 Hi, this is Stu Miniman with wikibond.org. Here with SiliconANGLE TVs live continuous coverage from HP Discover in Las Vegas. Joining me for this segment, we're going to talk about cloud. I've got Alex Williams from services.acle and Ben Keeps, who's with himself. So, Ben, it's our first time on theCUBE. Thanks for joining us, Ben. No problem, thanks for inviting me. Absolutely, so what we try to do on theCUBE is we find the smartest people we can find and we bring them on. Failing mate, you get Alex and I. Absolutely. Now, Alex is smart. And you say we've never fought before. There's a fist on for you. All right, guys, you know, save it for later. So, you know, we've known each other on Twitter for quite a while. We said, talking about the early days of kind of cloud and social media actually intersected pretty well. So, you know, the cloud-erati discussions where you get, you know, the 75 people that are really kind of driving some of that discussion out there. And today, social media and cloud, you know, are a little bit more real in many ways. So, Ben, you've been telling me you've been watching a lot of the news. You're doing a ton of traveling. Appreciate you coming all the way from New Zealand here to be on theCUBE. So, tell me, what you've been up to lately and what are you seeing in the cloud world? I mean, it's interesting, you know, what you were talking about about the old days when there were only sort of 50 of us on Twitter and we could have a conversation. You know, the thing that always surprised me and I was talking to Alex about it the other day is that, you know, the whole world is talking about cloud. Every company, whether it's cloud or cloud washing is talking about cloud. And yet, there's actually not that many people who kind of really know what it is or who are kind of independently talking about it. And it's always, it always really confuses me that that's the case. I don't know why, I guess everyone's tied up with a vendor thing, I guess. But, you know, I'm really, for me, cloud's all about actually enabling business to do, or organization generally, to do stuff better in a more agile way. And so, I'm really passionate about just education, just making sure that people know what cloud is. And beyond the technical stuff, for me, it's the business stuff that's exciting. Okay, I know, I love the education angle. I want to dig into that a little bit more. But recent news, what have you been seeing? What have you seen it discover? You know, Microsoft Oracle, there's been a ton of new news lately, so can you help? Yeah, so it's been a massive, massive week for cloud news. Probably the biggest news was that Larry Ellison got on Twitter and he sent out one tweet yesterday. And he was the most ungrammatically correct sentence I have read from a chief executive in all my days. He didn't follow the rule, which is like trying out Twitter, not sure about Twitter. I guess that was your sentence. I know, he just seems. What did Larry send? I'll look it up, but it's basically, he says, something about SAP not being in the cloud. Yeah, but he cracked on SAP. So it was cloud related, the tweet. It was, okay. No, that's cool. I mean, it's been an amazing week. I mean, it's been a long time since we've had a week so much news. So I mean, Microsoft has an event today where they're announcing a bunch of stuff and really, you know, it really is a bit of a revolution in that they're not so laser focused on.net. They're really opening up and seeing that other languages and frameworks have a place within the Azure story. Oracle announcing a bunch of stuff, which to be honest, doesn't feel like it actually exists or it's actually anything new, but it's just, they have to be seen to be jumping on the cloud and working. I don't know what you think, Alex. I think you kind of feel similarly. Yeah, definitely. I watched Larry Ellison yesterday. Well, just before we get started, Larry's first tweet was, Oracle's got 100 plus enterprise applications live in the cloud today. SAP's got nothing but success factors until 2020. It's a classic Larry. You just point out the competition really hard. Well, punchy, but it's actually a lie. And I'm not an SAP supporter, you know, but the truth is that SAP has by design, which has customers using it in production. SAP has a suite of higher level cloud applications. So it's, it's- And they've got- You were sapphire a couple of weeks ago, so- And they've got Sameer Patel. And you know, and Sameer is one of us. He's a blogger. He knows social. He's been hired as a senior VP over there. He's reporting directly to the LARS and success factors. The cloud strategy for SAP though is a question mark because they're trying to combine, what LARS just says, we just will build it. You know, it's not a big deal, but there is some, there's some infrastructure issues that they have, different architectures, for instance, that they're trying to, I think they're going to have to try to, they're going to have to work out. But Larry's, I mean, my point about Larry was that, you know, he says we've been building this cloud for seven years. I said, well, have you been building this thing for seven years? I mean, I mean, it looks like it was, you know, something out of, it looks like it was something so, I got a chance to tour the supernap at the beginning of the week. And so, you know, I've seen the cloud, right? You know, cloud security is guys with guns and clouds are real there and they're little racks. And I mean, HP has big footprint there. Nervonix is there, EMC's there, Dell's there, big presence, big data in the cloud is real. So, you know, 40 petabyte, you know, I think, was it the terror data that 40 petabytes? It was just massive, massive databases there. eBay has like a 50,000 plus to do cluster. So, you know, I almost felt like cloud, it made it even more real for me than I've been watching this trend for a long time. Sure. Yeah, you're absolutely right. And I think, you know, we're rapidly getting to a point, I remember CloudConnect, you know, a couple of years ago when one of the big vendors with a three letter name, three letter acronym name was on stage, you know, doing some serious cloud washing. And I think we're rapidly getting to the point where, you know, okay, Larry was cloud washing yesterday, but really it's too late for cloud washing. People are smarter than that. And I'm really looking forward to welcoming the day when vendors just can't get away with it anymore because it just sucks, it really does. I think where we are, in my view, where we are right now is we're, the whole discussion about cloud and cloud infrastructure really is one about like IT and data consolidation. It's not about, it's less about, you know, new opportunities, really opportunities come in with the data. And that seems to me where we are right now, we're kind of in this first phase where we're going to become much more innovative around data and the companies that we know and, you know, and love are doing this all the time, like, you know, FlightCaster, for instance, is a great example of a company that really embraces data. And the platform as a service providers, they understand data and they leverage, and they leverage infrastructures that they can rely on like Amazon Web Services. So, Heroku, for instance, in your engine yard. And so, that to me is where we're going. It's like, we're now at a point where, it's almost like we're seeing this aggregation now start to happen. I mean, HP used the term data lake when they talked about people, about companies aggregating data. And our, you know, our CTO, Dave Lawyer, talks a lot about the power of data. Like, and data by itself has a power of one, data combined, aggregated, shared, and then brought back to you, has a multiple data potential. So that's where the innovation, that's where the real growth will come. Yeah, absolutely. I mean, we see real value creation in some of the, you know, big data, another, you know, kind of hype term, but, you know, the data information, new value streams, new revenue models. Dave Vellante's, you know, set off, and you know, big data actually gives the cloud something to do. Sure. So, you know, Ben, what's your take on the data stuff? Yeah, that's absolutely right, I totally agree. So, I was talking with a guy here at HP who's a vice president of their transportation, traveling transportation division, and we were talking about how airlines, you know, need to, you know, things are hard for airlines, they're not making a lot of money, they need to find more ways to add value and derive some revenue out of customers. How do you do that? You do that by making an experience that's really contextual, really personalised to the customer. Well, how do you do that? You do that by aggregating, accumulating all of this data around customers and deriving some insights from it. And so, autonomy, which is, you know, HP bought for $10 billion or something last year, is doing some unbelievable things with just taking huge, vast quantities of unstructured data and deriving some insights from that and feeding that back into line of business tools. And that's incredible, you know, that's just amazing. And that's only gonna, you know, once the Intender Things comes in and we've got every device in the world is IP enabled when, you know, when my refrigerator and my microwave oven and whatever is IP enabled, the amount of data that's gonna exist and deriving some insight from that data is a massive challenge, but in terms of opportunity, it's just unbelievable. It really is. Yeah, it is unbelievable. It's unbelievable to fathom it, but I also believe that announcements this week, for instance, the implication, for instance, about Microsoft and HP working together and what are the implications of that? I think that's an important step for HP. You know, last year was a disaster with the WebOS and this year, you're starting to show that they are going to have some foundation for their mobile strategy and Windows, Windows 8 makes sense on one level in terms of it provides a synchronization between Windows 8 phone, Windows 8 tablet and even the Windows 8 TV environment. This is similar to what HP was planning to do with WebOS, some of that synchronization between multiple devices. And you know, and the Apple platform is fragmented. I mean, it's getting better. And Google is just as, you know, an Android is splintered all over the place and Android and Chrome don't have any real alignment either. I think Chrome is. So, HP has this opportunity and they really have to have a mobile, they really have to have mobile devices. So HP you're saying? I mean, HP really has to have those mobile devices because that provides them, you know, kind of an angle into the enterprise. It provides them an angle into developing an app ecosystem. It also provides them an angle to then be able to use a lot of the technologies that Microsoft has been developing particularly around GeoData. The only thing is, I mean, I agree with you, the only difficulty I see is that, you know, for HP like the other traditional legacy vendors you know, whether it's IBM or SAP or Microsoft or Oracle, you know, they've got, you know, HP has 270,000 staff and they're used to being paid based on selling hardware. How do you move those people to a model or to a notion or to a paradigm where they're not about selling hardware, where they're about selling services, how do you incent them so that they don't, you know, it's like kids on the branch. So, Ben, you know, I don't totally disagree with you, but I mean, you look at the enterprise services group. I mean, the old EDS guys, they've known how to put together solutions for a long time, you know, hardware is a component of that, but you know, I think, you know, don't you think HP has, you know, pretty solid services? I think, yeah, but there needs to be a huge amount, it does for sure, but there needs to be a huge amount of culture change and you need to incent people to not necessarily sell hardware when they can sell a package solution that does the job. And, you know, that comes down to compensation and it's ensuring that your compensation is targeted and mirrors the strategy of the organization. Yeah, I think you're right. So what do you think of HP's cloud announcements this week and HP's cloud strategy? They've got a lot of different pieces. We said it's a little hard to squint through all the different options. What's your take on HP cloud? You know, the converged cloud story, without, you know, there's dogma on both sides, public cloud, private cloud, but the converged cloud story is a really realistic reaction to the reality for Enterprise, which is that they're going to want some stuff public, they're going to want some stuff private and they want some consistency between the two. So regardless of whether that's going to happen on OpenStack or CloudStack or one of the other, you know, or the Amazon API, regardless which hardware vendor is going to supply that, some sort of convergence between public and private, allowing it to be hybridized, allowing it, you know, what you're talking about with Windows 8, the same system across multiple devices. That's the future, because we're not going to be tied to one device, we're not going to be tied to one location, we're not going to be tied to infrastructure based in one sort of motion. It needs to be across everything. I think one of the question marks, though, is Windows 8 itself, though. And it's such a radical different new UI with Metro that it's going to be difficult. I think that's going to be a difficult transition. So, you know, Ben, when I look at some of the gap between public and private, one of the challenges I see there is, you know, private environments, I've got all my legacy applications in public, you know, I want to do new applications and that transition is not a simple one, you know. So, I mean, you know, I always come back to a discussion I had with Christian Riley, fellow Clouderati and once upon a time the president of the private cloud. And, you know, his perspective is that, you know, he works for Bechtel and for his organization, there's literally thousands of legacy applications that are never going to move. You know, the reality is they work just fine, the costs of re-engineering and re-architecting those to go into cloud, it's never going to happen. So, in a lot of ways, you know, the cloud is for greenfield stuff, it's for particular point solutions. Over time and over the long, we're talking a long time, legacy apps will fall off as they go into disuse and more and more will go to the cloud, but the reality is that there's still mission-critical staff running on mainframes and there will be for the foreseeable future. And there'll be new mainframes, IBM is showing. So, Ben, they're giving me the two-minute warning. I want to talk about education as the last topic here. Before we talk about these changes and customers need to kind of get out of their silos and, you know, adopting cloud and new models and automation, it's the people. And you're heavily involved in the education. So, you know, what is the cloud education seen like these days? Sure. So, I mean, I've been part of creating something called Cloud U, which is a free vendor agnostic cloud education series. And the rationale for that is that you've got all these business people and you've got the traditional IT folks that really don't know what the cloud is, don't know the questions to ask, you know, not from a technical perspective, but just the basics. What is the cloud? What do you need to think about? Tips and tricks, those sorts of things. And, you know, cloud is a brave new frontier and in any brave new frontier, there's always a lack of education. So, I'm passionate about writing that. So, HP has some cloud education programs. I got a new book on cloud from the CTO of cloud here at HP and EMC has a cloud architect certification class that they do. What's your take on some of the vendor solutions? Yeah, so, I mean, yeah, it's great. I think there's absolutely a place for vendor stuff and, you know, both Alex and I both Alex and I were quoted in that book that you were given. Yeah, that's a great thing. There's a need for vendor stuff. There's a need for vendor neutral stuff. Yeah, so what's the hot job of the future if people want to look at the cloud? Yeah, I think there's a lot of hot jobs. I think data scientists are going to be hugely in demand. I think the whole DevOps question, moving from systems administration to really understanding applications and strategies and much more strategically business-focused IT professionals. Jobs that are in the business of data. Yeah, absolutely. So, you know, exciting time for kind of a next generation of jobs in IT and infrastructure. You know, Ben, I hope you get to enjoy the weather here in Vegas a little more. You told me it's snowing back home? Snowing at home. It's not possible. It's true. It must be like some other side of the world that I'm not familiar with. It is. Absolutely, completely. So, can I take that airplane on your shirt is when I want to go to New Zealand? Is that? In the future, you can pull it out, model it, you know, with your hands. First event, commission fly-away. Jump in it and fly away. In New Zealand. That is very cool. So, Ben, appreciate you coming on theCUBE here. It's always great to have the conversations online. Ben keeps on Twitter. The cloud use stuff is that on the rackspace.com site. Yeah, just search for cloud use. Find it there and your own blog. Yeah, it's da-da-da-da-diversity.net.nz. Excellent. Thank you so much for joining us. And Alex, always appreciate your support here on the cloud and everything else. So, this is Stu Miniman with Wikibon. And we'll be back right after this break.