service, that's our first pass offering. That's in private beta as is the block storage. Okay, so at what point, so it's in private beta, what point will I be able to swipe a credit card and start buying these services? You can swipe a credit card and start buying services today. So okay, great. So it's a live product. It's a live product, I mean, like I said, which is really geared for developers. The label right now is public beta, but yeah, and we have discount pricing right now, given that we are in public beta, but you can swipe a credit card, start to use it and get tried for it right now. Early adopter pricing, great. Exactly. Good. All right Pete, well thanks very much for coming inside theCUBE. Thanks for having me. Sharing your perspectives with us. This is HP Discover, this is theCUBE. I'm Dave Vellante of Wikibon.org, we're live. Keep it right there, we'll be right back. We've got a number of guests coming up. We'll be here all day tomorrow. Keep it right there.