 From London, England, it's theCUBE. Covering Discover 2016 London. Brought to you by Hewlett Packard Enterprise. Now, here's your host, Dave Vellante and Paul Gillis. Welcome back to London, everybody. We're here on the banks of the Thames River. This is theCUBE, the worldwide leader in live tech coverage, HPE Discover 2016 in London. Probably about 10,000 people here, milling about kicking the things on the floor, checking out these amazing, I don't know really what they are, but we're seeing all kinds of IOT action going on the floor and Duncan Campbell is here. He's responsible for the IOT ecosystem and partner management at Hewlett Packard Enterprise. Duncan, good to see you again. Great to see you both. New role for you, new role for HPE. Absolutely. Tell us about it. Yeah, you bet. So my previous time in alliances was time well spent because right now I'm all about the IOT ecosystem. And one of the things that we've learned in IOT is no one can go alone. And so it's really incumbent upon us how to use those partnering skills and really how to bring together that full ecosystem for IOT. So why HPE, why now? I mean, the types of partners, we were talking off camera, usually you sell the CIOs, IT directors, IT management, whole different ballgame here. What are you learning? Why is HPE successful? Why should we believe they'll be successful there? Yeah, you bet. So one of the things that is so interesting about IOT, it's a big industry, depending on which analysts you talk to, you know it's big, it's growing. You talk to IDC, they're talking about 1.47 trillion dollars by 2020, big, growing fast. So there's a lot of excitement in people trying to figure out, okay, well, what is this? But the industry's learning. And from our standpoint, really one of the areas that's really driving this is actually industrial IOT. So the people that have been in the business making like jet turbines, locomotives, different high value assets, they see the benefits immediately of IOT. And it's one of these things, you're either going to figure out ways to save money or ways to make money. Last month, there was a big distributed denial of service attack involving mainly webcams and certainly brought attention to the security issues that are inherent in arming all of these devices with internet access. Has the conversation changed? Has the security issue become more prominent in the discussions you're having with partners? And is this an impediment to broader adoption of IOT? Yeah, yeah, so one of the things that was interesting for those of us who are downtown London coming on out on the Tube and the DLR. Cameras everywhere. Yeah, cameras everywhere. So you go by the new financial district in London and that is one of the areas that has probably the most cameras doing facial recognition, security type of identification. So the answer to your question, that actually is one of our key use cases that a lot of specific cities and countries are very concerned about. Great actual use case for IOT. And from our standpoint, it's really exciting because people are learning. It really brings to bear some of our foundational IOT assets with our Aruba family. It's really kind of, I would say kind of at ground zero for us for IOT. They're all about the intelligent edge, but they also have these beacon technologies for kind of location-based services that are really fundamental to your point around security and surveillance, things like that. Yeah, so I mean, that was an interesting example. Basically it was a college kiddie script. People were using to attack DVRs and internet cameras. So I guess the question is, it's a two-edge sword. I think Duncan, what you're saying is, you can help with security, but the flip side of that is it increases your threat matrix. So how, in your conversations with partners and customers, how are they dealing with that challenge? Yeah, yeah. So part of this is, to your point, is people are learning. And one of the things that we have is part of our IOT program. We got a really awesome CTO office. So we have some people who go very deep in terms of the reference architecture, very deep in terms of the partners that actually have credibility and experience both by vertical and by use case. And one of the things we've learned in IOT, which is so important in a new market, you got to really kind of go to market both by vertical and by use case. Who are some of the players that you're sort of interacting with now? Some of the new alliance partners that you're entertaining or engaging with? Yeah, so some of these are household names and some of them are new names. So a great example for us would be people like PTC and National Instruments. So that's a great example of an ecosystem as well on the show floor. And you guys are in the perfect spot here because you are in the IOT zone. We got connected cars. We got pump demos. We have a wind farm. So I mean, it's just a blast being on the show floor right now. But good examples, like I said, PTC, National Instruments, we're doing something with a pump flow demo there, kind of as I mentioned, industrial IOT. Another great example is GE. And we're doing some fabulous things with them on a partnership demo. This is GE Digital, which makes the pre-dix family of software offerings. And then, of course, that allows us to open doors in terms of some of the different OT opportunities there, whether it's in locomotives, jet engines, things like that. And then you have other great examples like around power and energy management like with Schneider, who's here and one of our sponsors. And again, they're very skilled in terms of the whole energy management, power management. And actually, they're pretty strategic in terms of the convergence of both IT and OT as well. You hear a lot about demos of IOT. You don't hear a lot about real field practice. Are you seeing, and we're still in an early stage market, are you seeing examples or can you cite examples of companies that are doing things with IOT in the field right now, particularly industrial IOT that really are paying back dividends? Yeah, yeah, you bet. So example, yeah, it's a lot of excitement, a lot of demos, but in fact now what we're seeing is industrial IOT kind of leading the way. A good example would be somebody like Airbus, where one of the key use cases we have is around your predictive maintenance. So instead of pulling a high value asset out of circulation, out of making revenue, you kind of pull it out with doing it smartly based on where the actually asset has been actually, we have the type of sensors and information that says, yeah, now is time based on the usage model or something getting fatigued. So Airbus is a great example of Rio Tinto for mining like with self-driving vehicles. And that's also a very, you'll see on the show for both connected cars and connected vehicles as something that's very important, both not just from a cost, but from a safety standpoint as well. One of the things in the conversation with cloud, if I go back a couple of years, and it still continues today, but a big conversation was around sort of where you could put the data, regulations were here in Europe. Germany was always an example where you had to be very careful about where the data was. And so my question is with regard to IoT, of course, you see Brexit happening now, you're seeing more nationalistic sort of trends, but with IoT, that data location, I mean, how do you control that? I mean, with the cloud, you say, well, the data center's in Germany or it's not, so you have to make sure that with IoT, data is totally distributed. Is that a discussion in terms of regulation? Compliance seems like it would be a nightmare. Give us the update. No, no, very savvy question. So one of the things that we've done, and actually is one of our, I think our key focus areas is around the intelligent edge. And that has benefits to your point, to your question on multiple fronts. So one is you actually, you do the computation and you get the analytics actually right on the edge, right kind of where that high value asset is. So you're not moving data around to the cloud in every case. So there's performance cost benefits for doing that. And there's also compliance reasons for that as well. So you're only sending up to the cloud the information that's required. But some of the, then there are some specific examples like in financial services and healthcare, where actually you do need to be resonant to a specific country and domain. So in that particular case, you may not go to a cloud. You may go do something on premise for regulatory and compliance type of reasons, but what you need then is the type of architecture that HPE has and we're going to excel at, which is really kind of a hybrid architecture. So you actually have a focus on the edge and then a focus on the core, which is kind of the cloud to your point. Is there any debate anymore though over the importance of having intelligence at the edge? I mean, it's not really practical to send all of that data back to a cloud or a data center, is it? Well, you'd be surprised. So I would say that people are still coming to grips with that. But I think, especially on the industrial IoT, people get that. So I think they are over that. So you talk to some of our customers here, like ABB, Bosch, you know, these type of folks here, they totally get that. But there are big implications of that. You're talking about, we've spent the last five years re-centralizing IT and now we're talking about massively distributing it again with all of the control and the security issues that are involved there. I mean, are we going back to decentralized IT? Well, it's maybe in a new way and it's maybe with some, hopefully some greater intelligence and maybe a few more gray hairs to go with that. So from our standpoint, yeah, I think it is more distributed but with the lessons learned. And actually your cloud example is quite good. This has some similarities in terms of an industry that's learning, like what cloud was all about, the right mix of the app and the workload. Similar here, it's like finding those right use cases, having the right architecture with the right security. And actually the security piece is pretty key because it's so important to authenticate, okay, this is coming at you from the queue. And so we know that you've been authenticated and so we want to make sure to get all that information out. And it's also important in terms of how people may want to hack the device. So security as a consideration upfront is very, very key. And that's why we need actually different partners from the security standpoint, both within the older HPE and the new world. And that's why the partner ecosystem is so key. Who's going to crack that nut? Is it going to be the device makers, the partners, the channel partners? Is it going to be companies like yours? Is it going to be industry standards? The whole security problem. Yeah, yeah. So a lot of that is working on kind of what's been, what the industry has learned and what's been proven. So from our standpoint, there's a lot of work both in the standards community and the ecosystem. And that's from our standpoint, again, when I think about IoT, no one can go alone. It's really bringing in the experts, the cream of the crop that we have right here and discover whether, again, it's like, you guys guys like OSI soft, you have all sorts of security and analytic experts we want to bring in to the overall IoT stack. I wanted to sort of follow up on something that Paul said, you know, you're right, there was this sort of recentralization of IoT, but I feel like Hadoop sort of broke that model because it's all about, you know, shipping compute to the data and leaving the data where it is, and it seems like IoT continues that trend. But, and I wanted to come back to the spin merge with the software group. One of the things that's getting spun out is Vertica, which is big data and analytics. And so as we talk about all these analytics, is that a gap now in the portfolio? Do you have to partner to fill that gap? Of course, you're still friendly with Vertica. What are your thoughts there? Indeed, yeah, so I think the spin merge is something that actually opens us up to be easier to partner with. Now, specifically to Vertica itself, that is a real key asset for us in terms of the real-time analytics, especially in the core and the data center where it's a perfect fit. We are looking for more type of analytics for people who excel at the edge. So a good example is like this, as I mentioned, like in Texas, since we have our IoT innovation center in Houston, we actually have some key leading edge, like ISV analytic guys who come to the innovation center. We have one in Grenovo, we'll also one in Singapore and India to actually test out their analytics software at the edge. Good one is like Lone Star. So they actually have analytics for oil and gas at the edge. And that's a great example. But for the spin merge, we're actually easier to partner with. And from our standpoint, we want to have not just the most, but the right partners as part of the ecosystem. You mentioned off camera, the IoT hub. I know you wanted to give that a plug. What is that all about? You bet, okay, my favorite topic. So the IoT partner hub is a new sales enablement tool we have. It's all about speeding up the sales cycle and in fact, featuring our partners to giving them more business opportunities. So when you think about the whole IoT stack, it's saying, okay, I have a fleet management opportunity in Washington, DC, okay, who has the right services? As I mentioned, both systems integration partners are key, like Accenture, Deloitte, KPMG and CAP and Techman are great examples in TCS. Okay, we bring them in. They have a validated type of practice there. Okay, then we need, okay, who has the use case software to do fleet management? We go and say, okay, in the partner hub, we attract them in. So if you're an end user rep, you say, I got this deal, what is the partner ecosystem I need? And so we have this incredible tool that actually pulls in partners based on their vertical expertise and their use case. And then we do that matching, give them business opportunities and allow everybody to accelerate and to deliver business outcomes. So it's a marketplace of sorts or is it more of a market map? It starts out more as a kind of a market map and it's going to be both a marketplace. It's going to be a matchmaking service, a tender for IoT. Exactly, exactly. We are in fact, we are doing the type of matchmaking initially. But it really, where it starts to get very interesting is where you start to pull in different type of ecosystems, like from farm to table. You can think about that. And what also this model does, it actually allows co-creation too. So when you actually say, okay, I'm going to have something I just want for myself because that's my own intellectual property. Or you can say, I'm interested in co-creation and going a little deeper and innovating within that partner hub. So it's totally cool. Can you give us any preview of tomorrow? Tomorrow's general session is going to be devoted to IoT? Yes. Can you give us a preview of anything new we're going to learn about there? Is there going to be something exciting? Yeah, I would say tomorrow you're going to get some real deep type of insights on the edge, on why that's important and really our focus there from an HPE standpoint. And we're going to announce some new partnerships there as well. And so it's just going to be a very target-rich area for us. It's going to be where we want to excel and lead. So you've mentioned some of the demos around the floor. There was, I think, a national instruments demo that I saw, I've taken pictures of it. I had no idea what it was. I didn't have time to stop. But what's the buzz in the floor? What are people saying about some of these demos? We're in the IoT zone? What are you doing? Well, yeah, to your point. I mean, the buzz is getting to the point where people say, A, it's similar in CloudOK. I'm starting to get it. How do I get started? And what is the POC that we need to define? And one of the things that we have here that we're actually really helping define these demos, is that we have a reference architecture that really then allows and gives more definition and more confidence to our customers how to create these solutions to deliver those business outcomes. All right, Duncan Campbell, we got to leave it there. Thank you for helping us authenticate the signal from the noise. This is theCUBE. We're live from HPE Discover. Great to see you again. Great pleasure. All right, we're right back right after this short break.