 Live from the Sands Convention Center, Las Vegas, Nevada, extracting the signal from the noise. It's theCUBE, covering HP Discover 2015, brought to you by HP, and now your hosts, Dave Vellante and Jeff Frick. Hi everybody, we're back. This is Dave Vellante with Jeff Frick and HP Discover. Day two, right before the keynotes, the keynotes are coming up. We're going to hear from two o'clock to four o'clock at a local time. We'll cut away to those keynotes. Check out HP Discover.Social, it's our new digital social experience. Go to wikibon.com for all the research and check out siliconangle.tv and siliconangle.com for all the action around HP Discover and around the industry. Craig Partridge is here, he's the director of data center platforms for HP Consulting. Craig, good to see you. Thanks Dave, thanks Jeff, nice to see you. We talked, we actually kicked off day one with a discussion around consulting. Prior to Meg's sort of unveiling of those four pillars, you know, traditionally you would have a discussion about products and then that's really, you know, changing. And so it's kind of right in your wheelhouse. Right, and you saw the leadership team up there talking about transformation areas, right? And the products come because we're taking customers on the journey from a consulting perspective. This is like Manor from Heaven. I mean, this is all we do. We spend our time out there talking about solutions, talking about the journey, how to transform. And it's really a business outcome conversation and now to see us as a HP organization gearing ourselves completely around that, that's a fabulous start. Yes, so what does that mean for you guys? I mean, is that the whole organization now aligned around those sort of four areas. What do you think it means for your business and your customers? Yeah, in a word, a lot more pressure, right? Because, you know, we, and it's good pressure, it's the kind of pressure we want. It's actually the kind of pressure we've been asking for for some time and I think there was absolutely a time when customers would look at buying HP products and services and they do the speeds and feeds match and they compare against the competition. It was a product-driven conversation but I think increasingly over the last few years and certainly with the emergence of the digital economy as they called it, the idea economy, as you get into this kind of bimodal fast pace of IT, customers, they need to get past that and need to get to outcomes much quicker. So we've seen that shift from a consulting perspective. We've seen it for years. I think the time's right now for us to lead with services, lead with solutions, be able to be that trusted advisor to the customer and take them on that journey because actually everything that we do as HP then flows behind that. That's where our value comes from that tip of the spear. We talked to Johann yesterday, just we were talking about one of the tips of the spear was the workshops that you guys are doing. Right. And I felt like Nefkin's up on stage yesterday, was actually conducting a little mini workshop. I mean, did you get that sense, right? It was very consultative and giving some advice to the audience. I thought that was quite good. Absolutely, I mean, we're, you know, if we can get the right momentums going with customers, it always starts with a strategic conversation. Those are the best outcomes for HP and for the customer. And those are advised type discussions which are really around setting strategy, aligning teams which in most customers really don't speak to each other. And that sounds like a strange thing but for most of our customers, they're still very siloed. The compute guys, the storage guys, the networking guys and never mind the facilities guys, right? Who are running the power and the cooling to this thing. They very rarely get the chance to say, actually, how do we navigate this future that is coming upon us? How do we find our footprint in that digital economy? And actually as a team, how do we bring that together? That's what those workshops are really all about. It's, yes, it's thought provoking. Yes, it's giving IP into the room to the team. And yes, there's some educational side to it but really the value of those workshops is where those teams from within the customer account get the chance to talk about stuff they really don't get to talk about on a day-to-day basis because they're up against the cold face. Rarely they get the time to step back and be facilitated through something in a much more strategic way. So it was great to see them. Yeah, so how do those come about? Who catalyzes them? Is it you sort of pitching that to the CIO level and he or she sort of organizes that team? Is it more of a bottom's up approach? I think the thing that maybe is not quite as obvious, we have quite a catalog now, an extensive catalog. If you go to the transformation area here, you'll see a number of workshops in effect. And I think what may not be obvious in the outset is that they come at different levels. So there are definitely workshops which are set at the CX level and they would be the advisory type workshops. And they're really an abstracted conversation about some of the big ticket items that really disrupting customers' environments. What we tend to find is, and they are the CXO conversations, but what we tend to find is after we've done those initial engagements, what will come out of that is a kind of roadmap which says, okay, we need to explore this area more. We need to explore this area more. And so then you'll drop into a slightly deeper level of conversation. Still strategic, still needs a combined direction from the domain teams, but is focused in a slightly different area. I'll give you a good example. We recently discovered over in Barcelona, we launched our software defined infrastructure workshop. Now that's a broad ticket item because software defined infrastructure really covers the facilities, it covers compute, it covers storage, it covers networking. And it's really about trying to bring the automation and orchestration of all of that together under one fabric. What will often happen after that high level advisory workshop is, okay, the customer will say, well, I wanna start here. So in our discussions, I think software defined networking is the area where I'm gonna take the next step. And so we'll drop down into workshops which are really aimed at then exploring that in a lot more detail. So what I don't think is obvious is that these are tiered kind of workshops and they engage customers at the CX level and then we can get down into the guys that are actually spending the money in those domain areas as well. Yeah, so you're taking kind of a waterfall approach and appealing the layers, if you will. So take software defined infrastructure. You're talking earlier about business outcomes. So now that you're, you know, whatever, eight, nine months into it, what have you seen as some of the business outcomes of those workshops? I can pretty much summarize this in a couple of ways. So for most of our customers, the challenge they have is one set around what's happening to them from a digital work place, sorry, from a digital economy point of view. They're absolutely up against it, trying to find those new revenue streams, trying to connect to customers in different ways, trying to connect to citizens if you're a government entity in different ways. And in trying to exploit those revenue streams, which is the business outcome they're trying to achieve. This is a top line conversation. This isn't a cost issue, which has typically been the IT conversation. How do we take the cost out? This is now a conversation about how do we bring new revenue streams and new analytics and new insights? Those are the kind of business outcomes that are kind of on the table now. And software defined is really a response to, how do I get that cloud-like agility into the infrastructure fabric? So that as I go and explore in that area, in that kind of mode two kind of bimodal state, as I find those rich veins where I do connect and do generate the new revenue streams, how does my infrastructure adapt in real time to that stuff? Traditionally, we kind of built that mode one infrastructure which is rock solid and reliable, 99% uptime, but it's not very flexible. It's not very agile. It's designed for a high SLA. It's not designed for code changes coming out on a daily basis. And yet, actually as you explore the digital economy, you find those new revenue streams, code and code changes and getting that code into the infrastructure. That's a daily occurrence. So software defined is about trying to get that bridge across both worlds and I think that's really where the business outcomes discussions come from. Okay, so that's interesting. So software defined is sort of the means to that end. So how do you go from a non-software defined to a software defined? Great question. In fact, we just had a presentation with a great customer of ours here in the US, Centerpoint Energy. I presented it with Dr. Stephen Pratt, the CTO there. And we actually found a great synergy. We don't have a huge piece of work with those guys. It's a real partnership model, multi-year program to instantiate a new data center. And we found a few common anchor points, right? So there's a desperate rush to modernize. Lot of customers still sitting on N minus one, N minus two revisions of hardware, of operating systems, of middleware, of management and automation capabilities that all sit within those silos. So there's a desperate need to modernize and we have a pretty much half my business is really driving the modernize agenda. How do I take risk of that legacy system out? How do I move onto these new platforms that have RESTful APIs that are part of that open ecosystem? And then the big challenge then is the migrate piece which is the other big engine. How do I then get the workloads onto that infrastructure so they can start taking advantage of it? And that means tackling the real thorny issues. I've still got customers with lots of business critical workloads on closed, proprietary, expensive, mainframe, Unix environments and they're saying, actually how do I get that workload into an open standard x86 Linux based architecture? Because if I can do that, those workloads can then start to participate in a more open ecosystem driven by that software defined narrative. So modernize and migrate have been the huge engines, but there's two other key important areas. I've not met a chief security officer yet who doesn't worry that if we start taking the human middleware out of the engine of the data center, we start replacing that with code. Hang on a minute, that sounds like a vulnerability, right? So what happens if malicious code now starts driving my data center in ways that I didn't happen before. I had the human middleware in place to try to prevent that. So there's a huge security conversation in governance and risk and compliance conversation. And again, that's one of the big transformation plays as well, protecting yourself from that threat. And then the other side of it is really around the management automation piece. And I think that's the area that is generating a lot of interest. HP OneView launched, we launched with a RESTful API model, we did it across the compute storage and fabric. And the reason that we're chasing that so hard is that that's a pivotal part of how you bring all of that to life. So the management automation side, along with the security side are kind of the bits that encompass that big modernize and migrate engine. That's a, go ahead please. As I said, the modernize and migrate, it sounds like such a big, really hairy nasty thing. Is it simply because the new way is so much better or is it because it's finally, this is the catalyst to end of life, a lot of that old stuff and just get it over as opposed to just building the new on the new, which I would think would be much easier to execute kind of a carrot approach as opposed to the stick. Well, so, you know, directly ask you a question, I rarely come across a Greenfield site. I'm rarely looking at an empty data center floor and the customer saying, fill that stuff with new, right? And that is not an occasion that happens on a very frequent basis, right? Every customer is running a whole ton of hybrid, a whole ton of legacy. They got mission critical workloads. They got back office workloads. Centerpoint NG example, they have 81 mission critical applications and they're trying to distribute that across two active, active data centers. There's not an easy thing to do. So it's never a rip and replace story ever. It is an evolution. And when we talk about software defined, you know, there are elements of that which you can start to realize today, but it's actually a journey. It's going to be a multi-year journey. It'd be increments. It's not going to be a revolution. It'd be evolutionary parts as we mature the API models, as we move more of our workloads into that open ecosystem. And that's a journey. We'll start to get the benefits of that SDI model. And as we start to then plug some of the gaps that are in that model today, the analytics side of it, the arbitration side of it, we'll start to get faster at this thing and this thing will start to deliver more value. So it's really a journey. Craig, how will the four transformation areas that Meg announced yesterday affect your service offerings? Are you going to try to align to those? Are you going to plug into those? Talk about that one. Yeah, so my team actually directly worked, the advisory workshops aligned to each of those four areas. So we have the nice thing for us, and you mentioned it right at the beginning. This has been our DNA, right? This has been our fabric and consulting. We look at the world as a solution play. The transform to hybrid is really around this modernized migrate agenda. It's around cloud, it's around software defined. It's getting that cloud like agility into the data center. That's a huge piece, as I said before, that's a huge piece of what we do. I mentioned security, so protecting yourself from those risks and threats. That's again, something that has to permeate in every one of those transformation areas, not one of them is immune from that kind of discussion. We're doing a lot of work with customers around the convergence and the move into those highly scalable in-memory data analytics platforms. Our SAP HANA platform's been great in terms of getting that converged story onto the data center floor. And certainly when you go to those big end, those hawk type systems, the CS900 type systems, customers are needing the kind of services, support and consulting around that to get that time to value on the floor very quickly. That's been a big piece of our business. So again, the data-driven enterprise transformation is great from our perspective. And I think that whole digital workplace mobility and powering that workforce, that's been something that has been the outcome, the consequence of all of this shift in the way that we deliver IT, the way we consume IT, the cloud debate is I think just the other side of that mobility and productivity conversation. So I think from our perspective, that whole wheel is a very core piece of what we do. Well, you have clients that I presume you do come to you and say, hey, we have a security concern. Let's focus on that and solve that problem. And I presume you have other situations where you might have some other initiative and you've got to weave security in orthogonally. I wonder if you could talk about how that transpires. Yeah, so you're absolutely right. There's going to be times when customers come to us and say, actually, we have a discrete problem and we can isolate where it's painful for us and it might be in the area of security. It might be in the area of management automation. It might be that they don't have a single pane of glass across their data center. It might be that the facilities and power and calling is not linked to the way that the infrastructure is working. So yeah, security is a good example of when we can actually bring those advice workshops. You remember I said it, they're tiered. We can come in with the advice workshops around how to move your security response forward. We have solutions around governance or risk and compliance around data protection and control. That's all played out in those workshops. So if we need to come down to those solution areas and start with the advice stage and move into the design and the implementation and the support side, we can do that. I think where we're most effective as a consulting entity and where the customers really see the biggest value is when we're able to step back a little bit further from that, and as I said, engage at those big advisory discussions because they will drive everything else that comes after that as well. So it's definitely a hybrid of yes, there's point solutions, there's pain points today. We can find them, we can isolate them, we can optimize them, we can engineer around those. But the biggest bang for the buck, I think, is when you get back to those advisory questions. I wonder if you could talk about, well, it was interesting hearing you talk about human middleware before. And I'm thinking in my head, I said, okay, now you start to digitize essentially softwareized that whole infrastructure. You dramatically expand your threat matrix. And so I'm thinking all these companies trying to digitize in this idea economy, what Meg calls the idea economy. What about internet of things? Are you having those types of discussions with customers? Are they just starting? Are you sort of deep into them? It's such a great question, and it's so topical. When we talk about the idea economy, the digital economy, it's really a pivot. And the pivot here is that infrastructure is still a critical element of how to deliver outcomes to business. But where the business is engaging is in the analytics and the coding aspects because code gets them to their customers and to their citizens quicker. The data they generate, they need to reap the insights from, so that's an analytics discussion. And every customer's at that, right? So I have customers that make very traditional products what we would consider to be good old fashioned traditional pieces of hardware. And now what happens when they start putting a few sensors on that thing, they can really differentiate themselves in the market, but they're literally coming to us and saying, I'm now generating streams of data. I am not equipped to cope with. I do not have the infrastructure. I don't have the smarts. I don't know how to get the right intelligence out of this. How can you help us with that? Oh, and by the way, I need to make sure that my data, which is my IP, which is now what differentiates me in the market is protected. I don't need that data leaking out. So it really is, I think that digital economy piece, the shift to code, the shift to analytics, that's really driving, again, reinvigorating the need for an adaptable infrastructure. So it becomes a big holistic thing. I mean, it's not very easy to tear the whole thing apart. It's joined at the hip in all sorts of places, but I think that's where the market's going. It's fascinating to see what's going on. We just said Barrett Jackson on earlier, and they're a car auction company, right? They live stream their car auctions. Well, here now, they're storing all their data, their archives, and it's a metadata opportunity for them. And they're thinking, okay, we just digitized, they only digitized 90 terabytes. We have the same problem with theCUBE, right? I mean, the opportunity. So, I mean, that's just one example. The application is increasingly the touch point with the outside world, right? Whether that's your customer, your partners, whoever, and it's not just for banks, but even with physical goods, still, often the majority of your actual interaction is via that screen, where there's a little screen, a big screen, or a middle-sized tablet screen. That's your differentiation. I mean, center point energy, you think, well, these guys supply energy to millions of customers in the U.S., but actually, they're absolutely up against that same problem. Their customers now don't just want the lights to stay on and the heat to be in the room and to be able to put the TV on. They want to pay their bills online and they want to do it from wherever they are. They don't want a call center. They want to order an appointment. It's not a call center somewhere, right? And these are digital interactions now. They're not going down to the local post office, to local stores to pay for their energy bills. They're in person. They're doing it right there in real time through app-based. So, you're absolutely right. That was interesting with Scott said earlier, he even moved the conversation really from workloads, which always is a pretty, the topic into the user experiences, right? It's the user interaction within the device in which you're interfacing with, which are different and have different characteristics. But at the end of the day, it's really at the user interaction level is where you need to define that experience. And that's how the workload is delivered. It's exactly right. And what we're trying to, I think what we're trying to do with customers in exploring that software defined conversation, which is so linked to the way that coding is changing. I mean, you've seen the shift towards microservices and containerization instead of virtualization and DevOps and the shift from kind of an ITIL governance centric way of doing IT to this very agile, virulent, very quick way of doing things. I mean, this is a, from a consultant's perspective, it's a perfect storm that what's going on, right? Because it's new ways of interacting at the front end. I need a digitally ready core that's going to be able to deliver that experience. Everything's got to be dynamic and adaptable. Everything's got to run in real time. It's not a, and it's not just a provisioning and deprovisioning conversation. You know, we spent the last few years talking about virtualization and cloud and how that's enabled us to stand services up and tear services down very, very quickly. The next frontier is not just provision and deprovisioning in real time. It's as that workload now runs, how does it in real time say, I need this resource now, I need that resource. Well, and so that's, I was going to say, so you have the sort of nexus of innovation in these organizations, your customers shifting from their systems of record, and then to the systems of engagement, they're like, oh, okay, that's nice, so should we have an all of a sudden, well, I could take analytic data and transaction data and bring it together and affect an outcome in near real time, before the customer makes a decision, before the patient dies, before the storm hits, that's a massive transformation, but huge opportunity, but very complex. It's a good time to bank as long as chaos is wonderful, right? All right, Craig, listen, we have to run, but so thanks very much for coming to theCUBE, a great discussion, really appreciate it. Enjoyed it, thanks for your time. All right, so stay tuned, everybody, we're going to cut away briefly, we've got the keynotes coming up, Meg Whitton's coming back, Martin Fink's going to be talking, I'm sure he's going to talk about the machine, which is always a really thought provoking discussion, get out here. It's one of my favorite parts of Discover, actually. High school, he's been really good at that, physics and chemistry, photons and all kinds of cool stuff going on there. This is theCUBE, we're live from HP Discover, check out hpdiscover.social, we'll be back. Right after this, after the keynotes, Dave Vellante, Jeff Frick, right back.