 Live from Las Vegas, Nevada. It's theCUBE at HP Discover 2014. Brought to you by HP. Okay, welcome back everyone. We're live in Las Vegas for HP Discover. This is theCUBE where we go out to the events, Extract the Silver from the Noise. I'm John Furrier with my co-host Dave Vellante. Our next guest is Alistair winner VP, Technology Services Support for servers and networking at HP. Welcome back to theCUBE. Good to see you. Thank you. Good to be here. We had Antonio on yesterday. He's so smooth. He sits back. Late back. Such a gentleman. Such a gentleman. This is a great guest to have. But he's a fierce competitor too. I mean, he's very straight up and he's got the messaging down but he's not afraid to tell them how it feels. But he was clear yesterday. The innovation strategy for HP is about compute. Talk about that from your standpoint. You have to go out to the customers and understand what's going on. How is that translating into the marketplace? Yeah, it's absolutely the case that innovation is a real big deal for Antonio and he's driving a multi-threaded strategy there with the server business. For me in support really, it's very much about addressing the core of our business which is really the Racken Tower space and that's where we have our big market presence. But also working in the areas of innovation, especially in the very high end hyperscale, our area with the partnership with Foxconn. So that's a very interesting area to develop a support strategy for. And also looking at the SMB and really what our customers in that space are really looking for from a support experience. So it's great opportunity for me to work with Antonio and really ensure that our support strategy delivers the value that customers really want from this innovation. Also talk about the evolution of the innovation around some of the support issues. Back in the, you go back and look at key inflection points, I actually wouldn't say inflection points, but innovation, as boxes move to more modular approach, you saw hot swapping out equipment. You know, obviously Google's famous as a service provider of just buying a bunch of gear, throwing it away and replacing it around and trying to break fix that kind of thing. And now you have the cloud, right? So what is the new tactic for services around hardware? Because obviously, density is an issue. The new servers here that we're next to are showing some massive power and scale at that level. So you got new density footprint issues, you have facility planning, power and cooling, you got blade servers sticking around, Antonio's like blades aren't going away. Okay, from a customer's standpoint, I've got all this gear and I've got all this technology. What is that next level of innovation? Yeah, sure, and you're absolutely right. I think it's the whole scale out, massive scale server environment that we're really looking to address and innovate around. So there are a number of key challenges that customers are facing there. Certainly around being proactive and having a proactive approach. Although it's massive scale and some of these single apps are massive scale, if a server goes wrong, there's still a problem and an issue to address. So being as proactive as we can, actually having the servers connected back to HB where we can assess and ensure we're addressing problems before they start. Also things like asset management and just helping a customer understand this landscape, really bringing tools and approaches that really help them manage that state. Yeah, so you mentioned hyperscale, you guys have a big initiative there. We had some of the hyperscale guys on yesterday and they had indicated that they see over a third of the market as opportunity for them, which is substantial, that's today. What have you learned or can you glean from the web giants that are doing hyperscale have been for the last five or seven years from a service and support standpoint? What's different and how are you changing, you referenced it before, but specifically how are you adjusting to that new model? Yeah, I mean they absolutely have a very different approach to the traditional enterprise where essentially a customer would expect HB to run the whole support environment on their behalf. These guys are very self-sufficient and each one that we deal with has a different capability set of requirements. So we have to be quite customized in the way that we approach the solution. Typically what we see is that they have a requirement to get access to parts that fail and that they will actually affect the repair themselves so they don't need an HB person on site to do that work. They'll do that themselves. Also clearly when something goes wrong or they have a problem, they want a very bespoke response, they want us to understand their environment. And also in the hyperscale space very often we're actually selling a server which is unique to the customer. I mean we design the service specifically for the requirements of the client. So when they call clearly we need to understand that and we need to be able to address their issues. Am I right that the hyperscale mindset is, I mean in the enterprise historically anyway, some device fails, device failed, fix it, replace it. Maybe there's some redundancy going on but from my discussions with folks in the hyperscale world and sometimes you have to squint through what they actually say because they're not too forthcoming but you talk to people who work there and the like. Then when a component fails in a rack, they just keep running, another fails okay and then eventually they throw it into the wood chipper. Is that, will that mentality seep into the, first of all is it an accurate depiction and will it seep into the enterprise? I think it is an accurate description. I mean when a server fails it is a pain so it's not, it's not a no problem at all, it is a pain. But you're absolutely right. I mean typically the application and the business will be unaffected by the incident. And I think what we're seeing is actually more and more enterprise IT teams actually becoming service providers. We had an advisory board actually a few weeks ago in Paris and these were enterprise customers and there's a huge interest in how these big tier one service providers are operating and really looking to try and understand how they can leverage that in their environment. So I do think we'll slowly see that approach move into the enterprise. One of the things John and I were talking about before he came on was the presence of the public cloud and the imperative or lack thereof of HP for example, being more aggressive in the public cloud. You've got a public cloud, I know that. But given what you said about customization that the enterprise is highly customized, the public cloud guys are highly homogeneous. So what can we take away from that? Does that mean that the cost structures of the enterprise will always be somewhat more expensive than the public cloud guys? And is that okay? Or will that continue to put pressure on IT as it has in the past five years? Yeah, I certainly think the cost profile will remain different for some time, but for sure what's happening in that cloud space will continually push the pressure down and I think it will evolve. I mean the customization of servers I think will only really happen at that very high end because I mean there is a cost associated with that and actually many of the features that a Google or Facebook require or don't require the enterprise does, so our ability to really monitor in detail the server itself, this is something that actually the tier ones really don't value, but when you get into the enterprise space they do and there's a cost associated with that and we can present the customer back with telemetry and knowledge that ensures that they have a very highly available infrastructure for their business. I also got to ask you about some of the big trends out there and how you can vector into that with your innovation, your services, software defined data center, is the talk of the town, at the end of the day that's kind of just a marketing term at this point but SDN certainly has traction with virtualization, you're seeing workloads being the focus of the customer's mind. Under the hood, how do you guys service that? Because there's risk, I mean we've heard from flexible capacity, things of that nature. Talk about the risks and balancing the risks and the reward side of taking the innovation steps because something to find data center is bleeding edge, it's being defined in real time, some new stuff's coming together, software defined storage, Craig Nunes was here earlier with David Scott on the cube, you got SDN, it's pumping on all cylinders, so that's all great. How do you keep up with that? Is it a wake of just new stuff and how are you sorting through that wake of innovation coming from the SDDC, software defined data center? No, great question. And actually I've had a lot of personal involvement in SDN so that's where my heritage has come from, that's the work I've done for the past couple of years. And we've been absolutely, from a services perspective, in with the product development teams from day one. And quite clearly in that environment, it's imperative that we really hide the seams, so we're presenting something that should be very simple and agile and easy for a customer to use, but behind that is a deal of complexity which really they're looking for us to abstract. So we're doing that and we're working very hard to ensure we provide that seamless experience. What are some of the touch points there? Give us a taste of specifics around, I won't say speed bumps on the accelerated path of software defined data center, but what are some of the hot button issues that you guys are focused on for customers? Well, I think the principal challenge is, and if you take SDN as an example, I think intellectually the CIOs and the IT teams are bought into this as something that they absolutely need to do. It's not a case of if I'm going to do it, it's more a case of when I'm going to do it. And we really need to help them find the right path for their business to adopt. So we release this trusted network transformation service at Discover, which is really for SDN, presenting the customer with a path we know will work because we've been there, we've seen it, and we've done it, and we've done it in our own IT team. And it's just about a pragmatic path, and when you start playing with the network, I mean, this is like open heart surgery, right? So you need to be very, very confident that- Well, the customer's wanting it, it's going to be a painful process, but obviously the future is pretty much paved the path of this is where you need to be for innovation, better advantage, cost structures, all those things we talk about in the queue, but I got to ask you, the old expression is, it's like changing out the engine of the airplane at 30,000 feet, it's really complicated. So a lot of people are scratching their heads and they want a roadmap to that. So what advice do you give CIOs in each stage of the adoption? Tire kicking to scoping it out, I'm in full planning mode and rolling out to a fast, early adopter. Well, I think the key, first and foremost, is that whatever you do, it has to be aligned to the business outcome. And I think what we're seeing actually is, and I can talk from experience in the networking space, that typically the networking team in a classic traditional enterprise would very much see their customers being the server guy or the app guy. And what we're able to do is to sort of elevate their thinking to really get aligned with the business and the business outcome. And especially with SDN, it's all about the app, it's all about trying to provide some differentiation and business value from the app. And once you can get the networking team thinking in those terms, actually they become very creative and they can really see the benefits. I think the other thing, of course, is it's not just a technology discussion, this is a people and process discussion too. And certainly our customers are looking for our help and our guidance to really overcome those people and process issues because the enterprise IT team of the future will be very different to how it looks today in terms of skills and capabilities. Well, I want to ask you about the enterprise IT team from an organization standpoint and it relates to your own title, servers and networking. And we hear about convergence and it's storage servers and networking. I've always said, storage is kind of an add-on. It's clearly the networking and the computer coming together and storage is there. We can put in the rack and call it converged. How converged is it really and how converged will it be in the future? And my specific question is, what does that mean for the service experience? So should I, am I reading too much into it that you're focused on the parts that in my opinion really are converged? Or is that something that will come in the future? I wonder if you could talk about that a little bit. I mean, it's certainly converging. I can't say it's completely converged. Yeah. Converging infrastructure just doesn't sound as good. No, it doesn't. And we'll get there eventually. And clearly Antonio's been charted with looking at that from a tech perspective. I think from a support perspective we've done a lot of work actually to really prepare the groundwork for this. So we have a very consistent portfolio. We've simplified our portfolio and from a customer perspective it's sort of seamless today, I would say. So the more the technology converges it will just sit really nicely into the work that we've done. So I'm really excited about the work that Antonio and the new team will do. And I think the other thing for me, which is great of course, is that I think with this new combination and this new focus we can really leverage the strength that we have in the data center with our servers and really use that as a leverage for our networking. So when you look at the networking business today, we're very strong on the edge of the network. That's really where our heartland has been and we have great products in the data center. We really need to using this trusted network transformation approach and the strength that we have on the server side. We really need to start pulling that into the core of the network. I wonder if we could talk a little bit about analytics. How are you using analytics to, well, will analytics change the service experience and they just needed that, how so? So what we've been really pushing with our service offers is this notion of proactive and actually moving to preemptive. So, you know, proactive care, we've been really pushing and it's been very successful along with data center care and that experience is all about HP being connected to the customer. We use telemetry data, we sense the state of the device, we bring that back, we analyze it and we present back to the customer information that we believe is of value to them. I honestly think we've only just scratched the surface and we've been taking a very much infrastructure approach. I think over time you'll see us sort of extend and expand that and, you know, again, when the customer is operating at a huge scale, actually being able to compare, for example, their environment with other people using similar products, you know, that's intellectual property that they will value and they will pay for. Yeah, I mean, I would think you have an opportunity for some dog food in here or champagne drinking, as they say, eat your own dog food or drink your own champagne with autonomy, being able to sit through log files, you got Vertica, being able to process information very quickly. That's all on the way, absolutely. Yeah, absolutely. What kind of timeframe are we looking at there? Is that a near-term, mid-term, or long-term? So I won't put you on the spot for a date because I know you can't tell me, but however you want to define it, near-term, mid-term, or long-term? I would say it's a mid-term activity. The work is on the way. What is the big work here for you guys next 12 months for your organization? Obviously, you mentioned the accelerated path for the software-defined networking, for the data center, and then went to Hybrid Cloud. What are your key objectives for the next year? So for me, it's very much focused on this hyperscale service provider space. That really is the future of compute when you look at the market share that we're projecting. So having the right and differentiated service experience in that space is absolutely critical. Especially as that starts to move down into the enterprise, we need to have that right. So that's very clearly the number one thing on my agenda. So you got to ask your personal question. Looking back over the past just three years, we've been here four years now covering HP. I want to get your take on the marketplace. Not so much HP, but HP's in the tornado if you want to use that expression. Obviously, when people talk about this inflection point being really something you've never seen before in terms of acceleration of innovation change. It's happening faster. Obviously, converged infrastructure meets big data. Cloud, mobile, social, computers, mobile devices, edge of the network, internet of things. All these things, it just blows people's minds. So I got to ask you a personal question. What's your take of all this? What do you, how do you observe that? And how do you describe that to your friends about in tech the importance of all this stuff coming together? I mean, within your experience, what is the most exciting thing and what is this all about? Wow, that's a great question. I mean, it truly is an exciting time to be in tech. I have to say, it's amazing what the possibilities are that this new style of IT can present. And it was actually fascinating watching Meg and her colleagues speak in the plenary yesterday about the strategy that Intel and Microsoft are taking. And for me, I think the key is really making sure that with all these things blending together, it really does enhance our lives. And I really do believe that we're at a point where, with wearables and all the other tech going on that we really can make a difference to society. And I think it's super exciting. It's not just the geeks, feeds and feeds anymore. It's really global impact. I mean, you're seeing Google water satellite company for half a billion dollars, short chains for them. So that can bring internet access to emerging countries. It can bring disaster relief and surveillance. But this is game changing, internet of things, changing the value chains for oil and gas to medical. I think what's interesting though is, although the future is very exciting, very clearly exciting, actually when you come back to the world today and the enterprise IT teams today, they still have a lot of traditional IT to manage. And that's what they wake up every day worrying about. So the more we can help them to migrate and manage and evolve that towards the new style. I mean, we always use car analogy, sports analogies. It's really like, I don't want to say horse and buggy IT, but like really it's model T. If you think about what's going on now, these engines of innovations are being reconstructed from a geek standpoint. I mean, you just think about SDN, how game changing that does at the networking level. It's just new engines of productivity and just scale. That's just phenomenal. Alistair, thanks so much for your commentary. Great to see you again. This is theCUBE. We'll be right back with our next guest after the short break live in Las Vegas for HP Discover. I'm John Furrier with Dave Vellante. We'll be right back.