 Okay, we're back live in Los Angeles, California. This is siliconangle.com, siliconangle.tvs, The Cube, our flagship telecast. We go out to tech events, big announcements, talk to the smartest people we can find, extract the signal from the noise, and share that with you. I'm John Furrier, the founder of Siliconangle.com, and my guest here is Kathy Jenkins. Welcome to The Cube. Thank you, thank you. Okay, so HP's announcing all this support stuff. We've been covering on services angle around the disruption of services. So tell us what you do and what foundation care is, which is one of the components that you're involved in. Okay, I will. I am a services business manager. I've been an HP person. Oh good, thanks for a lot, a lot of years. And I've worked- How many years? Do I really have to tell you? Were you there when I was there in 88 to 97? Yes, yes I was. Okay. Thank you, thank you very much for pointing that out. So I work with a lot of customers. I'm not a California person. I live in the heart of America and I feel like that gives me an angle to understand what customers are really feeling and living. Foundation care is actually the foundation of our services, our support offering. So it's maybe not the sexy thing that you want to hear about but it's- The platform. It's the very basis. It's the heart and soul of our services, our support offering and it really allows us to provide that base level of services to our customers who are buying our hardware, basically. So what's new about the services and where is the foundation place? We're hearing in the revolutionary services we had Michelle on talking about the, we believe in and all the things that they believe in. But there's a new age of IT. What is new about the foundation that you're powering? Well, very much. There are some new things. Basically, customers want to interact with us in a variety of ways. So they don't want to be stuck on the phone call in front of a server talking to us which is kind of the model that we had in the past. So one of the things that's different- Which worked great, by the way, back in the day. It was what it was designed to do and it did a great job. Now, customers need to interact with us in a variety of different ways. So foundation care is still that basic hardware, software support, but you access it differently. You can access it over the web. You can access it over the phone. You can, there's a variety of ways. Your system can talk to our system. The other big feature that we are launching with this is something called collaborative support. And that's really a new way of working with our customers. It gives us a chance to take the first call to HP and if they think it's a hardware problem, they'll start working down that road. If we don't know what it is, we'll start working down that road. It may turn out to be a software issue. And if we can solve the problem for them, even if they don't have software support from HP, then we're going to help them. If it's a known issue, one we can help with, we'll do that. If we can't do that ourselves, we've exhausted our known issues. What we'll do is we'll turn it over to whoever provides their software support. And that's kind of a new thing for us. We used to offer the hardware support. A non-HP company. Ford, when you say hand them off, what do you mean? Hand them off to whoever is their software support provider. Could be Red Hat for Linux. Could be SUSE Linux. Could be Microsoft. So, we'll handle what we can handle and what we can help them with even in those software platforms. VMware is another one. And then if it's not something we can fix, most of the time it will be something we can fix. Then we can turn the customer gently over to this other software support provider, tell them what we've done, tell them the things we've tried, so they don't have to start from ground zero. And then they can help resolve the customer's issue. Why is that different? You used to have to buy software support from HP for HP to help you with software support issues. Collaborative support, it's a different model. So, HP had the old escalation centers back in the day. The year essentially talking about you now have to be tightly integrated with all the other vendors, like VMware. So you have to then collaborate with those guys, share infrastructure, share information. Yes, and we are tightly collaborating with those people anyway. We're one of VMware's largest support providers. We're one of Microsoft's very largest support providers. We have that technology. We have that expertise. And the way we're doing things differently today is just interacting with customers in a different way. They get to place one phone call to HP and get started on the resolution more quickly. More effectively. So Scott was talking about operational efficiency has been HP's hallmark for years. And you know, you've been there. Great operational company, great process going back to the manufacturing routes with Bill and Dave when they were still alive in the HP way. Number one in all surveys of customer support satisfaction. Now you have a rapidly evolving marketplace where words like agile, business or buzz words that are real, right? So Scott was talking about the word evolve where he wants to get to help customers evolve their businesses where HP can participate. That requires rapid evolution within HP around change. So new things are popping up like big data, Hadoop. How does HP keep on top of all that? How does HP keep on top of things like Hadoop and big data and how in the support world? Yeah, because you know, I mean customers are kicking the tire. We actually do it by listening to our customers by understanding, asking them how they manage their support environment, what's going on in their support environment. What pain do they experience? What challenges are they having? What can we do to help them solve those tough challenges? So then once we learn about that, we have the conversations with HP as a big company. We can have those conversations with people like Cloudera or Hadoop or whoever the other support providers might be and put the strategy together to support that customer moving forward. What are you seeing as the big pain points for the customers in terms of, is it, I have to describe my problem over and over again when I call to other vendors, is it more of no one solves my problem, it's not fast enough, all the above? It's a variety of things. First of all, sometimes even just placing that phone call to HP is difficult and painful for them and it's not part of their business process. And one of the things we've had to do differently is understand the alternate ways they can open that ticket with us. And then once they open that ticket with us, they don't want to hear take two firmware updates and call me in the morning. They want us to be more understanding and knowledgeable about who they are and who their business is, what their business is, so we can prescribe something that works for them, more specifically. So Kathy, I was looking through your marketing material and I noticed this HP Foundation Care, I'm sure you're familiar with this slide and the one thing that pops out as new is this collaborative support. Right. Can we talk about that a little bit? Oh please. Like what's new about it? What does it all mean? How is it different? What does it mean for the customer? So let me give you a little history lesson. Before, if you were my customer, I would sell you hardware support and I would sell you software support. And if you didn't want to buy both of those things with me, you would have to place two phone calls. If you would go to your hardware support provider or you would go to your software support provider and you, the customer would be the person interacting, pulling it all together. What's different with collaborative support is you'll call us. Maybe you still get your software support from another provider. You'll still call HP. We'll start working the problems. We'll try to figure out what's not working, what we need to do to fix the problem. We have a huge amount of information about the software support issues. We can pull that in. We collaborate with those software support providers and figure out together what's not working. So you don't have to buy two separate support, manage two separate vendor managers' problems and processes and figure it all out on your own. You've got HP, the first call to HP and we'll collaborate with whoever we need. So make sure you understand that. So I can buy software support from an ISV and then I could buy foundation care from you and if I have a problem with my database, let's say I could call you. Well, let me be clear. Let me be clear because where we're starting, this, again, this just launched just in the past few months. So we're starting with Microsoft. We're starting with certain versions of Linux and we're starting with VMware. So the customer's questions, we're going to look at it from the hardware side, from the operating system side, from the VMware side. If the issue can be resolved based on what we know about those things, then we'll certainly help the customer. Okay, so I don't have to call Microsoft, I call you. Right. Or I don't have to call Red Hat as an example, I call you. Right, they can start with HP because most customers think it's a hardware problem first so it's natural for them to call us. So they'll start with us and if we can fix it, we'll help them fix it and move them on their way. If we can't fix it, we can turn it over to Microsoft and collaborate with Microsoft on the fix. I would think your customers would love this. Oh, very much, they've been asking for it. And I would think the friendly partners like Microsoft and VMware and Red Hat, I presume is part of the Linux ecosystem, love it. Yes. Because you're selling a lot of their stuff anyway. Yes. And I would imagine your competitors hate it. I hope so. I'm guessing Oracle's not lining up to be part of this program. I really hope that causes them a problem. Oracle. Oh, man. So let me ask you more of a philosophical question. Maybe I have direct answer, maybe perspective. So with the collaboration component which is really a big deal in my mind, I think that's to me, I think the key thing here is that you're collaborating with other companies in a B2B way and really solving customers' problems is I think a big, big deal. But as the technologies and tools out there, like Twitter, like Facebook, your customers are also on these new forums. So how do you guys look at the new technology available, like big data and using analytics, predictively to figure out trend data around that? You guys look at things like that or? Absolutely. How does that? Absolutely. Now, I can't give you dirty details because that's just not the part of the business that I'm in. Come on. Share the dirty details. I won't do that. We'll find some. You would if you had them, right? Absolutely, absolutely, yeah. But like Comcast had this, had a Twitter person that was an employee that called Comcast Cares. He registered a Twitter handle and he became the face of Comcast on Twitter for customer support. Are you guys looking at things like that as well with Twitter? Absolutely, absolutely. We have all kinds of social media people to, and that's me personally. It's something I have to learn a little bit more about but I've got lots of great people to help me go there. Just dive right in. That's what they're telling me. Just dive right in. So, but there's another aspect of that which is data, big data that you have, analytics on what's going to break, when it's going to break, why it's going to break. How do you see that evolving? Oh, that's a good, thank you for giving me the chance to talk about something called insight remote support, which is the tool that we use to communicate with our customers. It's actually from a system to a system level inside HP and it collects data about the system, how things are working in the system. If something looks out of whack, if something falls out of the parameters, it's going to tell us, hey, your customer's going to have a problem here. We need to pay attention to this. So, building that kind of information in those analytics, we're able to use that inside remote support to actually monitor the customer's environment and help them. Well, that was a key differentiator day. We heard from GNA. The question is that, how do you deal with other vendors who might not have the intelligence? So, we did the server announcement. That was a key thing, they use big data within the system to automate some of those. So, insight remote support is not just with GNA. Insight remote support's been around for a while at HP. Because of GNA, we can do some new things with it and it can monitor many more things, but it's still a foundational part of our HP hardware offering. So, it's an automated way to get more data and give the customer some signals? And the notification and understanding what support level that one of the 20,000 servers that customer has might be under. Or a port might be bad and all kinds of things like that. Absolutely, like things like that. What kind of access do customers have to that data? Oh, they have access. Their channel partner can have access. It's whoever they allow to have access. It's not just strictly between HP. How are they using it? They are also using it to become more aware and nobody wants to fail when it's a critical time. So, they can use that same monitoring information that we have for planning any proactive outages that they need to take to resolve their issues. Do you see, is there, you know, I think of, we started Wikibon, John. We started with the concept of Wikonomics and the idea was share your Wikonomics book by Don Tapscott. And the premise was share your data and other people will find things that you wouldn't have seen. Are you seeing that with the channel and with your customers at this point or is it still not enough data out there? I'm not in the right position to really give you the educated answer on that. I would hope we are. Yeah, I would imagine at some point. Because the collaborative, it's just part of the collaborative model. We have to pull the best that we have, so, absolutely. So, what, again, another philosophical question is just more personal. Put your personal hat on. Okay. We love to get personal with you. Not so much the HP hat on. Because you'd have been there so many years. You can, I'm sure you have a big, Do I have a personal hat? I'm sure you have a perspective on the history you've seen and where it is now. But what is the coolest thing about HP right now on the support side that you can say, well, I'm really, this is really some of the coolest things that we've ever done. Sitting here this week at this event, the coolest thing for me is the tools. I've been asking that my management team give my customers the tools for us to communicate more efficiently and effectively together. And I'm hearing it, it's coming. The tools are here. Insight, remote support is continually being updated. The mobile app that you'll hear about is fairly new still. Insight online, which is part of Gen 8. The tools are what I'm excited about. They're listening. The people are listening to our customers. So you said you're in the middle America, the heartbeat of America, the heartbeat of the customer support. What are you seeing? That outside of Silicon Valley, outside of the major metros, there's real, what's the real things that you're seeing in the trenches with customers? What are the challenges and, you know, the normal day-to-day stuff that's not always written about that you can share with the folks out there? I think, I think, Problems, opportunities, challenges, opportunities. I think there's still scarce technology resources. There aren't ever enough people to do things. There's not enough time to do things. The rate of change is very rapid. That happens to us in the heartland too. You talked about Cerner earlier today. That's where I live. So that's one of our big customers. And just understanding what their customer needs are and their drivers are, that you don't have to be in California to face those challenges. Yeah, and we talked earlier about turning IT costs into profits. That's a good example of what Cerner's doing. Kathy Jenkins, thanks for coming inside the Cube and sharing your perspectives.