 Present a focus spotlight. Live from Las Vegas and VMworld 2011, host John Furrier and Dave Valente, a human being. Cloud Conversions will support from HP Cloud System, the most complete integrated platform for building and managing clouds. Okay, we're back at VMworld 2011. I'm John Furrier, the founder of SiliconANGLE.com and I'm here with my co-host with this panel. I'm Alex Williams, editor of SiliconANGLE. And our guests. And we have some guests today. On the end we have Steve Deesh of HP and Erica Brescia, CEO of Benami. So this panel is about cloud, hybrid cloud, the realities of cloud. So Steve, you've been on theCUBE before, you know the drill. So we'll start off with you. Cloud, what is the cloud? Where are we in the cloud? And Mark, a point in time, and give us an update on where you think we are. Hype, how we're coming with the product side. You guys are actually delivering. Give us a sense of the cloud definition and where we're at. Well, you know, I think we're beyond, I don't even want to use the word hype anymore. I think the cloud's a reality, but it's a reality that may be not as real as people think it is. The cloud is, and I think you've heard from some of my colleagues that the cloud's a journey, it's a destination to get there and people need to take a stepwise pragmatic approach. They're not losing focus on what they're trying to accomplish. So you see at this show, you see at every trade show today and we're guilty inside the industry of hyping the technology without really stepping back and saying, what am I trying to accomplish from a business perspective? And at the end of the day, somebody said it really good yesterday. They said, at the end of the day, I'm not even going to call this cloud. Wouldn't somebody just want a real agile, efficient, flexible environment and call it whatever you want? That's what people at the end of the day are trying to do and throwing some self-service and charge back and internet technology and resource pools. That's really where we're going. If you want to call it a cloud, we'll call it a cloud. And I think people are actually moving there quite fast but everybody's going to be on a different maturity stage, let's call it. So do you find it's just pay as you go, robust, agile and infrastructure? If you want to call it that, you can. I mean, Amazon really kind of confuses the model. We heard from Archie Reeve from HP who just said, you know, really no, none of the customers he talks to wants to put anything in the public cloud. And that was his kind of soundbite, but in reality, that's somewhat true. Public cloud is dangerous, wouldn't tell about data. What do you, how do you feel about that comment? I'm not sure I'd be as harsh in that response. I think there's a lot of use cases and workloads that will go to the public cloud. But you know, the way I look at it right now is the first step around moving to the cloud is standardization and consolidation of your environment, cost, ability to move workloads. You're going to virtualize and automate and then you're going to be ready for a paradigm shift. You'll move to private cloud, non-production workloads. And then you might be ready. You might be mature. You've got compliance worked out. You've got non-mission critical apps. You'll put it in the cloud and you'll have a hybrid environment. But you know, and look, some things will never go public. It's just a fact. Some people say are saying publicly and privately that HP really doesn't have a cloud strategy. And you guys have, you know, we met Carnegie Mellon on last year in Dell's Cowboys talking about how they got a cloud up in two seconds. And you know, and they're saying that because you know, you join OpenStack which kind of looks like a groping maneuver. And so just clarify the fact that HP's in the cloud business. And you guys been in the data center business, you've been in the infrastructure business. I mean, with real products. So I mean, what's your take? You need to say to those people. Yeah, we'll make a very blatant statement. Very blunt. So there's no confusion. HP is in the cloud. We've been in the cloud. If you talk about the cloud in the terms I mentioned previously of creating agile, flexible resource pools, knowing how to create mission critical environments for the largest and the smallest companies on the planet. We know how to do that. We're the largest IT company on the planets. We have the broadest and deepest portfolio. And we're in. We're in from building clouds, private public, from delivering cloud services, from helping from transformational services across the board. We're, I would point blank, say we're all in. Okay. Alex, what are you seeing out there as you're scouring the landscape for stories with SiliconANGLE.com? Well, I was going to, you know, I was, I think of it this way. I think of the cloud, you know, what is the cloud? You know, I think of like, what am I trying to achieve? What are the people I know? What are they trying to achieve? You know, people are trying to create things, right? They're consuming things, they're expressing themselves, and they want to use it for work to get, you know, to get all their, to get their work done. And it just, from my perspective, it seems like that's the finish line. And we're seeing all kinds of ways that people are trying to get there. You know, so there's all kinds of, there's a million different kinds of approaches. And I think that's, you know, I think what part of what we're seeing here is just such a major disruption that there is a lot of confusion about exactly what it is, because there are so many different choices and there's so many different... Well, there's confusion about not only that, there's confusion around who has what, and what is what, right? So, even if you have a cloud foundry, it's got a lot of buzz. I mean, on our, quote, you know, meter, that you know, tool we use to track stories and intelligence, cloud foundry is causing a lot of buzz. Why? Because VMware is launching cloud foundry. You know, it's just getting rolling. Yeah, so HP has been delivering some cloud for many long, you know, many years now. Do you want to call it, you know, cloud? So that's why I asked you the definition, because what is cloud? Well, I'm curious, Erika, how do you see it? Because you guys provide like an app store for the cloud and you work pretty closely with Amazon web services. What, how do you guys define it? We believe, I think you defined it really well. We've always seen the cloud being about automation. We think it's automation and that leads to agility and that's what's most important in the cloud. And obviously I have a very application specific focus and approach to the cloud, but we've been working with a lot of the leading open source companies, Al Fresco and Sugar CRM to name a few, talking about their cloud strategies for several years now. And we're just finally see everything coming together and the vendors understanding that, yes, they really need to have a plan here and it might require some product changes and some pricing changes and some sales model changes and they're really starting to work on those and implement them. So the economics are driving that but with the automation you're driving more economically. If your customers want to run your apps in the cloud, you better have an answer to how they can do that or you're going to be in big trouble. Yeah, and they need networks to run it over, which is, you know, we had talked to Mike Bannick at HP. Yeah, you know what's interesting following up on Eric's comments is the one thing that customers and clients are tending not to look at, even before they get to deciding where they're going to place their workloads, cloud works for you as a tool if you've decided to create an efficient business model with standardized business processes, efficiency in your organization and then you worry about the technology and we're seeing a lot of clients that may be rushing into decisions about deploying technology without stepping back and taking those decisions or plotting that pragmatic path and they run into a lot of problems and then they're going to have to back up. Lessons learned, but by all means backing up. We just heard from a CIO who basically just said, they said most, the biggest fail point for cloud is jumping in without a plan and just they think it's easy because they hear about the stories about credit cards on Amazon and whatnot, but to me, the question is, where is, it's an extension of your data center, right? So like member client server and we talked with Sikki Gunta from CSC, big partner of you guys, and she said client server, it was millions, zillion dollar deals, 24, 36 months rollouts. Everyone, big gravy train. Cloud is a little bit different. I mean, what's your take on that, Steve? I mean, what are you seeing for deployments in terms of deployment ranges, how fast are clouds rolling out? So assuming that somebody has a well thought out plan, which is important, and you should do that upfront thinking as an executive team, not just your CIO, but your lines of business, your marketing, the people that are actually going to consume the service, including your CFO, who has to be convinced. Our guidance to our customers is to take that pragmatic approach to it and then deploy non-production first into a carved out, well-defined set of workloads. The biggest failure other than that upfront plotting is that customers try to do too much too fast by bringing not only those new workloads, but legacy workloads over, and it turns into an 18 to 24 month rigmarole that then you have to go back to the CFO and say, well, you know what? We're making it have to reboot here and start over. Well-defined prove that the cloud is beneficial from a financial and an agility perspective to your CFO and your organization, then move forward. You know, I'm curious, Erica, too, from your experiences with the software companies, what they're saying about it. Are they, how are they compared to a year ago? Are they confused as they were a year ago? Are they starting to see some clarity? Do you have some examples of that? They're absolutely not as confused as they were a year ago. I mean, most of the companies that we work with now have a very clear plan, even if they haven't started executing on that. I think one really good example is Alfresco. They launched a new team edition product and they came to us before launching it and said, look, people are either going to have the option of downloading it or deploying it to the cloud with Bitnami. We want to have an extremely simple process. We need to reach out to a new market and we want people to be able to come to us with a credit card and spend a few hundred bucks a month and get a pretty enterprise content management system. So that's a good example of how companies are actually even using the cloud and the less or the frictionless sales model of the public cloud and designing new products and reaching new markets that way. And so how are service providers reacting from what you're seeing? I think the service providers and the solutions providers are still figuring out, they're still figuring out how to redefine their business models around the cloud. They have a lot of clients trying to pull them in that direction and they're trying to figure out exactly how they're going to be able to sustain and build their businesses that way. A few have the right idea, but I think it's still early. The question for you, Steve, is on that note, apps are driving everything, but yet you need the infrastructure to run it. So on the cloud rollouts, how much are apps driving decision-making on how to do cloud? Are you seeing, can you comment on that at all? Well, at the end of the day, the cloud is as an IT delivery vehicle, it's all about the service of the app. A lot of people seem to be fixated on infrastructure, which is okay, you want an efficient infrastructure, but at the end of the day, you're delivering a service or an application. So you should be planning from a workload application perspective when you deploy your infrastructure, but a lot of people, at least in the immature state we are, are leading with an infrastructure as a service private cloud that delivers an efficient DevTest environment is a real simple example. Actually, we've seen about 60% of initial private clouds be non-production DevTest environments, but it's with all the thinking of the next step after they prove out the initial ROI and the agility test is to move to internal software as a service. So we've seen the collision between big data and cloud happening, right? And so that's driving a lot of these new applications, especially mobility, whether it's small data or big data. What is, you guys bought Vertica, can you comment about what's going on with Vertica and how that implements into your cloud strategy? You know, we can't comment on it too much at this point, but obviously the ability to utilize both Vertica and I can't comment on autonomy either, but both play into the whole idea of big data and structured data and the ability for a business to leverage that data. And having that available in a private environment or actually as a service at some point in the future is monumental for companies. You know, you can think about not only big companies, but think about the enablement of imagine the number of business models that can be created because companies have access to that type of powerful tool. Hey John, if you don't mind, I'd like to make a comment on Steve's last statement about how people are starting with Dev and Test and now looking at apps. We're seeing a lot of that in the last six months on an almost daily basis. Now I get an email from cloud providers or cloud platform providers who are looking for app stores now. So they started out playing around in the Dev and Test space and now they want an app library and an easy self-service system for end users to be able to use. So they're crossing over. Yeah, so they're looking for us to provide, you know, port our Bitnami cloud hosting product, which was initially developed for the public cloud to their private cloud platforms so that they can get apps easily deployed internally. So final question here, we're getting under time pressure here for both Steve and Erica and Alex. Just predict next year, next year at VMworld on theCUBE, what's going to happen this year? In the cloud business, not necessarily a macro HP sense. We'll watch that too, but just in the business, what are you going to see evolve? Next VMworld with VMware and the ecosystem, everything else. I honestly think that 2012 will define this market. I think you'll see an emergence of winners and losers. There's a massive, we got to remember as we move through 2012, the industry needs to remember, including HP, what problem are we trying to solve here? Coming up with great wisdom technology or is there a business problem we're trying to solve via technology? And we're not doing ourselves a favor with this fragmented approach that we have in the industry right now where we're asking customers to bring together the components and perpetuate problems that already exist. I predict that you'll see a consolidation where there will be a considerable number of winners that are trying to address that fragmentation and provide more of an integrated approach to customers that go forward. Erica? That's tough. You took the words out of my mouth but made them sound much better than I would have. You got to get something out there. Yeah, consolidation, absolutely. I think that's probably almost a broken record thing at this point, because everyone's talking about it. From my perspective, I think it's going to be about applications and real deployments and making it easier for not just Dev and test but for end users to actually get their applications up and running more quickly. And I think the focus is definitely moving up the stack from the infrastructure level. Alex, anyone take a stab? Yeah, well, you know, my big thing right now is an interest in what's happening in the storage space. And I think that's going to start to have some effect on the types of services that we see out there. I think there'll be an extension of those services that will provide for more apps, for more data. And that's going to be, I think there's going to be some real ground breaking stuff in that area. Well, I'll take a stab and just say, I think it's going to be a year of delivery. Put the meat on the bone, as we say, sizzle and steak. And I think we'll see a lot more product come out and the winners will be defined by the solutions that they put out. So Steve, Erica, Alex, thanks so much for this panel. Appreciate it and Cloud. And that's it for the Cloud panel. And we'll be right back.