 Live from the FIIA Barcelona Grand Villa Compensator in Barcelona, Spain. It's theCUBE at HP Discover Barcelona, 2014. Brought to you by headline sponsor HP. Here are your hosts, John Furrier and Dave Vellante. Welcome back to Barcelona, everybody. Chris Cograves here. We're going to talk consulting services. Chris is the chief technologist and strategist for HP's technology consulting services business. Chris, welcome to theCUBE. Thanks, Dave, it's great to be here. Yes, so we were just talking, you know, people don't realize, you know, when you come to an event like this, how busy you are, how many people you meet. And of course, we're in Barcelona, so nobody even eats until 10 p.m. We're working on not a lot of sleep, we're on fuel, but it's good, there's a lot of energy here. A lot of energy there, definitely. A lot of action. So give us your take on what's happening at HP Discover, let's start there. Well, I think there are lots of individual things happening here, and I think we're seeing a lot of announcements around the sort of next stage of infrastructure evolution with hybrid cloud, with converged infrastructure, and particularly with software-defined infrastructure, which is an area where we're releasing a series of new services at the moment. So a lot of things happening, a lot of exciting things, a lot of things that are very relevant in the market at the moment. So your title is chief technologist and strategist. So, and you're part of the consulting organization, we always call it the tip of the spear. So I presume you come in and work with customers to help them understand their technology, their architecture, their strategy. Talk about that role, and then how are you typically engaging with customers? Right, well, basically what we look at is defining a vision and a roadmap for customers. We understand what customers' business problems are, what business outcomes they need, and then we work on helping them realize those through the application of technology. So if I give you a typical sort of life cycle that we look at, we start off with what we call a transformation workshop which builds consensus. I think the key thing in a lot of customers is that there are more and more different stakeholders involved in order to get a solution that works at the end of the day, you need to build consensus. We talk a lot about technology, but the software issues, the people and the processes and the organization issues are becoming more and more important, you can't ignore them. We help define a roadmap, defining where you wanna go, where you are now, how to get there, and then look at an overall architecture, top level design, et cetera. So we take them through very much the front end of the life cycle driven by their business needs. Okay, so the common theme that you hear when you talk to customers is okay, we have these pockets of innovation that we built up, aka legacy systems that are vertically stacked, and the reason was we had an application that we had to get done and it was going to solve a business problem or create some revenue, and so we built an infrastructure stack around it, and we built another one, another one, another one, and every project had a beginning and maybe not an end, and now we're left with this mess that doesn't allow us to be agile like Amazon. Okay, help, you must hear that everywhere you go. I think it's about getting the house in order. If we look at what's happening with most of our customers at the moment, the business is under more pressure than it's ever been in order to react quickly. We have the mega trends like cloud, big data mobility coming along, requesting more storage, more bandwidth, more compute, more space power and cooling. However, in most organizations, we're stuck with these stovepipes of network server storage, each with their own army of admin, very much manually driven in terms of all the activities that need to take place. So when the business comes along and says, you know, we need something now, it's a case of well, we'll have to go away and we'll work out and we'll come back and we'll tell you what it's going to take and how long instead of saying, how high do you want us to jump? That's really what expands. Is that saying, okay, what's the budget? Okay, so as I say, you hear that a lot. What you just described those sort of stovepipes of expertise, one of the ways that people are attacking that is with converged infrastructure. I often tell people that when I talk to them that look, you should think about your organization and your process before you just go out and buy a box. Somebody said to me, yeah, if you do that, you'll never get it done, just buy the box and then figure it out. So I said, wow, that's kind of an interesting way to do it. So I started to probe this particular customer and he said, no, I'm serious, that's what we did. We brought it, we said, we're doing the converged infrastructure, we brought it in, we had no choice but to then reorganize around that. And so I wonder if you could talk about that intersection of people processing technology and how you help customers manage that. Yeah, I think it starts with the business drivers there and what are the key requirements and who are the stakeholders that are affected? We find, my experience in the past is that you could have gone in and delivered the best technology solution but that could fail if you haven't got the organization and the people and process elements in place. Yeah, I think there's a lot to be said for doing something now rather than waiting but at the same time, you've got to be careful that you don't end up with a box sitting there which is great, is plugged in and he's not doing anything because it's constrained. So I think you've got to have a coordinated approach that moves forward, that brings in not only the technology but the people in the process. You need the right sort of models to understand where you are, what you need to do, you need the right architectures that you need the right approach in terms of the workshops that we're talking about. If you don't do that, you're going to come unstuck sooner or later and I think it's about having the right people involved at the right time, building consensus and then sort of taking this forward. Not as a big bang but as an incremental approach where you're looking at quick wins where you're involving the respective parties and then building out based on those. So I think one of the hardest parts of your job is really understanding that outcome in a way that you can deliver success. What I mean by that is, every company works this way. You've got a sales team that's going in, huge problem and they say, wow, this is being a big deal. Okay, but if you don't have the executive sponsorship, if you don't have the processes, the tools, the people, et cetera, it's going to fail. So an HP doesn't want to fail. So how do you sort of rationalize that and balance that out? Right, right. Well, I think more and more as we move forward, we're moving away from an era which was focusing on individual boxes, technology silos, to overall solutions and those solutions are driven by business outcomes. And what we're starting to do more and more is that the start of an engagement will find a sponsor within the customer organization that is connected to the key decision makers at the business level. You're not only talking about the network server storage people, you're talking about the finance, you're talking about the HR, you're talking about a range of people there. We usually start off with what we call a transformation workshop and here at the show, we've got some rooms laid out, there are life-size panels there. We think it's really key to build consensus among those key decision makers and give them a shared vision of what they want to do in the future because if you don't do that, you can come unstuck moving further along. So we start off gently to give people a view of what it's all about. It's very interactive with there as a facilitator to encourage discussion and there's very lively discussion there and end up with a shared consensus on where they want to be and what they need to do to actually get there. So right at the start you're going to bring in the key stakeholders there. If you don't have that shared vision then you're likely to end up with a situation where you're satisfying some stakeholders but not others and the overall solution won't work at the end of the day. The other hard part about what you do is you got a lot of different agendas. So one agenda might be, hey, I want to build my Acme company cloud, my horizontal infrastructure that will allow me to be super agile. And then the other tug is I got this revenue opportunity and I need a solution as you just described and I need it yesterday. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. So, I mean if I'm in your shoes I'm saying, okay, we can do that and we could put it in. Yeah. You know, tomorrow, let's say. But it's not going to fit with your other objective. Right. And you got the business saying, I don't care about that other objective, that's not my problem. Are you seeing that a lot and how are you interested in it? Yeah, we do see that a lot. I mean what we do is, you know, we tend to take an architectural approach where we can position all of the different technologies and the benefits. You know, when software defined infrastructures come along, there are questions like, how does it fit in with cloud? How does it fit in with convergence? And I'm doing some convergence projects. I'm doing some cloud projects. So what does that mean? What we've done is we've developed an overall sort of reference architecture which takes you from the ground up where we're able to position the various initiatives and identify where customers are now and what they've got to do. Equally as much, it comes back to business outcomes in terms of what's going to give you the biggest bang for your buck across all of these particular initiatives. And in order to get to that point of prioritization, you need to be able to position these projects in a common framework and show, you know, how those will contribute and also from a timeline basis, where can you get quick wins now and where are you going to get the larger wins, you know, over a period of time? Okay, so does this lead to the software defined piece? So I guess, let me ask those questions that the customers are asking. How does software defined fit into cloud? How does it fit into convergence? And how does it fit into this overall architectural vision? Well, I think I always say that software defined is about getting the IT house in order. It's very much about agility. If you look at the many cloud deployments that have been done now, in a number of cases, expectations have not been met because what lies underneath in terms of the provisioning of the network server storage services has not been agile enough. So I look at SDI being the fulfillment engine, in other words, the invisible part that's below and cloud being, you know, the visible part, the business visible part at the top. In terms of convergence, convergence I think helps software defined because what you're doing is you're starting to simplify what's happening underneath the control there in terms of network server storage. It's an architecture. It's a journey. It's not one thing that you can buy. Many customers are different. What works for one doesn't necessarily work for another. So my perspective is we do enough that is good enough for the customer that meets their needs. If I was to say you need to software define all of your infrastructure, you need to cloud enable all of your infrastructure, you need to converge everything, that would be wrong. You know, you look at what is right to achieve those business needs. What's the right balance of those technologies? So the average age of an application, enterprise app is probably about 20 years old now. Yeah, yeah. So I would agree with you. You can't just cloudify everything. Yeah. But do you make those recommendations for all the new stuff? In other words, the new apps, you do want to cloudify, you do want to software define, you do want to converge. Is that true or? Yeah, I think you've got to take a balance for you in terms of the old with the new. I think what we're starting to see is like a bimodal model where you have the steady state efficient stuff, the number crunching stuff which is not really going to change, which is at the center of the organization. And then you have a whole load of new customer centric innovative applications that are changing rapidly that you need to maintain. And you've got to have a balance between supporting those two environments because the agility aspect is really key. That's what's really holding IT. IT is starting to become irrelevant in some cases because it can't react to the speed of business and business is going out to public cloud to get services. So we need to make IT relevant again, but equally as much, there's got to be a decision of what do you want to keep inside? What makes sense from a performance, cost availability perspective? What do you want to push outside to public cloud or outsourcing? What do you want to keep inside? Traditional private cloud. What you want to keep inside, how do you configure that in the most flexible way? I want to talk a little bit about disruptive business models and digital business models. And you can look at any industry, whether it's financial services or healthcare or telco or media, name it. Virtually every industry is getting disrupted by startups that are born in the cloud. And we like to look at little individual pockets of technology, but it seems what's happening is this sort of digital matrix of fabric emerging where you've got infrastructure, you've got some applications, what do they call them? Transaction applications or... And now you've got these systems of engagement as people call them and you've got the big data riding on top. So you've got these horizontal technologies and then within the industries, the old vertical stacks of design, production, manufacturing, distribution, ecosystem are changing. You look at Netflix, Airbnb, Uber, and they're riding on top of this digital fabric. And I'm wondering how much of your activity relates to helping customers understand those changes. Telco's got to be a huge one. We had Sargillia yesterday talking about network function personalization. He was educating us on sort of how they have to move to compete and change their essential, their fabric. So are you having those discussions? I mean, people I know, they're happening. How much are you dragged into this? How do we digitize our business? How do we maybe not own all this internally? Maybe we ride that digital fabric. How do we leverage data? Those are big, complex issues. Are you helping people solve those problems? Yeah, you're exactly right. Those are the conversations we're having every day. Businesses are in a position where they're being forced to change. And their ability to change depends on the amount of inertia that is within the organization. We look at the present business model. What are the options in terms of moving forward? What are the business outcomes that are enabled by these different technologies? And it may really end up in a completely different business model for the organization. In terms of what's it's raised on DETRA, how does it differentiate itself in the market? Is there an opportunity to implement a new process which is going to be a differentiating factor if it's to move forward? The transformation workshops that I'm talking about do tease out these issues and help position things from an overall business perspective. And what are the outcomes that are driven by all of these different technologies? And how do they rate together? Where are you going to get the biggest bang for your buck? How do these figure in terms of a risk profile in terms of an impact on availability cost? And it's really about defining a balanced portfolio going forward that's going to give the best for your business over a period of time. I keep saying it's a journey and that's very true. It's not one shot solution. It's an evolution over a period of time and things will continue to change during that journey. Is your typical engagement sort of a never-ending engagement or is it sort of beginning and end? I think we try to position ourselves as a trusted partner to our customers. We start right at the beginning in terms of understanding the customer's environment and what are the pressures upon the customer environment. We help build a vision for them. And again, I keep saying about consensus amongst the stakeholders, which is absolutely key. You've got to bring everybody along at the same time. We then look at understanding where they are at the moment. That's absolutely critical. A lot of companies dive straight off on these new initiatives without really understanding where they are at the moment in terms of the degree of agility, the costs, and so on. And then we build with our capability models what is the path, the roadmap of projects to get from A to B, not only from a technology perspective but also the people, the process, the governance perspective and then help them put in place a flexible architecture and infrastructure where we can position various products from HB as well as our partners. So you got a baseline, essentially is what you're saying. And then from that you can say, okay, how are we going to measure our success? Baselining's hard sometimes. The customer doesn't have the data. So I mean, I'm sure you have ways to sort of estimate, use rules of thumb, but it's a lot of tugging. Yeah, and I think, I mean, there's a good example with HP when we did our own internal transformation. We started off with what we had, x thousand applications and when we actually did an analysis, we found we had a lot more. X thousand times ten. Yeah, so I mean, all customers are different. We have a range of models, assessment tools, right from interviews, right to actually discovery tools which are able to go out in the infrastructure and find out what we have there. Again, it's a balance in terms of what are the right models to apply there. Every customer is different, whether you do a complete detailed analysis as opposed to something that's more like a questionnaire up front. Having said that, I don't think I've met one customer yet that started off by saying, we know exactly what's out there, but going on a few months, they didn't. There's a lot of surprises there, the shadow IT, there's lots of things going on that they didn't realize and that's why, as I say, it's important to get as best a baseline right at the start so that you're building your future infrastructure on a firm foundation rather than something which is going to shift as such. One of the other challenges, again, I think you have a really challenging role in the organization. Not just you, but you're the consulting organization and it's vital because if you don't get that first five, 10% right, you're doomed, or you're going to be lucky with you, right? So another hard part is you got infrastructure, it supports applications, applications connect to a business process that ultimately drive value. And that sounds simple, but though the relationships between those business processes, the application dependencies and the infrastructure that supports it, the infrastructure actually is, in theory, the easiest thing to understand is the connections to the applications and how they support business processes and where value flows and it's a rat hole. Do you try to avoid going into that rat hole? Do you have a technique to sort of simplify things or is there a minimum viable product analog in your business? Well, I think there are tools there. You know what I'm talking about. I know exactly what I saw. I know exactly, eight, six and one-half doesn't have another of that. We have tools that really go into all the dependencies, the mappings and so on. But having said that, it's very much a case of do you want a big bang solution where we take everything and we try to solve world hunger? Or do we pick one area where we can actually demonstrate something working that will deliver a degree of business benefit there? I mean it's like software defined. Do we start off looking at how we complete a complete software defined infrastructure right away? No, we look for low hanging fruits. You know, we look for sort of applications which require rapid scaling up, scaling down. You know, we look at things that you've got to replicate several times. And we pick particular areas of the business that we can demonstrate a business value without necessarily having to get into all of that, you know, that morass of difficulty there. Because I think what you've got to do with any of these areas is first of all demonstrate the benefit of that, the real business benefit in a particular area before you get the permission to start looking on a wider basis. And you know, if you try to solve world hunger then you know, you end up in a difficult situation. So is the solving world hunger business pretty much dead? Or maybe check HP's internal example. That was a big, chewy world hunger classic stuff. Because you knew if we didn't change, we're going to be really in deep trouble. So you have to be anticipatory on that. But I wonder if you could sort of talk about that. Well, I think one of the advantages we had when we did our transformation is that we had, you know, very good governance behind it. Mark Herd told Grundy Mott, you're the CIO, you're responsible, you make the decisions. So literally, it was very simple. Well, I won't say it was very simple but the governance was in place. I remember those days, it was binary. Yeah, if you look at a lot of organizations with many CIOs, obviously it's more difficult there. And it's more of a challenge. It's a negotiation, it's a plea. And I think it comes down to having a long-term plan in terms of where you want to go and then what you need to do, what are the key pain points in each of the areas and how they're related together. Because often you find that one area is directly related to another. And I think Randy Mott said, you know, if you change one thing, it has implications for the other and so you've got to look at what all those linkages are moving forward. Well, he was a unique individual in terms of that role and somebody who had the personality to pull it off and the authority. So you're right, that's a key factor. And sometimes it's hard to predict what the downstream impacts of all that are as well. Well, I don't think any organization is going to be able to predict everything with certainty. I think what organizations are realizing more and more now is that we're moving from the technology-centric area where you can buy a box, put it in, and it will work to a much more solution and business-centric era where the infrastructure has really got to be invisible. It's like going back to the old PC era era. Remember when you used to buy all the components, the graphics card, and the memory and you spent a lot of time putting it together. Now, you buy a box and you don't care, it just works, it's invisible there and that's how infrastructure has got to be going forward. Back then we thought it was cool and then we realized, wow, what a waste of time. Yeah, exactly. I've got better things to do. It's exactly the same analogy now, exactly the same. Chris, last question is common mistakes and advice that you would give to organizations. Right, okay. I think with any of these technologies we're talking about, don't wait too long. Start now. I think understand where things are going. If I look at software defined, there's a lot of confusion in the marketplace there and there's no need to get a clear view. Define a vision. Where do you want to go? Get the necessary help to do that. Understand where you are at the moment. Get a clear view on where you are at the moment. Involve key stakeholders and I think as we move forward with software defined and other solutions, it's not just about the server team or the network team or the storage team, it's about the linkages between all of them and we're going to start sort of breaking down those areas moving forward. And I think you've got to pick areas to start off with the low hanging fruits to actually demonstrate business value rather than trying to take the big bang approach. And as I said at the start, it's about architecture. It's about a journey where you're going to successively move from step to step and build on that. And as I said, the people, the process element are very key. You've got to involve the respective people and you've got to build consensus. So that would be my advice. Actually, the upfront insulting case is crucial as I said before. If you don't get that right, you're going to be in trouble. It de-risks a lot of activities within organizations and helps validate your direction. So Chris, thanks very much for coming on theCUBE. I appreciate your insight. I appreciate it. Right there, everybody. John Furrier and I will be back right after this word. We're live in Barcelona, HP Discover 2014. This is theCUBE.