 HP is announcing their global reconfiguration of their portfolio services. This is theCUBE, SiliconANGLE.tv, SiliconANGLE.com. Flagship telecast, we go out to the events and tech and talk to the smart people we can find, extract the signal from the noise. I'm John Furrier, the co-host of theCUBE and I'm here joined with. I'm Dave Vellante of Wikibon.org and we're here with Michelle Weiss who is the VP of Technology Services. Michelle, what do you got going here? You got your bearing gifts, I see. Totally, totally and you're going to get pink and you're going to get green. And what I wanted to share with you guys is actually it's all in a little scroll. Can we open? Absolutely, absolutely. Love presents here? These are presents and what we've got here are. We have a fan club brewing and groupies are next day for theCUBE. Absolutely, absolutely. Always ask for money wrapped into things, right? Okay, so we have some. This is really the guiding principles. We sat down to re-architect this entire support portfolio, many billions of dollars of business, many tens of thousands of customers and we said, kind of what's in our head? What's really guiding us? What's our doctrine? What do we think? And we actually committed it to paper. So like all good revolutionaries, we have a doctrine. All right, so let's read the declaration of support independence. Support independence. Let me start with the first one and then we can talk about this one. So we believe you need a direct connection to experts anytime, anywhere. I mean, who the heck likes waiting on the phone and someone asked you for your serial number for the 11th time, which you really want is somebody to know who you are and what your problem is. Right, so it's almost like I want to be able to call their cell phone now. Exactly. Now, so you can do this today and this is the reality? Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, I think you guys are gonna hear even more about proactive care but the idea in proactive care is you get directly connected to an expert, to somebody who knows, you know, not only kind of about the technology because you expect us to know the technology. I mean, we're HP, we should know the technology but actually knows your environment, what's happening with you, you know, because they've got all the instrumentation, the telemetry coming back to them and they say, okay, we know this is the problem you're having, go write to them. So what's the user experience like? I call an 800 number. Yeah. And then what happens? You get a very rapid access then, directly over to your assigned expert then. And they say, hi, Dave, you know. Oh, you again. No. No. Yeah, not you. And they've got their dashboard of my environment. Exactly, exactly. But you know, even if you don't have the proactive care piece, we talked to you guys at the, you know, the Voyager, Gen 8 introduction. We talked about Insight Online, which is the cloud-based support portal, right? So that's access anytime, anywhere, wherever you are and you get that whole dashboard, that personalized dashboard with the support information, the management information for you. And that was really, really important because that's, you know, kind of for anybody can then get access. If you're part of the HPE family then. One of your things here on your declaration is, we believe you want push button simplicity from your technology and support. Can you talk about that? I mean, I love the notion of push button. It means, it implies like something gets done. There's L's out there doing stuff and you push button, people answer. What does that mean to you guys relative to all the range of support you guys offer? Absolutely. And I mean, you guys have been in this industry, well, I'm going to say longer than me. The woman's right to be younger. I've been here a long time. So yeah, you're okay with that. And John's younger than I am. Yeah, okay, yeah, yeah. All right. I think you know that to make things simple is actually really, really, really hard. And that's true anywhere. I mean, again, we'll harken back to the Voyager piece, right? It was all about simplicity. It was all about taking steps out. It was all about giving days back. It was all about automation, right? You saw that took. The energy thing was a big message too. It was fantastic. Exactly saving energy. You saw that took $300 million. It took 900 patents. It takes a lot of effort to get to that piece. So is push button simplicity absolutely there? Do you just push a button and get everything? No. Is that the design center we were after? Absolutely. And in fact, Inside Online is a great example, right? Personalized dashboard right there for you at your fingertips. It's just there for you on the, you know, via the cloud when you want it. And we'll show you later access on a mobile phone. You know, it's that kind of thing. Make it easy for me to know what the heck is going on. One of the things that Scott talked about, Michelle, if you can kind of give it the marketing flair for him, is that that I took notes on that I liked was the automation is great, but there's also a personnel component and all the single point of contact, innovate, agility, serve the CIO as a service broker. All that stuff's great. But the key thing I liked when I asked him, what was the single most thing that you think HP does well? He said operations, operating things, process. And, you know, being actually HP, I know HP is very process centric. He said the challenge is to get in there and help customers evolve to operations. How does that all fit into the credo that you were putting forth? Yeah, no, I think those are all really good points around, you know, where people are and then leveraging our strengths. But, you know, at the end of the day, it is about people. And a lot of what we talk about is connecting with experts. A lot of what you've seen, you know, the videos we're playing are our real experts. So not actors, they're real people. This is what they do. Well, here for some of them, they're going in. They try to hire actors, but they couldn't do it. They couldn't do it. They were like, what is this stuff? But you see, they're, you know. We're not actors, babe. We're not actors, babe. Though we've had a little work done, right? But they're from all over the world. And really, what they do is they're not just connecting with your technology, right? They know your business. So I think that's really the point where we get people, which is, don't just give me a generic set of practices. What about me? What about what I need to do? What about what my goals are? And I think that's part of that operational piece. I think the other thing we're really good at is collaborating. I think that, by far, is really a hallmark of an HP culture. Is that we collaborate. So for me, collaboration in the support world is about with the customer. What are you trying to do? What's going on? Where are you going? Here's what I recommend. But it's also collaboration with the rest of that ecosystem, right? Because. You get channel partners who want to make money. Channel, absolutely. It's all about gross money. And services is big margin. I mean, it's all gross profit. Absolutely. And we'll talk about service one. The other part is the ISV community, right? Talk to me about VMware. That's what my environment is. We have, we do the most VMware training in the world. We have all these VMware certified experts. Talk to me about Microsoft. Talk to me about Red Hat. It's all of that part of it. So that, all those pieces are in there, for sure. How about this, we believe routine problems should fix themselves. What kind of problems? What are you doing here? That's how you caught my eye. Yeah, I mean, I laugh to these guys. I always call that one the while you were sleeping. I just have this view of some guy he's sleeping. And while he was sleeping, his machine sent an alert out to us. We saw it. And then when you get up, and while you were sleeping, the part's on its way. While you were sleeping. You get the alert, not me. I love that partner gets it. Dave and I use that all the time when we say the best business model is the ones that generate income when you're sleeping, like what Google does with their business model. Yeah, exactly. The business is running on machines. Essentially, they can't be down. I actually have some poll results, actually on that routine problem one. We're actually in real time doing a poll. We've got one on Facebook. So like us on Facebook. Is there an address? Is there a URL? Facebook.com slash services? Yeah, yeah, yeah, TS services. And you can also do a hashtag. So it's hp.com slash go slash TS connect. TS connect gets us to our main expert website. What's the hashtag on Twitter right now? Hashtag HP tech, TCH services, SVCS, all one word. So hashtag HP tech services. And someone just gave me the poll results off of Facebook. Off of Facebook, I want to stop solving the problems from scratch every time was the number one answer, which is pretty cool. We're also doing the poll out there with the connect community, which is our users group. HP connect is not run by HP, but it's a user group community. And oh, well here, they're going to patch management, which is part of our manifesto here. I want to stop the nightmare that is patch management number one with the user group, number one. So it's actually not even encountering these problems anymore. I mean, you're taking that away. And the other thing you hear a lot from customers is when I have a problem, I want it solved fast. Absolutely. I mean, that was a big theme of Voyager. Have you seen it start to hit reality? And how does that change the support aspects? Yeah, I think at the end of the day, people want value. And I think there's a whole economic model around support, which really pushed us to revolutionize this piece. Because support in the old days was great. Very high touch, but really, really high price. You can think about, name the proprietary stack of your choice. I mean, the mainframe environment, whatever. Solaris, very good, but really high price. Then the plain people said, you know, I really, I can't afford that. And what happened to them? Where did they end up? Acquired. Well, our back of the queue waiting in the offshore call center to give you serial number for the gablean time. So people said, well, I need value in there. I need something that will give me that speed, that rapid response, because time is money in what I'm doing. So that was really part of what we were getting at. But in order to get that speedy response, there's a lot of back to the simplicity, right? A lot of R&D effort around doing that, right? Because you really need to know what the problem is. And you even saw a member of Wager, we talked about the smart socket guide on the processor, just looking to say, pins got bent. Why? You know, you have obviously a strong product marketing background, and I was going to ask you what's different between product and marketing, product and service marketing, and I still want you to answer that question. But it also, just an observation, it seems like they're coming together in a big way. So talk about that a little bit. Yeah, I really think that with, particularly with Gen 8, and I keep coming back to that, I think because in a way, that was a catalyst for us. It really springboarded things to say, let's really, let's have the intelligence embedded. Let's have it automatically ignite. And what you see there, I call it this convergence, which is a big buzzword, but this convergence of the server and the services coming together there to bring that customer experience. Because at the end of the day, that's why people buy from us. It's what experience do they have? They can't tell if something's a nanosecond faster or whatever, but they know the experience. Am I always up and available? Can I get the results I need quickly? Do my applications run fast? Am I protected? That piece of it. And that's really what we've got here is that convergence of these coming together. And in fact, organizationally, you see, we all report to Dave Donatelli. So that, I think, helps spur things on as well. Yeah, I think that was, we noted that move last year, last June around HP Discover, and I thought that was a good one. But Michelle, I'm reminded of that movie, Robocopy. Remember that movie and the crazy corporate guy? You are. He goes, I am old. It's like, I had to be back to the 80s, and he's saying, 20 years of maintenance, you know? It's going to line our pockets. And so in the near term, don't you make less money when you do all these great things for customers? I totally disagree with that statement. I mean, I think at the end of the day, the customer is who, that's who writes my paycheck. That's who pays us, that's why. They have to see value in what's being provided, or they will opt out. They will opt out. So you really have to constantly push the envelope. We have to revolutionize where we're going. We looked and we said, you know, support done that same old way, it's just not relevant. You know, if you think about support per one box, it's virtualized, where the heck is it? I don't know. How does that make sense? How does my contract make sense? Make sense of it for me, give me value, and I'll stay with you. So you just interrupt. Just interrupt. We got a little Twitter action here. So we have Todd Cadley out there, who's a senior executive in New York City and for communications firm. He says, Furrier, way to start a trend. Service is angle. And then another. See a buddy. No, these aren't plans, actually. And then Matthew Stott says, hey, what's the cube doing in my backyard? Come on down. I say we're starting beach angle next. That's our next. We're close here. So obviously Twitter is a, you know, I love Twitter because it's instant response. But these are the kind of tools that we're talking with your GM about that, about these new environments. Absolutely. You guys have to adapt to that. How do you guys look at this from rolling out? Because you said customer centric collaboration requires, you know, touch points, which you guys have had a great reputation at. But those touch points are changing. Absolutely. So you have to be transparent, but get real time. Yeah, I think you're absolutely right. And you no longer can you do that kind of, we did a price increase that we didn't tell anybody and we just hope you don't notice in your contract. You know, it just doesn't work that way anymore. And I think that we recognize what's, and you asked me the difference between product and service. I'll make you come back to that. Please. Because one of the really cool things I found in services, and this is going to sound a little bit like motherhood now, but I think it's going to sound a little bit like motherhood now. I think it's going to sound a little bit like motherhood now. A little bit like motherhood and apple pie, but it's about people. It's a people business. And having spent most of my adult life working on products and ideally love products, services is so cool because it's people and people mean community. And I think for us, as you see our experts going forward, we realized that right off the bat, we said, wait a minute, that's our differentiation. It's in the people. It's in their expertise. It's in bringing a human touch to technology, even if we have great technology, we'll continue to have great technology, but people relate to another person. So how we harness that community together is super important. We have over 30,000 people like us on Facebook. We've only put a Facebook page up at Christmas time. We were like lightning. I said, because people relate to other people, they relate to who they either talk with, chat with, comes, shows up on their site and whatever, that's where it's at. I think when you, and I talked to a lot of customers, when you probe with customers what the real value is, this product, this brand, there's all kinds of things that you can break down, but really what it comes down to is that, it's when I have a problem, they're there for me. It's the people, it's the relationships, it's the service that I get from this organization, which is why I keep buying. And I would say, if you had to allocate $100 of value, I'd say 50 is that. Absolutely, absolutely. And that's, we are the face of HP to everyone. And that was one of the neatest things for me coming over, I have a big storage and server background, came over and I realized that I didn't have to push my team on customer intimacy. Because I'm so you saying, you need to get out and talk with customers, that's in their DNA. They're like, we are the front line, we know that. And that's who they know from HP. So indeed, as we roll out new technologies, as we come up with new strategies, making sure that all the people in technology services understand that and can articulate that, is super important. So my job, my job is a communications job. Really is. And it's equally as important internally as it is externally. Because those are the guys who interface, right? Those are the guys who talk each every day. And it may not be always face to face, it's going to be hopefully using automated tools, all of that. The crowdsourcing things like some things we're doing. But you talk about communities, that's something that's really close to our heart, this notion of communities. Because in this always on world that you guys are putting your services around, people are talking to each other, just as much as they're talking to their own family and friends. So your customers are talking to other customers, not necessarily through you, so you have this new dynamic of social interactions where you have experts. So how do you look at your plans? How are you marketing your experts? Because that's a unique advantage. It really is. So I'll tell you, one of the things we're doing is something we call an expert chat. So what we do is we say at this time and this date, you can come in live and talk with one of our experts. Now we also have a bunch of people that are there with them that will take real time questions and we'll post all of that. We're actually doing one in a week's time, Friday I think, next week on protection in the cloud. How do I ensure and do IT assurance basically? All ITIL processes, all of that. How do I do that in a cloud environment? And so you can come on in and do that. Of course that's all available, replay, et cetera. But we're doing that real time. To us, we're mostly going out to our install base, right? We're saying, hey, you guys want to know in here, but anybody's welcome, anybody's welcome. Talk with each other, talk with us, engage with us. And then on that site that you just said, www.hp.com.go.ts-connect, you can actually click on any of our experts, you can see what they've written, you can see their patents, and you can send them a note. So Steve Jobs, who recently passed away, obviously lives in Palo Alto, is really the revolutionary in a lot of people's minds, and he's being written up that way. You guys are to have a revolutionary theme here. Hey, we're revolutionary. So this is all about the, and your press release went out, it's changed the world. That's great messaging. So talk about that revolution. What specifically is the revolutionary aspect of this announcement, the science, and getting some of the specifics? Yeah, for sure. If you want to get down to specific, let's talk patch management. That's about as specific as you can get, right? If you talk to a lot of our experts, I'm gonna say that the main culprit of, and let's just say downtime, issues. Main culprit of issues is what? It's firmware revision levels, software updates, it's that kind of thing. Not the sexiest thing on earth. It's not hardware breaking, right? Well, it's usually that. It's that kind of, it's right. You can recover from that. I mean, you know, stuff happens, but it's usually that kind of activity, right? What people want to know is, don't tell me every update that's there. Okay, one good thing, you can tell me the status of my environment and where I am. Tell me what's critical. Tell me what I really need to do. Tell it for me, specifically for my environment. Which are the ones that are critical? And that's part of what we do with this proactive care. We go out and we say, you know, let's sit down twice a year. We'll go through, we'll do the whole. We'll look at everything you've got and we'll make a recommendation to you. These are, these you really, really ought to do. Don't worry about these. So you're saying patch management has traditionally been one-size-fits-all. Well, everybody goes, you're supposed to do all these. And it shouldn't be. Yeah, it's like, is this really critical for me? It takes a lot of time, money, that's value. And you saw, we were just laughing about the poll, but at the user groups, they say never one. Man, it's a nightmare for me. Okay, we got a question from Matthew out there. I said, lop in the question. So his question is, we will put this in for everybody. How does HP help manage community clouds? Question mark. Why are community clouds, AKA vertical clouds useful, slash necessary? Look, I think the, I mean, you guys should probably answer this better than me because I've just been looking at some of the fantastic algorithms and stuff you have running and on the vertical slant on things, et cetera, on stuff. But I think that putting the blinders on to stuff that's happening out there is completely the wrong way. And I think that we've learned that over the years, many, many times, right? I think embracing pieces here. But what do you guys think on this one? Because this is definitely a new milieu. Well, maybe I'll help tease the question off. Matthew can just give me a tweet and explain what is he specifically mean. Here's what I think he means. I think community clouds is about creating essentially multi-tenant-like environments for services. Services being products and services and or collaboration services. So, you know, you go back a few years, you can go back seven years. The whole enterprise 2.0 trend was a big thing. I mean, that was like seven years ago. What do we have now? Jive and Yammer, that's it. I mean, come on, that's the weak in my opinion. But, so I think my opinion is, it's the ability to basically instantly turn on resources and services around predefined or pre-existing user groups. I don't know, I think that's more about, would be a product that you guys would have to offer. Yeah, it would. I think Kevin Smiley would be a great person to ask this question of. He's got an industry. See, I inferred the question differently. So, I take a healthcare company like CERN, who's standing up their own public cloud and providing services to the healthcare industry. And I think you're seeing that in financial services and healthcare and others. Other industries and I think we should re-slope that question again. So, he follows up and says, are enterprise IT departments really on Twitter? Question mark, using Facebook to connect with their service providers? Question mark, new developments, kind of what's happening in the environment? I'll just say, they're definitely on Twitter. Yes they are. No, IT, CIOs may not be tweeting because they're too busy. They're too old. But some guy out there. Ask Oliver Busman. IT person has a port problem. They're gonna be on Twitter. Damn, this port's not working. Absolutely. So, they're essentially, you know, you're saying they're unhappy. So, you can actually get that information. And actually, I just looked, I'm actually on the board of the IT Services Marketing Association and one of the things we look at every year is how people are getting information. Huge break this year. Huge break this year about where people are really going and of course, huge bifurcation in age. So, you can just look at the data. I'll send you guys the data because it's really interesting to look at. And it's clearly now they're going to social media, to websites, to all of that. Used to be peer recommendation, number one was always number one. It's been number one since, you know, God was a baby boy, no longer. They really are, people are looking here. But you can actually cut it by age and you're seeing it's all over. So, this whole idea of I want to go to Cerner because Cerner's an expert in healthcare. I want to get the source services from them because they know what they're saying. And I also want to all follow and have an affinity to that together is the next thing we're gonna see. Okay, we're here with Michelle Weiss of APM Marketing for the Technology Survey, HP Revolutionary. We have the document. We have the scroll. We heard some great questions from Twitter. So, we're actually behind schedule now, all that great conversation. Thanks for the tweets. We're gonna get to his questions about social. I personally believe this is changing the game. I think HP's announcement points to that. And we're gonna go deeper in that with some of their experts and some of our commentary. So, we'll be right back and we're going to our next segment. We'll be right back.