 from London, England. Extracting the signal from the noise. It's theCUBE. Cover, Discover 2015. Brought to you by Hewlett Packard Enterprise. Now your hosts, John Furrier and Dave Vellante. Okay, welcome back everyone. We are live here in London, England for kind of the wrap up here for HP Discover 2015. HPE is now the HP Enterprise, the first show takes place in Europe actually by all coincidences. It's the first show of the new split company, officially split. It's our third day and wrap up of the three days of wall-to-wall coverage of theCUBE. SiliconANGLE's flagship program. We go out to the events and extract the signal from the noise. I'm John Furrier, my co-host Dave Vellante and our special guest on this segment is Calvin Zito, influential blogger. HPE storage guys handle Calvin Zito on Twitter. Always doing God's work out on the trenches. Blog posts, social media. Great to see you back on theCUBE. And sometimes they have me doing branding stuff, John, so I have to correct you. It's not HP Enterprise. Did you do the logo? Do I got to get Meg over here? Did you do the logo? What does it call this? Well, it's always, this is funny. You know, branding people are branding people, so. Hopefully none of them are watching now, but. They will watch some. They've actually sent, you know, when we first split the register did a story and it said HP Enterprise. And they got a letter from Hewlett Packard Enterprise saying this is an incorrect usage of the name. There's only two correct uses, usages, and it's either HPE, which is not preferred, it's the short form, or it's Hewlett Packard Enterprise. And it says you should absolutely never use HP Enterprise. Everyone's going to do that. That's what everybody's going to say. Everybody's going to do it. I like Hewlett Packard. I mean, it's the roots of the company. I have no complaining at all. But the PR people probably aren't going to like you too much if you keep saying HP Enterprise. I'm just telling you. So I wrote a blog post last night, the new HP, and I had someone put the logo in on our blogging team and it was the old logo. I'm like, guys, you also have to go in and change the logo. But they got caught into the RSS feeds. So on all the shares, LinkedIn and Twitch going crazy, it's sharing with the old logo. Oops. The brand police are going to go crazy. But the branding is pretty good. I like it, the green logo. Some are calling it the green coffin. But it works. I like it a lot. I do like it. It's grown on me. I like how they've used the elements. Love how they're using photography. Images are beautiful. Great branding. You know, when they first showed it to employees, it was actually before the discover we did, the HP discover we did, they showed it to us internally on a forum and it was just basically the element with the brand Hewlett Packard Enterprise. It wasn't the usage of it. And there was actually a forum that was online where 95% of the comments, actually 99.9, were, you know, WTF. I mean, really, how much did we pay for a rectangle? That was my reaction, but I'm getting it now. You walk around here, you see the way the element's been, your fire going through it. I clicked on a video. It opened up in the element. I was like, oh, that's cool. Did you guys see the open of the keynote? Yes. And the way they used it in the background with the symphony plan, that was just like, what? So there's a lot you can do with that. It's simple, squares are easy to use, and it's flat, works well on mobile, so. So guys, I want to introduce this segment. This is a new format for theCUBE. This is a wrap up, kind of bringing both worlds together for a unified analysis. Dave and I get to sit down with the executives and customers talk about, you know, the stuff strategy, what's going on. We ask why I'll ask questions sometimes. Well, I do, Dave doesn't. Calvin's also doing the same thing with all the influences and bloggers. We're all talking kind of the same people, getting different perspectives. So I thought it'd be great if we just share perspectives. Just kind of talk randomly around what we've seen, what we've heard, observations, anecdotes. I'll start. Calvin, I just think that it's just a good vibe this year. The energy around not having a floor that's laid out like an org chart, you know? It's like, it's solutions, right? E-government, you're seeing, you know, IoT, not, you know, the Vertica booth, or the Astoride Idol booth, or store, well I mean, you know, but it's all blended in. So I thought that was key. I liked Meg Whitman's opening keynote when she said, and I love when CEOs do this. And more than ever now for HP, Enterprise is, you look back at Enterprise, she thanked the customers. Thank you for your business. Can't do enough by saying thank you for your business. So those two things jumped out, kind of paraphrase the whole thing. And then the composable thing and the synergy, I think, is the next equivalent converged infrastructure. And I think that is going to be a head-scratcher for some. The DevOps guys like us can see it right away, Doc and all the stuff kind of playing out, but HP had converged infrastructure right from day one. People scratched their heads, took a few years, but it's mainstream. I think the same thing is going to happen. So that's my big takeaway. Thoughts on your end? Yeah, you know, I totally agree in terms of the floor layout. I think the one thing that's a little bit of a problem that customers have found, there are customers that come and they want to go talk to the product guys. And so I actually found a customer wandering around on the floor with one of the event organizers who had a customer trying to find store once. And they're sitting there like, where do I find store once? And I knew where it was, so I took them right over to it. And then I pulled the person aside and said, you know what, what I probably need to do is at least in the directory, tell people where the product stuff is because they don't even do that. I mean, it's all organized by the solutions. Yeah, good point. So the customer couldn't find store once and they wanted to go talk to a store once customer. So I love the fact that there's now a solution focus. And it's not the product stacks. But they do need some navigation discovery. They need navigation. Yeah. Dave, what's your thoughts? Well, I've been talking about it all week. I mean, it sounds like a broken record, but to me, the balance sheets changes everything. You got a cleaned up balance sheet, you got no debt. You've been mentioning this, I want to expand on this. So HP, I asked Meg Whitman, I want to say three years ago, one of the analyst meetings in public. You know, he asked the question. I asked her and I knew it. You always do that. And I tried to put it on the spot. I said, what's the balance between organic growth and R&D or inorganic growth, you know, acquisitions and R&D and what do you think is a better investment? Knowing that they had this big chunk of debt on the balance sheet. And her answer was, we're not going to do any M&A until we clean up the balance sheet. So then I asked George Kadifa. Meg just said, you can do any M&A, you're going to software business that's now shackled. And he just rolled his eyes, like, oh, there's another analyst question. But the point was HP didn't have the flexibility at the time. Okay, now what's happened is HP, Hewlett Packard, Inc. Well, HP, before they split, took a $14.5 billion note, restructured the debt, put most of the debt under HP, Inc., which has the cash flow to pay off, service that debt, cleaned up the HPE balance sheet. There's no debt on it anymore, delevered. And now HPE can go out and make acquisitions. So HP, Inc. is the Cayman Islands for the transaction. Yeah, it's like I've been saying. So this is like to me, it's been rope-a-dope for three years. So they're clean, they have no debt. Muhammad Ali in the ropes, and now it's the seventh round and HP can come out fighting. It's got all this energy, it's got a cleaned up balance sheet that can make acquisitions if it needs to, which it will, obviously Aruba's won. And so internally, that's got to be a breath of fresh air. Yeah, I mean, and I maybe didn't have the depth of your analysis there, Dave, but I kind of knew it was about to reduce the debt and put Hewlett Packard Enterprise in a position that- Solid footing. Yeah, and Enterprise is changing fast. And maybe consumers is too, I don't know their business, so I won't speak to theirs, but I think Meg was really trying to put Enterprise in a place where if we needed to acquire, we could. There's certainly organic stuff happening. I'm sure you guys have seen the machine. I actually just did some videos with folks over there. I mean, I'm blown away by some of the stuff that's coming and it's, you know, we'll be here, they said by the end of the decade. Very cool stuff they're doing. So innovation is alive, but acquisitions are required. I feel like in a way, the deck is stacked. I mean, I've done a lot of small P&L management. And when you do, you know, changes, you can say, I want this division to succeed and I'm going to set it up for success. Boom. And I think that's what's happened with HP. Yeah, and that's cloud. Obviously cloud's in the center of that. Storage is a big, they converged us all coming right as they had planned years ago. It's been fun as doing the cube now for six years, seeing all the conversion of such stories and talking about all the execs, a lot of left, most have stayed, but seeing that they stayed on track, Dave, they didn't waver and they added new stuff to it. So all that distraction, all that noise, they did good. I stayed on the core. So I love that and it's good to see that people get their reward now. They're unchecked with a clean balance sheet, but I want to ask more deeper, Calvin, from your bloggers and the influencers out there, what are they hearing? What's the vibe? Taking note of what's the hallway conversation like? I mean, they don't pull punches. They want to see growth. Yeah. What's the community talking about? Well, the vibe you get from a blogger depends on their perspective and you guys know this. I mean, some of them tend to come in with a very sarcastic, you know, these guys can't do anything right attitude. And those are the guys that you want to see, how's their attitude going to be when they leave, when they really understand what you're doing. It's a bellwether. Yeah, and, you know, there's, again, get back to the corporate people. Sometimes they don't like those people because they tend to be snarky and they'll tweet snarky stuff out. Yeah, I want to know what it is. I want to know what it is. They'll give you a fair, honest interpretation. So, you know, composable is one of them. I think, and maybe I don't think we've sold everybody, but a couple of them were really questioning composable. It's like sounds good, but, you know, three years from now it's going to be something else. And you guys have, it's, you know, what you're investing now in composable isn't going to be there. I don't know. I think what customers are looking for is make the infrastructure disappear, automate and instrument everything that we do. We're looking for that. I mean, we don't, some of the cube gigs, it's no brainer. Like they all want DevOps. It's just, it's too hard as hell to do it. Well, the machine and memristor are fundamental to the future of composable, right? As we saw it. And so, and you put an R and D there. So you're making your bet, placing your chips on the table. If those things fly, you know, Synergy's going to fly. Well, we had Rick Lewis on the cube and he was, we actually forced him to say it. Is Synergy the, not forced him, but we kind of like prod him. You asked him the question, is Synergy the first kind of peak at memristor and the machine when he started real? Well, that's when we're ready to message him. Well, yes or no? Okay, yes, it is. Architecturally, you know, if you look in there, it is. Well, so it falls on the HP's core. But that's great because you're seeing, what's the big criticism of the herd years where R and D get squeezed, we're seeing no more invent. HP's back to its roots of invention. And you've got to compliment that with M&A, which is why I think the balance is so important. You were privy to the CI launches, right? When Converge Infrastructure first came out, what was the reaction to that? Probably the same, right? Skeptics come around. Yeah, always, always were. And I think, you know, that you guys know this. I mean, HP was probably first out there talking about Converge Infrastructure. They were first, they were first. But. Well, Terradate was really first. There wasn't. They didn't talk about it in that term. Anyway. Terradate. Unfortunately, at that time, there was just a lot of. 1982. A marketing message behind it. And it took a lot of time for it to get to be traction, where we actually had something. And you know what happened? I mean, other people stepped in and they became the thought leaders around Converge Infrastructure. And that's why people said, okay, Synergy, Copycat to UCS, IBM did this three years ago. Give us your perspective on why that's not the case. I totally disagree, because we actually give an example. We started talking about Composable at Discover in Vegas and a couple of few months ago. And suddenly we started noticing Cisco started also talking about Composable. The way they talked about it is completely different. Maybe what they're trying to do is make it sound like it's UCS. It's not. I mean, I don't think there's a comparison. Well, there's no storage in Cisco. So it can't be built from the ground up. Right. And how do you orchestrate and compose? You know, how do you fire up a container by having somebody just go in and grab from a pool of resources. And you know, a couple minutes later, they've got a container and they can start doing stuff. And IBM with Pure conceptually probably could have done it, but it chose not to. It chose to focus on that application layer and not deal with the infrastructure piece that you guys have as a pool, which you guys have done. And that may not be a bad thing for them. But I think for our perspective, I think we want to own the infrastructure and then the APIs, they're going to be open APIs to be able to manage that stuff. I think we're in a great position to kick butt. And Oracle's choosing to optimize its stack. Okay, and that's what I'm saying. One stack. That's great for Oracle's stack. And I don't think it's a zero sum game. I think Oracle can do well. I think HP can do well. IBM's buying the weather company. I think they've got a different strategy here. Dell EMC, we'll see. I mean, what do you take on that? Well, I think it's going to be an interesting thing. Obviously it's going to create a lot of confusion in the near term. For me, it gets down to the economics of it that again, you guys probably know way more about that than I do. But to me, it's like, okay, Dell is needed a storage business. I mean, they were okay, but they really didn't have a compelling storage vision or storage direction. EMC needed servers and they needed to be able to have that whole infrastructure to be able to do that real end to end because UCS and Cisco relationship was obviously burning up quickly. So I think it's a good fit of together. The question is, was it worth the price? And that's the question that I see. And HP's a $28 billion market cap. Dave and I were joking. Wasn't Dell just buy HP? It's half the price. They got all the action. HPE, HPE. But no, I'm the worst Mac. I got to get Mac in here. So, yeah, right. Well, the other thing too is EMC needed a way to survive in a world that's not going to support 60 plus percent gross margins. Those days are gone for storage. In some people I've heard say it's a way for EMC to go private because now they don't have to like to go to Wall Street because of the gross margins. Because in the cash flows doing this, margins getting squeezed. So, Calvin, talk about the European show here. Obviously it's not in the U.S. We noticed we get the new cube gems. You probably saw some of the cube gems we've been putting out. The real-time highlights, the cube is trending. Not a lot of Twitter action in Europe. There's a social media dynamic that's different. What's your observation on the social media front here in Europe? It's definitely a bit different, but it's- Europeans don't tweet as much as Americans. They don't. Or do they? Well, I haven't seen that absolute metrics, but we put all these leaderboards out and it looks like the volume is pretty similar. I mean, I see a lot of action. Hans tweets. I don't have absolute numbers. We're going to bake off all the Americans versus the Europeans. Sweets more than Foskette. I mean, he's a tweeting machine. Well, we've got a couple of Belgian guys here because we're just kind of measuring the influencers and there's a board up there, of course. Let's create some healthy competition. And there's these two Belgians that you look every minute and it's somebody else who's at the top of the leaderboard. You're up there with Bert. Yeah, exactly. The content's been awesome. How about some of the social content that you've been hearing? Yeah, you know, honestly, this stuff gets to be so busy I was telling some of the other day. And what's the show been? I got here, I left Sunday to get here. I've had nine hours sleep since I got here. There hasn't been time for me to read stuff. But you know, the bloggers who are doing things, they've told me I'll spend next week really kind of chewing down on what they've done. I mean, we keep doing this because we get great stuff from independent bloggers. What's your take on the social in general? Obviously the transition, a lot of people had split up with socials, a very unified group I know at HP. Did people split groups? What happened with the social? I'm not sure that I'm going to be entirely accurate with this, but I think I am. Is that a lot of the social team came with Hewlett-Packard Enterprise. I mean, the stuff that we always did at Discover events in the past, the people all in that room down there, it's all the same people that did Discover in the years past. Some of the corporate level people, there's a few of those that got peeled off. But again, I mean, you guys know the books part of it. They don't have as much bandwidth to have the size of teams that we have. So I think a lot of the people doing social media actually came over to Hewlett-Packard Enterprise. What should we be doing? What should you be doing? And social and research and the cube, what area should we be covering? What gap should we be filling in your view? You know, you guys got a great gig going because you bring the insight that you have. So I'm probably not the right guy to give you free consulting right now. Oh, come on. No, I'm not because I mean, you guys got a great gig because you really bring that insight to industry events like this. And you're able to, like you said, boil down the extractive signal from the noise there. And you guys got a great gig. So I'm not sure I could give you anything to do to change how I do it. Well, I think I can answer that, at least my perspective is. Well, we know you can answer, John. No, this is why I wanted Calvin to come on this show. We talked about last night, you invite him, like, be great. We've never done a wrap and brought the two perspectives together because we're both doing the same job, basically. Scouring the landscape, extracting the signal from the noise, but just different formats, right? The bloggers are in the trenches, they're doing the one-on-ones, they're sniffing for stories. They're trying- They're basically tied more into that. And Stu Miniman crosses that on our team, right? You know that, right? So what, the great wrap up here is, hey, what do we compare notes? So I think unifying social, because social's collaborative. I mean, I don't know what the answer is, what that collaboration is, but to me, the best social media that I've seen done has always had one common, two common elements, collaboration and people. Done well, those are the two vectors of dynamics. So good people, good collaboration, magic happens. And maybe I'm reading too much, this may be a trend that's maybe different than what you guys are asking, but I think something that I see happening as marketing is almost in a way. You know, the marketing out, it's becoming social. And companies that don't recognize that that's what they need to do, because the customers are looking for that one-to-one interaction. They don't want to go to your website and read a data sheet. They're out there in social media. I think- They're sourcing and discovering information from their peers. And they're reading sources that they trust, which is the earned media, right? That's our, all right, Calvin, any final thoughts, the parties, give us the take, the storage party was fantastic. I'll see you in my birthday. I was very happy that you guys organized your party around my birthday. Yeah, thank you very much. 225, I said, if I could split. The storage party, yeah. I would be 225-year-olds. Yeah, exactly. The storage party was great. The storage party was great. The only problem was, is usually, you know, a lot of the women that worked for storage were left back in the U.S. this time. There were just too many guys there. So, I don't know. I was getting tired against rubbing up against people trying to get through, and every time it was a guy. So, we got to fix that next time. All right, Calvin. Great to have you on the wrap. This is a wrap-up from day three. Calvin Zito, he's with us. He's with us, just Dave, along with my co-host. Three days, Dave, great job, Calvin. Team, thanks for everyone's support. Camera guys, Dan, Leonard, Greg, team, and all the folks back at the ranch, live blogging. On the time zone, Jeff Frick, Patrick, pulling all-nighters, getting theCUBE gems out. Good job, well done. Great job. And awesome event, thanks for sharing. This is SiliconANGLE, and Bert Latimore on the number one on the leaderboard. Bert, good job. If you didn't pass out with fatigue, you're watching, congratulations for being number one on the leaderboard. And everyone else, thanks for watching. This is a wrap from SiliconANGLE theCUBE, live from London. That's a wrap for HPE Discover. Thanks for watching.