 Okay, we're back here live inside theCUBE. This is siliconangle.com, exclusive coverage of HP Discover 2012 in Frankfurt, Germany. I'm John Furrier, the founder of siliconangle.com, and we're here to extract a single from the noise of what's happening around HP, extracting the news, the analysis, and the guests here. I'm joined by my co-host. I'm Dave Vellante, wikibon.org, number one in real-time research. Check out the wiki. We just produced a manifesto on software-led infrastructure, another one on software-led storage. We got folks analyzing yesterday's HP announcements in the context of our framework for software-led storage, so take a look at that, chime in, hit edit, love to have your feedback. Hit us up on Twitter, I'm at Dave Vellante. He's at Furrier, send us questions, and we'll get him in. And we're here with Sam Rutledge, who is with Softcat, really interesting company. Sam met yesterday, love to have you on. Thank you very much for coming on. Good to see you. Softcat is kind of a reseller-turned service provider. And I know you guys have said, hey, we're proud of the fact that we're a reseller. A lot of people hide from that. And not us, that's where the rubber meets the road, baby. Exactly, we love being a reseller. We love getting out there and putting this stuff in for customers, but increasingly people want to consume it as a service, so it would be silly if it's not to react to that and build that part of our business also. You'd be very proactive there. I mean, a lot of the folks in the channel are looking at cloud, kind of scratching their heads, trying to figure out what to do with it, maybe putting forth some consulting services that whose ultimate outcome is, don't go to the cloud. You give me a, but yeah. You guys, I guess the outcome is what they don't have to sell. That's right, exactly. So you're taking a different approach, being very aggressive there. So talk about that and how's it going? So I don't know whether it's necessarily being really aggressive. What we're trying to do is come up with options for customers. So we see some customers wanting to own and run it and keep hold of their data and not let it get away from them. We see some customers wanting to focus less and less on infrastructure and more and more on applications and the services that they deliver to the business. And I guess we want to be all things to all people in that space, the Burger King, if you like, of cloud. Have it your way, have it on-premise, have it off-premise, we'll run it for you. So this isn't a pivot for our business. This isn't us changing and saying, we're going to stop being a traditional reseller or a traditional solutions provider. We love that stuff. This is about us presenting options for our customers and putting an arm around them and helping them get down that route if it's appropriate for their business. It's as simple as that, really. So how does that option manifest itself if it is something like cloud? You deploying your own cloud, you just got a multiple, you have a menu of clouds you can choose from. Can I go to Amazon through you? Talk about that a little bit. So at the minute, it's predominantly infrastructure as a service. So we use the platform obviously based on HP technology to deliver infrastructure as a service and we find customers using that for disaster recovery. That was probably the first use case. We find customers outsourcing particular applications to us that they find ugly and find a problem to manage internally. And we're starting to see customers take infrastructure as a service for everything. Just get rid of their own infrastructure and transition. Takes a little while, everything into our platform. So it's kind of an infrastructure platform that we can deliver to customers in those different ways, really. So it's a soft-cat cloud? Yeah, cloud soft-cat, we call it. Cloud soft-cat. So, okay, good. I'm a little dyslexic. No, don't worry. Amazon had its big re-invent conference last week. We're seeing Amazon get much, much more aggressive in the enterprise. We were at Oracle Open World. Amazon was there with the booth. They were trolling around VMworld. So we're seeing them much, much more. What are your clients saying about that? Is there visibility there? Are they looking to go there? What's your advice, specifically with respect to something like Amazon? Okay, so it's interesting that with the Amazon thing and there are other organizations getting on for that size and scale, we're not quite there in the cloud space. And don't get me wrong, that's fantastic. And we're never going to compete with Amazon at the scale that they work at. But one thing that our customers find is that they want a helping hand. They want someone to put their arm around them and lead them on this journey. Because if you're a mid-sized organization, you can't afford to have cloud architects and cloud propositions guys just sitting around theorizing about this stuff. You need to think about the way that you're doing with the resource that you've got today. And to architect your applications, to use something like Amazon Cloud, look at what Netflix have done with the Chaos Monkey and all their other monkeys that run around sorting out their software. I mean, that's fascinating. That's using stuff in a different way. For our customers with their traditional on-premise applications getting into a new world, they want to get there slowly. They want somebody that they can phone up. I firmly believe that there's a service angle in cloud. A customer service angle as much as anything. An opportunity for an organization like ours who knows their customers really well is the friendly face of IT, hopefully, for them. Who knows infrastructure? Who knows their infrastructure specifically and can help them with that gentle migration, perhaps. How about the SLA issue? I mean, Amazon last week said we've... John, I'm sure you heard this too. We've never lost a piece of business due to an SLA. And now I'm saying, well, of course you have. I know so many customers have said, I'll never put this data in the Amazon Cloud. They just don't know about it. But you didn't bring that up, which I was intriguing to me. But is that a point on customers' mind? In other words, I always describe the Amazon SLA as fluid. We'll do our best. And if we don't, just send us an email. We'll get back to you. Now, there's nothing wrong with that if you're a Rails developer. Yeah, absolutely. That's cool. Yeah, if you're using that platform to develop your application and then you're maybe going to think about bringing it back in-house. I mean, there's an argument that in theory, the scale should give them that level of availability that they can't afford to have themselves on-premise. But I guess the reality is slightly different. I think customers are realistic. They understand that this stuff is complicated and that it's going to go down. It's going to stop working, even if you're Amazon, unfortunately. But I think what customers do want or what our customers want is somebody that they can phone. You said it's gone down, email us. For me, our customers want to be able to phone their account manager, their service delivery manager, get hold of me, get, you know. Some of our customers probably even have the MDs mobile and then we can give them a call on a Sunday if it's gone wrong. That's the sort of level of service that our customers want as they move this stuff into cloud-type environments. Yeah, people are realistic about the fact that technology goes wrong. It's how you deal with it and how you approach that problem. Now, we talked yesterday about this. I called it the gap between what cloud service providers are doing and what the IT shops are doing. You guys are investing, I presume you're growing. Yeah, absolutely. We just put out a press release last week about wanting to double our tech team to feel future growth. You're doubling. I don't know a lot of IT shops that are doubling. I mean, there are some, but some of the web guys, but most aren't. Most are flat to down. Budgets are flat to down. Maybe they're up a little bit. So there's this innovation gap occurring. You guys are innovating like crazy. You're building out all kinds of management systems. You're investing in infrastructure as a service. And as I say, traditional IT shops get sort of baselineed. Now, how long can that continue? Doesn't it make sense that more and more customers are just going to put stuff into the cloud? And at the same time, it seems like with the pervasiveness of virtualization, this seems like traditional ITs hanging on pretty well. What do you see there? Is it up against the dam? We hold in the water back and it's just about to break? Or is IT catching up to you? I guess to see exactly what you said first. You know, a bit of both. So, you're right in that there comes a point when scale becomes important and where people gradually migrate to the infrastructure as a service providers and help them to innovate rather than perhaps in corporate IT. But people still like to have their own servers. People still like to be able to run downstairs to the server room and reboot stuff or go and shout at the IT guy or something. Companies like that stuff. So, and there are still organizations that we know of that are building out their own, effectively internal infrastructure as a service platforms or platforms to deliver applications to their customers. So there's still going to be a need for customers to build and run their own for some considerable future. I'm an absolute firm believer in the fact that the world will be hybrid for the next period as more or less as far as we can see in advance. You still got customers out there with AS400 on premise running that sort of stuff. That technology never went away. Sam, can I get a question in there? Sure. Ha! Ha! Good, Scott. One more, John. One more. You're struggling to get a word in your head. I taught Dave never give up the microphone. Obviously, you guys are investing, which is by the way, you were the star of the panel yesterday. You're too kind, so thank you. It was good. No, it's nice to hear, but I want to get your perspective on the cloud. I mean, honestly, we've been talking about the cloud going back when we started SiliconANGLE in 2009. There was a big promise. The whole world was running to the cloud as fast as possible. It was just huge migration, a tsunami. You could hear the footsteps, and all of a sudden it's like, ugh, where is everybody, right? So, you know, everyone's coming, but a couple of things happened. SSDs came really on the scene quickly. Cost dropped on the hardware side. So, it kind of created some on-premise innovation and efficiency. So, people were doing stuff on-prem, plus it's risky putting the cloud. So, that's all happened. But where are we now? I want to get your perspective. State of the industry, where are we with cloud? Obviously, HP's got a couple of different strategies within cloud, we'll get that in a second. You know, private cloud, hybrid cloud, and they got the cloud business. Where are we with cloud? I mean, what is it, what is the state of the union for cloud from your perspective? Okay, so I guess I can only talk about the UK, but we're absolutely seeing an acceleration of this stuff. You know, it's taken a little while. Maybe we've been in the, what did Gartner call it, the trough of disillusionment or something like that. I love that expression. It's brilliant. I think people are coming out of that. It's absolutely horses for horses. If you're making money, that's how con-illusions can you be. It's like, if money's flying in the door. How many services business grew 1,000% last year? So, you know, that's got to be an indication of people moving in that direction. More intoxicating, less delusional. Hopefully, hopefully, yeah. So it's growing, some real business there. It's definitely growing. You know, this for me is about the skills and the appetite within your organization. Do you have the people within your organization that can drive your infrastructure forward and support your applications in an IT as a service manner? Or are you better concentrating on those applications than the services that you deliver to the business and letting somebody else take care of the infrastructure? And companies will come down to different sides of that argument every time. Depending on the situation. Depending on the situation, depending on their skills, depending on their existing investment in technology, right down to a hardware level. That's absolutely fine. People can do with this what's right for their business. There's no cookie cutter, there's just innovation. No cookie cutter, exactly that. There's no prescribed way of doing this. Ask you a different question, because you mentioned UK, so we get a large audience on SiliconANGLE. We look at the law that's from London. And we get a lot of traffic from in the UK. So London's been exploding on the tech scene. Could you just share some color around London and the tech scene there? What's it like and is it massively growing? And it seems to be really technically built in and growing. So what's the state of London at this point? So I think we operate more in the, I suppose specifically the infrastructure space, of course. But there does seem to be a big sort of upswing in things around social media and application development and that sort of thing. My little bro works in that side of the world and there's definitely some energy there. There's this concept of this thing called Silicon Roundabout which is around Old Street, sort of in London. And there seems to be a lot of stuff there, a lot of innovation. It was all your web marketing companies, your design and development companies. And that's moving towards a sort of an appetite culture and community as that business goes. Needless to say, all that stuff is going to drive investment in infrastructure because somewhere some of this stuff's got to run on a server somewhere, right? Absolutely. Okay, so my final question for you is relative to some of the things you talked about in the panel yesterday, scale and scaling up with multi-tenancy was things that you kind of talked about. What are the core things right now that need to get done? And your mind's eye, obviously your business is growing so there's some validation there that the business models are changing which we've been talking about, check that box. But actually security and some other things around multi-tenancy, you're always a hot topic. Hybrid cloud seems to be the sweet spot as we've always talked about the bridge to the real public cloud. What are the areas in your mind's eye to work on for some of the cloud area? So I guess the big thing for us is probably the connectivity aspect. That is the bit that slows this progress down really quickly. If we need to get a line for a customer into our data center or something like that, that can take a long time to get that sorted. That's probably the almost the most difficult bit about this stuff. Comm's is still important. Hopefully we're going to get 4G in the UK shortly. It's in some cities already. People need to be able to access those applications faster and faster and that will drive, I think, more and more a centralization of IT services towards those points of internet presence. Okay, Sam Rutledge here inside theCUBE. From SoftCat, welcome to theCUBE and thanks for your time here. Congratulations and a great panel. Yes, yesterday at the BigHP storage announcement. Thanks for coming on. We'll be right back with our next guest after this short break.