 Live from the Sands Convention Center, Las Vegas, Nevada, extracting the signal from the noise. It's theCUBE, covering HP Discover 2015, brought to you by HP. And now your hosts, John Furrier and Dave Vellante. Okay, welcome back everyone. We are live in Las Vegas for HP Discover 2015. This is Silicon Angles theCUBE, our flagship program. We go out to the events, extract the signal from the noise. I'm John Furrier with my co-host Dave Vellante, our next guest, CUBE alum. It's got Weller, SVP, General Manager of Technology, Support Services, they get that right again. I mean, it's the same group, TES, TC, welcome back. Great to see you. Good to see you guys. It's a tradition every year to have you on and talk about all the, because we've been chronicling the evolution of your group for years. And so it's great to get the update because services are still hot. It's always the same thing. Hybrid cloud, four pillars. I mean, the new messaging at HP is laid out for you. It's all solutions, it's not products. So what's your take on that and how does that integrate into the execution plan? Well, I think that, first of all, this event is interesting for us because there's, for me, a real charge in the air with us separating and it's just very exciting, right? It feels a little bit like a startup environment. And I would say that this articulation of our strategy has a level of clarity that maybe we didn't have in the past. So I think the way we're able to, as a whole company rally behind these transformation areas is a really good thing. And some of the announcements we've made recently, like you say, just play right into that. Yeah, I mean, it's a guiding principle. You got essentially a song sheet everyone can sing to and know what to navigate to. But I found it interesting that it was very solution-driven and that the customers that we've talked to over the years on other cubes is we need to cross this bridge in this modern era. And some people, the IDC calls it platform three, whatever we want to call it, we call essentially cloud, right? Cloud Mobile Social. What are you guys seeing in that area with support services? What's some of the things you're seeing in customers and what's the new stuff you guys have? Give us an update. Yeah. So I think one of the things that gets lost sometimes is that companies don't so much transition from one product to the other or even from one architecture to the other. What they're really doing is moving from one IT experience to another IT experience. And of course sometimes that does involve tech or architectures, but more often than not these days it's about processes, even paradigm shifts. You know, look at the whole dev ops thing. So what we're focused on and we've sort of pivoted a little bit now is not at all to forget about the operation professional and their needs and so on. As you guys know, that's what we're all about and we have been for forever. But we also recognize that there's these two other constituencies, the developers, right? And also the CFOs in these companies are looking for specific things out of the IT experience that we didn't really work toward in the past. And so we're really focused on making sure that all three constituencies get a great IT experience starting with the data center but also moving into hybrid IT. So maybe we can follow up on that. I mean, maybe start going to go around the horn on the four pillars. So we've been talking about whatever you want to call a private cloud, hybrid cloud for a long time that seems to have gone full circle. I remember there was a paper that came out above the clouds. Berkeley wrote a paper that essentially said the public cloud is the cloud. Everything else is non-cloud. And the industry, the enterprise industry, HP and others said, whoa, whoa, wait a minute. No, this is like two trillion dollars a year spent on IT and we're going to transform that. And so the industry put forth a vision of this hybrid cloud. Now it's taken a good five, six years to achieve that but it feels like we're finally there. What's happened to bring us here and what is the state of the customer with regard to hybrid cloud specifically? Well, I think that every tech trend and you guys are really experts in this too is that there's a maturity curve from early adoption to really legitimizing it as business ready, as commercially ready. And so I think all the elements have finally kind of come together. And on top of that, I would say that this DevOps movement in particular, this whole paradigm shift around infrastructure as code has created a way to harmonize experiences across hybrid because the reality is, as we've gone through this journey in the industry, if you wanted to have a hybrid deployment, it meant really a lot more complexity. You had to know the public provider. You had to know the private side of the equation. You had to bring it all together yourself. It was a huge burden to actually realize the value of hybrid. Now there's a lot more services, a lot more products in that space and a lot more expertise that you can rely on to get there. Yeah, I mean, the hybrid cloud brings up this whole notion of new way, kind of the modern era we talked about but what we talked yesterday at the Convert Systems folks, I really love this composable infrastructure vision. It's basically DevOps. So how do you guys bring that to your customer base because what's also interesting about this show is the embrace of the HP customer infrastructure, some say legacy, what not, but they're there. But now you got a DevOps mindset in Convert Systems and then that's what customers want but they need a partner. So that's coming out of the oven right now, it's being baked out. What does that mean for a customer and HP? How do you guys rationalize that? So in my business we're all about supporting the data center which includes legacy products, traditional products, multi-vendor products and these newer products offered to find and now composable, the fluid resource pools exposed through a unified API. This is just cool stuff and not only that. It's awesome. When you think about it in a DevOps context, I mean you can do DevOps on traditional gear, right? There's nothing that prevents that but if what you're trying to achieve and realize is all the values of DevOps, the agility, the instantaneous nature of things, continuous delivery, everything about that, it just gets better and better and when you have a technology underneath all of that that's composable, now you have like the perfect environment, now you're going to get the ultimate in agility, right? And that's what we're trying to drive for our customers is make sure, because ultimately customer, all of this as you guys know has come about because the fact is you can't rely on long cycle punctuated delivery of classic IT. You need that continuous delivery in order to have the agile business that can innovate at the speed of the market and create these market-eating customer experience. And the developers are curious, the software developers are very critical because now the customer, your customer base as well as others are investing more in app developers who want tunable infrastructure. That's infrastructure as code. Yes, well exactly and you know what's interesting is developers have always cared about IT but they've moved a lot closer to the business now and after all they're the ones who translate requirements and they make stuff, right? So they're a lot closer to the business. That means they're having conversations like, I could get this to market faster if we did XYZ and IT, right? And so there is a huge momentum now building up around what developers say and what they want out of IT. They're actually setting the agenda in many cases. So like you said, things like composable, things like infrastructure as code, these are really essential and the industry is responding and we certainly have responded in data center care. So when you think about infrastructure as code, obviously the benefit of reducing the elapsed time to get stuff done but it also eliminates a lot of the heavy lifting. And your teams are in the center of all that. We always talk about the 30, 70, 30, 70% keeping the lights on 30% growing the business or innovation, who knows if that's the right number but nobody seems to argue with it. Some say it's maybe even higher, 80, 20. But so I'm curious as to what you've seen over the last several years in terms of how your teams are spending time, presumably they're doing less time helping your customers do this non-differentiated heavy lifting and more time doing more strategic things. I wonder if you could get specific on that. Have you seen that shift? What are those things that you're now doing up the value chain? Well that's an interesting question for us because in fact as customers make that shift, we've always talked about 70, 30, or 80, 20 and it's been backwards, right? And but it's been really more a discussion that's a financial discussion. How can I stop spending over here so I can spend over there? Now it's different. Now it's about how do I spend my time in areas that develop capacity for innovation? How do I get more ability to experiment? So it's not like cost is not a concern anymore of course it is, but it's different things. You know the CFOs for example have always cared about IT spend on an ROI basis, but now it's really about how do I avoid capital outlays? How do I make sure that we've got the capacity to experiment all these kinds of things? So what happens to us and my business is we end up taking a lot of the burden and complexity away, that's the business we're in. So what we're finding within our business is we're doing more of those things, not less so that the customer doesn't have to do them. You know we talk a lot about bubbles and I think about the last bubble and I think about Y2K and it feels like we're finally, I can't really put my finger up, but my gut is telling me and I wonder if you have any data on this or you have an opinion, is that in the last bubble it coincided with Y2K and people would spend money on Y2K to fix this problem which nobody really knew if it was going to blow up the world and they would sort of justify these other sort of incremental business benefits which may or may not have ever transpired and many of them, most of them probably didn't. Today it seems like we've gone through a decade plus of do more with less, cut, cut, cut, cut, cut. And now there's this flip whether it's big data, cloud, the digital economy, there seems to be this awareness, sensitivity to we have to act, we have to deliver business value. If we're saving money over here we have to actually invest it over here. Are you seeing that flip? And it just feels like it's more sustainable than the Y2K bubble, I wonder if you could comment. Yeah, I think it's, I see exactly what you're saying and I think it's different though because what's happened is there's not any let up in terms of IT has to be efficient. But what's different is that I think IT over the last few years is being recognized as the core differentiator for business. As the value we create is more and more in absent data we're all hyper reliant on agile IT. So now instead of IT being kind of in the back room like turning the crank on things and making reports and running ERP and so on, this is like the lifeblood of business and so this is where I think we're just starting to see the investments being very targeted not like you can spend without care but it's really about investing in the thing that makes your business create value. So on that thread, I'm just looking at the Twitter stream you got some good buzz from the keynote yesterday you did. The title was learn how to make your data center attractive to developers and the CFO. Some highlights I want to get your commentary. Making data center attractive to the CFO. Time to value is enemy number one, so Scott Weller. That's quoted. What do you mean by that? I mean, time to value is the KPI and that's a problem or is it an opportunity? We'll see what that means. I think that's exactly right. There's a lot of ways to sort of figure out what the core issue is but frankly, if the majority of the value you're creating is in apps and data and you've got, most companies aren't sort of starving for good ideas the problem is can I get that into the market before somebody else does? So if you're dealing with an IT engine that's really kind of driven by these long cycles, you're just not going to get into the market quickly enough and the other thing is software is run like designing bridges which is a strong engineering and science mind. Software development is still the art of incremental testing, try, innovate, experiment. QA, tons of QA. And so basically it's a different kind of process and if you don't have the enablement for that, if you think creating value is I come up with an idea and for sure six months later it's in the market, that's just not how it works. So this is where IT is so crucial and that's why we're saying maybe it's provocative to say it's the enemy one, but it's clear that change really, unfortunately change is one of those bad words, right? And what we need to do is get into a mode where change happens so often that it's not feared, that it's just commonplace. So you said another quote you just hit on, more value we create comes out of the apps and data. So tying back down to time to value. So time to value is the objective, right? Lower, fast, fast time to value, that's the goal. The enemy is you mean if you don't do it, that's the enemy. That's what Meg was kind of pointing out about the Uber example on Airbnb and our idea economy, which I thought was a great metaphor to talk about what you could be, carnage or the innovator, right? So I was just, you're riding the wave or you're driftwood. Take your choice. The Uber example is so interesting on so many levels, but it just points to the fact that you can't afford to wait, you can't wonder if this thing is real that's coming at you, it's real, right? We have to be in a position where we can address these changes in the market and it's not just about features, it's about business models, right? And IT again, because so much of the value is coming out of IT enablement, we've got to have IT that's the fastest, that's the most capable to experiment and be able to try and create value. Dave and I were arguing yesterday, well debating. This is where I want to go, about the idea economy. The idea economy. And Scott just said it, he's helping you understand. I don't know. Ideas are the raw material for the digital economy, right? I said it's all about execution. Did you get it? Yeah, okay. But nailing jello against the wall is hard to do. I love the idea economy. Love the, it's kind of gimmicky, but I want to ask you a question, make it tangible for me. I mean, I get the Uber example, that's just a metaphor or so, and you could be the disruptor, but it's in the execution. So give an example in your group where you guys have had taken that idea economy concept with the time to value and explain what it means for the customer. So it's not just some fantasy Kool-Aid injection? Yeah. Well, I mean, this isn't going to be an example that most of the audience will relate to in terms of their developing value, but this pivot that I talked about where we've been in the business of really creating the best possible experience for the operations professional, and here we are nine months later talking about creating the best experience for developers and the CFO. That's just a very different, I mean, you don't expect that kind of thing out of a business like this one. So within the group, we've had to go through a lot of different thought processes. We'd have to implement things. I mean, my business had never taken a call from a developer before. We didn't know how to do that. So that's an example of how we're having to drive and go fast and our IT capability is part of doing that, frankly. We've been talking to a number of executives at HP about the whole developer outreach. And we haven't talked to them this year, but Robert Young-Johns and John and I talked extensively about sort of the need to reach out. And it seems like there's a great awareness of that and there are pockets of outreach. We do the Vertica conference in August. We've talked to other sort of initiatives that are going on. How do you see that coming together? There's so much activity going on inside of HP it's such a large company. Do you see that actually coming together in a way that you can really start to substantively service that community? So our software group has been all over this for many years, right? But I think what's happened is when you see things like the composable infrastructure story, we're now, we're creating the enablement all the way down into the metal for this. So that's just one example of how both the market and also HP's response to it is really coalescing. So it's not like we just woke up and realized DevOps is important, but across the company now, there's all kinds of initiatives in every group like the composable, like what we're doing to create a very different kind of experience with data center care. All of that stuff is coming together at the same time. And inside the company, we've got communities of professionals that are working on this together. We're coordinating to have a unified vision on what does DevOps mean, not just for HP of going into the market, but what does it mean broadly, right? What are the key points? What are the kind of decisions that you make strategically on partnering, ecosystem, tools, technology, all of that stuff. Scott, you tend not to be a big buzzword guy. So I'm going to ask you about software defined, which is a big buzzword. Do customers talk to you in those terms or do they speak to you in different terms? Like you're speaking with DevOps and developer productivity. What's the language, the language with Franca in your customer base in regard to that whole software defined meme? Yeah, software defined can be clear, right? But the problem is that different companies have picked up the term and kind of repurposed it for their own use. And I won't talk about who they are, but you guys know who they are. And so to me, the ultimate embodiment of software defined is what we've done with Composable. That's what software defined is. Fluid resource pools exposed through an API. That's what it is. But other companies want you to believe that it has to do with a decision around what particular layer of technology is important, right? Or how you should orient your IT processes and so on. So that's what's different, but software defined is the future. More and more of the IP in IT is going into software. It's very clear. There's also, I wanted to ask you about the cultural shift that's going on within IT. I mean, things like open source, things about being comfortable, coming up with an idea on Monday and shipping a product 10 days later, the whole cycle time, new skill sets, and specifically as it relates to open source, what are you seeing in your customer base and how is that affecting your team? So I think we're going to see kind of waves here and open source is not new, it's played out for many years. I think right now there's so much great technology that's coming out through open source that big companies are adopting in without maybe a legitimizing influence of a commercial version of that, right? With the full support and the backward compatibility and all these kinds of things. I think over time, companies will have to make a choice about what part of their business they will bet on pure open source versus the commercialized versions of them, but I think it's, this is sort of here to stay. We're not going to lose this momentum. I think it's just going to be a matter of deciding which part of your business is running on kind of unsupported versus supported and the rest of it is I think a way of life for us. And open stack specifically is an interesting example because you're in the business of supporting stuff that's happening today that's installed in the customer base and open stack is the future. Are you starting to see any increased pull through from the traditional customer base in terms of open stack? Well, I mean we support HP's open stack as soon as HP made the decision that they were going to have a commercial distribution. We got behind it and so we're doing that in the market today. That was another big change for us. We've never supported kind of an open source based product but we got through that. So I think again, companies are looking at all these different options and again, it's here to stay. I don't see that changing. Scott was reviewing some of our tweets from last year and we've stored obviously in our CrowdChat platform and you made a comment from when you started this group zero in revenue, billions was kind of I threw that I don't know if you said it or I said it. Either way, I was talking about good growth. It sounds good. It's good growth. I mean, that's a very relevant good success. Yes, great. So I want to ask you the final question as we break the segment is with the new messaging which is really in your wheelhouse. What's next? What do you see the path looking like for your group and the customers that you're serving? So I think we're, it's probably too early to talk about what's next after this because this is such a major shift for us, right? For us too, and you made a comment about culture. You know, when you've spent your entire career history on enabling operations professionals and now you're trying to embrace a broader community and give them a great experience and also do it not just in a data center but across hybrid, that's a major initiative, right? And so you'll see us focusing on that for several years. And then within that, of course, there's all the, our ability to take data, data from these engagements, data from the products themselves and actually use that to create a better experience, to improve uptime, to make IT more and more available, to make it faster and faster. Those are the kinds of refinements that we're still working on. So operations as a service could be a product in the future? For sure, absolutely. Why not? Why not? DevOps as a service, why not? Well, I mean, the operationalizing of cloud, I mean, it's kind of, I mean, it's a shift, it's a natural extension. I mean, connecting the dots. Yeah, exactly. Putting words around like, yes. Well, great, I mean, I think it's going to be great. I mean, I think the challenge is operationalizing cloud. What do you, how do you do that? Yeah. On top of IT. Yeah, yeah. And that's why with data center care, we're really focused on harmonizing the experience because the developer and operations person shouldn't have to care where the IT actually sits and who's running it and so on. It ought to be very seamless. If you're, if you're really focused on time to value, that's what you would do. All right, Scott Weller, SVP, technical support services at HP, doing a great job. Again, more and more services, customers journeys just beginning. That's the cue, we're sharing that data with you. We'll be right back after this short break.