 Okay, we're back here live at VMware 2013, 2012 was last year, four years going. Dave Vellante and I, I'm John Furrier. Dave Vellante, this is theCUBE, our flagship program. We go out to the events, I start to see them from the noise. I'm here with Dave Vellante. Yes, John, we were started here in 2010. This is a great location, we're thrilled to be with Steven DeWitt, who's the Senior Vice President and General Manager at Global Marketing for HP's Enterprise Group, longtime Cube alum and friend of theCUBE, Steven, welcome back. Great to be here. Great to be at VMworld, you know. I remember a number of years ago as Diane was creating VMware, at the time I was building a company called Cobalt Networks and I remember Diane's passion around the opportunity for virtualization, it's awesome to see the journey that they've been on, the impact that they've had in the market, really the highs and lows of that journey because, you know, we're all on a journey. There's a lot of big things in front of us, the cloud, alternative models, new underlying technology, et cetera, but this is a great example of an entrepreneur's vision turning into a multi-billion dollar business. Yeah, and then, you know, the thing about HP, and I think uniquely, other companies do it, but HP is particularly unique in this regard. When a trend occurs and you didn't necessarily invent that trend, you are able to leverage that. You know, you sell probably more VMware licenses than anybody, obviously VMware sells more, but the distribution channel, so you'd be able to take advantage of that. But now that's changing, you know what I mean? That world is changing, we're talking about multi-hypervisors, we're here at OpenStack, you guys are behind that, so where are we in that whole journey and what do you see as the big shifts that are going on and how are you going to capitalize? Well, two things, first off, you hit a very key point, you know, Hewlett Packard has been around for a long time, you know, if you think of the business challenges that we were solving in the 30s, in the 40s, in the 50s, in the 60s, really what draws the tie between all of those is technology was necessary in order to solve something that brought the human experience forward. When JFK challenged the world to put a man on the moon, and all of a sudden, okay, we got propellant that we can put in a rocket and send there, but how do you actually build a system that can go to the moon and return people back safely? It's not like there was equipment out there, I'm going to run down to Radio Shack and pick that up. You had to invent, you had to create the technology that enabled that experience to happen, and HP was there, you know, turn the clock forward, Bob Evans creates the 360, compute is born, it now starts to move from big rooms into the enterprise. You know, you get in the mini era, then server technology comes, HP was there, the personal computing era comes, HP was there. HP's an engineering company, I mean, when you really peel back the onion and you look beyond the headlines and the, you know, the hyperbole out there, it is an engineering company at its roots, and the culture of the company is very much what are the problems that we need to solve and how do we organize to solve them? You know, this is an interesting show that's both flattering and I think speaks to the reality of the market right now, take converged infrastructure, something we talk a lot about at HP. Why do we talk about it? Because it's something we pioneered, it's something we have a lot of passion about because we believe the convergence of infrastructure is necessary for the Star Trekky in future to emerge, where the human interaction with infrastructure is frictionless, it's not about the language of networking or the language of storage or the language of server technology, it's the language of us, it's the language of applications. And that's, you know, that's a big step forward and certainly represents the hill that we have to climb through the rest of this decade. Steve, you give the history lesson on HP and obviously the trends here is a modern era and the theme has changed, I mean, 10 years of VMworld, a lot of changes in the marketplace has been some changes at the executive level of HP. Microsoft has an executive change, Steve Ballmer, legend retiring and I'm sure he's not really happy about it, he wants to stay in fight, I mean, knowing Microsoft and you know those guys. So there's massive change going on and so if you go back to HP, kind of the Carly Farina time point to today, you're seeing HP has turned into an operating company and you mentioned they're an engineering company, they are an engineering company, so I got to ask you, what's going on at HP to make it an engineering company in the mind of the customer and to the employee base? Yeah, it's an excellent question. You know, look, history will judge the leadership of Hula Packard through Carly and Mark and Leo. You know, all three of those leaders were very gifted go-to-market leaders. All of them, I think, radically matured HP's field capabilities and that was an investment that was key. Hey, showing up, being there, having that relationship with your customer is consistent with HP's values. You know, the majority, not a majority, but a huge chunk of our employees spend all day, every day out of customer premise, so we like that intimacy. But in our world, innovation, no offense to Procter & Gamble, a great customer and partner of ours, but innovation in our world isn't adding lemon fresh scent or, you know, taking a particular sliver of a brand and changing the packaging, et cetera. Innovation in our world is about the fundamental transformation of a work process, a way things are done. I mean, look at Apple's products today, they're driving their revenue, weren't even around five years ago. No question about it. Does that fill your point? Absolutely, and if you think about the new style of IT, what faces an IT leader today, there are, the differences are massive. You have to, we're in a post-angry bird's world. You know, you're dealing with millennials, you're dealing with a brand that has to be able to prosper in a mobile connected universe. You know, it was just a handful of years ago that we would take virtualization, for example. It was a handful of years ago that an IT professional could walk into their senior management and beat their chest. Hey, I've been able to virtualize 50% of my compute infrastructure. And as a result of that, we've been able to derive these savings, which can be used there. That's a great argument. That's an argument that drove a lot of VMware's growth. Great consolidation, yes it is. Unbelievable story that's out there, but now what IT needs to do is they need to transform their apps. You know, they need to go from legacy hardwired apps to mobile apps. They need to go, they need to build apps that are built on top of a data lake so that whether you're using an app on your phone or a core business app, that it's getting the benefit of all of the data underneath in a way that's very transparent. Dave knows I hate the word data lake. I like data ocean because it's a lot of, it's big. But you're talking about top line revenue, right? I mean, you're talking about not just being a cost saver, but in consolidating, but driving business. Is that what you're getting at? Absolutely, and look, there's no question Hula Packard's revenue portfolio, like it has done in the past, will evolve to match the opportunity of the market today. If you look at our last reported results, you know, we break our PPS business, our enterprise business, our services business, et cetera. You are going to continue to see the evolution towards rapid innovation, co-innovation with our partners. You know, we just launched an enterprise campaign at Hula Packard, which is featuring companies like NASCAR, which you'll see on television in the days ahead. In a story that will talk about how an entity like NASCAR is able to bring the power of the data ocean to the fingertips of their ecosystem, their drivers, their teams. There's a lot of waves to surf in that ocean. There's a lot of waves to search there, but that is representative symbolic of the new positioning of HB. So let's talk enterprise group, right? Obviously, you know, obviously the performance on the earnings was, you know, we know this, Dave and I have been covering these products. We know they are their service storage network. We know all the folks who run them, and they're selling shipments, products, and then obviously the services, and software has been a big part of it, but the modern era of cloud and big data, there's a lot of co-mingling going on, right? So can you shed some light into the vision and how you get the innovation as you got blending? Okay, is that George Kedifus' group? Because he's done a good job in looking at what George has done. He's solid, looking good, grabbing those up, even with Vertica. Vertica's had a great quarter. Vertica had a fantastic course, so did autonomy, so did the security portfolio. You know, I think it speaks to convergence. At the end of the day, end customers are looking for solutions that don't have friction. They're looking for solutions that can be tied to their business priority and their application strategy, evolution, life cycle, et cetera. And they want a partner that can provide a full service across that environment. Not every company is the same. Not every large enterprise company is going to make their journey to the cloud the same way. You know, an operating model for a media and entertainment company like DreamWorks is very different than an operating model for a transportation company like United. So they have to look at the context and the opportunities of clouds, application transformation, and they need to be able to plot that journey along the path of their business. But cloud is central to the enterprise group. Oh, I think cloud is central, really. Cloud is a metaphor for the radical transformation and how infrastructure is being delivered is fundamental. One of the things that was announced last week, as we talked about Bill Vecti moving in to lead the enterprise group, is, you know, we began a handful of years ago under Dave bringing server storage and networking together. We recently announced a Converged Systems Group under Tom Joyce that will drive the integration of a number of our solutions as well as our go-forward orchestration. But that's just infrastructure convergence. Then you have to bring the other aspects in so that ultimately you can get to a world. This is not a siloed model. That's about applications and experiences. It's not a siloed model. I think what you were saying before was right on. It's the applications that have to now transform beyond what you're saying about consolidation. So let's unpack that a little bit. You guys talk about the new style of IT. We've been talking about sort of modern infrastructure. You've got this data. Most organizations today, I would argue, are not data-driven. And I would say most when it comes to mobile, most organizations are kind of paving the cow path. So they're not sort of taking a mobile first. So is that what has to occur for this transformation to happen at the application level? A modern infrastructure, a data architecture, an application development, DNA that is rapid, maybe DevOps-like. And then on top of that, a set of applications that are truly driven for the consumer user experience. Yes, unequivocally across the board there. And there's so many big nuggets in what you said. Start with that experience first off. We've all witnessed the growth of Google. 12 years ago, they had no revenue, no customers, and all they did was bring the human, I'm trivializing an enormous amount of data science and algorithms, but what they were able to do fundamentally is bring the human experience and data together. That sort of capability is ripe in the data center now. IT's job is to service the business units. Business operates at the pace of business. Business doesn't operate at the rate of silicon evolution. Business doesn't operate at the rate at which you can drive converge management. This is the transition period where the underlying building blocks are evolving, modern architecture. And remember, we haven't even talked about the huge change that's coming in infrastructure with the emergence of memrister and silicon systems on a chip and board level photonics. Systems, infrastructure itself is going to go through a massive transformation. But at the end of the day, what we believe is a true north is that IT operations are all about the speed of business, the ability to deliver the application intelligence as well as all of the requirements inside of the enterprise for security, compliance, regulatory, whatever your industry is, in a way that is orchestrated by the human, not defined by the different languages of the building blocks that make it happen. We're going from pieces parts to a truly integrated system and that is also building a new class of service provider or delivery vehicle for that capability. The cloud service provider, the managed service provider, the role of the legacy VAR channel are all morphing dramatically in response to this so that that local customization and that local, whether it's knowledge of your city or your vertical, et cetera, will still be provided in this new world. Steven, you know, HP's lucky to have you because you have an entrepreneurial background, you have a great passion, you've got a good nose for the trends, but also you great marker and an operator and as an executive. So I just want to say that it's awesome for HP to have you. But I got to ask you a question that's got a little bit of tap of your entrepreneurial background and your HP knowledge. We just had D Raj on the founder of Nutanix, he's been in the business for a while, knows this up and down like you do. And he said something, we made big bets with Nutanix. All the Naysayers for a full year said no, no, no. So there's a lot of Naysayers out there on HP. Break up the company, do this, do that. So my always signal to read to T. Lee's was whatever the Naysayers say, if there was a good feel for it, it's probably not going to happen. So I feel that the Naysayers are off based on the breakup HP philosophy. Because if we all do the Naysayers sit all the time, there'd never be innovation. So what's your gut feeling on those Naysayers out there on HP? Oh, break up the company, spread the cash around. Look, I know. Innovation's impossible. Unequivocally, brain dead. You know, part of the power of HP and certainly the unique position of HP in the market is that our R&D horizon goes from your fingertips through the data center and back. From the human experience, to the IT operations, to the application development world, to the unique realities of businesses in their world and their language. Being a portfolio company gives us unique perspective. Having that services footprint gives us unique perspective. Look, let me get the data out there. We've looked at it. Everybody's looked at it. Could you ginsu up the company? What are the synergies? What are the dis synergies? The simple reality is, and hopefully the promise of all of this, is that we are moving truly to a customer driven world. To a world that is about the unique dynamics of the enterprise or the small business or the carrier, et cetera. This is what we'd always hope we would get to. So the promised land that we're evolving towards is a good promised land. It's up to the company to evolve. It's up to the company to make sure that its portfolio is appropriately aligned. And we're doing that. And there's proof in the pudding. And I think the naysayers are getting it. Yeah, the PC market has changed. There's no doubt about it. We're not carrying big lunkables around. Now we're actually, I would argue, moving into a true era of personal computing, where the potential of your state being delivered against any piece of glass isn't a pipe dream, it's a reality. Now we need to get there. And companies like HP are well positioned to do that. Google, Apple, Microsoft, other players. We will do as we've done in the past and we will knit it together. And the people that have been successful, look at the history like D. Raj, they blow past the naysayers and stay on the course. And that's, I think, the key. And I agree with that. I think HP is going to break through it. So you've got to be mile markers along the way that say that what you're doing from a strategy perspective is working. Meg was extremely clear with the street and the investor community in general about the transition and the path that we were going to go on. And we've been on that path. Over the last handful of months, we've dramatically reduced the debt on the operating company. If we execute well through the remainder of our fiscal year, we will exit this fiscal year debt-free on the operating company. Yeah, it's consistent. It's got the cash machine fixed and you can go debt-free. Your balance sheet matters. HP's just too big to go private. And I think Michael Dell's move is interesting because that to me validates HP's on the right course. And let me give you my example. By him going private allows him to retool his product strategy. That doesn't say just kill the PC. The people are still going to use something. No question. Like a usable computer, Star Trek phone, whatever they're going to do. Compute exists. So the whole idea that the PC is dead is ridiculous. I mean, it'll always be personal. It might be free. It might be embedded. So to me, the Dell signal's interesting because that means he's going to take it private. We organize the research for the long haul. He's not giving up on the PC. So I think that to me is a signal. I think it's a signal. Michael is a, I have tremendous respect as a fellow entrepreneur at the great success that he's achieved. You are trading one master for another master. And that is something. Look, your financial construct will influence and dictate your strategical. The private equity master. No, no, no. Michael will own three fourths of the company. Silver Lake only will have a quarter. So it's going to be his Michael's playground. So it is Michael's playground. You have some fun, I think. Do you want to try on that compete? Look, it's going to be a challenge. And at the end of the day, you got to love that. The one thing though, that regardless of who's got command and control, you got to engineer, you got to build. You got to have the vision of what you're building towards. And you've got to have the ability to co-innovate with your customer base. I think I have the employees behind it. I think one of the things I like about what Meg is doing right now is that it's zero tolerance to people who aren't on the plant. And I think that's the way I would say it without going into detail before I get more facts. But I think the bigger picture to me is huge customer base, huge revenue, great R&D. Can the people, the troops, pull it together? Oh, I think Meg has done an amazing job of lighting up HP. And she hasn't done it with platitudes and shtick and things like that that you see so many leaders doing it. She's done it with transparency. She's done it with a culture of accountability and look at the end of the day. And she stayed out of the spotlight unlike Marissa Mayer, who's like all over Vogue magazine. Meg has been very much behind the curtain, not really putting herself out there. And has put a level of energy and intensity around the company that is awesome. I can say, and look I can't speak on behalf of the entire HP community. But as a proud HP'er, she's done a fantastic job but it's what we do from this point forward. Let's get her on theCUBE someday. So, when you see her next, then hey, you got to do an interview with John and Meg. All right, I'll put in the camera. So final word, we're getting the hook here, but I want to just give you the final word. HP, we're here at VMworld, 10 years. You know, known Diane Greene, you said it from the beginning. Where's this going, this world? This is the, give us the Steven perspective. The next, the next 20 mile stair. Okay, the next, the next, the next valley. Yeah, put on your invent hat. Well, so a couple of things. Just one thing really quick on, to close on VMware. You know, the first five years, five, six years, we watched hand in hand. I wasn't at HP at the time, but I watched VMware go through the prove it out phase, working in some of the most complex environments on the planet. If you look at 2005 really until now is when the industry has said we get it, we understand it, we internalize the value proposition, and we know how to make that magic happen. And it's been awesome to be a partner with VMware through that, certainly from an HP perspective. We've driven billions of dollars of business and have saved customers a ton. I think moving forward, and we certainly have a very tight commitment and alignment to VMware on this, we're all going to put futures out there. We're all going to talk about our true Norse. We're all going to talk about the priorities for our engineering. And in a lot of cases, we're going to be very aligned. And in some cases, we're going to have some divergence. And, you know, I think it's Gartner, who does the trough of disillusionment? That's Gartner. Yeah, it's Gartner. Well, things go through hype cycles and things come out. Just as virtualization went through a hype cycle and came out, there are so many big themes around orchestration, around open stack, around so many other supporting aspects to all of this. The next two or three years, there's going to be a lot of vetting out of that. But I can... It's the inflection point. The winners and losers will start to emerge. The bets will be materializing, and we'll see. And you got to look where people are putting their dollars, where their R&D is going right now, what they're telling you about that trough north, because that trough north is going to be in your fingertips by 2015. And we're excited about that. Steven DeWitt, Senior Vice President of HP's Enterprise Marketing, entrepreneur, tech athlete, great executive at HP, great to have you on theCUBE again, CUBE alumni. Always great to talk to you. We'll be watching you guys. Continue to watch the Enterprise Group and George Kadeva's Group software both kicking butt. True north is cloud and big data. Modern infrastructure and applications. You guys are on it, and the winds are shifting. Congratulations, and we'll maybe see you in Barcelona. This is theCUBE. Be right back after this short break with our next guest.