 Cube SiliconANGLE's continuous production of HP Discover. We're live in Barcelona. Tim Crawford is here, friend of the Cube, crowd captain, advisor to CIOs. Tim, great to see you again. Good to see you too, Dave. Thanks for having me again. Yeah, well, our pleasure. You're very welcome, always a great guest. So let's start with HP Discover. We're here in Barcelona. What do you think? I'm really impressed about how some of the conversations are starting to mature for HP, looking at the technology and how it's starting to evolve. You know, for a company the size of HP, it's hard to move the battleship. It's hard to move it forward, especially as we're starting to see newer technologies, methodologies coming from startups and other innovators, smaller innovators. Yet we're starting to see some of that innovation come out of HP too. In their storage line, we're starting to see a bit of that. But I think the real story here is in the data and what they're doing around data. So what do you mean by that? Where's the story from your perspective within HP? Well, it's bringing the different components of data together. So it's not just about big data. It's not just about structured data. In fact, I was in a presentation earlier today and they were talking about data generally as opposed to just talking about the big data aspect. Because it's easy to get sucked into the marketing engine around big data. But the reality is that most enterprises are leveraging much more than just what classical big data is. And I think the combination of taking Haven with the Vertica and Autonomy pieces together and how they're able to build that correlation engine is pretty interesting. I think that's a good point. And I'm interested to hear what Meg has to say. I think your keynote's today, I think. I think so. And so I was making a point to listen to the CEO's keynote. Because in the past, Meg is not, in my opinion, emphasized data enough. I mean, she'll give examples, talk about new style of IT and how you'd be a data-driven business, et cetera. And then she'll tend to go through and tick off some of the HP stuff, things they're doing. And it's hard, right? Because HP's got this huge portfolio. She has to check the boxes. Obviously, she wants to pitch her products. But that vision around data has been lacking. Not because they don't have the pieces. They do have the pieces. It's just having them tied together and articulated. Would you agree with that? I completely agree with it. But let's take it a step further, though. They have the right pieces. But do they, meaning they have the right ingredients. Do they have the right recipe to pull it together? So that's one of the pieces. They need the right recipe. And I think they're still trying to figure that out. But there's another component here that can't be underestimated. And that has to do with the buying end of the equation. So it's great to talk about futures. It's great to talk about what things could be. But the reality is most enterprises are still struggling with traditional problems today. How do I deal with my 80 plus percent operational costs? How do I get away from traditional infrastructure and move more to cloud? That's great to talk about big data. It's great to talk about data as a whole. But I'm a long ways off from there. So how do I start getting down that road map so I can intelligently talk about data and actually get my arms around it? Well, John and I were talking earlier about HP's organization. And we always pay attention to the earnings calls and listen to the calls when we're around or read the transcripts thereafter. It's better to listen to the calls because you can get the nuance. But you tick through the businesses at HP and they're all flat to down. I think one business this last quarter was up. And now there's some bright spots like converged infrastructures growing, obviously three parts growing. But organizationally, I like the way you said it, that they have the recipe. So I think part of the recipe has to be organization. And this is not an easy company to organize. I understand that. But it seems like HP's not organizing around some of the growth opportunities in a way that they could. And I understand it's complex, but I wonder if I could get your take on that. Yeah, the one thing that I still see within HP is a number of silos. I mean, you're still seeing those individual silos around a particular service, around a particular product. And the integration isn't at the level that it really needs to be. But one thing I am starting to hear here in Barcelona that I didn't see at HP Discover in Las Vegas is more of that integration across groups where they're able to talk about the different products and how they come together. And that's more of a conversation amongst the product groups rather than just bringing in enterprise services to tell the story. Yeah, yeah, we can do this for a fee. Right, right. And I think that's a really good point. And it's not integration just for integration's sake. You know, frankly, personally, I really don't care if HP integrates its printing business into my enterprise or even frankly, it's desktop business. Mobile, different story. So get the mobile act together and then integrate that piece. But certainly autonomy and certainly verticals and I would say as well, the converged infrastructure piece and then parts of the software business maybe as well, maybe some of the systems management stuff, that's of interest to me. So it's not integration for integration's sake, it's integration where it makes sense where you can solve customer problems and drive market momentum. Does that make sense to you? Yeah, it's getting past integration though and moving more towards automation and innovation. And as soon as you can get the integration under your belt and be able to move to more innovative approaches and leveraging those innovative approaches, that's where the value really kicks in. That's where you really kind of go from low gear to high gear. Without that, it's just incremental improvements. And the problem with that is the incremental improvements take so long to get through each iteration and you look at the business growth and the business innovation that's needed, they just don't match up. We last saw you at Amazon re-invent a few weeks ago. We didn't come on theCUBE, but we talked a lot. That's why I thought you were on theCUBE actually. We talked so much that week. But so what are CIOs? What are your CIOs telling you, asking you about cloud? What are you advising them? Let's start there and then we'll get into some of the differences between, say, HP and others. Yeah, so number one is, where do I get started with cloud? Where does it fit into my portfolio of services as a CIO? How do I leverage it to really catapult that growth? So instead of being an incremental improver as I go through the sequence, how do I use cloud as a way to enable me to move forward? And innovation is really what you were talking about before. Innovation, yeah, absolutely. But the other piece is, and this is something that's changed just in the last 12 months, we're starting to see a change in the way that cloud is being adopted and the way that the conversation is happening around cloud. Whereas even 12 months ago, I was having conversations around, well, we're going to use cloud for this specific purpose. Now the conversation is, okay, here's what I'm trying to do as a whole, as an IT organization and helping the business out. How do I start to leverage cloud in a multifaceted way? It's a holistic conversation that's happening now, which is a much more mature conversation from the IT leader and from the organization. Well, it seems like, that's a good thing. It seems like in the early days, it was like, that cloud, that's a bunch of BS. And then it became sort of, well, my CFO was making me do it because the economy's bad and then it became the shadow IT thing. And now it feels like CIOs are getting it. They're embracing it. Yeah, it's no longer a question of, should I do cloud, should I not do cloud? It's a question of, where do I best do cloud? The challenge, I think, that I see for most CIOs is, okay, the world is huge. How do I start to digest that and figure out what pieces fit where? Because it's really complex and there isn't a lot of autonomy from one provider to another provider. So you can't simply say, okay, well, these providers are about the same and so I can do a bake-off to try and determine which provider is best suited for me. So I got to be impressed with the Amazons. I mean, they built a multi-billion dollar business in a very short time, moving super fast. They are what they are. We said off camera, they're trying to be one thing to all people, which all people don't necessarily need that for all workloads, but nonetheless, that's Amazon's vision. So very impressive, you're at re-invent. What's your take on Amazon? What's your take away from re-invent? Let's start there. Yeah, so I think Amazon has a great product for what it does. And the challenge is that some folks are trying to make Amazon into, it can do everything for everyone. And that's not true. Well, Amazon is trying to make that happen. I mean, over time, right? I mean, that's the vision. Well, who wouldn't? Who wouldn't, right? It makes a bigger marketplace that you can start to leverage and so that turns into greater revenue streams. But at the end of the day, Amazon has their own kind of closed-knit ecosystem that they work with and that's it. They don't have a really well-developed or what I would call healthy partner ecosystem that they can leverage like some of the other incumbents. And I think that's one of the downsides to Amazon that, and as we're starting to see just in the last couple of weeks, couple of announcements of people pulling out of their APIs, HP being one of them, right? Pulling out of the APIs to tie into Amazon. And that doesn't help them. Do you think that's the right move by HP? It's a mixed bag. What's the motivation there? Yeah, I'm glad I didn't have to make that decision because I think you want to have that interaction and that integration with something as broad as Amazon and EC2, but it's a competitor to your HP Cloud product. So why do I want to make it easy for potential customers or customers to move off of my product onto someone else's product? I want that stickiness with the customer. Well, you're right. I'm glad I didn't have to make that decision either because it's not a no-brainer. And you can make a case either way. I mean, the case for pulling is obvious, right? You don't want to help Amazon give more, Amazon doesn't need more momentum, right? But at the same time, if your customers want to drag you that way and you go a different direction, I mean, HP talks, hey, we're open. Whatever the customer wants to do unless they want to do Amazon. So there's a little bit of a disconnect there in my view. I think as the industry starts to mature a little bit more, I think we'll start to see those APIs come back up in conversation, the APIs between different providers, because you're going to have to. You're going to have to create that what I have said multiple times before, you've got to create those on-ramps and off-ramps. You've got to create the on-ramps to get to your product or solution, so it's easily adoptable, easily consumable, but you've also got to create those off-ramps because the last thing that I as a CIO want to do is get locked into a product that is going to be like extracting the heart out of the human body. You just can't do that easily. It's painful and pain turns into cost. Well, and of course, then it leads to the OpenStack discussion. Of course, a lot of people in the OpenStack community, Randy Bias in particular, put forth what I don't know, six months ago, four months ago, that OpenStack should embrace the Amazon APIs. Many in the OpenStack community said, no, let the community decide, but no, we don't necessarily think that's the right thing, and then Amazon will have too much weight over the direction of OpenStack. Again, not another easy decision. What's your take from a CIO perspective? They want that openness. I want the flexibility. At the same time, aren't they willing to give up some of that openness for functionality? Sure, sure. So, and risk lock in? Sure, especially because the industry as a whole is not very mature. I mean, really, we're only talking about cloud for the last five years or so. Even for the more aggressive folks that are moving to cloud, it can be a multi-year process to get there. So, those folks, those early adopters, they're trying to figure out, okay, so what's next? Where do I make my next chess move, right? But in terms of OpenStack supporting that connection to Amazon, again, I think it goes back to, you're going to have to have that level of integration, especially if OpenStack is truly going to become that ubiquitous player. Let's talk about HP's cloud and your take on that. I mean, HP Private Cloud, I get that. The OpenStack play makes a lot of sense to me. The HP Public Cloud, I'm fuzzier on. And overall HP's cloud strategy, I'm still a little bit fuzzy on. Maybe help us squint through that. What's your take? I think HP's still trying to figure that out, but the good thing is they're trying it. And they've gotten some bad press recently about trying to be more open and more candid. Here's our solution. Here are the problems that it currently has. So that people are aware of it. And quite frankly, there are going to be some folks that are going to say, ooh, blood in the water, let me go after it. Others are going to say, let me embrace that. Say, okay, they're being honest. You get the good with the bad. But the other piece here is I think they're also trying to figure out what's going to stick in terms of products with the consumer at this stage of the game. Because while the HP cloud is an interesting solution and even Moonshot is an interesting solution, it might have been, Moonshot might have been a great solution for the enterprise say three to five years ago. But today, I think it's a question mark because who's going to have the scale to be able to build out that level of infrastructure for a specific workload, a specific application. And the example that HP commonly uses is hp.com, their website, which is great. They've got the scale to be able to justify that. The average enterprise isn't. So I think the miss there isn't that Moonshot is not a great product. I think Moonshot is a fabulous solution. But I think the target for that would be the service provider market. And this is one area that I don't think it's nearly enough air play is how are we moving from the enterprise space to the service provider space? When we talk about demand in the services and the classical IT organization. Yeah, bringing a hyper scale to the enterprise. John Furrier's back, John, welcome back to theCUBE. Nice to do a quick blogger relations at the blogger lounge. Tim, I want to chat about the scale and enterprise needs. So flexibility is obviously one major factor of cloud. Agility, Amazon has demonstrated that, hey, developer focus, pull it out in the cloud. Don't have to worry about the configuration of hardware. But HP's always been about choice. Multi-vendor has been a core theme for HP. So what's your take on that? I'll see, can they be the Amazon for the enterprise? Obviously, we're hearing some of that earlier today from Scott Weller that AWS, in essence, is on their radar, on everyone's radar. And their model seems to work, except it's not purely enterprise ready yet. Doesn't have all the flexibility in terms of choice. And no one enterprise is the same. So talk about that dynamic. What's your take on that? Well, the way I articulated is, and someone was mentioning earlier, being able to take really complex things and make sense of it and boil it down to something that's much more digestible. If you look at the traditional enterprise, it has a pretty wide portfolio. It has had and it continues to have. And it's very complex. If you look at what Amazon provides and how much of that portfolio it really can assist with, it's a small piece of it. The bigger piece is all of this legacy footprint that exists in every single enterprise that's out there. So what are you going to do? You're going to move that legacy app to Amazon? Never. I just don't see it happening. I'm sorry. I agree with you. But here's the thing. I do think one of the pieces, kind of going back to what Dave was saying about the recipe and the ingredients or what I was saying with Dave earlier about recipe and ingredients. I think HP uniquely has all of the right ingredients to get from traditional IT. So they've got their servers. They've got their storage. They've got their networking components. Great. If you're a traditional IT shop, you've got that. But they can also help you get to the service provider piece with some of the moonshot technology and have a data story to tell too. So there's traditional to transformational. Here's the gotcha there is execution. Can they pull it together and execute on that? And that's a big question. I was just talking to someone out in the hallway and the metaphor I was using was, it's like they have this company of people who play all these instruments and someone just kind of needs to orchestrate and kind of be maestro if you won't, right? So to your point, they have all the elements under the hood. You see in their product portfolio, they have things incrementally moving the ball down the field, run, get a few yards, use a football analogy. But what we're trying to figure out, and I just don't see it yet, what is the big pass play? How are they going to move the ball down the field? What is going to be that driver? How are they going to come out of the woodwork like, hey, this is the new HP. We're a modern era of computing, big data applications, obviously cloud and big data are front and center, obviously here at the show, but what is that big driver? How do they move the ball down the field? They've got to have a solid rock solid road map and that on ramp to be able to move from one stage to the next stage, to the next stage of progression. HP doesn't have it, most vendors don't have it today. They might have it in pieces for part of their product strategy, but they really don't understand this because this is not traditional IT, right? But the other piece, which is really the question mark in all this is the community is the buyer ready for it and how much can HP and others influence the buying mind, right? Because if they're not ready for it, you can have it. So let me ask you about Amazon, so because obviously we're going to compare and contrast with Amazon, obviously public cloud, not private, not hybrid. What is it about Amazon that you think impresses HP or even IBM or all the other vendors sitting back on, damn, these guys are killing it because they are. Amazon is just dominating the public cloud space. What impresses you about Amazon and what do you think impresses HP as they look at Amazon as kind of the gold standard of their approach, a design spec? Well, I mean, number one is Amazon from a perspective of public cloud, they are the dominant public cloud player today. There's no question in that. And I don't know anyone that would argue with that point. So I think the first step is they're a competitor to HP cloud. So how do we compete to it? But they also have a well-established ecosystem within their bubble, but they have a well-established ecosystem of different solutions that work around the Amazon solution. HP has to do the same thing. They have to start building that out. So one of the problems is, you know, kind of first market mover advantage, right? Amazon's way ahead of the rest of the pack. And so the question is, how can you, if you're HP or any of the others, how can you start to catch up and actually maybe even leapfrog what they're doing? Well, certainly they got to win the developer market and win the dev ops, or as that we say, it's more cloud ops because their dev ops is a unique breed of developer in the hyper scale. Tim, thanks for coming on to the CUBE at Crawford. Great to have you on the CUBE. Obviously, participating in our crowd chats is always fun too as well. Thought leader, great person on Twitter to follow. Thanks for coming on the CUBE. We'll be right back with our next guest after this short break. This is the CUBE. I'm John Furrier with Dave Vellante. We'll be right back after this short break.