 Okay, we're back live inside the Cube, SiliconANGLE.tv's production of HP Discover. This is our flagship telecast. We go out to the events, extract a signal from the noise. SiliconANGLE and Wikibon.org put together an independent research analysis commentary here inside HP Discover, bringing all the signal to you. I'm John Furrier, the founder of SiliconANGLE.com and I'm joining my co-host. I'm Dave Vellante at Wikibon.org and we're here with Subu Ayer, who is the Vice President of Products and Strategy for HP's applications business. Subu, welcome. Thank you. Good to see you again. I heard you guys, you're actually a Cube alum. You've been on before on the mini-Cube, right John? When we did the software launch at the Cupertino and we had one camera logitech connected to my Mac. Wasn't so much the Cube per se, but it was remote coverage Dave and we got the content and we captured it and it was a really good event. It was a blogger influencer blogger event and TopicsX came in and talked about HP software. But we were talking about HP software, software in general within HP. We absolutely believe that HP is a software company, even though that people are not saying that, but you guys do have a great opportunity in software with big data now and you guys have a pre-existing group that you're involved in. So tell us, HP's in the software business, right? Yep. So thanks, thanks. So just kind of going back to the dirty little webcast that John talked about, it was actually a great success for us. John did a great job with the camera which on his laptop and streaming and we got I guess about 12, 15,000 users looking at it. So it was a great success for us. Coming back to HP, so I think software is always going to be important within HP, not just as a separate business unit but also across the company, software is built in every business. Whether it's printers, PCs, whether it's storage, servers, networking, there's a lot of software that's built within those groups. And then HP software itself is an independent business unit as you know and it's going to be really important going forward whether you're talking about cloud, whether you're talking about mobile, whether you're talking about information optimization, big data, whether you're talking about security. So huge opportunities for the company and really where our customers want us to go. So Meg Whitman super said HP's not trying to transform itself into a software company. What is HP trying to do with software? I think a couple of things, as I mentioned, in these areas of cloud, information optimization, big data and security, you'll see there's a lot of transformation happening in the way customers are reshaping their infrastructure, their IT delivery model, their consumption of services and software enables HP to actually provide a differentiator when it's competing in these markets. It provides HP to go back to its customers and sell a solution for these transformation journey that these customers are going after. So let me give you an example. When we talk of the cloud, cloud is about storage and servers and networks and efficiencies, but there's not a lot of software that needs to be built and needs to be there to make all this really seamless and easy for the customers. So what we announced with the Converge Cloud, for example, is really a common architecture across the traditional data center of a customer, whether it's a managed private cloud, whether it's a private cloud or a public cloud, so that as a customer goes through this journey, they can actually seamlessly decide, maybe I want to start with a private cloud, but at some point in time, I want to move that journey over to a public cloud and back and forth. How do you make that seamless? You build a common architecture and you have software that actually helps you get there. So HP is obviously the largest computer company out there. And I think you've said, like the fifth largest software company out there. So it stands to reason that HP has some upside in software. I mean, I've said, John and I have been talking all week, HP could be a big force in software. So it's strategic and it's also going to drive margins and it's going to drive cash flow, which is important. So is there an objective to grow that software business or become the Jack Welch number one, two, or three in your market or is it more? We want software to support our core business. Absolutely, we want to do both, right? I mean, software will definitely play a role in supporting the broader HP businesses, whether it's storage servers, networking, PC printers, but in of itself, software is a growth market, right? Every business in software that we are in, whether it's the applications business, whether it's the operations business, whether it's the security business or information business with the autonomy and vertical acquisitions, they are exploding. There's tremendous growth in applications. There are four times as many mobile apps that will be built as a regular non-mobile app by 2015. So this entire space is exploding. The opportunity is out there. It's a tremendously fast growing market. So there are four businesses, cloud, information optimization, big data, and security. Okay, so security's pretty clear. And cloud is infrastructure software, is that right? Or cloud enablement? It's infrastructure software, it's platform software, it's software as a service, the different layers to basically the cloud challenge. Okay, and information optimization is? Information optimization is about actually providing customers with an easy way to process all the data that is being gathered by the companies right now. The big challenge that companies have is with the big data problem that John mentioned earlier, there's a reams and reams of data that's being collected in from all kinds of channels, whether it's presence, points of presence, whether it's on the web, whether it's your retail, what have you, right? How do you bring all that together? How do you process it? How do you drive intelligent information from it and then actually get back and do something to connect with your customers? So information optimization and big data seem very much related on struggling with the blurriness between those two lines, is that by design? Yeah, it's at the end of the day, I think big data is about actually analyzing the volumes of data, the gigabytes of the terabytes of data and actually driving relevant information from it. So there's one piece to information optimization which is how do you store all this data in an optimized manner? But then the other interesting opportunity is how do you analyze all of that and discover some meaningful information so that you connect with the customers? So one of the things we were talking about yesterday, we talked about the speed issue around business, speed of business is the big buzzword. IT is slow, right? Oh, developers also develop things and in order to be successful developer, you got to break things, things break, you got to debug, code is never one time shot, right? It's always kind of, you guys make tools, make developers' lives easier. But when you talk about the cloud, cloud is an opportunity for IT to faster move their organization with app development infrastructure, all that good stuff, and we talked about the conversion infrastructure. But on software, particularly, what needs to change in the market right now or what's changing in the market today to make software environment for developers go faster? Because IT seems to be slow, you got to call someone up, get stuff provisioned, all the normal stuff. Hardware has always been about ops. And developers just want stuff to work. Yeah, I mean, I think you bring up a good point, John. I mean, it's a traditional battle, in terms of how much do I invest in ongoing operations and management versus how much do I invest in innovation? It's always been the 80-20 rule, which is I put 80% of my budget in keeping ongoing business and ongoing applications and my data center going. I'm 20% in new innovation if I can. I think what's changed, though, is businesses and customers don't want to wait anymore. They want new capabilities, new innovation right now. They cannot wait for 24 months for a new release of an application. They want incremental, monthly, quarterly releases, maybe even weekly releases. It's a huge differentiation for a customer. What specifically are developers focusing in on in terms of tools and languages and whatnot? So I'm coming to that. So I think for the first time, what's happened is, as you mentioned, the cloud offers an opportunity or an alternative to traditional IT. I, as a developer, don't have to wait anymore to say if I need a few machines for testing or building a new application, I can rent that from the public cloud and pay with my credit card, and then when I'm done, I basically disconnect and I'm not paying for that anymore. So it's instant gratification and an alternative that it provides. But it also provides an opportunity for IT to actually look at that and provide some of those similar models internally. So IT can build a private cloud with a set of services, infrastructure as a service, maybe storage as a service, to their internal lines of business. This is DevOps. This is DevOps. This is DevOps. And so we love DevOps. In fact, we just launched a new publication called DevOps Angle. I don't know if you've seen that, but it's early and we know it's early because we had the predictive analytics to know it's a hot trend. We're getting behind that because that's where the cloud is going, right? Rapid development, rapid deployment, buy as you go, outsourcing, nice, cool. The question is, is that, not a lot of people know about DevOps. I was at a presentation giving a keynote to IBM sales executives, and now they're partners executives, and I asked the audience, how many people here have heard of DevOps? Like two hands out of 300. Really? Yeah, it's just like, but they're out in the trenches. They're just out deploying some cloud, but that's new to them. So what is going on with DevOps in your mind? Good and bad and the ugly. What's the good, bad and ugly about DevOps? DevOps is early, right? It's early in its maturity, it's early in its evangelism, it's early in kind of customers actually learning about it, but there's a huge appetite for it because most customers have made the journey to Agile. When they made the journey to Agile, they figured out how to release new innovation, new versions of applications in an incremental fashion. But guess what? They're operations teams which are measured on the uptime of the application, the performance of the application, the security of the application, can't really keep up with the rate of change that's coming down their way. So if I'm a data center operator, my first task is no more changes because change is a risk for me, change is actually contrary to the metrics that matter to me and my job. So DevOps is all about actually speeding up that pipeline of innovation right from the conception of the idea to actually delivering it to the end customer. What are some of the challenges in getting stuff in production? Because you know, obviously there's been all kinds of tools out there, like you mentioned in public cloud, which is really just a way to get stuff up and running, right? And then ultimately you got to move it into production. So the trend right now, and we've seen some on the storage side in particular, you don't want to, you want to get into production as fast as possible because there's a lot of testing that you do mention. What's going on around that relative to the new products that you guys are building? So I think, as I said, DevOps is all about streamlining this pipeline. So we think there are a couple of angles to really make DevOps work in an enterprise. It's about automation, automation and automation, infusing a lot of automation in this process so that you don't rely on manual work. You don't make mistakes when you do this in a repeated fashion. So automation is going to help significantly. So what we just announced with our lab management capabilities with ALM 11.5 is essentially allowing customers to really automate the build verification test process when they're delivering new software in an incremental fashion. Secondly, it's about collaboration. DevOps is about dev and ops. How do you get the two teams to work together and partner and share information? So what we released with Performance Center 11.5 around a capability called Continuous Application Performance Delivery is about sharing those best practices and the knowledge that the operation team has back into development and really making that entire 360 degree feedback loop as productive as possible. So we really think there are two parts to this automation and there's collaboration and sharing of best practices between the two teams. Collaboration is a good point. We talked yesterday. This was the big conversation yesterday was it's not the CIO's problem. It's more of a people problem. DevOps has always been like ops and dev. They don't really like each one. DevOps is what they said. Everything's about no, I don't want to do that. And developers just want to break stuff. So with that, talk about the collaboration. What do you guys have that's cool right now on the collaboration stuff? So I think what we have is really, really exciting. And I think if you haven't seen it, I really encourage you people to look at the product. We've released a capability called enterprise collaboration and it's not just a collaboration for the sake of collaboration like other collaborations software out there. It's actually embedded within the ALM software product. So when you buy ALM, there's enterprise collaboration which is part of it. And the beauty of it is it lets the users delivering an application. We just talked about dev and ops. It's a team sport. There are 15 different stakeholders and 100 different roles and people involved in this. It cannot be done by just one smart developer or a team of three developers. So collaboration, enterprise collaboration, HP Enterprise Collaboration lets you actually work in a collaborative manner across these different stakeholders in context. If you're working on a particular requirement or a new capability for an application, how beautiful is it if you can actually talk to the developer, talk to the business analyst, talk to the tester, talk to the ops guy in the context of that requirement? It's just mind blowing if you see that capability and customers love it. Where does social play into that capability and how does it relate to your big data offering? So social, I mean when I talk about enterprise collaboration it incorporates social elements into it. Getting to talk to people in their environment of choice. If you're kind of in the ALM product using enterprise collaboration, you're talking to the VP of apps who most likely is not going to log into the ALM product but wants to know information or you want to get approval from them. And it's probably using some other form of communication. It's probably on Twitter or Facebook or as an instant messaging or whatever. You can actually provide that information directly to that media of choice that the VP or the executive may have. So social is a huge part of this. We are embedding social in a lot of our products. So Subbu, there was a lot of discussion about HP software business in the last several years and obviously you had a lot of great infrastructure management software that being driven by HP's core enterprise business. And then of course you've made some strategic acquisitions. Obviously the Mercury Interactive, more recently Vertica, now Autonomy. And it seems like those pieces are starting to reshape the HP software strategy. So what in a nutshell is your vision for HP software? Well, I mean I think you talked about it. I think we were basically looking at building a presence and security. So we made a couple of acquisitions, ArcSight, Fortify software and then when we bought 3Com we got TippingPoint which is network security. So we think we now are a pretty strong winner in the security business, in the enterprise security business. But just from a vision perspective, we really think this entire industry is going through a transformation. As a part of their transformation there's a lot of challenge for the customers out there but there's a lot of opportunity to really reform yourself or transform yourself for the next 10 years or the next decade of IT. And HP's vision is actually to help customers make that journey as easy as possible. So we want you to make it easy to build new applications and innovation. We want you to really make it simple to operate your infrastructure, your applications. We want you to make sure that you can really secure all these capabilities. And we want to make sure that you can actually process all the deluge of information and data that's coming out there and drive a valuable information and connect with your customers. That in a nutshell is what HP Software is all about. Excellent. Okay, well, great. Thanks for coming on theCUBE. We're looking forward to seeing you guys back down in Cupertino in your next event. And anytime you want to come on theCUBE I have the Palo Alto studio which I have to get you guys up there for an in-depth drill down on the software because I'm sure there'll be a big data autonomy component in the works. Yeah, thanks a lot guys. So I enjoyed this. I mean, the show has been a great hit. I mean, several customer meetings, a lot of enthusiasm. So thanks a lot. Thank you. Thank you very much. Okay, we're inside theCUBE. We'll be right back with our next guest at this short break.