 Welcome back to SiliconANGLE.com's exclusive coverage of HP Discover in Frankfurt, Germany. I always want to say Munich, Dave, but you know, we're in Frankfurt, always have those memories of going to Munich, but Frankfurt's where all the action here. Frankfurt's where all the action is at SiliconANGLE.com. We're extracting the signal from the noise here, and this is theCUBE, our flagship program. I'm John Furrier, the founder of SiliconANGLE.com, and I'm joined by co-host, as usual. I'm Dave Mellon, Dave Mellon.org. Go there for real-time research. We've just released a new report on software-led infrastructure. It's all the rage, so check it out right on the homepage, wikibon.org. We're here with Nina Buick, who's the CMO of Connect. Nina, welcome back to theCUBE. Thank you, it's great to be here. Another Discover, this is your home turf, right? I mean, you love this action. It's all your people, it's the customers. You're focused on the customers. The whole ecosystem is here, right? This is what I love. It's a great opportunity. I think about the first Discover that I went to, seven years ago, was called HP Technology Forum and Expo, and it was in 2005 when Katrina hit New Orleans, and everybody moved to Orlando. What's changed in seven years, there may have been some leadership changes, right, whatever, what hasn't changed is the enthusiasm. You come to these events, everybody's excited, everybody's here to learn about the products, but also to learn from each other, right? Because this is where they can come. This is where friendships are forged. This is where people help solve each other's problems, and it's awesome. Yeah, it is awesome. So, what are people telling you in the ecosystem? You mentioned some of the changes that are going on, but HP customers remain very loyal. What are some of the things that the customers are challenged with that are on the top of their mind for 2013? Sure, so we recently did a survey of our members around the world, and as always, I think budget tends to be the number one issue. So, people come, especially to these events, to find out how to create efficiencies, right, doing more with less, and I think they can do that, and HP's got a great answer and a great story to tell. I was at the storage press conference yesterday, and having been in this industry for 24 years, I don't think I've seen such a huge announcement. This is like a decade's worth of news in one day. It's amazing, the technology coming out of HP that actually serves a small to medium-sized business. Amazing. Nina, I have to ask you because obviously everyone wants to know, and prior to coming to the show, obviously we get pinged a lot. SiliconANGLE has been covering HP for a very long time. Obviously I was there for nine years. People kind of know my biases, but we've been very critical of HP in the past, publicly, obviously there's a track record of news and bad black eye for HP right now, currently in the marketplace, but there's so much positive things going on, and one of our goals here is to extract those nuggets and shine them and show the world what HP's got and try to get the real story here at HP. But I wanted to ask you specifically, relative to the general sentiment about HP right now, given all the turmoil, we don't need to kind of go there at all on that particular topic. But there's a loyalty with HP employees. We're talking to entrepreneurs who've made a lot of money selling their company HP, who are sticking around. The customer base is very loyal, but there are some reputation issues out there around HP, currently given the kind of the mainstream BS that's floating around. What's your feeling, what's your sense as you hear and talk to customers about how they're responding to that and what's the latest on that? Because that's important, people want to know. It is important, so I've got two answers to the same question. The first is, I can only tell you that our community has grown. So even with all the noise going on at HP, our community in the past three years has grown by 19,000 members. So while there may be noise going on at the top, the people who are using the technology are not really faced by that as long as innovation continues to happen, right? The next piece is I recently spoke with a CIO and he told me that even with, because I asked him specifically, with the changes up at the top, did this impact your decision in investing in HP? And he said, absolutely not. He said, let me tell you something. He said, what's important to me as a CIO is that the people that work with me directly and they're selling me the product or taking good care of me and that the product is world-class. And that's really the concern, really, is are the customers being taken care of at the product and service level? So I think the answer is yes, from my experience. There's a lot of noise, true, and we're seeing Meg trying to take care of that with her turnaround plan, which we've been supportive of actually. So we're cheerleading for Meg and we think she's doing the right things at this point. I mean, we're hearing just great things about HP but the press is killing HP. Well, it's almost like in search engines, when you have a bad news story, you got to just keep burying it with good news so the noise goes down, same kind of thing. And there is a lot of good news. The Cube certainly has the ability to amplify the news. So that's our job. And people look to us to try to figure that out. That's why I wanted to ask that question because it's one that's kind of sitting out there that needs to be addressed. And it's okay to talk about it. Say, hey, you know what? A little bit of a black eye. Let's just get through this. And it's still the same game, serving customers. We heard from Dave Donatelli earlier. I mean, very, very impressive set of products on the infrastructure side that has been just throwing up a lot of profitability. The software side is kind of bulking up. They got to digest autonomy and figure that out. Vertica doing very, very well. So they have a good portfolio. Can they execute? That's the question. Well, I think that they're in a better position to execute because they're becoming more nimble. I think there's less layers now between the top and the customer. And I think that absolutely helps you being nimble that way you can better serve your customer. So let me ask you a question about your organization now and the customer base. Have you done any surveys that lately give us an update on kind of what's happening with the pulse of the community that you guys are involved in? Just give us an update on that. Sure, absolutely. In the recent survey that we did in terms of new technology, everybody's looking at cloud, right? Everybody is. They have to. There is no question. I just got a laptop from HP, a new HP Folio. There's not even a CD-ROM drive in it anymore. I mean, everybody gets their technology from the cloud. So in the enterprise space, people understand that's where they have to go, but it's doing it and moving there in a secure manner, right? That's the challenge. That's why they're here. Can you talk about Connect a little bit? Connect's an independent organization, right? Yes. A lot of people don't know about it. So take us through that. Sure. We're HP's largest independent user group, right? So we represent typically the practitioners, right? So we have 85% of our members are IT practitioners. About 15% are CIOs and VPs worldwide. We have 44 chapters. We have 13 special interest groups. And our goal is to help these individuals who've invested their careers in HP get the most out of their investment, plain and simple. Talk about the special interest groups. What are they focused on these days? Sure. So we have, again, multiple specials. We just added converged cloud. We have enterprise security and what they do is they come together. They talk about, again, sharing best practices with one another. If they have, they would like to influence HP in any way, maybe product direction. We're able to do that. Take that collective voice, give it back to HP and get a response. This is a global organization, right? Oh, yeah. So how often do the chapters get together? Is it a monthly thing, quarterly? How does that work? Some get together. It depends. Some chapters are country chapters. In the United States, there's many, many chapters. Some get together as often as every month. Some get together quarterly. It just depends on the community and how vibrant it is. And how's funding work? So we get our funding different ways. We have sponsorships. HP is one of our obvious sponsors. We also, HP has a ton of wonderful partners that we work with by advertising from us, that by booth space at events that we hold, signature events. We just held an event in San Jose. We had 200 people come from around the world to do an event. And it was fabulous. What was that event? It was the non-stop advanced technical boot camp. And we had Jimmy Trebek was there doing a keynote address. And he was awesome. He was awesome. Fantastic. All right, Nina. Well, listen, we really appreciate you coming by theCUBE and give us an update on Connect and your great energy. You're a fantastic advocate for the HP customer base. So really appreciate seeing you. Thank you very much. Thank you. Okay, we'll be right back. HP still strong, loyal communities still deliver in the process of services. Nina, thank you so much. We'll be right back with our next guest after this short break. Thank you. All right.