 Okay, we're back live here at HP Discover in Frankfurt, Germany. I'm John Furrier with SiliconANGLE. This is theCUBE, our flagship program. We go out to the events, extract a signal from the noise. This is day two here at HP Discover, and yesterday was a great day. A lot of interviews, almost 20 interviews, getting in the trenches, getting deep, extracting the signal from the noise. That's our purpose, that's our mission. I'm John Furrier, the founder of SiliconANGLE.com, and I'm joined by my co-host. I'm Dave Vellante of Wikibon.org. Check out all the research at the site. And we're here with Scott Weller, who's the vice president and general manager of the technology services and support group within HP. Scott, welcome back to theCUBE. Yeah, thanks, Dave. Great to be back. Here at Discover, over the pond this time for us, anyway. So, big show, 9,000 people, comparable in size to the U.S., which is impressive. So you guys are covering nearly 20,000 attendees across the two shows that you do in June and here. So, what do you guys got going on at the event? What are you spending your time doing? What are customers telling you? You know, so, as you mentioned, we were in Las Vegas about six months ago. And since that time, we've seen a lot of traction, a lot more footprint in the cloud market. And we've built up a lot of new capabilities that are being announced here. So, you know, we're all very excited about the things that our customers will see here in Frankfurt. And really, the key theme is cloud and all of the technology enablement for what we call Converged Cloud. Right, so, you guys not making a big press push at this event, but you've made several announcements over the last couple of months. Can you talk about those a little bit? So, let me put, so you're talking about announcements in my business. So, let me put it in the context of the cloud announcements here. So, you know, one of the things that we did announce here were several extensions to cloud system, which is our flagship product for customers to build a private cloud. We talked about new bursting capabilities, new cloud maps, new management and security capabilities. So, that's that product. On the software side, we announced several new products, one of which is a great product for DevOps, where the target is a hybrid environment, traditional, private and public cloud. On the public cloud side, we announced our platform as a service which has been in beta for some time and several point products, if you will, for communication service providers. So, then, with that as a contact in my business, we've announced several things, one of which is a pay-as-you-go model for customers who want to deploy something like cloud system, but want to be able to make that OPEX and CAPEX trade-off. So, and there were several others. So, again, a lot of emphasis on cloud. You know, we've actually hit this part of the adopter curve where customers are just ready to go and they're out there actually buying technology products and solutions to get on that path. So, Dave Donnelly talks about his group, the EG group, an enterprise group, transforming virtually all the businesses that you guys participate in, networking servers, storage and services, specifically. So, talk about that transformation. You mentioned this pay-as-you-go model, that's pretty intriguing. I presume that's an example of how you're trying to transform the way in which you create that customer experience. Can you talk about that a little bit? Yeah. So, my business is in an enterprise group, Dave's organization, and what I would say is that the sort of the approach to bringing technology to our customers is just changing. So, what we've done is we've said, look, it really ought to start with, what is the experience that we're trying to deliver? And then that ought to set the stage for what are the, you know, the product features, the speeds, the feeds, the technical services that go around that. You know, it used to be you'd have a product and then do you want fries with that? That was sort of the model for services. Now it's really an integrated model all about what is the both the buy, sell and ownership experience for that technology? And so, yeah, I mean, I think that's been a major shift for us over the last 12 months is to create that kind of integrated model and the way we develop products and ultimately the experiences customers have with HP technology. Scott, we were hearing yesterday, obviously big data is pretty much native within all the different people we talk to from customers to system integrators and cloud providers, as well as HP. That kind of the big data DNA is now kind of native as we call it. On the converged infrastructure side, on the infrastructure side, a lot of services activity, we talked to some folks are saying, traditional IT spend is kind of hovering but cloud spend is rapidly rising and scaling. So there's a lot of effort around the services. So that's kind of interesting data point we extracted out of yesterday. And then yesterday's news was that EMC and VMware are spinning out cloud foundry, spring source and green plum in the big data analytics, essentially cloud and big data analytics are being spun out of VMware. So you kind of see the coalescing of what seems to be the industry strategy infrastructure and then developer. You mentioned DevOps. So what are you seeing from HP standpoint relative to that context around the services because customer demand seems to be high for services, yet it's still unclear what the path is is a variety of different options of private hybrid, public cloud, Amazon and recently did a deal with NetApp. So all these things are kind of going on. So how do you make sense of it from the services standpoint? Because that seems to be the action that people are planning on what to do and what are you guys doing in that area and how do you talk about that? Because DevOps seems to be developer focused more applications and then the infrastructure obviously is a lot of the software led stuff we've been hearing from Dave down the Tally's team. Yeah, so I agree completely. And in fact, I would add a third which is the whole big data information optimization piece of that. So on the DevOps side, as I mentioned, our software group is all over that and they are, I think they may be the first in the industry that's taken that step to recognize that DevOps isn't about a single target. It's like, how are you going to manage all of these workloads moving everywhere around the ecosystem? So that's one. On the infrastructure side, I would say that this model that maybe Amazon pioneered the platform as a sort of infrastructure as a service model is now ubiquitous and it's the question of it's the standard sort of supplier and partner question who's going to deliver the best experience for you. And it goes beyond just the technology but what is the service level? That's one of the key questions that people are asking is what is the service level? I'm going to get anybody who will bet their business on a technology needs to understand who will I call, what is the downtime going to look like if there is some, what does the remediation look like and so on, is there root cause analysis and so on? Or is it sort of just like, well, we were down. So that's really key. And then on the information side, I think we've gotten again to a point in the technology curve where you can make some strategic choices. There are enough suppliers out there, there are enough different models out there and even business models behind it. So I think we're at a very interesting point in time and really the buyer has all the advantage. Talk about the services option now within HP because obviously HP is huge, obviously. The services side ranges from outsourcing on one end, just like the old way and then now under technology services under Dave Donatelli, it's your blocking and tackling IT services where that's transforming for on-premise, there's a lot of activity and then as you said pay as you go. Where are the customers in their evolution? It's a migration to the cloud or a hybrid or integrated cloud where they can get the on-demand utility type computing that they're looking for, you mentioned pay as you go and where are the customers at in terms of on the scale 10 being fully adopted and zero being not doing anything because there's a lot of education seems to be involved and a lot of hand holding or white glove treatment around. How to really migrate things over and or while business is running, how do we move the value into these services, these new services, which is IT services and also he's talking about applications. Right, so I would say that there's no one characterization for even a single customer, depending on what their department is trying to do and where they are in the technology adoption curve. So a single customer can be all over that and every step along the way. What we're seeing is that there are two fundamental paths to the cloud, one is where a company realizes my developers are being teased and taunted, if you will, to find faster ways than IT can provide them a server or a pool of resources so they're going out to the Amazons and others and they're saying look, that's just not sustainable for us. We have a lot of data that we're worried about and so on. So that's a path to private cloud. Once that happens, other departments begin to realize that pool of resources are available, marketing and so on. And eventually mainstream applications can find their way through an app migration process into that environment and then eventually bursting and then onto the public cloud. So that's one path that we see all the time. The other path is a traditional outsourcing customer who says you know what, I've been outsourcing with you, I've got a few workloads that I'm just ready to take to the cloud now, help me do that migration and I leap directly to the cloud. So we're seeing customers do all of the above, all at the same time, and really again it's about what are their needs, what is their appetite and also their sensitivity to where the data is. We have customers who have data like trading sites, the data's out there, it's publicly available. The question is how quickly can you act on it and it's the output that's the key IP. Other customers, you know, they have design boundaries, they have terabytes of data in their design, they don't have the ability to just move that around. So again, it depends on what am I trying to do, what's the nature of my data set and what are my concerns about privacy and latency? Data is a real big factor because public cloud has been criticized for the lack of support around data because data has a couple of issues around security but also the scale of data, you can put it out there, you really don't want it to go away. So kind of that Amazon model doesn't really work there very well right now. It's kind of kind of colluding and evolving but the enterprise customers, they want enterprise grade cloud at public cloud prices. Kind of that's kind of where they start thinking about, okay, yeah, it's economic advantages. So talk about specifically the SLA involvement because HP has done very, very well. We were talking to David Scott in the storage side around these guarantees, he has these promotions, they're often guarantees. Is HP doing anything similar in that kind of SLA guarantee mode and in terms of around SLA and delivery because enterprise grade is one of those, it's the shark fin or the tip of the iceberg underneath the water, it has more cost involved, so that's one question. And the other question is multi-vendor because now you have multiple clouds, you have OpenStack, you have AWS and a variety of other things of your own cloud. So two questions, one, how do you deal with the enterprise grade SLA requirements and any kind of guarantees? And two, how do you handle this multi-vendor which has been a great area for HP? Right, so I think you've raised a good point and this is why outside the DevOps community a lot of the public cloud offers to date have really not been viable for real business. And so HP's cloud and especially the managed cloud offer does bring a lot of those SLAs but it begins with enterprise grade infrastructure and understanding how enterprises actually build out infrastructure which is not necessarily what is built out there from a public cloud standpoint or leveraging some of the retail anchor tenants in the way they've built infrastructure. So it starts with that and then the SLAs on top of it absolutely. In my business, our business is all about service levels and so it's understanding that you want to prevent issues to begin with, you want to preempt issues through analytics and so on. And then it comes down to understanding what is my response going to be when there is an issue and baking that into a service level agreement and that's just a run rate business for us. There's a lot of talk these days about putting mission critical applications in the cloud. Are you seeing more of that and how does that change the way in which you're supporting customers? You know, I'm not seeing that, Dave, in the traditional sense. Applications that have been built from the beginning to be self resilient, some of the search tools, Hadoop and other things that have been built that way can be made mission critical but when you take a very traditional workload and try to move it onto the cloud that is really a difficult proposition because in the end mission critical comes down to understanding unplanned downtime and understanding your response to it and most of the cloud providers just don't have an answer for that. That doesn't necessarily fit their business model and it's quite a stretch to get there. Yeah, I think it's a lot of futures marketing, right? You're seeing some of the emerging cloud providers talk about that and maybe some of the flash guys talking about how you could, in theory, you could do that Oracle of course is doing a big push for its cloud but that's a lot of software as a service. So my second question on that, Scott, is are you seeing any indication that so-called hybrid cloud and what I mean by hybrid cloud is certainly people have public and private, we know that, but if you narrowly define hybrid cloud as a federated application, are you seeing any indication that customers want to do that? So absolutely. So we may be defining hybrid cloud a little bit differently than. So what we're saying is that, look, first of all, you want the opportunity and option to deploy your workloads where they best fit the environment, they best fit the service level, the cost, and so on. And then you want the ability to move those workloads almost at will. And I think in the future what we're going to see is there going to be brokering systems that almost like energy trading that says, you know, today I'm getting a better deal over here, I'm getting a better service level over there, you know, and I'm going to move my workloads there preferentially and sort of in an automated way. So it's that ability to decide where and when and how without having to worry a lot about, okay, you know, what is the operating system, what is the operating environment, and so on, and actually sort of bring the question up a level to, you know, these sort of business questions and everything else is sort of abstracted away in that model. So what do you make of, we've been tracking Amazon pretty closely, they had the big re-invent conference last week, I don't know, I joke about it a lot, especially me, I talk about Amazon's SLAs being, hey, we'll do our best, we don't send us an email, we'll get back to you within 24 hours or something like that, but nonetheless, Amazon's being very aggressive now in the data center, we saw them at sort of the big events. What do you tell customers? What are customers telling you? Are they willing to put their data and their apps in Amazon? Is it more just the development crowd still? What are you, what are your mainstream customers telling you? So what we're hearing is that customers want that, they really have a desire and appetite to move workloads into that kind of environment. What they're unsure of is, what is a company like Amazon, and they're not the only one, but what are these companies telling them in terms of what is the experience I'm going to get? You know, what happens when there is an issue? You know, it's, there's nothing wrong with best effort. You know, best effort is a fine model, but you know, best effort doesn't work for almost every mainstream business. So those are the key questions, and I think any provider out there needs to be able to answer those questions that they're really going to be able to draw in the hardcore business community, which is huge. So, you know, I don't blame anyone for wanting to get into that market, but you know, it's not easy. It looks easy, it looks like it's just like an increment from where they are, but no, it's a huge lift. It's got my final questions, we're getting on the time limit here, but you guys have hundreds of customers with cloud system and with the cloud services, and you guys are working with customers to migrate services and build services and they consume the services. What have you guys learned around cloud? Because you know, yesterday was, the consensus was, and we've been talking about this before, is that no one customer is the same. It's like, you can boilerplate spec a customer. Their needs are different, they may have different applications, but at the end of the day, enterprise-grade infrastructure is pretty consistent. You know what it is, when you see it and it works, it has to be up, all that good stuff, industry standard servers and whatnot and so on. So what are you finding with those hundreds of customers as you guys expand out the build and the consume side of the business? Is it, are they rolling their own? Do they want to manage services in a mix of both? What are you seeing from what you've learned and what are you guys seeing happen in the next few months, a year? Yeah, so I'll share the cloud system experience, which again is our product for deploying private clouds. What sometimes happens as a customer says, and this tends to be the very large customer who have actually moved along the virtualization curve early, they'll say, you know, that's a great product. What I want to do is I want to disintegrate that product into its elements and I kind of want to roll my own. And these are the kinds of IT shops that have a lot of capability and they have a lot of design capability and also execution. But you know, so those are really the two different sets and what we're not seeing a lot of is customers saying, you know, I'm not ready for the cloud, I think we're well past that now. And so what I expect in the next year and two is that customers will start to just assume that they can do private cloud. Although it's actually, it's not an easy thing to do if you've been traditional all along, if you haven't explored virtualization and so on. But we do make it easier with these products. And but I think over time, customers are going to begin to sort of segment into, I'm not going to necessarily roll my own, I'll take a reference architecture, take a set of technology, but I'll deploy that in the way that makes sense for me. What about security in that equation? Where are we with security? You know, security is something that is always a moving target, no matter what you do. So, but as I mentioned earlier, cloud system, we've just added a lot of security capabilities. We'll continue to do that. So whether it's in our standalone software and our point solutions, you'll see that as a major, major focus for us. Any goals that you have in the services group this year you want to share with the folks out there in terms of what you guys are trying to do and for next year? Sure. So we don't talk about futures, but I'll tell you there are two areas that I'm really focused on now. One is deep analytics for preemptive work so that, you know, it's not even prevention, it's beyond prevention to preemption. So that's one area. And then the other areas as we've been talking about is service levels in the context of a bursting situation. That's something that the market hasn't really addressed and you'll see us focus in that area. Okay, Scott Weller, Vice President and General Manager of the Technology Services within the Converged Infrastructure Group and Cloud and all the great stuff with the Enterprise Grade Cloud. Thanks for coming on theCUBE. We'll be right back with our next guest after this short break.