 Hey, welcome back everyone, this is theCUBE. I'm John Foudier, and we are here on theCUBE with Xavier Poisson, in Europe, and I'm joining my co-host Dave Vellante. Xavier, you are in charge of the cloud computing for EMEA, Europe, Middle East, and Africa for HP. Welcome to theCUBE. Thank you, good morning. Dave, notice I said Foudier, because that's the French version of my name. So welcome to theCUBE. So we've had, you're the first European executive we've had on talking about cloud. So welcome to theCUBE. Obviously we're in Barcelona. Big presence here. I was commenting to Dave when we were walking in today that this is a bigger event here in Europe than it was in Vegas. So big European presence for HP. So first, share with the audience that watches the dynamic. What is HP's presence in Europe like? What does the market look like for HP? Size, big, and happy customers. What's Europe like for HP? Well you know, we started with the cloud motion here in EMEA already three years and a half ago. And we started to be very, very pragmatic to build the next step of our virtualization for our customers. As you know we operate in both built on the consumer area overall, but we have been spending significant efforts to really bring our customers to come to the next step where they can on top of reducing the cost, increase the agility, and generate new business streams. And it was a motion of everything around the private cloud strategy we had here in EMEA. We are operating in eight subregions. So a very, very large market from Helsinki to the Cape in South Africa. And what I would say is that everywhere, everywhere the cloud market is taking off. It's taking off in quite all the industries. It's taking off of course in the classical ones like the telecommunication industry which has been very, very strong in putting the next generation of infrastructure for cloud and software. But also we see an expand in various verticals like finance, insurance, like energy, distribution, everywhere where cloud computing is not only a matter of reducing the cost I said or increase the agility but what is more important creating new services in order we can increase the top line not only think about reducing the cost inside the enterprise. So cloud is obviously a phenomenon that we're all aware of and watching. Amazon is doing an amazing job. A lot of things happening in the US certainly a little bit different market than Europe. What are the challenges in Europe? You have countries that have different requirements, right? So that's a big discussion we always have when we talk about cloud is, oh the Germans want their data differently and different country requirements is there a lot to get to the EU and what does it look like? What is the challenge and opportunity of cloud? Well you know it's fantastic. Really amazing stuff because I used to say to my customers on tour, to the analysts on the press despite all you hear, the cloud does not belong to anybody. The cloud is a son of internet, it is all about freedom. The freedom of choice, of confidence and consistency exactly where we have been putting our assets on investing heavily in developing our intellectual property. As you said it, yes we have a different market. We have different market with different laws, different regulations and different laws about data privacy, that different laws about security and we need to embrace that. I would say that it is a huge opportunity for HP because we have built the comprehensive strategy of HP offering in cloud about hybrid delivery. How you can combine workloads both in public clouds and in private clouds. How you can have for one customer wants to make for instance 4,000 VMs in a test and dev. It can build it on premises and on be compliant with the regulations and also been doing that with one of our cloud agile partner being in a kind of public cloud. So because what we have done is we have developed a comprehensive ecosystem of cloud service providers powered by HP who are delivering each in their countries some huge cloud services and we help consistently with the problem that started two years ago all our cloud agile partners, these cloud service providers powered by HP technology to really deliver cloud services on their local market. Because what you have to understand also is that people say cloud is easy. No it's not necessarily easy, it is a transformation, it is a journey and you have different segments of market and you have different size of companies and according to a small and medium enterprise or to a large company you need to address it differently. So that's a specificity on the market. We are here at Xavier Poussaint, the VP of cloud computing in Europe, great answer there. So I got to ask you further, one of the things of hybrid cloud is the notion of flexibility. So you are essentially highlighting some of the advantages there. I got to ask you around deploying into these different countries. So what is the benefit of the cloud is the flexibility. What specifically does a customer have to be global, to operate a global platform, means they got to be in worldwide. What flexibility features does hybrid cloud have from HP that allows an enterprise to be global in the EMEA market? What are the features and what are you, what are use cases that you've seen? So you need to come back to some bit of technology which is the orchestration layer and the capability to create a unique service catalog for one customer on 12 different delivery modes. What is the most impressive in what HP has been building is the capability to separate the service catalog from the different delivery modes. It means that, imagine you are a very large company operating, I don't know, in the financial industry. You need to have one source catalog of service. You build it with cloud service automation with HP and then you will have all your services being described, your cloud services being described in this catalog. Now the good point is that if you need to have your data located for some part of your customers, let's say in country X, Y, Z, you can execute the cloud services locally. So this is the beauty of it. And when you consider the global regulation framework we have here in the EU, it is an extraordinary asset. I have one very interesting example which is referring to that. I would say it's an internal example. We have been launching last year a huge cloud for education. Because we identified that we need to boost the capability for enterprise to screw up unemployment. And HP has been working on that. How we can have better people going better, have a job, and make it happen? And we isolated the fact that self-entrepreneurship was key. So then we looked after how we can make it happen the right way. And it was how we can educate better the people who are launching their companies. Educating better these people in marketing, in finance, in people management, everywhere. And so we have been launching comprehensive cloud service for the planet which is based upon content that we push to the different users. Guess what? Today this cloud service is available worldwide. And you can connect to one single service catalog. But if you are a French guy, I'm French. So if I am a French guy, when I press the button I say I'm French, it will be executed in a cloud service provider in France. You get a question and a copy with your cloud when you hit the French button. No, but so you're saying, the service catalog allows for dynamic orchestrations. Is that what you're saying? Exactly, exactly. So I want to come back to that service catalog question. Because when we talk to practitioners in our community, the majority are trying to move to that service catalog. That's, when you talk about IT transformation, that's what they're primarily doing. We're trying to get to a service catalog, but they say the biggest challenge that they have is aligning those sets of services from IT with the business requirement. So I wonder if you could talk about, is that the case in your region and how is HPE helping customers facilitate that? You talk about a very, very important point. I used to say that if you want to success in a cloud computing project, you need to invest 20% of your budget in management of change. And it is exactly related to that. Not only for the transformation of your IT department or from the CIO leadership. It's also how the CIO becomes a broker. And it becomes a broker internally. It means he has the right to sit at the table with the CEO, the CFO, the Chief Marketing Officer to discuss how, because it will make it happen with let's say an external sourcing, an internal sourcing, it will be able to deliver the right IT solution and not necessarily an internal IT solution to the business needs. It means that the CIO has to discuss with a different line of businesses, more than ever, to validate the fact that they have the confidence to go on solar services inside the cloud strategy he has been building. And yes, this governance, the fact that the role of the broker of the CIO is coming faster and faster is of major importance in the project. We see that in every large project here in EMEA. What about the public cloud? You see guys like Amazon putting data centers in places like Ireland, different requirements. It's not just one region. You described that very well up front. What about the public cloud in EMEA? What's the adoption look like? How does that fit into HP strategy? So, different points. First of all, it is a ramping up from, I would say, the small and medium businesses to the cloud. It's not the blooming, okay? People learn, people have to learn. So, then you have the traditional big cloud service providers that we know. Amazon of this planet, the Google of this planet, et cetera, et cetera. Now, the big difficulty these people will face here in EMEA. It is the fact that you have different rules, regulation, and for data, and for security. Everybody's aware about all these NSF prism effect and so on. Now, our position is not to say to our customers, go and go to HP public cloud forever, whatever. As I said it, the cloud does not belong to anybody. What we need to propose is a framework here in the EU on which we can offer, and perhaps it's a huge project, I will not speak later on, but on which we're working, to be the global service catalog across the EU, bundling and having as share owners, participants, all the service providers here in the EU, all the governments, in order to publish all the cloud services, in order that these cloud services can be reused everywhere in the different countries. So, we are not in a direction of saying to our customers, go and purchase to HP, come what may. It's not the topic. We believe that we need to be very, very precise on the diversity. We need to be very precise on the workloads. We need to be very precise on data privacy rules, on to allow all the cloud service providers here in the EU to play their role in the economy. Don't forget one thing. I believe that cloud will have reached the real impact if it allows the software development community to grow first and make more money, and it is something we need to work on. And second, an ultimate target is to solve here in the EU two points, unemployment and deprediction. And that's a big, big area on which we, as the EU cloud team, are investing time. How we can really leverage all the job done by the service providers. How we can better leverage all the job done by all the governments who have been publishing some cloud services, and create a kind of federation of all these services, just in order that here, we create more employment. Here, we create more deprediction. So if you look at the history of the professional services business, systems integration, consulting professional services, it's very local in nature. A lot of business occurs locally. Is your premise that you expect to see the same type of dynamic with cloud services? Yeah, absolutely. You know that HP is going with. We have a huge ecosystem of partners from system integrators, from channel partners, integrators, resellers. I would say that one of the biggest challenge we have is to give to this ecosystem of indirect to market the best of great of HP in order that they can transform their own people first, but also that they can have the right tools to discuss with their customers and open to them the road to the cloud. One example, when you have a cloud service provider with a cloud agile partner from HP. So he has been powered by HP, working with HP to build his cloud capabilities. Our job is really to help this cloud service provider to distribute his cloud services everywhere in the countries, cross-AU, cross-EMEA. So we are putting a lot of efforts in working with our ecosystem of resellers in order that they can be linked with these cloud service providers part of our cloud agile ecosystem and they can propose to the market the cloud services who have been built by these cloud agile partners. Why? Because here in EMEA at least, it's very important to understand that building the IT for a small and medium business is relying on my reseller, is relying on the company who is near me who has been working with me all these years to build my own IT. And I need to be educated by this partner of choice with my reseller, reselling HP offering. And tomorrow, this reseller will perhaps propose to me, I am an SMB, I've been working with him, perhaps he will not propose to me a server, a storage, but a cloud service. And this cloud service should be the one delivered by the HP cloud agile partners, the cloud service providers powered by HP. So we are putting a lot of money in that area. Zavya, I want to ask you about the European context around developers. One of the things Amazon has done extremely well and is the blueprint for, and there's the design center for what is everyone else in the enterprise, because Amazon is the tidal wave of cloud that's hitting the beaches of the enterprise. And the question is, how much of the enterprise will they take? Now we are saying, they'll take a little bit, they're doing some tests in dev now, there's some shadow IT as we say in the US. But for the most part, Amazon really isn't enterprise ready. I mean, that's my view and many others' views. So the challenge that we said at Amazon's reinvent in Las Vegas was, whoever can build the Amazon for the enterprise will win everything, because the enterprise needs the same philosophy. Integrated stacks, elastic beanstalk, full closed loop, provisioning, messaging, red stack, data warehousing, all in a new way. But with the focus of developers. One thing that they've done is the developers. Please share with us your view. A lot of developer action in Europe, very hot developer market. What are you doing? What's HP's developer angle in the cloud? So this is a message for all the developers. Look at HP in the coming months. Look at HP what we are going to launch as a formal proposal to the EU Commission. I can tell you we're working on a very, very big project for you, the developers in the EU. I can tell you what we want to do is really to bring all together, all the players of this industry in the EU. We believe that if we can bring together all the cloud service providers at the same table, all the government who have been building some cloud services, we can build a global EU service catalog on which you developers can rely on in order you can reach every single of your customers in the EU. We can do this because of cloud services automation, because of this software that we've been creating that will enable to build a global marketplace or not a local marketplace in order that you developers can put everything on this platform, even though with the HP technology and the hybrid delivery model, it can be executed locally by all the cloud service providers here in the EU. I reveal that today, it's a big announcement. We are working on that. We are just starting the project that I can tell you in the future. When is the announcement going to come? No, it's not. It's where we are working on. Multicom. Okay, stay tuned. Okay, so first of all, the passion is awesome. We love the passion. So explain, let's talk more about the developers. What kinds of developers? Because DevOps is the new way, right? Programming and pushing code, whether it's Node.js at the top of the stack, or whether it's something on a database, unstructured, structured, I got some Vertica, I got some non-Vertica. Developers don't want to get under the hood. They just want to code, write code. So infrastructure as code is the deal. So service automation, orchestration, these are important things you've talked about. So what kind of developers are you targeting? What are the most relevant developers and what are the things that you'll offer them in terms of success? Distribution, flexibilities, just elaborate more on the developer. So our target is really to put the right tools in place for agile development. I am very clear about that. And you will see some announcements here. During these days, I cannot speak about that. It will be announced. You will see some announcement about some new tools for agile development. In order that you can, if I am a developer, I need to embrace the latest technology. And there is nothing more than great that how I can make it happen, collaborating with agile development. I do not believe that the next step for development is to have one developer in one area. What we see as trends here in EMEA at least is that you have Turkish people being connected with Swedish ones, being connected with, I don't know, Romanian ones, and thinking about one project and how they can really collaborate using the latest tools. So be stay tuned on that also because you will see some announcement about collaborative development in the cloud from EMEA. It is a huge focus for us and it is where we are putting our minds. So that would suggest that interoperability across cloud platforms is very important in this region. So would you agree with that that it's maybe perhaps more important than the functionality of an individual cloud? How do you see that trade off shaking out in this part of the world? So what we see is that the workload portability needs to be there. So you have different ways to come to the workload portability. First of all, you can come to tools like Tosca for the development of application in order that really you can embrace the comprehensiveness. Now, I believe that one of the big, big bed that HP has done and that is bringing to you customers, developers is also open stack. Let us be clear. There is a big, big bed of HP there. We are putting, if you listen to Bill Vector, if you listen to Meg Whitman, if you listen to Sargillai, if you listen to Martin Fink, we are putting the money there. Why? Because we believe that we are, and I believe I listened to you when you were discussing the last 30 minutes. There is a new event coming. The new era when some years ago the Unix 6M5 was created and today something is popping up. Which is open stack. I tell you what, we have been instrumental. I was discussing with Alan Clarke from OpenStack Foundation and Numergy in France which is a G Cloud powered by HP. Was embraced already, you know the road to open stack and we had press conference together. This route to stand out will be key for the achievement of what you say, the interoperability, the workload portability on top of using, in connection with these tools, the application links with tools like Tosca. So, upward APIs, not only thinking of downward APIs. We are in the world of the software. Well, OpenStack is one we're very bullish on. We broadcast live at OpenStack Summit. We didn't go to Singapore. But OpenStack has challenges right now. One is the market's moving very, very fast. You saw what Amazon was doing at 3Invent. Clearly they're moving into that area. Rackspace is a great partner of OpenStack but they're not a big player. I mean, they're a hardware guys, they're not software guys. So what we're seeing is, obviously we know you guys have been great with OpenStack. OpenStack has so much momentum and promise and CIOs want OpenStack to win because it's a warm blanket of execution. It allows for customization. We've spoken to SAR, we've spoken to George Kedifa. The openness is a really good and it fits the multi-vendor strategy of HP. So we are not seeing the leadership at the OpenStack level. There's a lot of little skirmishes going on. Neutron down at the SDN layer but we need to see a leader for OpenStack. Is that going to be HP? It will be HP. It will be HP for one single reason. It is that we know how to make an enterprise scale kernel for OpenSystems. And you will see more about CloudOS in this area, in this exhibition and new announcements coming. But we announced that already in early September and this summer. We have the proof point now. We have been very cautious. We have been taking the best of what OpenStack can deliver to transform this into a global set of functionalities that you can deploy in a data center. The big, big advantage of what we have been bringing with OpenStack is not only the fact that we have been with Havana, one of the main developers of OpenStack. The new version. It's because we have been able to package it. We have been able to make it compliant with the patch. And also with the patching, with the lifecycle management. You know, you say, why would CIO say okay to OpenStack? It would say okay because it is reliable. It is scalable, but also it has a lifecycle management. And that's what we bring with CloudOS and we will have some very exciting press conference tomorrow. We'll see some customers of HP using CloudOS, speaking about that. I believe that we have taken the point because we are testing that, and now it's all about industrialization of OpenStack. It's all about CloudOS, how we can making scalable for the enterprise, but not only scalable, not only rich, not only interoperability, but lifecycle management proof. Well, we're excited to hear more about that on OpenStack. We want to keep in touch with you. It's great to have you. Great interview, great passion. We're excited for the EMEA approach to the cloud. It's very challenging. You have your work cut out for you. Certainly here it seems harder than the U.S. So final question I've got to ask you. There's been some recent management changes at HP. You have a new leader, Martin Fink, who's been on theCUBE before, theCUBE alumni. What's the management structure for the cloud? Okay, so Vecte was running it kind of before, right? So is SAR and you report to? So what's the structure look like? It's very simple, you know. From a go-to-market perspective, the guy, the person, the leader who is doing that is Bill Vecte, you know, that's normal. We embrace all the segments, we embrace everything. Now from a technology perspective, so everything is connected to a Sargillai which was in charge to develop all the, I would say the third dimension between the product and the segments. And we take the base of the product, we build the cloud offering, we push that from a go-to-market to the segment. I am in charge of pushing that here in EMEA with my pre-sales, my sales organization, all these people are dedicated to that. And the big change, for me to say is that HP has decided to have a real dedicated people to that, to increase investment on that, and it will be, it is already, but I can tell you, it is useful. So Martin is the boss, so sorry, Martin, Martin we saw with Vecte. So Vecte is not managing the team? It is, you know, it's too hard to go-to-market and Martin Fink is managing, yes, the global development. Well thank you very much, we're excited for the HP cloud and we've been watching it kind of being cobbled together from back when it was just kind of like the idea and the early days it had no support, just open-stack kind of team coming together. But to see you guys really pull together the cloud system, pull it all together, we've talked to SAR before. I think it's you guys are doing a lot of good work, I can't wait to see the results, certainly looks good right now. Thank you very much for sharing your passion. Thank you. And we'll look for the developer announcement. Again, it's about the developers. At the end of the day, infrastructure as code is the new era of modern computing. This is theCUBE, of course we love this. We'll be right back and with more in-depth coverage here in Barcelona, Spain, for HP Discover Europe, we'll be right back after this short break. theCUBE is...