 Okay, we're back live here at HP Discover 2012. This is SiliconANGLE.tv's theCUBE, our flagship telecast. We go out to the events and extract the signal from the noise. I'm John Furrier, the founder of SiliconANGLE.com. Join with my co-host. I'm Dave Vellante of Wikibon.org, and we're here with CUBE alum, Scott Weller, who's the VP and General Manager of the HP Technology Services Group. Scott, welcome back to theCUBE. Thank you. Good to see you again. HP Discover is a big show. Last time we saw you, we had done theCUBE. We had a nice little intimate event and now it's exploded, you know, 10,000 plus customers here. And of course, we're in Vegas. Where else would you have that many people? So, anyway, welcome back. What's, how are you feeling? What's happening at Discover? Really good. I mean, this is, the energy here is unbelievable. We have, I think we've set a record for an HP event. And of course, it's all in the context of a lot of new services and technology. It's just great. The buzz on this from our customers is just really overwhelming. So you guys announced a couple of months ago, Converge Cloud, you were talking about there, Meg announced it in Boston. So, talk about the HP's cloud strategy and what that means for your services and what new services you guys are bringing to market as a result of all this. So, Converge Cloud really, and I'm sure you've heard this from other guests, is that it's really a blueprint, an IT blueprint for infrastructure that's agile, but also reliable, that's built on choice, and that has really interesting and flexible economics. So that's what we've enabled through all these announcements. Now on the service side, if you think about what all of that choice means, it means that the customers, the good news is they have a lot of capability and flexibility in how they source their IT. We imagine that over time, CIOs become service brokers, but it also means that now they're going to have to deal with the complexities of making those choices and maintaining them governing and so on. And so what we're here to do is try to make that all seamless and a lot simpler for our customers. And we do that through the service that we call Data Center Care. And there were some other services that we announced this week that are related, but that's our core new service. So talk about Data Center Care. What is it all about and how is it different? How is it cloudized? Right, right. So I think it was with you guys a couple of months ago that we sort of previewed it, but we really couldn't tell the whole story because we hadn't announced Converge Cloud. So now that we've done that, it all comes together. So Data Center Care really starts with an enterprise wide service arrangement that's tailored for the data center. And the tailoring includes everything from reactive, proactive, on-site and advisory services that are pulled together depending on the customer's data center environment. We integrate different service blocks and so on to create a very tailored specific service and it covers everything again from traditional IT all the way through Hyberscale and cloud. So when you think about cloud, you think about simplicity, ease of view, swipe the credit card, all those wonderful attributes and it's great from a customer perspective. The backend is complex. Right. Arguably, or maybe it's not arguable, even more complex. So that puts more tension on IT. It changes somewhat the role of IT and it ripples through to services. What are you seeing there and what's changing as a cloud? Yeah, again, the CIOs want to be able to deliver services to the business and they want to be able to do that in a very different way. Inagility is really the key word here because historically, if a business said we want to do a particular thing, it could take weeks, months to provision the IT to enable that and then you had to live with whatever the economic model was. Now, they want it provisioned in minutes. They want to be able to decide it runs here or outside or in some other place. They want that to be almost real time and that's the environment we're in right now with business models changing and people, frankly, inventing new business models every day. So we might have talked to, in fact, you might have been the guest, I said this too, but we see everything as a service. Platform as a service, software as a service, on and on and on and on. How about this notion of service as a service? People are asking you to consume services in an on-demand way and be able to dial up and dial down and is that a reasonable request? Well, that to me is the role description of the CIO to make service as a service. That is their job going forward and we're here to enable that. Someone asked me the other day, so I guess you're going to be a broker. I said, no, actually we're in the business of helping other people be brokers. Yeah, because that's sort of, I touched on that before, but the role of IT changing, becoming more of a cloud broker. You're not the broker, you're enabling the broker. That's right. But it's also changing the way in which they consume hardware, software and services or no. Yeah, it absolutely is. And in fact, the line where the concern line, I would say, where the CIO wants to worry about certain aspects of IT is just changing. So it used to be down at the hardware level, now it's way up into the application level. And really it's about where do those apps live? How do I enable them? How do I do all that very dynamically? And also how do I use the flexible and economics of cloud? And so really it's where do CIOs pay attention? Where do they put their time and effort? It's really changing and we're trying to abstract all the rest of it away for them and make it seamless and simple. What's happening on the support side? Can you talk about that a little bit? Sure, yeah. Well, support has just changed, right? Support used to be break, fix on hardware. Now support means I got to take the call no matter what the issue is. It could be an HP issue. It could be a third party software issue. It could be open source issue. It could be an issue with one of the cloud bursting partners, Amazon or HP's cloud. The customer doesn't have the time to really understand or figure out where the issues are coming from. They want somebody to call, somebody to resolve it for them. And so we're having to get more involved in all these aspects created actually an ecosystem around HP of back to back service arrangements so that we can abstract away all the complexity and make it simple and seamless. So we did a survey recently, Scott, in the Wikibon community. Let me ask, what initiatives are we going to require outside help in 2012? And you can see cloud strategy, cloud deployment and cloud management with three of the top five. And you touch at least two of those three. Are you seeing that in the base, that these are the top things that people are looking for outside services? And are we missing anyone else is bubbling up there? I think that's a reasonable representation. I think we're well past now the point where people aren't sure about the cloud, like is it real? I think we're all convinced it's real. But the problem is, while the customers get it, they're not sure how to do it. They need help to first of all get on the journey and then build once they're ready to build and understand what a future state looks like. And that was really the other service that we announced this week, which was Converge Cloud Planning Services, which includes all of that, everything from what's the cloud promise, what's the implication to governance and applications, architecture and so on, all the way down through Gap Analysis, Future State and Business Case Development. So that's really the beginning of how we work with customers. But frankly, in the context of data center care, that's sort of a running arrangement. And at any point the customer can say to us, okay, we're ready to learn, we're ready to move, ready to migrate. We had Kim Stevenson on from Intel, CIO. She gave a keynote. She came in the queue this morning and we were talking about a lot of things, big data. But around IT in particular, we asked her about cloud, are you eating your own dog food? What bleeding edging? And she said that cloud, for her, meant for CIOs that the speed of business and the slowness of IT is a mismatch. And that's kind of, we all know that. Business is moving fast with real-time analytics, big data, now big theme here. Cloud, you can provision up much faster. So that's going to be a real gateway opportunity for IT to speed up their game. Can you talk about that, because you're dealing with a lot of the IT organizations that are really trying one, get their act together and get faster. But it's hard, it's a hard problem. Talk about that dynamic of speeding up IT. Yeah, so I think that's the best sort of characterization of the state of things right now. If you think about traditional IT, it's not only static, but it's siloed. So if you want to talk about pools of resources that can be provisioned on demand against a business problem, that just really doesn't exist before cloud. And then to realize the full potential of cloud, you've got to start thinking about your applications differently. So you've got whole industries that need to migrate. Now the good news is certain verticals are there. They're moving faster, depending on the vertical. And of course, anything that's new in a business can be provisioned that way. And I see a lot of small companies just saying, why would I do it any other way? So it really is about matching the sort of the impedance match of business and IT and needs to come together. Excellent, so we're here, we're live at HP Discover, we're here with Scott Weller, who's the Vice President General Manager of the HP Technology Services Group. HP's gone through quite a transformation and service is a big part of that transformation. Maybe you could talk a little bit about the business and how it's evolved in the last couple of years. Yeah, so I would say, if I think about my business particularly, we've got a very large base of people and a lot of technology and processes. And what we're finding is that with all of this complexity that we're trying to take on, we're having to train and retrain and actually bring up everybody's game. So from a people, from a human capital standpoint, a lot of investment and getting people able to be that single point of contact. You know, it used to be you could call and say, I've got a problem with my hard drive. Now you call in and say, I've got a problem. I need you to figure out where it is. So it's a different kind of skill set. And then- Call the Tinker Twins. Exactly, exactly. If I could have them on the phone all the time, it'd be awesome. But, and then of course the process is around that, the technology and so on is evolving so we can go a lot faster than we have in the past. And so it's really key to be deep and also fast in the way we respond. And so that's really driving a lot of change in our business. So that's interesting. That's sort of what you're doing with the human capital within HP. What are you seeing in your customer base? We've talked before about IT transforming to become cloud brokers. Maybe cloud architects, maybe not. Maybe they're relying on you for some of that. But there's got to be some notion of architect on many of your customer side. And then this whole thing of big data, the lack of data scientist. Are you seeing the customers focus on that HR element as you have, are they a little bit behind or are they really aggressive and proactive about it? So I would say in the past, there was a lot of pressure to slim down IT departments having to do really on the cost side. Now it's more about focusing on hiring data scientists versus having a lot of IT people. So it's really a different choice point in the way people hire. And that's why again, taking on all this new complexity is not interesting to customers. They want to invest other ways and so far we've been able to show them how they can do that. You know, we've talked a lot in the past 10 years about the core competencies and focusing on your main business. And unfortunately because of all that complexity, organizations have been dragged into having to deal with a lot of stuff that's not their core competency. The cloud seems to be changing that. When you talk to people about how they're transforming IT, they're transforming their infrastructure around cloud. And that looks like finally, we're going to be able to allow organizations to get rid of some of that mundane management stuff. And really truly transform and focus on some of the more interesting things. Is that pie in the sky by me or is that finally there? No, I think you've nailed it. But I think the problem has just changed. The attention goes to a different place. It goes to things like governance. How am I going to govern all of this new stuff versus how do I build it? How do I provision it and so on? So it actually raises up the game. It raises up the questions and focus to more of a CIO's attention where it really belongs. And don't you think a lot of organizations early on when we use the term cloud, remember there was a big backlash within IT and they didn't want to use the term, they wanted to call it IT as a service. And that's clearly changed, no question. But my feeling is that part of that friction was people were afraid that they were going to become obsolete. But in a way that's true. The traditional role of IT is changing. Some people have said, well, it's the final graveyard. Cloud is the final graveyard of traditional IT. That doesn't mean there's not great opportunities in IT. What's your take on all that? So I guess I don't see it that way. I think first of all, for any real business, there's still going to be a lot of build out of traditional IT. It's just going to be operated and provisioned differently with a lot of different skills around it. Support will be different as we've talked about. The kind of concerns that IT professionals will have will change to, I think, to a higher level where it really belongs. And so I think, first of all, if you think about a career path for IT professionals, I think it's clearly there and actually more interesting than before. Closer to the business concerns. I think there's actually a long tail, a long future around traditional and cloud. Scott, when I asked you about the concept we were tossing around earlier about DevOps. So the personnel, the labor problem with IT is always going to be there. And it's part of that. We talked about performance management, dashboards earlier around the software side and all the benchmarking, all the process stuff. The people equation is important. So with development becoming such a focus, the consumerization of IT, app stores, that trend is still kind of out far too far to get to yet for most enterprises. But it does bring up the talent, the developer. The role of the developer in the IT equation where ops is obviously a focus. And how do you see that whole DevOps equation? You know what's interesting is that there was a lot of talk outside of certain industries like gaming and so on that really the role of the developer was being diminished by the way you could mash up different kind of applications and so on. But actually if you look at it now, I mean, if you can find somebody who's an app developer in the context of something like the Apple App Store, high demand, incredible demand for those people. Companies want to adopt that model as a way to push out IP and content into the workforce. So again, it's just very interesting how things are turning and some of these things that we thought would kind of go away frankly are back in force and probably are in the highest demand right now. And so that's going to push the speed. Because the developer market today is iterate, iterate, iterate. And the problem is that developers to be successful have to fail. We write debug and test. Ops guys aren't used to that. So when you have this conversation on the services side, how do they go? Like, how do you approach that? I mean, DevOps is great. We want to get there. But it's not that easy. Well, you know, the way I think about it is agile development couldn't have come along any sooner. I mean, agile as a development technique has been in the workplace now for about 10 years. And frankly, everyone is looking at that as a way to execute in business. I do a small thing that works. I add to it and keep adding to it over time. Every drop has value. Every drop actually works. And so if you think about that in app development, if you think about that in terms of IT development and deployment, that to me seems to be the trend across the board. It's infecting literally everything that we do in IT. Well, on the point you were talking about before, about opportunities for IT. I mean, that is really, truly a transformation that is going to drive significant business value. It's going to address a lot of CIO concerns about cost and efficiency. And it's going to create hyper-productivity across the organization. And we had a lot of narrative on theCUBE about big data and its impact on business. And our feeling is that data is the new currency organizations and those that can figure out how to get value out of and monetize big data are really going to succeed. I mean, much in the same way as ERP had a big impact on companies who adopted it early on and big impact on productivity. So I agree with you about the opportunities for the future. I think it's bright. I always encourage my kids, get into something data oriented and learn technology even if you don't go into the field it's going to help you down the road. Final question for me is in that light, a lot of young people in our audience, what advice would you give them? People interested in the technology business? Yeah, so this industry hasn't been any cooler than it is today. First of all, it'd be my point. And then I've been around a long time. The other thing I'd say is business and IT are closer together than ever before. So if you're interested in IT career, learn about business and vice versa. You almost can't separate them anymore. On that thread, big data is a future that everyone is acknowledging and even HP and their core messaging. It's all about big data, you see with Vertica now autonomy and it's integrating into all the product sets. And it's still so early, but that's such a game-changing opportunity for folks either in people who have a career. How do you see the big data conversations when you talk to customers? Because we know, we pretty much validated that outside the really super early adopters. It's still kind of like what is, how do I deal with big data? What's your view on that? Big data is like diamond mining. Diamond mining, you have to dig up a lot of dirt and the dirt is all this data. And somewhere there's a diamond in there, right? So people who can figure out how to find it, people who can figure out how to drill it and dig it up, this is a huge career path that hasn't existed before. It's certainly not in these terms. So absolutely, the role of the data scientist is going to be a huge one, I think, going forward. Okay, okay, we're here inside theCUBE. Scott Weller, General Manager of the Technology Services. Thanks for coming into theCUBE. Services is hot, services angle. Thanks so much, appreciate it, and a great event in LA. All those videos are on YouTube, by the way, youtube.com slash siliconangle, and also siliconangle.tv. Go look for those videos and enjoy the videos. We'll be right back with our next guest here inside theCUBE right after this short break.