 Live from the FIIA Barcelona Grand Villa Compensator in Barcelona, Spain. It's The Cube at HP Discover Barcelona 2014. Brought to you by headline sponsor HP. Welcome back to Barcelona, everybody. This is The Cube. We've been here now for two days. We're going wall-to-wall coverage for three days here at HP Discover. And this is our, I can't even keep track of any more HP Discover, documenting the turnaround of HP. We're going to talk about information management. David Jones is here. He's the senior vice president of that group. And he's joined with Scott Baker, who is in the product side. Gentlemen, welcome to The Cube. Thanks for coming. Thank you, thanks for having us. David, good to see you again. Scott, I think this is your first time on. It is, absolutely. It's great. So, David, I wonder if you could set up the organization. We just had Colin Mahoney on. And he was talking about the balance sheet. Data used to be that data was looked at information as a pure liability. The general counsel said, oh, we got to delete the data. It's expensive to keep. And all of a sudden, this big data meme hits and the bit flips. But you still have that tension in organizations. And that's really kind of what you guys are all about. It's helping customers manage that. So I wonder if you could just describe the organization and the mission. Sure, sure. We talk about it in really two parts. It's all part of the Big Data Solutions Group. So at HP, our belief is that Big Data is more than analytics. And analytics is what everybody's talking about. It's sort of the sex that gets everybody into the conversation. But honestly, if you think about the problems with Big Data, they really start with how do you gather it? How do you manage it? How do you access it? How do you keep it secure? Without that taken care of, everything else that happens upstream is really not going to amount to much. And so what we do in the Big Data Solutions Group is work on the information management and governance aspect of it. So part of it is managing and keeping that secure. That's the information management component. And part of it is how are you compliant? How, if you have legal issues, how do you mitigate those legal issues? How do you mitigate risk in the organization? So there's two pieces of it. Yeah, so there's tension there, right? Because in the one hand, I want to keep everything if I'm a Big Data guy, because I want to analyze it, get insights, and act on it. On the other hand, if I'm a general counsel, I want to delete everything. I don't get sued. So what are you guys doing? What are the conversations like with customers these days? Well, I mean, your point is a very good one, right? Is that it really, it's different within the organization and it's different between organizations, right? So a law firm is going to be very different from a financial services firm. That's going to be very different from, you know, an auto manufacturer, a drug, retail, you know, whatever it might be. So, you know, what we look at and really what we bring to it is policy. Policy based on information, not metadata, but truly the information itself. That's what we do that's different than anybody else. When you're talking about policy, we believe you really need to get down and understand at an intimate level the information that's contained within it. Because that's the only way that you can really make good decisions, and policies are decisions that are made, which you have to be able to abstract those. And you have to abstract it at the information level. And that's what we do that's different. And we do it on the information management side. So backup, archiving, how long do I keep it? What do I manage as a record? What are my deletion policies around it? And then how do I prepare for inevitable, you know, litigation that might happen? And if that happens, you know, how do I produce the evidence in a way that is, you know, friendly to the courts? David, you made an emphasis, not metadata. Talk about the data. The data itself. It's not metadata. Well, I mean, metadata is helpful, right? But metadata really doesn't tell you what's inside the information. And it's not going to give you, it's going to give you basic information. You know, who owns it? When was it created? When was it modified? What are the size? What's the, you know, what's the format or the structure of the data? So it gives you lots of information. But that doesn't really tell you, you know, what is my risk in this information? Or, you know, is the information actually active related to things I'm working on, even though I haven't access to it in a while? Do I want to keep it around in an active data set? Or can I take it and I push it off into an archival? You got to crack into the data. You really need to understand the data itself, the information. And that's what we do that's different. We do understand the metadata. But we believe you really need, and we'll let you set policy around it. But we really believe you've got to go deeper than that. And it's the information content itself. It really is, is the heritage, you know, much of this is the heritage of, you know, the autonomy acquisition with idle, and then together with Vertica and the Haven platform. You know, that's sort of the guts. That's the, you know, the secrets of the foundation, and with the foundation, which it's built. Because between those two, you cover all the different data types, and you have very rich analytics capability. So Scott, I wonder if we could talk about the product portfolio. Sure thing. In the group, and anything specific at the show, this week at the show. All right, so, you know, building on what David just shared with you, the focus for us is really all that information. So I think the big data itself, the way that it was defined in the market initially, is really shifting. Because all data to me is big. Just as you said, there's this dichotomy between do I keep everything, or do I delete everything to prevent myself from risk. So at the show, we're really focused on three specific products. There's the core backup protection and recovery solution that we have, the data protector, that's all built around the analytics phase. We believe in the market, there's a ton of backup solutions that are out there. But no one is really focused on how you analyze that environment. So how do you take the information that's occurring on a day-to-day basis? You have hindsight so that you can resolve issues very quickly, give you a very dynamic sort of view, or real-time view of the information from plugins and extensions that we offer to things like HP Operations Manager, Microsoft SCON, interfaces themselves. And then how do you use that same information and capabilities of the underlying infrastructure to do forecasting and trending? For example, if I bring on a new workload, where's the best place for it to fit on my physical infrastructure? Before you just throw it in blindly and then find problems later on. So as we look at that analysis piece and we think about the records management and the overall use of the information, we wanted to extend that to our end users. So one of the other products that we're releasing or talking about here at Discover is our HP Connected MX product line. This is for the endpoint-based or mobility or mobile information management platforms. So it's based on top of our endpoint-based backup solution HP Connected, and we've enhanced that and extended it so that the focus is now on dealing with information that is truly mobile. From the laptop back to the core data center, how it may be synchronized to a cell phone or a tablet, and then how that might be shared with individuals within or outside of an organization. The focus is really about delivering solutions to the enterprise that allow them to analyze the overall backup recovery, the future needs of that particular piece of information based on the individual components that make up that file. Okay, did I miss one? So I got the backup piece, which is data protector. You got this HP Connected MX. That's correct. And the third? You said three. LiveVol. It's liveVol. Okay, right. Also server data protection. Maybe just to pick up on a point that Scott was making about Connected MX is a good example of how we use information, not metadata, but information to make decisions. So Connected MX is the next version of a product that's been in market for a while called HP Connected. HP Connected has always been thought of as laptop back. In fact, it's the leader by a large margin in the market for them. But if you think about the world in which we live today, the world in which live today is not me and my laptop. It's me and all my mobile devices, including my laptop, and access to all my information. So what in that world is really data protection? Well, it's not just about I've corrupted a file or got a virus or accidentally overwritten my file or lost my laptop, I need to get it back. That certainly is an application. But it's, I'm in an airport departure lounge and I need information to certain corporate assets. How do I get that, right? I'm on an airline, I've got my tablet, I'm at a customer site. It really is mobile information management and part of mobile information management is the ability to recover from something bad that's happened, virus, corruption, overwritten file. And that's all access, bring it back to me. But part of it is really being able, from a corporate standpoint, just a policy around, okay, so he's that guy with that role, accessing this piece of information which has personally identifiable information. What then can I do with it? Can I share it? Can I download it? What network am I coming across? What device am I actually accessing information on? All of that's information that from a policy perspective we put in the hands of IT to say, well, figure out what works for you. But for that to work, you've got to know about the infrastructure, right? Which is easy enough, network, access type, those kinds of things, access device, which you also need to know about, well, what's the information? Is it, does it have personally identifiable information? Does it have confidential information? Are there things in the information itself that would tell you you can or you can't share it with somebody else, download it over an unprotected network, put it on the mobile device? It's really information level. So the mobile example is interesting, because that's the most challenging. When you think about information risk, risk by its very nature is distributed. It is, mobile devices are laptops. So how do you attack that problem? The example I'm thinking is, I don't know what I don't know. And maybe there's a legal hold. Sure. And I need to know, who's got what? Sure. And so does the connected MX fit into that and how so? Absolutely, absolutely. So here's where we sort of flipped the problem on its head and said, really, data protection is not about backup and recovery. That's an aspect of it. It's really about the information itself and what you can do with it. So what we've done with connected MX is, we use the backup process. You think about the backup process. The backup process is a highly secure, very efficient way to transfer information from where you've created it to someplace else. That's really what it is. We call it backup and recovery today. But that's effectively what that does. But if you think about it differently and say, okay, so as I've done that, really what I've done is to create an information hub. And that information hub becomes then the access point for all my various different mobile devices. From an IT perspective, that creates, to your point, that creates the risk. 27% of all corporate information is contained on edge devices, all right? So there is your risk. Now I've got it in my pocket. I leave it at a restaurant as I did last night. Oh no. So you have all these, I got it back. You have all these things going up. What we do is we give IT the ability to then create policy around it, right? So what can I share? What can I download? What can be on this device versus that device? So that's how, that's what we do. And you mentioned legal hold, another great example. Usually what happens in an IT department when legal hold comes down is they turn green because the first thing you have to go do is go physically recover somebody's laptop. It may not be possible. They may not be where they can get at it if they have some idea of what's going on and they're part of the wrongdoing. There may be other reasons that they can't get at it, but you actually, IT actually has that asset. It's their backup data set. It's their information hub. And so through Connected on X, you can place legal hold on that asset. You can do early case assessment on that asset. You can identify information custodians, the people who would have access to this kind of information based on the kinds of files that have been included in backup sets or have been shared with other people under those policies that David talked about. So I like that concept of an information hub. It's powerful. And you have a lot of knowledge about the entire enterprise. I mean, assuming it's been backed up, which most enterprises are. Well, enterprises are, laptops are often not. Yeah, okay. So that's a potential blind spot for organizations, but so you can help solve that problem and close that gap. The question I have is around that notion of information hub. You've got knowledge of all that information. When it was created, when it was created, where it lives, how many copies there are. How do you, or can you use that knowledge in a way to help me drive efficiencies, help me be more agile? Absolutely. I mean, I think of it as a catalog of, that is the place that all knowledge of the data lives. Absolutely. I was just talking about that a little bit. Yeah, absolutely. So to your point, it is where knowledge is created in an enterprise. That's really where the thinking goes on and it's captured on those devices and it's contained in that information hub. So for instance, Connect.imx is integrated with Haven on Demand. Haven on Demand is a rich set of tools that allow organizations, be they end user organizations, VARs, systems integrators, to write scripts to be able to get at and build different kinds of information access. So we have a company, a systems integrator that is building a knowledge management system. They're a professional services firm. They're building a knowledge management system to be able to mine all that information and allow their employees around the world to figure out who's worked on this kind of a case, who's worked with this customer, who's worked with these rules and regulations. Without having to ask questions, but rather query knowledge that exists at the edge. That's an example. Yeah, and I can see sort of a roadmap of how you might even apply that to solve other problems across the HP's portfolio, not just in the backup and archive. Absolutely, absolutely. And that's how do you mine it for value. That same technology that turned a different way, which in the legal context is, how do I assess my risk? What's the same technology? Well, what have I got? Somebody's using it to find and create value. Somebody else is using it to mitigate risk. So where does that knowledge live inside a data protector? It lives inside Connected MX, which is the distributed file system that lives out in the cloud or it can be on premise and access to a set of APIs through Haven on Demand. The same principle that we were just talking about, the same principle that we were talking about for Connected MX and Edge data also applies to information contained on server data. So most of the times when I'm talking to executives at organizations about big data, their eyes light up and they definitely get, if I could get at that information, I could gain business benefit from it. But then you get into, well, but how do I connect to all those different pieces of information? And if I could connect to that information, how do I do it in such a way that I don't bring the production systems down to their knees? Well, think about it. Same principle and information up. I backed up an archive, all the information in my enterprise that's important to me. So I've already solved the problem of how do you access the information? And I've done it in a lazy store, something that I only need in case of disaster, right? It's not mission proof. So I've solved the problem of production data. What we do then is that backup and archiving data then become sources of information throughout the enterprise for the same kinds of things we talked about with Connected MX. Excellent. We're out of time, but I'll give you guys the last word, Scott. Let's start with you. Just kind of summarize HP Discover in 2014 Barcelona, whether it's customer discussions, product innovations. What's the bumper sticker on the show? Well, I think that my favorite one that I saw that I don't see anywhere here was Pure Haven was one of my favorite slogans that didn't quite make it. So certainly big data changes everything is what we are certainly talking about here. As we look at the customer conversations, what I'm finding is it's really a connection opportunity to folks like David, myself, and the other product managers. They know we're behind the scenes, but they don't get a chance to see what we're actually working on and actually see the vision that we're talking about. A focus on the endpoint-based devices is David's admission, policies, being able to give true control over the information to the enterprise without sacrificing those end-user conveniences that I, myself, look for when it comes to working with IT. On the enterprise side, really getting harder into the integration, the analysis of the information itself on the back end to help people make more strategic decisions versus responding to very tactical fires that they have to put out. That reminds me of Meg's keynote yesterday. She said, public cloud gives you convenience, private cloud gives you confidence. You guys are kind of in the confidence business. Absolutely. Yeah, so give me the summary, your summary on discover. You know, to me what's wonderful is just looking around the show floor, going to different booths, it's innovation. It really is innovation. It's different ways of thinking about problems that our customers have and bringing innovative solutions to them. What I love about what Meg's done with HP is there's a very strong belief that one HP together, so hardware, software, services, those things together bring better solutions to customers. And I think what you're starting to see on the show floor this year as opposed to prior is the different groups working together. We work very closely with Converged Systems, very closely with Storage to bring much of this innovation to market. So you're starting to see a lot of that happen. That's what gets me excited about it. Yeah, we've heard that innovation team several times throughout this show. Meg mentioned yesterday, and obviously in the earnings recall, HP spending more on R&D, 10% over last year. HP getting back to its roots in vets. So gentlemen, thanks very much for coming on theCUBE. Thanks for your time. Thank you very much for your time. All right, keep it right there, everybody. We'll be right back. This is theCUBE, we're live from HP and Discover in Barcelona, we'll be right back.