 and HP Discover in Las Vegas is where all the action is happening, this is theCUBE, SiliconANGLE's flagship program, we go out to the events, I strike the signal from the noise. I'm John Furrier, the founder of SiliconANGLE, I'm joined by my co-host. I'm Dave Vellante at wikibond.org, Scott Weller is here. He's the vice president general manager of HP's technology services support group, and I have a little news for you, Scott. We're in Vegas, lucky seven, this is your seventh time on theCUBE. So I think you've given Pat Gelsinger a run for his money. That's great. Donatelli's showing up too, he's like clockwork too. Now we've got George Kedifa hooked on theCUBE. I had to count it, it's so high. Well, one of our guys just passed me the remote, Matt Mark Hopkins said, hey, guess what? Seven times, so that's great, awesome. We had one of our senior executives, one of your senior executives at theCUBE say to us, I love theCUBE, not only is it fun, and it's good content, but I have to meet all the other executives here. Absolutely. It's like a watering hole. We're all traveling around so much, but you're right, great. So how are you? Doing well, and another exciting week out here in Las Vegas. This just seems to get bigger every year, a lot more energy, so yeah, it's a great venue. So what's being discussed here, honestly, the customers are all here, getting all your customers and your partners in one spot, it's a good spot. Are you guys announcing anything specific? Are you just having, in what kind of conversation you have with your customers? Yeah, so it's, we always make announcements in this forum, and this discover, unlike the others, through the year, is a very technical one. So if you look around, there's lots of technical displays, a lot of technical people from HP are here, and our customers bring their technical folks in to have those deep discussions. So I think what you see from us overall is a response to a reality in the market, which says that just two years ago, customers would say to us, I get clouds, some would say it's just not for me. But now, cost pressures being what they are, governments, banks, literally everybody is either contemplating moving workloads onto a cloud of both private and public, or they're already down that path. And so what you saw from us in technology services was a very holistic response to that with a life cycle set of services, everything from advisory to design, and then the operate as well. So in my group, we announced Converge Cloud Support, which is all about what is the experience that you get, how do you get confidence to move workloads out into the public cloud in an orchestrated fashion and have a known response to that, a known service level. So I see we talked to Sargill, I talked about his objective, we always ask, what's your key metric? He had one of his key metrics is obviously, get all HP customers onto the cloud. That's obviously a key goal for him. And that's a path, it's a journey. I'm not a big fan of the journey where it's a little bit overused right now, but I call it path, because you have to paving a road. And I think a lot of the life cycle discussions are interesting because it's not just a one-trick, pony kind of tool, it's an ongoing series of education, reference architectures, technologists, there's even Tom Choice, he's got a whole division now dedicated to basically packaging Converge infrastructure for the cloud. So he's doing it, your customers are doing it. So what have you learned since our last Q and G that you share the audience around? Some of those dynamics we've seen certainly on OpenStack Morantis has got great traction. Let's just, here's OpenStack in a box for POCs or whatever. So what's changed in your world? So I'd say two things. One is that we've recognized that customers are at every place on that journey or path and we need to meet them where they are. And that's why you see our response and the kind of services that we announce this week. And then on OpenStack, we're all in. I mean, this is a big deal for the industry, it's a big deal for us. It's the basis of our HP Cloud OS. And what we're basically saying is, look, this thing is built on open standards. There's no lock in here. If you build to HP's Cloud OS, you've got workload portability. That is the holy grail, frankly, to make all of this stuff a reality for customers and drive all the benefits. So I got to ask you about the OPEX question. I mean, obviously one of the things that's attractive about cloud is economics. Right. Like, cat-backed was OPEX and that's kind of, everyone knows that trick. It's, you know, leasing and whatnot. So, but now with bringing cloud on premise, private cloud, I've heard some conversations here about making that OPEX and that there's actually services. What have you heard? What's going on in that, Eric? That's what we hear from customers. Dave and I were hearing that from some customers. Is that an option? It is, indeed. So we have a service of four walls, data center focused service called data center care. And one of the options our customers have within that is to essentially procure using an OPEX model, right? And the service itself is called flexible capacity service as part of data center care. And what that does is it's a completely bundled services plus gear, plus an embedded lease arrangement that starts with a threshold and it's really geared to customers who know they're going to grow going forward. And frankly, that's almost every customer. So yeah, there's a lot of excitement around this. And right now we're in talks with some very large companies who basically want to shift entirely to that model so they can better match their cash flows. Scott, you said a couple of years ago so the theme was the discussion was cloud, it's not for me and that really has changed dramatically because I think a couple of years ago it was like, well, somebody down the hall in the business line said, well, it's for me, I'm going to go do it. So presumably you're seeing that shift. Where are we? Is it still really mixed? Are there some guys still resisting? Or is it, do you feel like IT is under such pressure? The CIO actually wants to be that cloud broker. The people in the organization want to get those skills that it's just a momentum. Is it going to be more like distributed computing or is a big fight for a decade? Or is IT going to embrace this? You know, I think that at the basis of all this is management of change, frankly. A lot of customers I talk to are saying, you know, we understand the technology implications. We really know how to do this. We've got vendors who are willing to help us like HP. But, you know, when you talk about traditional IT, you're not just talking about technology. You're talking about the silos, the islands, the hierarchies, the organizational, you know, fiefdoms that kind of grew up around this in some of our customers. And frankly, you know, you've got to shift away from that to this notion that you can go all in on pooled resources that no one group controls. That doesn't mean, you know, one of the questions that I get asked a lot is, you know, what does this mean to the IT profession? And what kind of roles will there be in the future? Questions. You know, and what I say is, look, you know, it's not like, you know, storage specialists go away. But, you know, you're going to have more focus on service management. You're going to have more focus on being a broker and dealing with your ecosystem of partners to enable that. So it's really, it's really a huge management of change and challenge. And I think that that's really the biggest sort of inhibitor right now. It's not the technology, it's not the architectures and that sort of thing. Okay, but so you say storage specialists won't go away, and I agree, it's not going to happen overnight, but if you're advising your kid, you're not going to say, hey, you should become a network admin. You know, you wouldn't, right? You'd talk about, hey, you should get involved in data. Or, you know, might get involved in some kind of service provision or something like that. I mean, that's the kind of skill set that I think people are embracing within IT. I think, you know, a couple of years ago, maybe even four or five years ago, they were holding on. Well, what do you mean? We're going to cut cost or we're going to reduce labor. You know, they don't want to have that conversation. Your salespeople didn't want to have that conversation because they got friction from the buyers. And I think that mindset has changed. People are seeing, hey, there's real opportunities to create value at job satisfaction, make more money. Well, Kedifu is talking about the modern business, the new business, and that's one of growth, right? So people are in growth mode. And I think, you know, we've always talked about something like this is why I love theCUBE is that people really need a path and they need the playbook. And the playbook, it's that simple. I got to go from point A to point B. Point A was the old way. Rack and stack, loading Linux boxes. People don't want to load Linux boxes anymore. They don't want to install boxes that load Linux and a new software patch. They want to satisfy. They want to run it over the network. They want dynamic provisioning. They want dynamic policies. They want to fabric, right? So that's pretty obvious. But then you think about the reality is they're pulling that off and you just kind of get your arms around that. It's just like, okay, where do you start? I mean, what do you dial? What do you call first? Who's your first phone call? Right, well, that's what we're all about now. You know, I completely agree with you but the complexity is all still there. But there's a lot less interest in focusing on that. There's more interest in focusing on, okay, what can I do to drive a lot of agility into the business? Who am I going to call to sort of manage out some of this complexity for me? And, you know, there's still a huge desire for kind of best of breed in the stack. So you've got to be able to deal with that. And at the same time, take the complexity away from the customer. We've talked about that. It's interesting, you know, one of the things that's highlighting for me is discovered, it's been obvious, I mean, Dave has been talking about it a lot more than I have been following it. But this show at HB Discover, security is just, it's just huge. If it was a tag cloud of like concepts that are taking front and center, it wouldn't be big data. It would be security, in terms of relevant, most influential conversations, cloud, then big data. So cloud is obviously on everyone's agenda. So, you know, here you can do security, do the cloud. So it's, okay, move from A to B, while you're going to move there, just fix the security. You've seen that same thing with the, are there's a far along in the conversations? What's your feedback from the field? So, you know, security's always been important, right? It's not like the industry woke up last week and said, wow, we want to care about this. I think what's happened though is when you get serious about hybrid and you get serious about having distributed workloads that might be orchestrated and enabling, you know, through a federated fashion, enabling business processes, what happens is you can bring in new vulnerabilities as a result of having that kind of architecture. So I think that's what's changed, is hybrid means, you got to think about security even differently, you've got to think about networking differently. And again, these are the kinds of services you saw us bring out this week to address those very problems, yeah. My final question is, we got to get our wrap up for the day here, is what's on your to-do list now between now and the end of the show? From a customer standpoint, because you have an opportunity right now to talk to a lot of the big customers. So, what's your objective here at the show in terms of conversation type, conversation agenda? And then just in general, next six months to a year, you're going to be at the Barcelona, all the shows, what's on the plan? So obviously cloud is a huge trend and topic and I guess what I would say to customers out there is that look, we're a known entity when it comes to the kind of support experiences that you get from HP. And what we want to say is that we're here for you in the same way, same phone number to call, if you're actually moving workloads out now, right? We're going to give you a defined experience to let us help you do that. And the other thing is, in the industry and the support of industry, there's a huge, a massive shift away from remediation which is the old style break fix to prevention, proactive services. And then the next leap, thinking forward to answer your future question is about preemption. So we are now able to look at a lot of data centers, a lot of different data centers that different customers have. And without disclosing any proprietary information at all, we're able to sense when there are brewing issues and we're using autonomy software and other kinds of big data analytics to do that. So customers, the whole prevention thing is, I don't want to wait for it to break. Preemption's about, we ought to be able to sense things and come in and prevent the very first issue and that's what we're working on. And that's the dynamic world of preventive, using predictive analytics and taking the manual labor or the manual piece out of it somewhat, but you can't take the manual piece out completely. You still need domain experts, right? We'll always have service engineers eventually something might break. We're not going to go out of that business, but the idea is how we can prevent that and even preempt it. Dave and I always talk about services angle, a section we have, and it doesn't get the fanfare of the Google stories and the Apple stories, but right now we're just seeing so much demand for services, web services, cloud services, actual consulting services. Help me. Yeah, I mean, people are in, I need shovels and picks and I need people, I need to design, I need some blueprints. So the build outs are happening and it's really exciting and it looks like an area that you don't want to pay attention to, but literally channels are being recasted so channel providers are changing what they deliver, how they deliver it, that's going to change the economics. So a lot of cool things happening in the services. Absolutely. Well, Scott, thanks for coming on. We're going to continue to always cover your area. Obviously we're watching that services angle. This is Silicon angle. Go to services angle.com. Soon that's going to fold into Silicon angle.com slash services angle. We cover that and you know what? It's important because you know what? A lot of profit has been made in services. We sell us make a ton of dough on services. And a lot of value created. A lot of value. So value, where there's value, there's money. So we're going to be watching this. So this is the queue. We'll be right back with day two wrap up after this short break.