 Live from the Sands Convention Center, Las Vegas, Nevada, extracting the signal from the noise. It's theCUBE, covering HP Discover 2015, brought to you by HP. And now your hosts, Dave Vellante and Jeff Frick. Hi everybody, Jeff Frick and I are back. This is Dave Vellante and we're winding down the marathon day two coverage of HP Discover 2015. Watching the transformation of HP, a big part of that transformation must be, I've been saying this for a while, the software group, Jerome Labatt is here, he's the CTO of HP software. Jerome, welcome back, good to see you again. Thank you very much for having me here. Yeah, so what's new in HP software? What's going on? Well, what we've seen this year, especially at the Discover show today, is evolution in the transformation, moving from just offering technology services in IT to really transforming the business of IT and moving forward where I'm closer to my business and starting to offer capabilities to my business in such a way that it's self-service, it's efficient, it's agile, it's right when I need it in essence. So talk about HP software strategy. I've said that, again, there's any transformation, software has to be involved. Mark Andreessen says software is eating the world. How would you summarize HP software strategy? Well, we've been working so far on anything that had to do with automation, transformation of data center, automation of data center, automation of engineering processes. We are now looking at data and big data on a way to provide insight and solving the existing job of IT in a new way. So think about the predictive enterprise going forward where data and deep insight are going to allow us to resolve problems faster, connect dots that we were not able to connect in the past. So we've been talking a lot about and we sort of stole it from Jeffrey Moore. Systems of record, systems of engagement, and now overlaying systems of intelligence. What seems to us, which this is not stealing from him, seems to our observation is that whereas before those systems of record and systems of engagement seem to be somewhat separate, we see systems of intelligence bringing those together, acting upon data, bringing transaction and analytic data together and trying to affect outcomes before you lose the customer in real time. So my question to you is that scenario seem plausible to you or is that something that you guys are working on? Let me start there. Oh absolutely, so you really have three categories of information or data. You have your traditional system of record data like we talked about. There is also the machine data, everything that has to come out of the logs and everything else. And then what we call the human information data or the social information. And bringing those three together is starting to allow you to change how you do the job of IT. So for example, the social information will tell you that your application is down before even your system of records will tell you your application is down. You know, my kid will tweet before it's, I know that my app is down because they can't access it. What do you call that? Do you call that machine data? It's a combination of machine and social data. It's really the human information because at that point there's no machine. It's your user, your end user is so connected to your application that it can tell you and trigger an alert. So does, how important is it? So HP doesn't own, so to speak, the system of record. That's not, I've never been in your business. System of engagement, not so much either. Do you need to have a stronger presence in those to be a player in that systems of intelligence? Or is it an advantage for you that you're not bogged down in those? I wonder if you can comment. We're not bogged down. So that's actually a key advantage. And what we do is we have the engines that are going to allow you to get there. So think about the vertical, the idle technology from the autonomy acquisition. We can bring those things together and completely change the game. I can now dynamically re-encapsulate information that would sit in my data lake, like a Hadoop Lake for example, where I had no idea that this information were there and using my tools, my engine, I can start to formulate insight that was invisible to me before. Clickable to security jobs, clickable to operation jobs, new ways of even asking and connecting to our customers. Yeah, okay. And another big part of your strategy is Haven. We heard Robert Young-Jong's talk a little bit about Haven. Yesterday up on stage, we had Colin Mahoney on. Of course, Colin talks a lot about Haven. It's fundamental to his business. So you were obviously involved in putting that together. Where are we at with the Haven journey and where is it headed? What's fundamental to the strategy of software is the underpinning of the new way of solving those new jobs. So if you think about log analytics, for example, a new way to look at our operations and transforming how we do monitoring of our systems, it's using the core engines of Havens. It's using the Haven architecture to do that. If you look at our new service management technology or service anywhere, the new way of ticketless IT is actually enabled using the Haven technologies. So how do you look at your portfolio? Again, I come back to the strategy because I have to say, sometimes I'm unclear on HP software. I get what you're saying about what we're calling systems of intelligence. That's clear. And the vertical and autonomy pieces combined with your security makes sense to us. You've got other parts of the portfolio. There's IT service management pieces and other sort of automation pieces that may or may not fit in in my head. So I wonder if you could help us sort of rationalize that, square that circle. Sure, I mean if you want to simplify the job of IT at the end of the day is to fund the new going forward and help the business and be a partner to the business to enable this new digital experience. First thing first is I need to bring efficiencies to my data center. So I need to bring that cost down. How do I do that? Automation. Second step is once I have automated all those tasks, what can I do? Well, I can enable new processes. So think about DevOps or more efficiencies. Think about this tactic, ticket plus IT. So this is all about orchestration. So I take all those automated tasks and I start to orchestrate them and create those new processes. More efficiencies, more ROI. And the final step is this transformation step where I'm taking in all this work that you've done with automating those processes and start to transform the business of IT itself. I've become a self-service type of organization. I allow my users to connect to me in a self-service fashion. I can now be a service broker and I can allow my users to come and select the services they need at the time of the need and they pay per use. So the new business model, a new way to deliver my services more reliable, more accurate, more secure. Choosing a public offering, private offerings. It's really about IT and governance at this point in terms of the service they want to deliver. So automate, orchestrate, transform is really the key. And you do that for infrastructure, you do that for applications, you do that for IT services and business processes. So that's sort of hardcore, I was going to say infrastructure but it's more than infrastructure software but it's operational software. Absolutely, it's the core of what we've been doing for so many years. So HP software focused on that operational piece. I get that, it is the core of what you've been doing. And I would even, I would put the security piece in there as well, it's fundamental. But then all of a sudden this big data thing comes in, you acquire Vertica, that doesn't fit so nicely in that part of the world. It opens up a whole new opportunity for you. It's actually very, it's actually very complimentary because if you think about how you can leverage now this new insight and new capability and literally change the game, I mean think about operations and bringing security and operations together in a different way. Yeah, I could see that. Okay, so in that example, using for instance Vertica technology, maybe autonomy as well to sort of predict intrusions or predict who's gotten in with bad guys when they get in, they don't want to tell you anymore. I can use that with support services. I can use that intelligence control and what you're doing in your cloud environment. You know, how are your engineer performing? Looking at your test suites and using analytics to think about what can I do to improve the quality of this product going forward. I have all this information in my defect center. I have all this information in my call center. What if I were to bring them together and start to look at my bills and then bring all this information together and now I can start to potentially look at analytics to help me predict the quality of my deliverables from an engineering perspective. So really changing, you know, looking at traditional jobs but you can get analytics to solve those jobs in a new way, in a faster way, more efficient way. We heard today about, I want to ask you about open source and we heard today about Gromit. Sure. I tweeted out, it's the first time I've seen an open source project announced in a video with three guys high-fiving. But Gromit, that's interesting. Let me start with open source. So, open stack, obviously, HP's all in an open stack. I think in the last several years, that's five years really, has HP started to play a much bigger role both internally and externally in open source. Is that fair? Absolutely, and we're looking at open source as a way to accelerate even some of our work. In some cases, we're actually contributing back. So if you look at an open source project called Cloud Slang, what we've done is we've taken an operation orchestration enterprise product and took a little bit out, task allocation and engine allocation and actually created an open source project out of that. And it's called Cloud Slang today. And we felt that it was filling a gap in the orchestration set of projects that you have out there. Other projects we have ongoing internal where we have engineers accelerating our fuel system. Well, we have this thing called Verigreen and we put it out under the Eclipse Foundation and it's just an open source project. And what it does, it pre-builds your code and it stops the commit to go in to destruct your next build. And we improve our build cycle by 35% in terms of quality of release. Just, and we contributed those back. So we use open source, we contribute back and it's really a strategic initiative from that perspective. And it seems like it's relatively new, let's say, last five years. Is that unfair? Is that a misperception? I think from an HP perspective, it always has been there. Like Martin mentioned today, it's been out there. But I don't think the attention of the communities and the different domains where you have open source activity coming in are, we're not paying as much attention as we are now. Sometimes I get confused in the organization. So like Paz, where does Paz fit? Well, obviously Cloud Foundry. Part of the cloud group, part of the software group. Yes. Well, it's another tool in your tool belt to build applications. And so if you think about Paz in the Cloud Foundry sense, I'm going to call those A-Paz or Application Paz, a new way of doing platforms. Because you still have today in your traditional 3D application, a Paz service. It's just monolithic, you have a cache service, you have a database service. In the new world, you have new abstract ways of managing and controlling those A-Paz or those new services that you want. So you code to the Paz layer to an API. But in the traditional world, you still have to build a Paz. So there's a debate right now on how do I transform my applications from where I am today to this new Paz world? Do I need to do that? And what about containers? How are containers going to allow me to transition from one to the other? When Meg Whitman took over, I was at an endless meeting and I had an opportunity to speak with her and ask the question, R&D, acquisitions, what's a better use of your dollars and systems? No acquisitions for a while until we pay down that debt. And that's happened. Now, HP's become acquisitive again, making small tuck-in acquisitions, a big Aruba acquisition, CTO, are you looking your chops, looking around, excited? What can you say about M&A? Obviously a lot of opportunities out there, you must be in the heart of evaluating opportunities. What's the strategy with regard to M&A? Well, I think the recent acquisition of Voltage, for example, was a very tactical acquisition to help and support our security portfolio. So where assets are going to be warranted, we're going to be looking into what's happening outside. On the other hand, you have assets like Heaven that we can really leverage and work on, so it's a combination. Yeah, but it is a combination and we feel very strongly that you've got to have a combination of organic and acquisition in this world. But for a couple of years there, we were kind of hamstrung, so you must be excited now to be able to go out and evaluate other companies. Well, that's definitely a play going forward in the heart. Are we looking at a portfolio? I know new opportunities, it's very exciting. So what's your take on what's going on with Hadoop? There's a lot of discussions around the evolution of Hadoop, it's becoming real time. Some people have said, Hadoop's over. It's dead, Colin laughed at that. He said, no, no, not at all. Hadoop is a fundamental part of our strategy and we think customer strategy going forward. Maybe talk about that. Hadoop, the big data theme, what's your take on all that? Well, every customer I talk to today have a Hadoop project in play on many, and some of them will be science projects, some of them are actually real project in delivering value to the business. And so it's complementary to what we're doing is actually the foundation of what we would see a data like. And as a result of that, we embrace it. So you're going to have multi-distribution, multiple types of distribution of the Hadoop system, the ecosystem, but we have capabilities and technologies that are going to be sitting on top of the data lake and providing even deeper insight, more capability out of that. So we see it as a value add, as actually our assets are complementary to these capabilities. What's your biggest challenge as the CTO of software and HP? It's not a technology. Biggest challenge is actually transformational and getting the people to wanting to move forward and sometime accepting that new technology is awesome but you have to also build from the core. And that is a transformation journey itself. You know, I can go agile, I can have all the mechanics and all the tools for agile, but if I don't have a belief system, they're behind it to help me move forward, then I need the people to be there. I need the processes to be there. And is that a statement about HP internally, about your customers or both? Well, it's a bit of both. As you go forward, you have your own internal IT transformation, we're going through some split today. There's customers that are now talking. I mean, one of the great things is discover, is I can see customer talking about transformation. So we're no longer talking about, you know, switching a nog or technology here and there. It's how can I get my own customer adopting my own automation, my own orchestration? The solution I'm delivering as a service internally, how do I accelerate that uptake? So it's a very, I think we just passed, you know, a chasm in terms of what does this mean for IT to get back at the business partnership? So you're sort of saying technology's not the hard part. It's the other pieces that are the hard part. It's a technology is complex, but if you don't have the right set of people and the processes, technology is there to help you in that transformation. But without a mindset, without a transformation mindset, you're willing to move forward. It's going to be difficult. We always like to ask CTOs, like, what's exciting you? You know, I mean, you see containers now, all of a sudden, you know, get hot containers been around for a while with Docker really got it right. You're seeing all this, you know, action and spark in the big data world. What's exciting you as a technologist? I think the, what I'm going to call the new class of applications that we don't quite understand yet is what can I do with all this information? This is in line treatment of the data and really change the game in terms of how my applications are going to behave. So it's almost like, think about at the network level where I have, you know, IP transaction, point to point transactions. Like, can I take data and information and in this, insert my logic within shaping the data as I go through? So my application is no longer a set of components that are processing information on the edge. They're actually component that are processing information in flight and I can self, you know, organizing as you go forward. So it's a very different way to look at application structures and services going forward. All right, Jerome, well, listen, thanks very much for coming back on theCUBE and sharing your insights, perspectives, and it's great, it's exciting times at HP, exciting times in the industry. Thank you very much. All right. Okay, keep right there, everybody will be back right after this brief break. This is theCUBE.