 Live from Las Vegas, Nevada, it's theCUBE at HP Discover 2014, brought to you by HP. Go, hello everyone. We are live in Las Vegas for HP Discover. This is theCUBE, SiliconANGLE and Mookie Bonds flagship program. We go out to the events and distract the signal from the noise. I'm John Furrier, the founder of SiliconANGLE. Joining my co is Dave Vellante, co-founder of wookiebond.org. And Dave, this is our fifth season with theCUBE. We've interviewed over 3,500 executives, thought leaders, CEOs, entrepreneurs, tech athletes, as we say. And so we're back at HP and no better time to come back and see all the HP action. And it's interesting story, HP. And I want to get your take on this as we kick off three days of wall-to-wall live coverage here at SiliconANGLE.tv about HP. Housley, Meg Whitman, really conservative on her turnaround plan by the numbers, Dave. I mean, she's not making any big massive moves, just steering the ship kind of away from the icebergs out into the warmer waters. I want to get your take on what you think of that plan, state of HP and the current situation. Well, there's at least stability at the top, John. Meg Whitman, when she took over, said it's going to be a five-year turnaround and has been slowly turning the steamship around over the past five years. Now, that doesn't suggest there's not been many, many changes inside of HP. HP quite a while ago announced a lot of layoffs. They just recently announced they're going to extend that. They've made some changes in the ranks. Bill Vecti replacing Dave Donatelli. Just more recently, George Kadifa is being replaced by Robert Young-Johns, who we're going to have on. So Meg is not afraid, John, to make changes at the top. So she's executing on her plan, according to her plan. Now, I've often said, jeez, I wish it could happen faster. A lot of people say they wish it could happen faster, but they're throwing off cash, they're paying down the debt. I've also said, John, that HP has to shrink to grow. That's exactly what's happening here. There are some growth spots. Certainly networking is a growth area. Meg calls up Vertica as a growth area. Printers grew a little bit, PCs grew a little bit last quarter. And converged infrastructure is a growth area from a smaller base. But in general, the company is not growing. And as I say, it's got a shrink to grow. It's extending those layoffs. The big challenge that HP still has, it's this $120 billion company with a $64 billion market cap. So it's trading on 50 cents essentially on the revenue dollar. But as I said, it's throwing off cash. And over the last 12 months, its stock price has gone up very nicely from the low 20s and it's now into the low 30s and pops up even higher sometimes. So by all accounts from Wall Street, it makes doing a good job. So there's obviously some news going on with Apollo, some of the supercomputers. IBM also announced today that they're shipping the availability of their Power 8 systems. So certainly the game is changing. We're going to get to that in a second but I want to get your take. I was having a conversation with our editorial team and with some other analysts a couple of weeks ago in a private meeting and we've talked about where HP could have been. If you go back to the Mark Hurd era, Dave Donatelli was on board. The trajectory of HP, their corporate governance strategy, their corporate development strategy, they had a bunch of acquisitions on the table. And we had the conversation of what could have been if you had connected dots before that scandal, where HP could have been on a trajectory basis. And I'll see what happened after that was well documented. Certainly we talked about it. But now Meg Whitman's almost taking them back to that same trajectory, which is their roots. They kept their PC division. They're keeping their consumer stuff. The consumerization of IT is now the hottest trend on the planet. Good call, good call there. Two, they're back into the high end super computer market. But what's happened is cloud. The cloud market is decimating silos. It's decimating other landscapes like the server business, right, and seeing things like that. And so all those are changing. So I want to get your take. What could have been, and is HP in that same spot now where they were hoping to be just five years ago? Well, I think, again, I've said many times that HP's got to get back to its roots, which is invent and HP's got to get the R&D machine going again. And that's something that we all know, Mark Hurd caught and he saved that money and dropped right to the bottom line and made Wall Street very happy. But now HP's paying the price. Ironically, he's at HP competitor Oracle. So cloud, HP's been talking a cloud story for a long time, but the helly unannouncement that they made a few weeks ago is how it looks like the real deal. So, you know, the HP public cloud is there. They're going hard after private cloud. They've made a lot of investments in the cloud, but it's taken several years for them to get where they can actually compete effectively, you know, with the likes of Amazon and others. If you're watching this broadcast, go to crowdchat.net slash HP Discover. That's our social chat container. We're going to have an active conversation login, be part of the thought leaders, be part of the social media, digital crowd here, who are organizing the conversations there in crowd chat. Dave, there's a rumor out there that HP in discussions to buy the cube. I just want to clarify that the register had posted a story that said HP and SimpliVity are talking about buying it out. And they obviously they make the OmniCube. So if that happens, if the OmniCube gets bought by HP, we're going to have a little conflict around, you know, trademarks and confusion. What do you think? You know, they've shown they've invested in media business, right? The journalism museum down in DC, right? Is a big time sponsor. We would welcome the OmniCube into the HP family. But I mean, you know, it's all joking aside, John. I mean, one of the things that I've said is HP's software business has to grow. We're going to talk to young Johns about this. HP is the sixth largest software company. It's about, you know, it's less than 10% of HP's revenue. They brought in, you know, the asset of Vertica. They paid a lot of money, obviously, for autonomy. Everybody knows about that. So that's nice. But there's a lot of other software assets in big data, for example, and even in even enterprise technologies. You were talking about a company called Docker the other day, a lot of excitement in Silicon Valley. Would that be a fit for a company like HP? They're not back in the acquisition game yet. They've got to get back into the acquisition game to grow. Otherwise, we're going to just bump along. So I think Meg's strategy is to pay down the debt, you know, stabilize the base, so essentially keep revenues flat for as long as they can, and then start the acquisition engine back up again. So here we go again, right? Let's talk about the supercomputers. Obviously the server battle grounds are laid down. The low end, x86 is, I won't say being sunset, but it's just a brute force business. Jim Gonfay will be on later. Talk about market share. Cisco announcing UCS is topping on Blaze, but that doesn't count certain things. I mean, IDC slices the numbers 10 ways from Sunday. So everybody wins. You know, everyone wins there. But really the battle's going to be in the high end. If you look at cloud, large scale data centers, the trend towards large scale computing, large scale distributed infrastructure, combined with the consumerization of IT, really is to me, the main thrivers in this business. We will be covering that from that angle and underneath the hood of all that is cloud mobile and social, with the data science piece being a big thing. So, you know, I've always said HP, if they can't get out of their own way, they're going to do well. Meaning they have the assets, they got to get the morale up, trim down the fat, stay on focus, and I think they're in a good position. And again, they're fighting IBM in the server side, but now new territories out there, the big data business. I think the autonomy and vertical opportunity is massive. I think they need to harness that. To me, the key, John, is make, we'll talk about the new style of IT, EFC, Joe Tucci likes to use the IDC term of the third platform. Here's the bottom line is, you have to show that you're relevant to the future. And that's what HP is trying to do. And that's what HP's cloud initiative really is all about, combined with the way in which they're continuing their investments in their core infrastructure business. And as I said, they've really got to show growth in the software side. Vertica is, I think, a great opportunity to do that with Haven and Autonomy. And I think down the road, you're going to have to see some additional acquisitions there. So one thing I'm going to be looking for Dave here is to hear the leaders from HP around their infrastructure side of their business, they converge infrastructure, a big retool and a big reset going on, I would say reset, but really more of a, you know, maintain the existing market position and get the new products in there, modernize the infrastructure. The big data aspect, I want to hear about the software side of the business. And then third, more importantly, I really want to hear from the cloud group. They have made some really amazing things. You're talking about the Helion announcement was pretty significant. Those, although may look like vapor on paper, we want to dig into that talk to Sargillie and the folks there. We're going to talk to the variety of the folks here, all the guys coming on. So the cloud business is a driver. It's not mutually exclusive with their existing customer base. And again, this is going to come down to who can deliver large scale value for the customers. That's truly multi vendor. That's open, uses open source software and can provide those fun consumer experiences to the users. Yeah. Last thing I'll say is we are at an inflection point. You know, we talked about Docker. We talked about, you know, the impact that that potentially could have on VMware open stack is a real leverage point for HP. HP's going all in on open stack. We, you've talked a lot, John, about how open stack needs leadership. HP could be one of those leaders, if not the leader for the open stack community. And that gives them, I think, significant momentum in the new era of IT. Okay, this is theCUBE. We are here live in Las Vegas for HP Discover 2014. We're going to be scouring this place for some great stories. And of course, hearing from the leaders of HP themselves, watch the interviews. And again, go to crowdchat.net slash HP Discover. That's our new innovative crowd chat active container. Log in. All the posts go to the hashtag. Log in from Twitter, LinkedIn, or Facebook. We'll be answering questions on the crowd chat. They'll be open for all three days. Go check it out. And we'll be here listening to your questions. We'll be right back on theCUBE right after this short break.