 Live from Las Vegas, Nevada, it's theCUBE at HP Discover 2014. Brought to you by HP. Welcome back to Las Vegas, everybody. Dave Vellante with Jeff Frick. This is theCUBE. theCUBE is our live studio. We go out to the events. We extract the signal from the noise. We're going into our cloud segment. We got a lot of stuff today on cloud. We've been talking. We talked storage yesterday. We did a lot of server stuff this morning. Now we're going to dig in deep to the cloud action. Bill Hilfus here is the senior vice president. Product and services management for HP Cloud. HP Cloud has come a long way in the last couple of years. So thanks very much for coming to theCUBE. Good to have you. It's great to be here. So give us the quick update. You guys have been active with announcements. You made the Helion announcement a few weeks ago. You made a network announcement recently. So give us the update on HP Cloud. You got it. And as you can probably see as you guys walk in here, we have the Helion branding all over the show floor. And we're really excited by it. And so for us, HP Helion, it's not just one product. It's basically the brand name of our pan HP Cloud portfolio and everything we're doing from products and services, what that will fall underneath that brand. And so we've since May, when we brought this out into the world, what we've announced with Helion is a set of products and services underneath that brand name that provide infrastructure to service if a customer wants to build it, or if they want to consume it through a public cloud, as well as a set of tools for developers to build on top of. So we have a whole host of announcements we're making this week. Awesome. So the brand is a good brand. I mean, I like the name. Where'd it come from? Oh, good question. Well, we wanted something that was unique to both what we were doing in the cloud space targeting, really, we target open base enterprise clouds. Customers that want to build a hybrid cloud architecture using the best to breed open source technologies but supported from one of the large site vendors. So we didn't want to just call it an HP Cloud widget. We wanted something that was unique. So we took, I mean, no joke, probably six, 7,000 names, legal scrubs. You can't tell you the amount of marketing and what's available. Translation. Does it mean like, you know, spotted monkey and some kind of language we did on a phone? Yeah, and we came down about four or five and, you know, just to be fully transparent in it up because you can never pick a perfect name after we tested our own employees and we got down to four or five and then a group of us sat down and picked a helium. Excellent. All right, so talk about the strategy before we get into some of the products and services. Yeah, so for us, and I'm a year in an HP now and I previously, I was GM of Windows Azure at Microsoft and so I spent a considerable amount of time talking to enterprises and governments and service providers about cloud computing in general. And there's been a few common themes. One is enterprise customers are going to use a mix of technologies to build a cloud and I personally believe that over time the terms public and private and man, those will just disappear and we will use cloud computing in the same way that we think about the web today. It's not a place that we go anymore. It's part of everything that we use. And so from a marketing point of view, we call it the fabric of an enterprise because we believe that customers will build the cloud that they need, not necessarily the cloud of the vendor's trying to describe. So against that vision, what we've built is a cloud portfolio that is very composable. So we have the choice for customers to use our software, our servers, our storage, our networking, our services in a way that they can compose the type of cloud they're trying to build. And so we've built a lot of that around open source technologies, like OpenStack and Cloud Foundry. And over the past six months, past year really, we've been working on productizing a full commercial distribution of OpenStack so that if a customer wants to build a cloud or consume a cloud, using OpenStack technologies, they have a large stress of vendor like HP behind it from, not only from the support point of view, but we test it at extreme scale, 40,000 or more virtual machines running in this environment. We run it ourselves in our own public cloud, and we apply all of the security and sort of enterprise class rigor that we put into all of our other product lines into OpenStack. So that's the core, Healing on OpenStack is the core of our portfolio. And this week we're announcing pricing related to that. We're announcing a new development platform that sits on top of that. And then across everything that we do at HP, this will be a very important foundation and really a cloud operating system for everything that we do going forward. So I got to ask you, so your scenario, the vision that you put forth is that a lot of these buzzwords are going to sort of coagulate, come together, and we're not going to have, you know, so much nuance between public and private and hybrid and on-premise and off-premise and public, et cetera. Having said that, when you listen to guys like Andy Jassy at AWS, he's got a different view of the world than you guys. It's almost two ends of the spectrum. He will say, we believe that very few companies are going to have their own data centers in the future. You believe, I think, not to put words in your mouth, but others that I've talked to at HP, that most customers are going to have some mix of on-premise and off-premise for their cloud. So you've got two ends of the spectrum. So do you really see those two worlds coming together or do you feel like that premise is off, the AWS premise is off base and you're just missing the enterprise marketplace? What are your thoughts on that? That's a fantastic question. It really is. And I'll try to contextualize it to my own experiences. Over the past five years, I've talked to literally thousands of customers about cloud computing and the enterprise. I've been very fortunate to be in these two different roles to be able to have that conversation. Good place to be. It is, yeah. And I've named the country, named the industry. I've talked to them. And literally across thousands of customers, not one time, has a customer said, I'm moving everything I have to one spot. I don't care if it's a public cloud or what. Now, if you talk to a startup, you're building Instagram or Snapchat and you're building it from new, from file new, it's very different. Of course you're going to start with a public cloud because that's the easiest, cheapest way to do it. But for an enterprise, the idea of moving everything into one basket is just not realistic. And so, which is why you don't see a lot of Amazon being used in broad enterprise. You see a lot of startups using it or companies like a Netflix, right? Where they need that type of horizontal scale. So I do think there's a difference in terms of strategic intent. What I believe will happen over time is the public cloud will become in many ways similar to sort of the web tier and the three tier architecture where it's used for very scalable, horizontal applications like a, streaming media for the Olympics or videos on demand or the types of mobile services where you have to push a notification out to 10,000 different mobile devices. But in an enterprise environment there's still not just legacy systems but scale up systems, SAP systems, Oracle systems that really don't want to run on a multi-tenant shared infrastructure. If you take a system like SAP HANA, SAP HANA really wants every resource on that box it can get. All the memory it can possibly get and it doesn't want to share that resource. So saying that IT and enterprise IT will go into one modality is at least in my experience not very real because it's usually, I had a CIO tell me just down the hall here, he said, literally Bill, I have one of everything that almost every vendor has ever made and he goes, so I'm not an HP shop, I'm not a Microsoft, I've got one of everything in my environment. So the idea of a composable system, a tool set that they can architect with is very appealing for me. There's a lot of diversity in clouds, you're right. I mean, you see environmental clouds, you see, let's say, multi-tenant clouds, you got guys like ServiceNow, they're not doing multi-tenant clouds so there's a lot of diversity in clouds. I think it was great because we had Bill Vecchio earlier and he really talked about cloud, not in terms of the infrastructure but really the benefits, right? The benefit of rapid delivery, the benefits of rapid scale. A lot of the things that are delivered that we think of cloud and maybe we're kind of pioneered and kind of a cloud-centric view of the world but ultimately it's benefits to the business user and the IT users in terms of how you deploy and scale infrastructure. Yeah, Bill, I mean, I've known Bill for over a decade and he's a great friend. He and I talk a lot about this as well and there is a reality check going into your point about the Amazon view of the world which is in 2014, I fundamentally believe, HP fundamentally believes enterprise IT is a lot smarter about cloud computing than it was six or seven years ago when it was, hey, I can swipe a credit card and get some cheap compute over the internet through a web browser. Today, enterprise IT can get to a point where they can look at a type of system and say, I can get near those same economics, near that same agility without having to give up all the concerns I have around data sovereignty or privacy or security, I can get near that model. So the benefits of the cloud, and I will give Amazon and Salesforce full credit for helping drive the pioneering of those early days, the benefits of agility and the economics are still real. I think the very simplistic thinking of it's going to be private or public, I think we're near the end days of those concepts and just like we no longer say, let's get on the information superhighway or go to the web, it's now part of everything that we do, cloud computing is going through that same evolution. With the exception, the notable exception of Amazon and Google that are driving that public only, that's really all they got. That's in their business interest. And I wanted to unpack security a little bit because I think our thinking about security has evolved because it was easy for us in the enterprise to say, oh, public cloud is not secure. Now, you know from your experiences as you're, you're now at HP and everybody you talk to, security is the number one priority in any cloud. It's not necessarily that the public cloud security is bad, it's just different. So my question to you is, I talked to a lot of customers, for instance, that will negotiate would say, even a SaaS company, negotiate a security policy and then maybe partner with Amazon to do a public cloud service, but the security's different. They've got to spend another six months doing it so they say forget it. So my question to you, can HP, will HP go to a customer and say, your security experience, your compliance, policy, audit, everything else, can be identical on-premise and off-premise if you want it to be. Is that the strategy? Or are you not going to get there in the near term? I think, yeah, part of, you are fundamentally right. Across any cloud computing conversations, security is still, I mean, public, private, managed, security is still at the top of the list of concerns that, and you have everything from sort of the Snowden episode, you have what happened with, you know, large retailers in the U.S., all these different reasons why that's an issue. Security is a broad spectrum. You have on some cases, how do I secure my web app? And then on other cases, you have regulated industries or government agencies that might have a FedRAMP requirement or even an ITAR requirement, which is weapons-grade compliance for exports of U.S. intellectual property. In that world where you have that wide variety of spectrum, you have to really choose the right solutions and workloads that you're going to secure. There is no generic security, you know, like people tend to think, oh, encryption, and everything's fine. Well, obviously that's not the case. So when people are designing architectures, a cloud architecture, understanding what data, what app, where those things live, what security requirements exist, that's the reason why we're building a common platform against a public cloud, a private cloud, or a managed cloud. The reason behind that common platform is a customer may say, this app here, I actually need this to be in a public cloud because it's very horizontally scalable, it's a mobile back-end, or I just want the best economics I can possibly get. But if I ever need to, let's say the compliance landscape changes, let's say the regulatory landscape changes, which it tends to do. It should be wind, right? And they need to move that somewhere else. And that change, all of a sudden, they're in a re-architecting migration scenario, and if you're in a pure play public cloud, you're going to have to say, how do I extract that data and application now into this other environment? So that's how we're differentiating. Say we have a common platform that's open source base, it can run in these environments, and now it's part of announcements around He-Lan Network, running in third-party service provider environments, not just our own HP public cloud, to give that choice and flexibility to customers when it comes to big issues like security. Now, we do have many customers that we deal with where it's not just security in the sense of, I don't want people to access my data, we have many customers work with that, life-critical systems, healthcare systems, hospital systems, airline systems, where security has not just a requirement, it means something different. And those types of systems, we typically can help a customer in a purely managed environment where we can say, we always know exactly where those servers and that data and the people and the chain link and the dogs around the data center, where they need complete and total understanding of that environment. All right, real quick, I'm just ignoring the guy telling me, we've got to go. So, because you're really good and smart and you've got a lot of good perspective. I wanted you to touch on a couple things, the He-Lan development platform. Yeah. Talk about that a little bit. Sure. Part of having a cloud solution is not just the virtual machine infrastructure, the infrastructure as a service, but how do you abstract all of that, even higher up the stack for developers, often platform as a service or pass, right? Right. So, formerly known as middleware. The artist formerly known as middleware, that's right. I used to work for IBM software a long time ago. And it's funny, a lot of these terms, what we call now, you know, message queues, we used to call enterprise service brokers, even before that transaction processing model. But what is important is developers want those services, like database as a service, messaging as a service, identity, you know, exposed even higher up in the stack. So, we, like OpenStack, we're making a commitment to an open source project called Cloud Foundry, where we're a Platinum member of the Cloud Foundry Foundation that's forming right now to help drive a similar agenda with others, with IBM, Pivotal, Rackspace, VMware, a whole bunch of different partners are coming together to build an open source based platform as a service with the same design intent that we have, that it will run in any of those environments that a customer wants. So, they don't only have to pick the public cloud platform as a service, they could say, yeah, I want to run some there and I want to run some here, I don't want to change my app. Right? So, that's something we're announcing this week as a preview in this... So, that's a Cloud Foundry collaboration? We call, yeah, so we take Cloud Foundry and we build around that and we call that the Helion Development Platform. Okay. And we have a preview of that coming out this month. And then you've got collaboration with Intel around OpenStack? Yeah, partnership with Intel where essentially there's some great capabilities in the hardware that we want to illuminate all the way up through OpenStack and all the way up through Cloud Foundry. So, we're partnering with Intel on how do we take advantage of some of their innovations in the hardware and make that come to life in Helion OpenStack so that it becomes even easier and simpler to take advantage of some of the powerful things. I got to put you in the spot a little bit. Yeah. You know, sorry to do this but Martin Fink's not here. So, I got to ask you, Wall Street Journal, Article, Red Hat, back and forth. You made the comments. What's your take on Red Hat? They're becoming a competitor now in OpenStack but obviously a great partner over the years. What's your take on what they're doing in OpenStack? Yeah, and certainly, you know, I work for Martin. He knows a thing or two about OpenSource. He's been through this area before. I do think you're seeing sort of an evolution in the different vendors as they're trying to really get their strategies laid out. As I mentioned, we have a, you know, kind of a clear line of sight in what Enterprise and Service Provider wants in a hybrid open cloud. I think Red Hat, because they are a software-only company, they have to make certain strategic decisions around how they will monetize their entire stack from the host operating system to OpenStack and above. So, I actually understand why they're doing it. They just have more limitations in terms of their overall business capabilities of what they will monetize. Certainly, it's something I knew at Microsoft as well. So, one of the things that we're doing at HP is we have a pretty broad business portfolio. We sell storage, servers networking, we sell services, we sell software. We sell consumption services for our public cloud. So, we can be very aggressive in the way that we want to help customers adopt OpenStack, the pricing that we're going to offer. I do think they, you know, Red Hat has some big questions they need to figure out in their business model related to how do they want to work with the community? Because as you well know, it's not just taking from, you have to be a vibrant member inside of that community and work upstream as much as possible. So, they're going to, they're going to have to struggle and figure out their position. So, you'd like to see though to be specific, you'd like to work with Red Hat and have them certify their Linux distribution on your OpenStack platform. Absolutely. Absolutely. That's something that you would push for. For sure. I'd take that phone call any day. I'd take that phone call any day. And the same goes with, you know, we've worked a lot with Canonical, a great partner we worked with. All right Bill, thanks very much for coming on theCUBE. It was a pleasure. It was a lot of fun. It was a lot of fun. All right, keep it right there and we'll be back with our next guest right after this. This is theCUBE.