 Live from Las Vegas, Nevada, it's the Cube at HP Discover 2014, brought to you by HP. Hi everybody, welcome back to Las Vegas, this is Dave Vellante, I'm with Wikibon.org, and this is Silicon Angles theCUBE. The Cube is a live mobile studio, we go out to the events, we extract the signal from the noise, we're here live at HP Discover. Jeff Vies is here, he's the Vice President of Solutions Marketing and HP Autonomy and Steve Spellacy, Cube alum, Director of HP Data Protection. The data protection software business is actually inside of the HP software business. Sometimes people forget about that, but gentlemen, welcome to the Cube. Thank you. So here at Discover, what's happening, what's the buzz, Steven? Well, two weeks ago we launched a second phase of our bull vision around adaptive backup and recovery. And with that we released a new version, announced a release of a new version of Data Protector, which is our enterprise backup and recovery product. And two new companion products, which are all about making backup and recovery smarter and more efficient. Okay, so what's the reaction been to that announcement? Well, the reaction from customers, partners, and from analysts alike has been fantastic. We're bringing forth a new vision on empowering backup administrators with information through operational IT analytics. So we're collecting all sorts of information about what's happening at the source where things are being protected and where they're being protected to the destinations of the targets. And we can capture that entire conversation and then iterate all the information that we learn about that conversation to improve and dynamically optimize backup. So we tell that story, we show it as a demo, or we install it in the customer's data center. They see, they connect the dots and they see the value immediately. So Jeff, I wonder if we could talk a little bit about sort of the organization and how the pieces fit together. Maybe we probably should have started there, but why don't you take us through that? Yeah, well, that's really the interesting part, right? But no, actually, I'm glad you asked, because this is kind of a marriage that makes a lot of sense. And that is because you have HP, which is just synonymous with IT infrastructure. And then on the other side, you have HP autonomy, which is focused on information, understanding it, analyzing it, understanding any form, 100%. And by marrying the two together to do adaptive backup recovery, we're kind of blending those two different approaches that nobody else in the industry has done. Now that being said, to answer your bigger question, HP autonomy is now firmly part of HP software. And in fact, what was just announced two weeks ago is Robert Young-Johns, who headed HP autonomy is now in charge of all of HP software. So we're starting to see, it's not a small business, it's about a $5 billion business. And we're seeing now the pieces of it going from one part, data protection and analytics, to application development, even security, starting to gel together as kind of one whole. That's starting to happen here in Discover. And the technologies we're using for this announcement kind of reflect that. So it's an evolution from what was a bunch of different parts within one organization to one organization through and through. Well, what I like about it, at least on my inference is that you're basically a lot of companies just look at archiving and backup as, okay, just do it and forget about it. It sounds like you have a different philosophy of, let's get value out of that corpus of data. Is that fair? It's all about that, Dave. So the old style, the old world was a lot easier. Probably was a homogeneous data center at one point with one vendor solution. That isn't the way it is now, you know that. So you have to be able to deal with all the variables in the data center, whether it's an investment in traditional mission critical applications and new infrastructure like FreePAR and other disruptive storage platforms and things like virtualization, which has completely changed the landscape of how we deploy IT services. Now, having to deal with all that, if you will, variety and the velocity of information that's created is the real challenge. So to set it and forget it just doesn't work anymore. The importance of your data changes over time. Decisions over what resources should be used and when have to change based on the priorities of the organization. So what we've done with Adaptive Backup and Recovery is actually given smarts into the backup application that can look at a given application stream, whether it's a file system, a mission critical app like SAP Oracle Exchange or infrastructure itself like a snapshot integration with a leading vendor like FreePAR and others. And basically allow the administrator to fine tune and, if you will, rank stack the order of importance of the applications and who should get and dictate access to certain backup resources in a given window of time. Now that we call prioritization, which was the first phase of our strategy we launched in November of 2013. What I mentioned earlier was the next phase, which we call prediction, where we can leverage IT operational analytics to actually improve and iterate backup and recovery performance availability, leveraging the information we collect to fine tune and, if you will, dynamically optimize how the operation works. And those smarts, Jeff, come from autonomy? Yes. Is that right? Those analytics come from us that we brought into it because that's what we understand. And that powers these four phases just to finish them off. It's prioritization, prediction, which is being able to look ahead and, if you will, I like to say look around corners because nothing is straightforward in IT. So you want to be able to look around that corner to go, where am I exposed? You know, I watch the color drop out of people's faces when I go, who's running different remote locations? We call it Robo, remote office branch locations. And everybody puts up their hand because very few don't have that. The lawyer. Not my problem. The secretary. Yeah. But the issue is that stuff used to be great and we had a customer today that said, you know, when we deployed a solution, we put something there, but that wasn't essential. Our business critical stuff was in the data center and the further you got out to the edge, less important. You lose a laptop here or there, it's okay. Well, nobody is saying that anymore. Often your most critical data is actually at your edge and the stuff that is actually in your data center, it's still important, but not maybe the most timely needed information. If you're running a bunch of distribution centers or retail stores and so all of a sudden that's turning on its head, how do I approach that? But the key thing that's resonating, you know, the four areas are prioritization, prediction, recommendation and automation. And what's really resonating, especially with IT managers is the recommendation because we make it clear that analytics when it's the most useful, it's augmenting your intelligence. It's not replacing your intelligence. It's bringing and calling together information and giving you insight so you can make the right calls and it's allowing a backup administrator or director of IT to be more strategic. And that's what we're focused on and that is resonating hands down with the people that we're talking about. So we're basically taking backup out of the basement and bringing it into the boardroom. So I wonder if we can unpack these four a little bit in that context. So the prioritization that sounds like it's a backup resource allocation, you know, concept to meet an SLA for an application. That's correct, that's correct. And the policy for that application is set by the business owner presumably. That's correct. It can be set by the, through the data protector advanced scheduler, you have the ability to define the critical applications, the windows in which you'd like those to run and the resources you'd like to have leveraged in that policy as well as limits or thresholds that you like to impose. What's the syntax with which I interact with that system? Is it things like RPO, RTO, is it high, medium, low? Is it either of those if I choose? Definitely on the time side we're looking at, you know, we need to get the data collected and protected in this given time. When you look ahead and you want to, after you've analyzed the data after you've created a bunch of backup, we do have a way of predicting potential RTOs. So we can look at the typical backup jobs and the result of those sessions and then using our analytics predict a best effort RTO that an IT director or a backup admin can utilize and say, look, the best I can get on recovering this mission critical app is from yesterday at this point in time and it's going to take me this amount of time to recover. Okay, so that's part of the prediction. They're telling me I only got three minutes left. We got a medium more time. So that's part of the prediction piece. Yeah, it's part of, and it's interesting because the things we do in prioritization are later leveraged in prediction. And you mentioned RTO, what about RPO? That's in there as well. Right, and you know, when it comes down to RPO you have to make tough choices about what you protect, how often and what style of protection you leverage. You know, if we're talking about a mission critical database and you're leveraging three-part infrastructure, you may want to leverage snapshot integration where you can get the, if you will, the most application consistent image of that data and you can do it in a short period of time leveraging hardware or offloading it. So it's making choices at the end of the day. How do we choose to protect? And the recommendation piece, what am I getting recommendations on? Recommendations are effectively the console is being educated by the data that we collect. So telling you where your potential optimizations may exist and then giving you the levers and if you will the dials to make those changes. If I will, there's three products to be really clear. What we're launching is DP or Data Protector 90. So that's the major release and that is the heart and soul of Adaptive Backup Recovery. And we've announced that and we're shipping that immediately. Then there are two what I'll call companion products that are in the front seat with you. Backup Navigator and Microsoft SCOM Data Pack. The Backup Navigator actually is backward compatible for our entire install base going back to Data Protector 70. It is analytics on steroids. 80 preformed analytics screens. You can customize them. It's got a social networking capability so you can share and collaborate. It lets you look at what happened, what's happening and what will happen. And then the Microsoft SCOM is for organizations that want that telemetry to look holistically at all the resources. Now we plug right into that. You see that hierarchical tree analysis and that way you can fold right in how you're managing your enterprise today. So those two last products already shipping, you already can go to autonomy.com or hp.com, download the trial today. So that's out and running in the race already. And the Backup Navigator, so it's a reporting type of capability. Reporting an analytics package. Highly customizable dashboard. It's, you know, if you will, it's an executive dashboard with a detail behind it. So when you say, Jeff, what happened? You mean like how long it took? Was it successful? You know, what the rate of backup was? Changes, yes. And then a projection of what likely, based on how I've been performing and the different dimensions of it, how I'm likely to perform in the future and am I going to run out of gas? So it gives you a look ahead capability. All right, so you can anticipate. Keeps capacity planning, better planning around the storage footprint in the data center when you may need to deploy more store once in this case. But the best thing is it's cool looking. It is the coolest looking product around backup and recovery, around storage that you've ever seen. And it's got more colors than a rainbow. And if that's not reason to download and try it out, I don't know what else there is. And where do they download it? HP.com? You can get it on HP.com slash go slash data protector, which is our landing page. HP.com slash go slash data protector, okay. Two last questions, because I'm getting the hook. Steve, what's the bumper sticker? Leaving Las Vegas HP Discover 2014. What's the back of the bus? What's the bumper sticker? Yeah, for me. Beer and wine and pocket-based cocktails. You can never get that right. I'll make her a never-quick deal. What I see is, what we're doing in our portfolio is reflective of HP's big bets. What we're doing at a micro level is really making backup smarter and more efficient. It's about saving customers money, reducing the amount of burden and time. And we had a great session this morning with a customer from White River Health Systems. We talked about how they reduced their backup windows but also reduced their administrative burden from four hours a week of admin down to 20 minutes. It's about making better decisions with what we've got, doing less and less time. Smarter and more efficient. All right, Jeff, where do you want to take this division, this vision, where do you see it going in the next 12 to 18 months? Well, this is one part of our embracement of information. Backup and recovery is the first touch point for many organizations where IT really touches that user-generated information. And that's the first inning of the game. Because from there, we want to, of course, manage it, govern it, analyze it, harness it, and act on it. And what we're trying to do with an HP software is connect those pieces. So many other vendors in the industry look at those in little, nice little silos. And that doesn't address what you're trying to do. You have to look at the hole. And so, I don't know if it's our bumper sticker, but we let people see the whole elephant, not just the trunk or the tusk. And that is really what we're trying to achieve here. I don't know of any other software company that spans the broad reach that we have in HP software. This is one part, but if you really want to rock and roll with us, look at the whole elephant. Excellent, gentlemen, we've got to leave it there. Thanks so much for coming on theCUBE. It was great to have you again. Great to see you, man. All right, keep it right there, everybody. We're right back with our next guest. This is Dave Vellante. We'll be back with Jeff Frick right after this.