 Okay, we're back live in Los Angeles. This is siliconangle.tv's theCUBE. This is our flagship telecast where we go out to events, conferences, things going on in tech and talk to the smartest people we can find, extract that signal from the noise. And we do this at events, corporate events. We do it at industry conferences. We talk to the experts, we talk to the leaders, and we don't care if they're VCs, entrepreneurs, or the senior executives. We talk to them, extract the signal from the noise, get the trend information, and share that knowledge with you. Sorry, the founder of siliconangle.com. I'm joined by my co-host. I'm Dave Vellante of wikibon.org, and we're here live in Irvine, California with Flynn Malloy, who's a senior director of HP's support services portfolio. Flynn, welcome to theCUBE. Thank you very much, guys. So we've been talking all day about how services has to change because the infrastructure and applications are changing. You guys have announced some new offerings around that. So let's talk about it. How are you guys responding to these changes? Well, starting over a year ago, we sat down and really took a look at what the support processes inside of the customer's environments, how they're changing. So the guy who gets up, or the gal who gets up every day, goes into work, their job is to keep the hospital, or the school, or the manufacturing plant from staying up and from staying online. And the processes that they have to go through, patch management, as we talked about, operations management, incident management, these things have changed in the new environment. When you're looking at discrete systems, and the kind of support processes you need for those, compared to the virtual pools of IT, and all the things that come with that, like they say, there's no smoking gun, right? So finding the problem in the new environment is very difficult. Okay, so convince me, the skeptics in the audience that will say, oh, well, this is just a lot of slideware and HP dressing up its portfolio. Why is it not that? Give us some proof points. All right, let's talk about an example. So we touched on it earlier. So when we think of reactive, so the foundation care is the reactive component of our portfolio that we talk about. When you think about the kinds of reactive services that customers wanted and still want, in a traditional model, in a discrete IT model, what you have are the ninjas on call, right? Which are the six hour call to repair ninjas when something happens, they parachute in, get you back up immediately. In the new world, you don't have on or off black or white IT downtime, right? You have performance slowdowns. And that requires a different level of service and a different kind of offering from the vendor. So you don't need the ninjas, you're looking for something like the red bat phone, right? So in proactive care, when you want to go straight to an expert, you want to pick up the phone and talk to them immediately. And that performance slowdown might be as painful as some downtime was 10 years ago. Yeah, that's exactly right. Okay, so you've re-architected your portfolio to accommodate this. But at the same time, you've got a spectrum, right? Talk about that a little bit. So we start with foundation care and then proactive care and then data center care. Those are really the three service levels. So what are those? Yeah, take us through them. So foundation care starts with a focus on reactive and the kind of reactive that you need in the new world. So as we just said, it's not the same stuff we used to have, it's not the ninjas on call. What you're looking for is think of the problem in the same way that I think of the problem. So hardware support, software support, all the way up to the ISV layer, the virtualization layer. I want problem resolution for the whole thing. I don't want to have to finger point, call this guy, what do I do? I need someone to walk the whole problem through with me. So that's part of our offering in foundation care is you can have these spectrum of support all the way up to the ISV layer, if you need it. That's a new support service called collaborative support inside of foundation care. Okay. So that's foundation care, that's reactive. Next step up is proactive care, which Michelle touched on, which brings into, it builds on foundation care, but then it brings in all of those proactive elements. All the things we've been talking about today. All the things we've been talking about. And different kinds of services designed to reduce the complexity in the environment. So an example, talked about patch management. I got a good story about that. We have a big event called HP Discover every year. It's a big customer event in the summertime and the most attended breakout session in this big customer event. We have breakout sessions on cloud, unified communications, network topology. The most attended breakout session was patch management, just like the vendor headsets. And while you go ask customers about it, right? I mean, they're going to say, I've got 14 patches that I need to upload. I don't even do patch management anymore, right? It's too complex. And so what we do is we offer a set of proactive services specifically designed to take that complexity away. You don't need that complexity in the old world. When we got a tower that's stacked on, you put your patch right on that app, it's right on the tower. In the new world, it all kind of mixes together like a big soup. So what we do is we put our best practices in place. We put proactive scans and patch management tooling in place to specifically say, this is best way to do it. So that's a premium offering, right? And what are the prerequisites? Do I have to have Gen 8? Do I... No, it's not even really specific to the box or the enclosure, right? So what we do, this is another element of the proactive service that it cuts across the environment. When you have a set of patch management or incident management, how are you doing these things? And we do a health check proactive scan, but it's not just on the blade or the pizza box itself, right? It takes a look at your entire enclosure and your entire environment. And so you don't have to have Gen 8. You don't have to have... It's an environment center. You don't have to have HP technology. When we talk about patch management, it has to do with the whole system. Okay, so it's the whole environment, not some box. So Floyd, my question is, the mega trend that obviously is happening, we've been talking about it in the intro. What do you guys see as the revolutionary, key pivot trends that you're taking advantage of that's creating this new sea change or revolution in services? Is it virtualization, mobile, cloud, all the above? Can you be specific? Because honestly, you're talking to customers and you're getting new requirements. You obviously have operational efficiencies with that. What are the key trends that are really driving this change? So I think, and we've touched on them already, I think virtualization, the maturity of virtualization. Even in the last year, if you were to look at the Fortune 5000, how has virtualization as a key part, key pillar of the new environments, how has that accelerated? It has been rapidly accelerating over the last year. So that is a very important part. When you virtualize out across a hyperscale environment, how you manage it, right? The processes that you manage, your incidents, the operations, how you do it, it's just different, right? When you start to look at where the problem set is, what the technology is, virtualization definitely changes support. Of course, convergence, as you bring all of those components together, that's, it's a new way of looking. When you think about your support vendors, just like the IT teams today, they are broken into, or they used to be broken into storage and servers and right, there's all those centers of excellence, right, that you call it. In convergence, just like bringing the software layer together with the hardware layer, it is a new way of looking holistically at the whole thing, right? You got to look at all those components acting together. And, you know, most of the call centers today, most of the customer environments today aren't really taking advantage of that. They're moving in that direction. What about the competition? Obviously, HP competes with a lot of the other big companies out there, but you have new upstarts coming into the, either from a channel partner, or startups, we talked about cloud scaling earlier. So you got these boutiques that are actually growing really fast, differentiating themselves. And you got the competitors like IBM and others pushing their own services. What's unique and different about HP right now? Well, you know, I think on this whole topic in general, you know, I think we've heard a lot and you know, as you guys follow with your services angle, you know, I think that we believe that the support industry as a whole has not really kept pace with the change of technology. You know, I think most of what you see out there, including some of the boutique shops, is still structured around the discrete systems, right? So really tackling the whole thing as a whole is a trend. It's a fast-moving trend, but we don't think that there's that many people really, really jumping in it. And reason why we think that is because, you know, it's, there's not too many companies out there that have all of the pieces in the chain, right? I mean, you have to be able to look at everything all the way up the stack in order to really tackle the problem set. So who out there, you know, other than just a few of the major players and the boutiques really have the expertise in every single piece. Well, we're seeing some joint ventures like with Cisco. We're seeing some joint ventures with Cisco and others VCE and other types of services out there emerging. Not sure if the partnering versus having the actual product will be a fit. Dave and I are watching that. It seems to be working well for those guys with VCE in particular. Well, in HP, I think the trend is your friend there. I mean, we just did some study on this and we see that the whole converged infrastructure play is going to be the dominant approach in the marketplace by 2017, well over half of the sale. So, but I wanted to come back to the offerings just to make sure we had those down, if I may. Please. So we got foundation care, we got proactive care. I think we get those. Then you've got data center care. So what is that? Do these build on each other? They do. They do, they do. Does the air service or? Well, so yeah, foundation care is sort of the base level reactive with all the components reinvented for this new environment. Then proactive care layers on top of that, which brings in all the proactive elements that we talked about, not just the tooling, the direct to experts, the rapid call-in to the advanced solution center. Data center care is kind of a whole new way of thinking about support. It's treating data center, the data center as a unit. Yeah, so it's a unit of support. So as you look at it, it's breaking down all of the different key components of support that you need in that environment. So that would be environment-wide entitlement. That would be enhanced call handling, different levels of reactive services for these kinds of environments. So here's an example. It would be data center care for a hyperscale customer, who probably has a crack IT team, and they don't want the ninjas. They probably want the bat phone. In terms of reactive, they probably want a parts kiosk. So I mean, if they're a hyperscale customer and they've got two or three profiles, right, they buy them by the truckload, they don't know their serial numbers, they don't care their serial numbers. What they want is like a parts kiosk there on site. So keep my parts, keep my fans, keep all that there. So be a pallet. Yeah, exactly right. And so when we recognize that reality, everybody's got four walls agreements, everybody can do that. I think what we've done is really look at the heart of these new environments, hyperscale environments, cloud computing, what do those environments really need from a support partner? And that's where we bring in data center care. Well, we're here live in Los Angeles with HP's big announcement. We would not be able to bring our great editorial analysis and commentary, was it for the support of HP? So I want to say thanks, HP. And Floyd, thanks for acknowledging services angle because Dave and I truly believe in that. So my final question is, and it was why we've been publishing around services angle. And people thought it was kind of like, what are you guys doing? You could be doing a lot of other things. What makes services sexy? Because we were talking before you came on about what that is. So why are services so hot today? What's your perspective on that? Well, so I believe that with the heart of services, in any kind of service, you've got IP, you've got back end, but when you think of services, it's people, it's brains, right? When we've talked about this before, what, HP has a great reputation in the market. You ask a lot of people, what do you love about HP? They say the people. Why do you love the people of HP? It's not the marketing guys or the sales guys, right? They love the delivery guys, the brains. When you think about really what is happening in unstructured data, when you think about what's happening out in the industry, the social media, it's not technology that's driving that. It's people that's driving that. It's a brain power. I'm thinking about some of your broadcasts and about the big brains that you put on there that put content out into the world. That is the cutting edge. It's what's in the brains. Flynn Malloy, great vision, good energy. We really like it. We can come back and maybe spend some more time with us today. We're out of time right now, but let's hear from one of those people. We've got a video from a GS expert. We've been running those all day. So let's hear from the people who are actually making it happen in the field. We'll be right back.