 Live from the FIA 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. Okay, welcome back everyone. We are live in Barcelona for HP Discover 2014. This is theCUBE, our flagship program. We go out to the events and extract the signal from the noise. I'm John Furrier, founder of SiliconANGLE. I'm my co-host Dave Vellante, co-founder of Wikibon.org, all part of the new SiliconANGLE Media Inc organization. And this is day three wrap up of HP Discover where we have special guest, Tim Crawford, who is the leader leading the IT revolution, CIO strategic advisor. Welcome to theCUBE. He's also our correspondent out on CrowdChat, bringing all the signal in, connecting the dots for us out in the field. Appreciate it coming on and great to have you on to help us with the wrap up here. Wrapping up the show, guys. I want to just have a quick conversation about what happened here. What happened in Europe with HP? I'll see. It's not a mirror image. 100% normally the shows are North America in the US and you got a mirror image. You got news dropping. You got some buzz. Meg Whitman flexing her muscles to the European audience. Clearly in charge. Troops are in place. Showtime is now for HP, Dave. And I think the theme is simple. Innovation is still alive at HP. Customers at the center of the conversation. Partners for distribution. Those are the three primary elements. All the execs are in their chairs. On the bus, you know, from good to great is the message. And will that translate down into execution to the troops? Ultimately, we'll tell. Also some highlights from the show, guys. I want to get that quickly. The machine, the buzz. That's the big buzz, the machine, the future. They're Watson, if you will, from an IBM kind of analogy perspective. Converge infrastructure, the real deal, the meat on the bone, hitting the table. Cloud, clearly the big story and the key enabler for the transformation of HP. And a lot of other side conversations, the hallway award goes to one view. I mean, Tim, you mentioned it on CrowdChat. You know, not a big feature item, but talking the hallways. So I want to get your take, guys. Your quick summary of what happened and who gets the hallway award. What's the buzz in the halls? Tim, we'll start with you. So I think there are a couple things to consider. All of the pieces that you mentioned, there's also the component around the split. We can't ignore that. That's been a pretty significant conversation, at least in some of the circles that I've been roaming in, is how it splits up. But what's interesting- How HP splits up. How HP splits up, right. But the other piece that becomes really interesting about that is, as you start to take the printing and ink piece off the table in that revenue, what happens with the enterprise group from a revenue standpoint, they have to be able to stand on their own two feet by themselves. And so we have to figure out, can they do that? Do they have the right focus, or does this split potentially bring things into clearer focus for HP, which is where I believe is the case. So that's one piece. The other piece, like you mentioned, is one view. And I think one view is a gem in the rough for HP. You know, I made the mistake of, you know, shame on me, I kept calling it open view and kind of dates myself, right? It does date yourself. That goes back decades. Okay, we won't get it. Well, I kind of do the same thing, to be honest with you. But new name, new tech. So you start digging into one view and what you start to realize is this is really a good foundation for them to really dig into the management aspects of managing all of this infrastructure and potentially extending that out to a broader ecosystem. Now, that's a big statement to make and they've got a lot of details to fill in in the gaps. But just looking at where one view is today and where it could go, I think there's some potential there. The one thing that I will say though is I don't think it took enough of a presence here at the show, as it probably should have. Yeah, it was kind of buried. You're right. It was. And it's management, right? So management always gets buried. I'll tell you, management in my view has been a jump ball since, I don't know, for the last decade. And now with the cloud and Amazon, what they've done, I think you're right. Well, until you nearly said, you'll see management be a big centerpiece of their innovation strategy. But we've been hearing a single pane of glass vision since I've been into this business. That's right. And it's been managers of managers and managers. And again, I think Amazon got it right out of homogeneity, yes, lock-in, blah, blah, blah. I think that's spawning a lot of the activity in the enterprise to say, okay, we got to get this right too, or what's host. I think there's an evolutionary transition that's happening in the enterprise too, where we're starting to step back and say, it's not just about a single pane of glass. It's not just about looking at the bits and the bytes. But I need to figure out how this ties to business outcomes. So I don't care about managing the components, the individual components, or the individual tools even. I need to work smarter. And I know that's cliche, but I got to figure out a way to do that. And if one views the way to do that, then so be it. If it's something else, then so be it. But I think management is going to make a resurgence in the IT picture. Well, so let's talk about what that business outcome is. To me, it's, and we've talked about this, John, the labor component of IT is too high. It is. I got way too many, if I'm a CIO, way too many people doing heavy lifting that I want them doing other stuff. Because Alan Nantz said it, not this time, the last time when he was on at the Vertica conference, he said, our CEO came out and said, 80% of what we do in IT is non-differentiated. 80%. Guess what? We're going to take all that non-differentiated stuff, and we're going to a cloud model. And so that's, to me, why the management discussion is so important. You know, John, we've talked about the hyperscale guys. They will spend time, engineering time, to save money. The enterprise, they don't have the engineers. They'll spend money to save time. And that really is where management comes in. Dave, I couldn't agree with you more. It's a simplicity issue. And Martin Meekos was on the queue talking about aircraft carrier, about HP. When I asked him about Cloud Air and all these innovative startups, he says they're the fighter pilots. And I think that analogy of aircraft carrier and fighter pilots, extends directly to the customer base. The customer is an aircraft carrier. They're moving slow. We mentioned it with the open stack. How do they roll out SLAs? But they want the fighter pilots. That's the mobile apps. You're seeing the confluence of the customer environment, looking like both an aircraft carrier with great fighter jets. And I ultimately, I think that's the goal of Agility. That's your point about management software. Management software now is the radar, right? So you got the radar, you got the heat seeking missiles, big data, all coming together. Well, I was thinking about that analogy going, but don't you want, and you said it, don't you want some fighter jets in your portfolio? Well, I think that's part of it. Exactly, yeah. You got to have nimbleness and that's agile. That's what cloud gets you. And I think that's why cloud is the disruptive enable of RHP internally and for their customers. But so who are the fighter jets? I think the big data group could be a big part of the fighter jet enabled. But he used cloud era, Hortonworks and MapR as examples. I'm like, okay. Those are the tools. Yeah, I think we- Where's your fighter jets to be? They're the hot products. Right, but also don't forget, you guys weren't here, but I did a CTO section, session with DHP software guys. The developers themselves and the third party ecosystem is absolutely fighter jets waiting to come in. They could be the pilots and bring your own jets to- Yeah, he's saying ecosystem. He's saying we have a place for the ecosystem. The ecosystem is their jets. They got to have their own internal jets too. I totally agree, Dave. That's hard to believe. Well, you called. You're like, well, wait a minute. It's not a story. I was kind of being cool, but given we were having a contentious conversation for a while and I didn't want to get them in a headlock too bad. There's been a few of those though, especially around cloud too, right? So it's also finally people are getting not just passionate about what they're talking about, but they're actually starting to add in a sense of reality into where we are as enterprises. And I don't think this is a broad statement to make, but there's a difference between where we want to be and where we are. And one of the things I've seen in some of the conversations today with HP folks is they're starting to come to that rationalization which is a healthy place to be to say, you know what? We are not everyone. We're not everything to everyone, but rather we've got some things that we do really well. We need to build out some of the other areas. And that's a good thing. That's a good thing that there's a recognition. I got to bring up and also recognize Bert Lattimore Perus has been our remote reporter out in the virtual space with CrowdShad and highlighting all the comments and also connecting the dots as well. But Perper is at a good point. He writes, comment I think one significant announcement that got ignored is the new alliance between HP and Microsoft. And initially this is around Office 365 but it could grow as it could grow to counter the IBM Apple relationship. So this is interesting. So Antonio brought up Hyper-V in our conversation. Microsoft, who's dancing with Microsoft? Is there making moves? They got cloud? They got a mobile? Dave, any thoughts on Microsoft? Well I mean HP and Microsoft have been partners for, I mean it's epic. It used to be like HP and Oracle. Well Intel big sponsor of the show, Microsoft, not here. So it's very interesting to me because Microsoft, they're becoming all things to all people. HP's all about the aircraft carrier. What were the big aircraft carriers? HP, IBM, Amazon, Microsoft. So there's a bit of a collision course there. I mean that's the way this is. It's not a unity but there's still some overlapping conflict. There's got to be some consolidation in this, right guys? I mean you've got to figure out what are the right, the right smallest number of components to put together. And I think Microsoft has some interesting pieces that cover both the broader context of the enterprise but also the productivity apps. And if you think about someone like HP, they don't have that productivity piece. And to me that's the goal within an enterprise from an engagement standpoint is those productivity apps because they're sticky. That's how user-based. Well Martin Nicos, his premise, Tim, was that's an advantage for us that we don't have that. It's because I was going down the path of look, Amazon's redefining the economics of the data center. And people call it a race to zero. I don't mean a race to zero profits. I mean a race to zero marginal economics where your profits go through the roof. And so my point has always been you've got two choices to compete with that. One is huge volume. So Google in theory can compete. Microsoft has volume. Or you need to vertically integrate. You need to have some differentiation. IBM has vertical integration to a great degree. Oracle, totally vertically integrated. HP is saying, no, we're not going there. We want to be the aircraft carrier that everybody lands on. So we're going to compete with a more attractive ecosystem. And we're going to have infrastructure that's on-premise, hybrid, public, private, blah blah blah. That's a viable model. But my contention is it's less profitable. Let me underscore something that you just said. The ecosystem, because they don't necessarily have to deliver that themselves. They could partner with someone like Microsoft to be able to bring that to the market. I agree with that. And that's their strategy. But my contention is it will be a less profitable strategy. Okay guys, we are getting the hook here. We're going to unplug us. We always go to the end. We want to go right to the very end where they pull the plug on the cube. Of course, we have to wrap it up. So let's wrap this puppy up. Guys, day three, I'm impressed. I think it's show time for HP. It's put up or shut up time. They're going to split the company up. That decision is made, although I have my opinions and from my reports in talking to folks, Tim, as I said on CrowdChat, they're already two separate companies. Although I say things just stay together. That's my opinion. Dave, do you want to share? I got to get a last word in here, because I was kind of being critical. I think HP's cloud strategy was a mess three years ago. I think they got it right now. And the second thing is, I think HP's getting back to its roots of events. And that's critical. I was actually going to go on the line and ask you what your final thoughts were. Well, I just came to thank you. I can go on, but we're getting the hook. They're going to unfold. Tim, what's your final thoughts? Yeah, I agree with what both of you are saying. The one area of caution as they go down the path of the enterprise pieces, they're hanging a lot of weight on OpenStack. And so the success of HP's cloud vision and their cloud strategy rests and dies with OpenStack. And so I think that's one thing that they're going to have to just keep very close to. Yeah, and my final thoughts is that Meg Whitman clearly showed me some great leadership this trip, very articulate, very scripted as always, but very on message around three core things, innovation, the customer and partners. And I think the story here at HP is the tale of two stories. The internal view, people are rocking. External view, oh, HP sideways. You know, HP's standing tall here with their customers saying, no, no, we are not irrelevant. We are going to be relevant. We're going to move fast. And Dave reminds me of that book, Good to Great. If you want to get the right people on the bus and then figure out the destination, they know their destination is the modern area with the cloud. It's also a new style of IT as they call it. And everyone's got their seat on the bus. Now it's just make it happen. It's showtime, rubber hits the road. And now HP's going to do is put up some numbers. And I think that's where we'll be watching. The strategy is still the same. Choice, multi-vendor, cloud, conversion infrastructure, big data all happening. And again, it's going to come down to the numbers. We should have more time. Yep. So guys, thanks for watching everybody. If you're watching, thanks for watching SiliconANGLE. Thanks to Andrew, Greg, Matthew, guys. Great job. Back at the Ranch, Bert Lattimore and all the folks watching and all the folks at home, Kristen Nicole and the team. Great job. And again, bringing that content to you. This is theCUBE. We love doing it. We love doing it. And thanks for HP for sponsoring us to come here. We really appreciate it. And we had great conversations. All the execs who are here, awesome, awesome events. Signing off from Barcelona, this is theCUBE. Keep watching and see you at the next event. I'm John Furrier with Dave Vellante. We'll be seeing you soon at our next event.