 From London, England, it's theCube. Covering Discover 2016 London, brought to you by Hewlett Packard Enterprise. Now, here's your hosts, Dave Vellante and Paul Gillis. Welcome back everybody, this is TheCube, the worldwide leader in live tech coverage and we're here at HPE Discover 2016. Wadad Kafta is here, she's the Senior Director of Amia Hybrid Cloud Consulting Business at Hewlett Packard Enterprise. Welcome to TheCube, thanks for coming on. Good morning, thank you for inviting me, thanks. That's our pleasure, so let's get into it, let's talk strategy, consulting, how you're helping companies, what is it that your role is focused on and how does it relate to cloud and hybrid IT and all the sort of buzzwords that we hear about? Yeah, so our mission is to make hybrid IT simple. This is what we tell our customers and you know that the trends are going into the digital transformation, so the digital transformation is a trend that companies cannot ignore anymore. So different verticals are trying to look at this in a different way and trying to find how are they going to start this journey and our role is to advise them and to consult them on this journey to digital transformation and when we talk about digital transformation, of course we are talking about technology, we are talking about cultural shift, we are talking about the end user experience and so on and this is our role. Digital transformation is understood differently, I mean you're responsible for a very large piece of the world and many different cultures and geographies. Is digital transformation understood consistently across these different geographies or do you see it being perceived differently in different parts of your area? This is I think the main challenges that we see here and as a consulting organization, this is the role that we are taking because of how they introduce and how do they explain, how do they understand the digital transformation, it's different from company to company. It's even different within one company, so the CIO understand it differently than the CTO, than the CEO. But at the end, the expectation, everyone wants innovation, wants speed, they want to differentiate themselves, so the business outcome is at the end similar to all of them. The question is how do we interpret the whole digital transformation and how do we take it within our company properly? So help us understand the relationship between digital transformation and hybrid IT or hybrid cloud, what is the relationship there? So when you look to the digital transformation, this is the overall, I would say, let's say, subject. And then you have enabler, so hybrid IT, hybrid cloud, or other subjects like mobility, DevOps, IoT, all those are enabler of the digital transformation. So when we talk about hybrid IT, we talk about technology, we talk about organization processes, and when we talk about DevOps, it's not only we talk about how do you develop your applications, we talk about the cultural shifts, about how developer are developing their thing, how do they work in processes, how do they interact with each other, with other, be used within the company. So it's not anymore about one silo, it's more about the developer are working closely with the application team, working closely with the IT team. So it's a big shift within the culture, so technology, culture, and user experience. Are there any areas of digital transformation where you believe European companies are taking the lead and are out front of the other parts of the world? Yes, within the innovation. So innovation is very much for them on the first priority within this digital transformation. Comparing to the U.S. companies where cultural shift is, for example, more priority than the European companies, yes. Goudad, when you initiate an engagement with a client, and you talk to your customers, typically the CIO or the Chief Digital Officer, where do you start? I presume you have the baseline somewhere. Where are we today with regard to digital transformation, with regard to cloud, hybrid cloud? You presumably start with a baseline. Everybody's all over the place, right? Okay, so after you sort of set that baseline, where do you go next? You mentioned the sort of cultural aspects. Is that where you go? You try to understand the organizational attitudes toward digital transformation and cloud? So what we try to understand is the business of the customer. What do they want to achieve first? And when we understand what are the priorities from the business side, then we can start with what we say like different work streams. As I said before, the whole thing is about different journeys. And each journey is starting from a first point, and then all from another point. And this is where we start then talking to the different C-level at the customer side in order to bring what is the business that they want to achieve? What is the results and the goals? With what we are going to do for them? So we try to then build for them like a roadmap so that they know that at the end, what we are going to achieve is going to achieve the business result that they are expecting. So the easy part of that is all, if you're a commercial business, you want to make more revenue and less cost, so you make more profit. Okay, but at the how is very complicated. Yes, of course. And very different obviously by different industries. And that's when you get into sort of where you prioritize, where the term low hanging fruit. But there's also the risk factors. How much discussion do you have on exit strategies? We maybe start this way, but we want to have the flexibility to have alternatives in case this was not the right strategy. Is that a big part of the discussion? Do you risk it? It is part of the discussion, of course. It is part of the discussion. It is always a joint effort between us and the company. And when we talk about the company, it's also the different efforts between the different be used within the company. So when we build it, it's not about building it for us. It's building them for them. And it's about them to be identified about this. So H1 needs to understand that this is my commitment to this journey and this is what I will then bring to it and this is what I will get out of it from this. And if we have the alignment and we have this commitment from all of them, then it is at the end the right way to do. And of course, it's a process. It's process. It's changing today. If there is a change in the organization within the company, then the process could change because priorities of the companies are changing within the next step. There are some trends coming. There are some facts are coming and so on. So it is changing. How do I engage with you? Is it a Hewlett Packard Enterprise as a service? Is it an engagement of some end number of weeks or months? What's the typical framework? So we engage through workshops. So this is like a tool that we use to engage with the customer. We have like we discover workshops, transformation workshops. And with that, then we continue. What is the next step after the workshops? It could be that we go the, let's say the way of a technology. So we start to do a POCs. We start to do pilots. It could be that we go another way. Then we do another type of engagement. So when we talk about the transformation, it's something which is going not only two months, three months. It is a non-stop engagement. It could be years. So when we work with customers on transformations, it is a partnership that helps both companies grow together. And when we say grow, it means that we benefit from each other from this partnership. I want to go back to something you said earlier about European countries being leaders in innovation. An area that many people say Silicon Valley is the global innovation leader. Are there examples you can cite of companies or governments that are doing remarkably innovative things right now? Yeah, there are, for example, in the service providers, there is a lot of innovation within Europe. In the financial sector, also the financial sector in Europe is trying to adopt a lot of innovation. Even if some of them, they are still a conservative company, but they are adapting it much faster than the US companies. Of course, the challenge in Europe is that we do not communicate it very, very properly. Many customers are doing amazing things. Governments are doing amazing things. But the communication of how do I do it? How am I promoting my new innovative product services is not coming as strong as in the US? How about things like, you know, pick two big themes in the markets in the US that we hear about our Brexit and the US election. What's the attitude here? How is that affecting strategies? Is it a strategy sort of occurring independent of Brexit on the US election or are they starting to actually consider those? They are starting to consider it. This is part of what I said. There is always, it's a process. It is a way to adopt the whole roadmap, let's say, and the process to digital transformation. So those are external facts that are impacting. So the customers also need to look at it and take it into consideration. They cannot ignore it. So how does it manifest itself in terms of strategies? I mean, both examples. I mean, you would, certainly Brexit is more nationalistic in its outcome, at least presumably. And one would expect the US election. It seems to be more nationalistic themes of being drawn, those two examples of maybe it's not xenophobia, but many think it might be. How does that affect strategies? So each external influence or external factor is affecting the strategy of the company. It is somehow that could be that there is a change in the behavior, how the user is consuming their services. For example, look at the financial sector in the UK. So there is an impact. So the companies need to react on this. And this is where they need them to think about what is the impact on my strategy? How do I make sure that I am mitigating the risk of such an external factor into my strategy? What do you do into brand HPE in your region with digital transformation? So mainly as a consulting organization, mainly it's the discussion directly with the customer. So it is about how we show them our skills, capabilities and experience in this area and how we build trust and partnership with the customer on those. And this is where extremely, extremely the C level appreciate this experience from other verticals, the experience from other companies in the same vertical. And they want to learn how we do it with the others. So that's why this is how we promote ourselves. In the US, I think HPE has historically been associated with being a technology provider, not a strategic partner as much as outside of the technology space. How is HPE perceived in your region? Also a technology company. We are a technology company, but the technology company also understands how the other factors are impacting the technology. So when we talk again with customers about how the technology changing the way how the user are consuming their services, how the user are using their product. So this is where how HPE is then coming into the discussion with the customers. I'd like to better understand again, coming back to some of the ways in which you engage. If I'm a chief digital officer or CIO and I'm engaging with you at Packard Enterprise for this kind of transformation consulting services, who do I need to bring to the table for these workshops? Who do I need to corral in my organization? So of course the CTO, the CIO and some of their business units leader. And then again, as I said, it depends on the business outcome they want to achieve. Then we can think about who are also the key stakeholders that will influence the agenda. And then we bring those together. I can give you an example. For example, there is currently workshop running with a large service provider. And their priority is IoT. So we bring the people, everyone who has to do with the IoT, we bring the people also who has to do with the technology because some of the recommendations that we are giving is that how do you want to achieve IoT if you do not have the right platform in this? So the hybrid cloud or the data center lead is interested to understand what is my contribution in bringing the IoT into the company. And he wants to be part and should be part of this discussion. And you're doing some upfront work prior to the workshop. Yes, of course. Interviewing these people, gathering data. And then when you present at the workshops, you're presenting the results of those findings or it's more of a collaborative effort with their presenting, your presenting? It's a collaborative. So they need to identify themselves as part of the results. Another regional question is, because it interests me, you're from Croatia originally? Yes, I'm Croatian-French, yes. I think there's, in my country, there is very little understanding of the former Soviet economies which of those countries really are the technology, the business leaders, the countries that we should be watching most closely. Can you give us some perspective on that? So in the emerging countries, they are ramping up very, very quickly. The challenge is that they are not very powerful financially. But they have extreme, extreme good technical people, if we say experts, due to the fact that the education sector was very strong for many years. So they have the capability, they have the capacity, but they do not have the financial power in order to ramp up very quickly like West Europe. Okay, and then the last question, sort of given all these geopolitical issues that are going on, we mentioned Brexit, U.S. election, other factors in the world, yet you still seem optimistic about the continent. Yes, I'm very optimistic, yes. What makes you confident? The passion, the passion on what's coming next. I like very much all the trends coming. It is something which makes me very, I would say, busy in learning new things, in trying to find out what makes different. So for me, it's not about making things differently, it's really about to differentiate things from the past. This is extremely very good. Thank you very much. We'll leave it there. Wadad Kafka, thanks very much for coming in the queue. You're welcome. Thank you very much. Thank you. All right, keep right there, everybody. We'll be back with our next guest. We're live from the Excel Center, the docklands of London. Right back.