 Okay, we're back live in Los Angeles, or Irvine, California, right in Orange County, 12 miles from Newport Beach. This is theCUBE, siliconangle.tv's continuing coverage. We go to the events where there's announcements and action, and we talk to the smartest people we can find. Extract a signal from the noise and share that with you. And this is our first CUBE event where we're showcasing servicesangle.com, our eight month old publication growing very rapidly thanks to our readers and our viewers, so I appreciate that. I'm John Furrier, the founder of siliconangle.com, and I'm with my co-host. I'm Dave Vellante of wikibon.org. We're here with Kevin Smiley, who is a consulting partner for cloud computing within HP. We've been talking all day about the support side of the business. Kevin is in the consulting side. And so, the lead in oftentimes, you're probably talking to a lot of CIOs. You just came off the keynote at this event. So how do you feel? I feel good, it was a great opportunity. We talked about a lot of good product topics today related to cloud, but we closed with how we bring all those together. And what we can do to actually help clients decide which path to choose to go into cloud and actually start to achieve the benefits that it offers to them for their particular company and their industry. So big theme around pathways to the cloud, implying that it's not a rip and replace, it's not a forklift, it's an evolution. Talk about that a little bit. How real is that? Sounds good, how real is it? It's very real because companies have a service delivery model in place today. They're already delivering services from a technology perspective. And cloud is another technology service that they're looking to bring in and incorporate into that model. And it's not a matter of simply pulling out, say, their current internal platform or replacing an outsourced service with cloud. It's how do you integrate that into how they manage the services, how they govern them, how their customers use them within the business. And so it's not as simple as just pulling out the technology and putting something new in or buying a service in the marketplace. It's much more comprehensive than that. So Kevin, can you break down the current state of the union relative to cloud? Obviously, we have a section called Cloud Angle on Silicon Angle. Wikibon does the premier research in the area. So going back a year or two, it was all nice and segmented out. Private cloud, public cloud. And then hybrid cloud became the buzzword du jour about a year and a half ago. So what is that, what's the landscape look like? Obviously underneath all that infrastructure to service, platform as a service and SaaS, all layer on top of that, mobile, social. So let's show what the middle section, private cloud is pretty much, we know what that is. It's on premise related stuff. Public cloud is Amazon, Google, Rackspace. In this middle, this new hybrid. Is it really a hybrid cloud or is it more, that's the delivery of it? Because consulting and services is really plays in that middle ground between those two. The enterprise and public. How should we look at that in the middle ground there? Think of it as a who owns what kind of conversation. So in the private cloud, the customer owns the resources that are delivering the service and the people that do the work related to it. In the public cloud, the service provider owns the services, they define the service. They actually decide what can be done and what can't be done in the service. When you think of the hybrid space or the virtual private cloud as we refer to it as well, it's a condition where the client wants to be able to define the policies and how their data, how their processing is managed and have someone else actually manage the infrastructure, in this case, a cloud infrastructure to deliver that. So it's a form of a managed service but with more direction provided by the client. Let's break that down a little bit. This is a great segue. So you got essentially private, public, hybrid or middle cloud. And then on the other axis you have ownership, meaning ownership of the resources. Policy definition, how to handle that. Private is owned by the customer and then service provider. What other dimensions would be on that chart? So I was going to build a little chart out. So for example, service levels. A very important aspect of this and why customers were looking for something in this space to begin with. In the public space, everyone gets essentially the same thing. It's meant to be a consumer model. In the private space, of course, a client can define the service levels however they want. And they want to be able to take advantage of sharing those resources across organizations but still have some control over what kind of service levels they're buying. And so service providers in that virtual private cloud space provide companies the opportunity to be more specific around what service levels they buy and what that means for their business. That means they can move more into that model than what they had available to them in the public space. Is there any other points on that? That's ownership, policy, SLA, control? Well, security is a huge factor. That's probably the biggest one for moving out of the public space and coming in. The security which you can interpret as an SLA around that. But still, it's a topic that warrants its own conversations. So that is a non-trivial concept and especially implementation, environment. HP obviously is in a position to lead that, what do you call virtual private cloud infrastructure? What do you need from your ecosystem to actually succeed? Well, it's a challenging environment because you have what you want to be a shared pool of resources across a set of customers that don't necessarily have shared requirements. So where the public model is able to take advantage of that very easily because they define what people can get. In this space, you want to be able to address as many of those clients' needs while providing that level of security, service level, policy definition that they want. And that's a complex challenge because you're fundamentally sharing the facilities, you're sharing the infrastructure, the network elements of this and still providing the client enough flexibility to define what they want. How about support? So we're here talking about services. So you have shared support? You have, so in a private cloud. In a private cloud, you either have your own support or you're hiring someone like HP in the services we just rolled out to provide that support. In a virtual private cloud, you're buying that support from the service provider. And in a public model, you're getting at whatever degree that customer or that company provides it. Well, I can sum that up. It's, we'll do our best, but if we fail, email us. Yeah, or spin up in the virtual instance. Well, that's a problem. I mean, you guys actually provide support to the service providers. Now, they're providing the shared support. So is it the tail wagging the dog or is it HP leading that? I mean, so in the middle ground there, that shared area, how does support play it? How do you guys, what's your offerings there? Well, we're bringing out a service from our enterprise compute service that's going to and does for a limited number of customers right now, provide that in a way that hasn't been done in the market before. The underlying technology to actually manage the ability to define those policies, the service levels, et cetera, is something that HP has developed as part of putting that service together. And as we get it out into the market more and gain more acceptance, our customers are going to find that it offers them a level of service and a flexibility that they haven't found in other virtual private cloud providers in the market. I want to go back to this. So you're saying then that HP will provide some unique technology to the service providers to enable them to abstract away the complexities of service so that they can actually support and or manage. What I just described, we're actually providing for our virtual private cloud service as opposed to providing to, it's a unique intellectual property. Okay, for HP. For HP. So that'd be a private cloud offering. Well, it's a service that we're providing and focusing on our enterprise services customers, our outsourcing customers. So I wonder if we could talk about this hybrid that John was hitting on before. Because I want to ask about your philosophies because it would seem to me that to succeed you need some degree of homogeneity within that hybrid cloud environment so that you can set policies that are consistent and you're maybe sharing multi-tenants with like-minded organizations. At the same time, HP is so diverse, such a large customer base, such a large portfolio of partners. So you support VM, where you support Microsoft, you support Red Hat. We're very friendly. Very friendly to the ecosystem. How do you reconcile that need for homogeneity with the diversity of your portfolio? Well, what we do is recognize the fact that we have a very complex environment today out in the world. Customers need a lot of different things but they want a way and a path to actually bring that together over time. So while the industry is moving towards more standardization, more homogenous operating environments and things, they need a way to get there from where they are today. And that's what we provide in our technologies across the board, largely, to be able to help them make that migration into those more standard environments. As they go, hopefully there'll be a lot more standardization. We continue to drive and support open systems in the market and that's a foundation for what we do. But we also aren't naive to think that that will be the only standard in the market over time and there will continue to be a need to be able to bring those diverse standards and capabilities together. So Kevin, in your consulting activities, what's hot amongst CIOs? What's on the top of their minds? Well, cloud is certainly one of those topics and it's driving a lot of other conversations around storage, for example. We're seeing clients looking at their current storage environment and the growth and explosion of data, both structured and unstructured, that's hitting them and what they need to do in order to update and make that environment much more cloud ready and able to handle the growth that's occurring. That's one of those topics that we're seeing a lot around. So it's data growth, cloud, obviously you've talked about security before. Security's pervasive. So, I mean, CIO's got to be a little freaked about the cloud from a security standpoint. I mean, they don't trust the cloud, right? I used to be one of those prior to joining HP. I wouldn't want to be one of those right now. I wouldn't sleep much and it would be a real challenge because there's so much facing me. One of the hottest trends on our site right now on services angle and on SiliconANGLE is mobile security and it's constantly, because mobile is a big part of service and employee access, et cetera. So I want to just ask you the question about platform as a service. So we've seen a lot of hubbub about Oracle, Salesforce, companies like that who are touting past VMware, has Cloud Foundry, HP's announced they're in beta with some similar offerings. What is the state of platform as a service? Is that just a path to nowhere? Is it going to be commoditized? How does that fit into the whole hybrid private public? Long term, like decades out, it will be commoditized at some point right now and for the foreseeable future. It's going to be an expression of a variety of different relatively closed environments. I mean, you describe the companies that were in that space. Haruku did it with Ruby. Right, HP's view on that is to again, go to open standards and make those standards available to everyone and be able to work from that perspective. A number of our competitors and our partners as well are going on more proprietary views of it. So basically if I can translate what you said into a kind of common language, it's roll your own infrastructure. Pass is essentially. To a certain degree. Use standards, create a platform and put it out there so you can empower SaaS apps. Correct. That would be kind of like I want a platform, I want it in the cloud. Or empower apps that I have in my organization that I want to make the equivalent of SaaS apps. Yeah, that's it. And then obviously infrastructure as a service, a little bit underneath all that is a lot of the sweet spot where HP's ESSN division plays. Right. There we've seen some advances on configuration, management, automation. How is that playing into it? That is, is that going to be the hardened top, if you will, as Paul Moritz would say? The infrastructure as a service is more of the hardened top where it's just there and the actions that at the past and SaaS level? I think it will. It's an interesting situation because so many organizations struggle with managing their infrastructure themselves today. So a lot of those developments that you're seeing to drive the improvements to provide cloud services are actually driving performance and behavioral improvements in IT organizations that should have been there for a long time. So it's a good behavior we're seeing come out of it and it's going to establish a set of expectations across the industry of what it means to provide infrastructure. So companies won't put up with to a certain degree some of the levels of infrastructure service they've seen in the past. And we're working with a variety of companies to help them accomplish those types of improvements. One of the areas that you see as the biggest investments of IT organization is development, right? And it's very high leverage and a lot's changing there. You're seeing new tools, new programming languages. You're seeing new models of IT operations like DevOps where applications and infrastructure, people are being cross-trained. And I wonder if you could talk about that a little bit, that intersection of application development and infrastructure management and what you're seeing in your client phase. Well, what we're seeing is companies that don't want to be impeded by the availability of their infrastructure to develop and drive their business through their applications. I mean, that's essentially what a lot of the cloud conversation is about today is I need my business to move faster, which means I need my technology and ablement to move faster. So my applications have to be able to adapt and respond to market changes much more quickly than what they have in the past. In order to do that, I have to have a flexible infrastructure that can move at that kind of pace. That's one of the reasons our support services that are coming out are a nice addition in the marketplace because they keep that kind of support going at the speed that cloud needs. Things working and available in a proactive manner versus just a reactive manner. So I saw a statistic today earlier in the keynote. I think it was a forester number that the line of businesses adopting the cloud 25%, no, 2.5 times faster than the IT operations. I mean, they have to come together closer but do they have to be identical? So they have to be completely aligned or are the advantages of private cloud, security, trust, the SLAs, the control enough so that they can be somewhat slower? Well, IT's role, part of IT's role is to have a fiduciary and protective responsibility for the company, risk management mitigation around some of these. So the business can grow and demand things that have paced faster than what they can respond today, partially because they're trying to protect the interests of the company, not letting it go too fast. It doesn't change the fact that the business wants to move at that pace and probably faster, frankly, if it could. So it's a matter of IT organizations getting to the point where they understand how they can bring their own internal services as well as external services together to increase that speed while still serving that fiduciary responsibility. So Meg Whitman today in her video said that the cloud is gonna be bigger than client server as a trend. Yes. What about cloud creep? Are you worried about that? Is that gonna happen? Is it gonna be like distributed computing? Was there a client services creep? Yeah, I think so. I don't know about it. Distributed computing and an IT was called in to bring it all in. Pretty massive growth sector. But, what is that? I think it's a potential issue and a significant issue for the industry, particularly as you're referring to the different platformers of services that are coming out in order to take their existing environments and actually bring them together in a cloud, they're gonna rely on where those platforms came from. So by default, they're gonna start putting services on some of those environments that they don't necessarily want to because they don't work well together. Someone's gonna have to integrate those. They're gonna have data needs and things that span those different clouds. Well, I mean, Dave, I think, I mean, my opinion on that is I think with cloud, like client server, I think there'll be a little bit of a slush funds going out there, a lot of consulting dollars and services. We've seen it already with the boutiques evolving, but ultimately when it comes down to the business drivers, client server quickly moved to, this is a business driver. Making money out of this, so yeah. Well, I mean, if the economic's changed and the technology levers are there with some of those security things you're talking about can be fixed, then I think it's a real deal we'll have something there. Well, and you saw what happened early when those technologies first came out, businesses realized they could go do it without going through central IT and quickly went out and started doing things on their own. We're seeing similar behaviors in cloud today. So let's talk about rogue IT. Are you seeing a circle back to, okay, we've done some rogue IT and we're seeing it with a dupe and big data for about a year earlier. Now it's like, okay, it's a real deal. So there's an element of, okay, rogue's happening. It's a pattern, it's a trend, and why is it happening? Okay, so bring it in house. What's the roadmap there? Because everyone's been doing rogue IT. And rogue software development too, by the way. Oh yeah. So you got rogue IT. It's a cycle. I mean, with each change in technology that comes out and the way services are used, business keeps finding ways to expand out and to grab technology services that then IT has to assess what's important to them and pull it back in. So what do you say to the CIO and his staff, and even down to the trenches that I got rogue IT, I got rogue software development, and oh by the way, my compliance is completely broken because people have bypassing compliance rules because all the applications that they're writing in a rogue way to get the time to market is all breaking compliance. What do you guys say to them? Besides you're screwed, what's the pathway? Was this part of the job description when you signed up? No, it's a matter of... No, these are real issues that we're finding. They are real issues, and you're right on the compliance aspect in particular, is it's a risk to the company. And that's the approach we recommend they take when they're talking to the business about it, that by not doing certain things, they're putting assets of the company at risk, exposing them particularly around security concerns, when they take these approaches and don't take a holistic view of how to provide those services to the company. So what do you say to that guy? So you're in a meeting, you're having dinner, you're saying okay, it's a therapy session, I laid out everything, and you're doing, what do I do, doctor? Well, patients on the table, what do you do? The first thing I would do is look at what the policies are, and what can be changed in those policies to begin to drive. A lot of these cloud services and where that creep has occurred, or that rogue IT has occurred, has been because people can use their corporate credit card to go out and buy a service. Well, when we've had these conversations with CIOs, we've asked them if they've gone out and looked at the spending to see who is buying service from these service providers in their organization. They're often amazed at how much is going through the corporate spend, and actually trying to drive that back in, putting policies in place to control where they can charge on those personal credit cards and beginning to drive those policies through. So that's the stick. I think there's a carrot aspect to that too, John, which is, and I've said this, you have talked about this a lot, is that CIOs are in competition with cloud service providers, and they need to transform their organizations and be the most attractive choice for their internal constituency. So they can use the stick, but unless they deliver the value. It's the transformation message today we've been seeing. I mean, it's so disruptive. It's really the perfect storm in IT right now because you have such a fundamental economic and technology lever, same time the human aspect of it with the labor pool and the demand for new skill sets is just causing all kinds of massive disruption. Well, and to that end, where the CIO has a trusted relationship with the business, they're in a good position to actually be a broker of those services and represent the business needs where they don't have that trust is where they struggle. Yeah, it's all about when they have a credibility they can succeed. All right, John, we're getting the hook. Okay, this is a great, we should have been an hour with you really. We're going to follow up with you if you don't mind. Tell me where you're located. Dallas. Yeah, perfect. We have an office in Dallas. So I would love to have you on theCUBE again, because we could probably go on an hour and do a deep dive there on some of the cloud, just like some of the matrix we were putting together. It's funny you brought that up because Dave and I actually put in a project together where we're breaking down the private public and the shared and kind of putting the key variables together. So I really appreciate the insight there. It'd be fun. Thanks for having me.