 From London, England, extracting the signal from the noise. It's the CUBE Cover Discover 2015. Brought to you by Hewlett Packard Enterprise. Now your hosts, John Furrier and Dave Vellante. Okay, welcome back everyone. We are here live in London, England for HPE Discover. This is Silicon Angles, the CUBE, our flagship program. We go out to the events and extract the signal from the noise. I'm John Furrier, my co-host Dave Vellante here next to Scott Weller as SVP and General Manager of HPE's Technology Services Support Group. Scott, welcome back. CUBE alum many times every year. Great to have you on. You're usually the first one on every time. But now your schedule's packed. You're on the last day. I made you wait this time. I'm sorry. I have more questions for you now on your last day. It really made me better for us. Welcome back. Thank you. So give us the update from your standpoint. It's just every year more and more stuff's happening that requires services, especially the technology services. This year it's composable. Dave and I were talking on the intro, HPE got it right with Converge Infrastructure. Right out of the gate. And back then, kind of people were scratching their heads, what's Converge Infrastructure? Looking back, it's mainstream now. Now you have the next bet on composable. We like it. I love it a lot. Now customers are probably like, oh my God, another new thing. So how are you guys doing right now with all the changes? Cloud's pretty clear. No public cloud, good. A lot of private clouds. So that's stuff you've been building out. Now composable. What's the update? So like you said, a lot going on. We have in a way reinvented the company, which you don't do very often, right? But I think the companies that can reinvent at the right times are the ones that survive and thrive. And in particular, pivoting our strategy around these four transformation areas is really important. And you'll see the implications of that play out over time, like you're seeing some of it now. But it really changes the way we think about our customers, what their problems are, what we're here to do for them. And you're right, there's a huge service element in that. In fact, you could even say that a lot of that is service led. And so the transformation area work has led to probably 50 distinct solutions that are in every way pan HPE. They involve, it's a pan portfolio, pan go to market, kind of view on things. And so right now, we have competitors that are single plays, storage competitors, server competitors, solution competitors. And so we have to do the new, we have to do this new view on the world as well as continue to be a fierce competitor, right? In these single play environments. So that's, I would say, a new challenge for us. But I mean, it's such an exciting time. And to see this, I'm actually very proud of what we've been able to do. That's really interesting. You certainly, for your memoirs, can put into the book this past couple of years and certainly the past year. I mean, you had the operating as a split entity prior to the official date. Huge ITTRAC crossover, huge services workforce, plus new hiring for the gaps we talked about last time. So congratulations on that. That's really phenomenal. I love to drill down on that. But I want to get to the point you just mentioned because this is interesting. In Vegas, we talked about the services piece because obviously the transformation was laid out then. Same four pillars. Now you're seeing a lot of meat on the bone. Even how the show's organized. It's not by org chart. It's by solutions. We see how to run your government booth over here. That's not a division of HP, it's a solution. So tell us what's evolved. I mean, I love this services let angle. Dave and I were just talking on the intro about IoT. Once you get into the network, the methodology for the customer depends on the customer. How they want to get the data as a function of what the device is. Again, just a random example, but this is the new normal, the services led infrastructure. It is and I can just tell you from the inside that this is not market texture that you guys are seeing. I mean, this is real, deep into the way the company not only operates and develop solutions and goes to market, but again, how do we think about what we're here to do for our customers? How do we want to show up in discussions with our customers? So this is a, I wouldn't say that we're through that. I mean, we have a lot to learn, a lot to do, but this is definitely a reinvention, a rotation for us and the reaction has been incredible. And like you said, we made a conscious decision that we would show up here like that. Like, we're going to start to live what we really believe we need to do as this new company. So Scott, an indication that it's not just market texture, it's real would be how you get measured by customers. And it used to be, okay, the project's on budget, on time, successful, check. And now that's table stakes. How as you move toward these new four pillars solution areas are the ways in which you're measured changing? Right, so what we're seeing and experiencing is a shift from sort of like project, technical project based deliverables. And have you done that? To have you created the business outcome that I intended when I went down this path with Hewlett Packard Enterprise? So, and those outcomes are, you know, contextual. They're unique, fairly unique to the customer situation. And it can be anything from have you moved us to hybrid? Have you shown us how we can be a high velocity IT shop? Have you brought DevOps into our context and shown us how to be successful? So, it's those kinds of things about, you know, are we, you know, ultimately without the specifics, the question is, are we helping our customers succeed through IT? And then the specifics of that context will drive it. But that's really the difference. It's not about project outcomes, it's business outcomes. Well, that's a much more complicated equation for you as well because you can check, tick off the items of the earlier days. This is what we delivered. And, oh, the customer didn't exploit it because of X, Y, Z, but now they're holding you responsible for the business outcome. So that basically talks to deeper business integration. How is that changing the way you go to market, your skill sets? Well, you know, a few years ago, there was a whole question of, do I just sell a product and then kind of the customers on their own to get some value out of it? And actually for all of us as consumers, if we don't use a product, we don't know whether we got any benefit, obviously. And so the companies that make those products would really like us to use them. And so good things happen when you actually help customers realize the value of their investments with us. You take that to the next step and you say, you know, if you care about whether the customer actually got to what they were planning for and tending by working with us, that's a different mindset. And it doesn't have to be contractual necessarily. It starts with a mindset and then you can write it into contracts and there are ways to do that. And we're seeing some of that. But really more, it's a mindset and what are we there to do for them? And yes, you begin to think about, well, you know, maybe this project, this deployment didn't really achieve what they wanted. What are we going to do about that together with the customer? One of the things that we talked about yesterday with some of the channel partners was this reinvention. It's blurring the lines between a VAB and a VAR and a reseller and a distributor. And Kerry Bailey was on from the cloud group and really saying, hey, you know, we're just going to identify the value points and focus on that. But I want to ask you on that thread because now that brings up the conversation we had again in Vegas, which is there's so much work to do on the services side. It's almost ridiculous to think about mind blowing and almost like how many reference architectures it could be, how many variations it could be. So we know you're busy working away on that. But also now the channel partners are there and there's also the channel conflicts. So how do you guys, because there's a lot of work to do, how do you separate what you guys are going to do within HP and go direct to the customers and or provide to the channel partners in the form of reference architectures because now they're taking that ball and going to the front lines as well. So seems to be that's the nice area. You guys are managing that. What's the thoughts there? What's your vision? So my belief is that actually simplicity is the better outcome. You don't want to have a buffet of reference architectures or even products. I think our customers and our partners expect us to do our homework, segment the market, understand what business we're in and have enough but no more in terms of products, use reference architectures and so on. That's part of being a thought leader in this industry. From there, you're right, it comes down to the kind of channel relationships you want, the kind of plays you want to run with the channel and in some cases it means the channel does everything. In some cases it means that the channel does one piece of it and the direct is the other piece of it. And we're so big and we're global so we have all kinds of buyers. And we have direct customers who buy direct from us for some things and actually work with partners for other things. So it's all of the above and we have to harmonize that. We have to rationalize that for sure. But again- But sometimes they might not have the capabilities, right? So it comes down to the balance between roles and delivery, right? And that's the other piece of it is the partners get really upset with us when we're not innovating. If they can do everything that we do then they wonder why in the world they're in our partner program. So there's a creative tension, right? We're always going to be innovating. Sometimes that leads us down paths that overlap. The forward-leaning partners, sometimes it works itself out. So, but that is a constant dance and it's a good thing actually because our partners teach us a lot. And we learn a lot. It's good checks and balances but you're also going to be an enabler, right? I mean, you can leverage a lot of the work you're doing and just pass it on. As you get to more of these converge and integrate it. That's an expectation, yes. And the channel piece is interesting is the channel is going through a massive transformation like everybody else. And let's face it, most of the channel revenue today is moving 10, but that's changing rapidly because that business is kind of going away. It won't happen overnight. So the lines are blurring. But my understanding, Scott, from speaking in the past, is that you're open to the channel white labeling your services. They do that. Talk to many of your channel partners that are happy to do that. And you allow that. It doesn't have, you're not dogmatic about it's got to be the HP brand. Can you talk about that philosophy? Was that true? So I think that's correct in that assertion. Is that right? So generally, that's not the way we kind of view the world. We have a few, what would we call partner branded programs. And those are very, very specific and targeted. Generally speaking, what we want to do is pour a ton of investment into innovation. And we ask our partners where we have clear innovation and clear leadership to sell our brands. We authorize them to do that. We pay them to do that. We encourage them to do that. And we have multipliers on how they can earn with us. The more for more model. But in a few cases, we do have a partner branded program. And sometimes that has to do with geography. Sometimes it has to do with the product and the competitors that are in the market with that product. I see, okay, so it really is selective and you're really trying to have that HP branded service. But the partner can resell that service and make more. The partner can resell and they can deliver against it as well. And again, we make it worth their while through our partner programs. You guys have a great track record too of the channel. HP's got a great history there. That's why I asked. But the innovation thing is what I was getting at. And I still got to ask you, since Vegas, what's the top seller? What product is working the most right now? Well, I mean, I mean, kind of joking, but I want to kind of know where's the traction. What's the most hot? Yeah, what's hot? Well, you know, you were there when we introduced proactive care, for example, three years ago. That's become possibly the fastest selling product in HP's history. And most of it is done through the channel. So here's the case where we're able to offer proactive insight backed by analytics and reporting that most partners don't have either the time, the breadth, the visibility to do. And again, that's where they said, hey, thank you, thank you for innovating Hewlett Packard Enterprise. We would like to take that to our customers. Composable services, what's going on there? It's new, it's right out of the gate. So it's a new announcement, the IOT stuff. Again, we love the IOT messaging. Got a Ruba wireless out there with a great leadership position. So I'll take them in order. So first of all, composable. You know, what every ops and IT shop will know is that it's really hard to provision, right? It's labor intensive, it's error prone, it's disruptive. Sometimes it's not very secure depending on where you get your images and so from. And so with synergy, what we've done is we've said, look, we want to make provisioning happen at runtime. We want the gear to self-assemble. Why can't the gear kind of discover itself and self-assemble? That kind of makes sense, right? But nobody's done this, right? So we're really excited about that capability. And then on top of that, it has native exposure for this infrastructure's code paradigm. Which now you begin to excite the developer community about this being a target, right? Versus the Maras that they sometimes feel that IT is presenting back to them. So it's high velocity IT, it's in the paradigm that they want. And from an ops perspective, a lot easier to live with. I mean, the livability of synergy versus conventional gear is so much better. So we're trying to take the hassle factor out of being an ops person and also encourage a collaboration that eventually DevOps is all about. But not everybody's there yet and it's going to take time. So we've just been discussing, John and I, all week whether synergy is evolutionary or revolutionary from a services perspective. You have a good angle on that. And if it is evolutionary, what does it mean from a services perspective? What's your take? Synergy, composable infrastructure that you've announced, evolutionary or revolutionary? And what are the services implications? I mean, I think that could be a fun debate. I'm not sure. But I think, for me, I think it's going to feel quite revolutionary to customers and that's the reaction we're getting. Of course, we pull the analysts all through the development cycle about what do you think and what do you think this is going to mean? And they're really excited. What's the sentiment? They're weighing in on revolutionary? I think they would say it's revolutionary. And from a service perspective, look. Yeah, what's the implication? From a service perspective, on one level, it's no different than any other product. There are potentially more seams or fewer seams for my business to kind of deal with on behalf of the customer. But it's also going to mean that we have the ability now to kind of fulfill what I've laid out as our vision, which is we need to be about making sure that customers are successful through IT and do that over the long term, independent of market headwinds and independent of technology changes. And so this is, to me, it's an enablement of what we're trying to do generally. And then the rest of our service just wrap around it as they always do. Were you, was your team asked to help dog food with the split? And did you get paid for that? Yeah. Well, we were all on the payroll at that time. Good answer. But yes, in fact, we talk about how, like in a couple of weeks, we had to build 4,000 servers. Well, my team got involved with that. Why wouldn't we? We have the expertise. So, and a lot of my team were involved in the various behind the scenes aspects of it. And, but again, that's something to be proud of because now people look and say, wow, that's almost like a benchmark for what, how things should happen, right? And so, and we've actually made a business out of helping other companies do similar things, whether it's divestiture or merger. It's quite an accomplishment. I think it's worth capturing and documenting as a use case because to do that at depth scale, at that level of that speed is really agile. And it's purest non-dogmatic form. I mean, agile in terms of development, I get that, but to move that kind of scale in that way. You know, I think about it like a man on the moon. In a decade, we will do X, Y, Z. And that's, you know, we, in one year, we are going to be two separate companies and we did it. Awesome. Well, I got to get you take on the overall vibe. Obviously, actually first IOT, I want to get to that point. IOT is really an opportunity. Moonshot's now being kind of disaggregated, opportunities there. So, first of all, there are cycles, right? You know, mainframe, client server on and on. IOT moving compute to the edge is the latest cycle and it's going to last a long time because as much as we'd like to put in the sensors, there's a cost, right? If the sensors are all super smart, now they can't proliferate. So putting compute on the edge is a nice architecture and Moonshot's a perfect vehicle for that. The thing that, for the service business, there's sort of an edge where I'm not going to take it further. In other words, I will, the true edge, in other words, I will provide support for the IOT aggregation, right? The aggregation point, the compute point. But people say, well, why don't you, you know, isn't, you know, a RFID tag just part of the architecture? Well, yes it is. I don't have people who can go into hazardous environments. Like I don't have people who are trained to go into medical facilities to go that last mile, right? So when it comes, yeah. When it comes to supporting services from us, from Hewlett Packard Enterprise, it'll go up to the compute layer or edge and then we'll work with other people and that'll be part of our overall big solution. When you talk about big solutions, like we might, you know, might be doing for an airline or for the health industry in general. So we've been advising people to define that edge. Yeah, and we added one way element to that, which is not only the provisioning of the labor and the training is also power and internet. And certifications and yes, everything. Everything about that. So it's a very, it becomes a collaborative play. Like people say, well, why wouldn't you want to do smart meters? Well, I don't have meter readers in my workforce, for example, and it's all going to be automated anyway. That could be phase two though. I mean, the reality now is that the addressable market now is the edge of the network, your true edge and then IoT, everything. Yes, let's do it. If you try to go outside the bounds of that true edge, as you were pointing out, you start getting into over your skis and you get into all these little fatal flawed tripwires. Well, not only that, but we can't forget that the companies who build the sensors are quite interested in the value chain of all this too. So this is where I think we'll meet in the middle, we'll collaborate and it's actually very exciting. In my past, I was involved heavily in telematics and so I know the drill, but I completely agree with this huge, huge opportunity. Well, interesting that the point about needing in the middle, that actually favors HP with the ecosystem play. Absolutely puts you guys in great with the whole cloud. So, interesting, we're kind of stitching this together in real time, we had a great segment on that great, great visibility. Workplace productivity, I've been trying to figure out what the heck that transmission pillar is all about. It's like, it's blended, right? And as a product guy, I'm trying to get a product out of it, but you got development, you got user experience, it seems fuzzy to me. Can you clarify that for what that means from services? So the very first and maybe the blaringly obvious part of that is mobility, right? And with our Aruba acquisition, we have, I think we have a great position there. And this notion that years ago we talked about work-life balance, sometimes it became kind of a joke, but work-life balance doesn't exist really. It's like I'm working now and two seconds from now I'm going to be on my life because I'm interacting with my kid or whatever on text back to work. And the only way that actually happens is if you can essentially be connected everywhere. And back to IoT, what we're doing is, you've heard about data center care where we wrap our arms around all the gear in a data center, we are doing the same thing. It'll be called campus care or something like that. But how do you provide that kind of integrated single point of contact experience for a campus network, right? So that you can create that experience. So that moves us toward the IoT. So it is fuzzy because that's the way the world is. It's fuzzy. It's blended, that's the way we work. I'm on the sidelines watching my kids look across the game and I answer an email in between halves. So is that bad or good? I guess the product just is. So I got to ask you, I know we're getting close on time but you brought up wireless and you mentioned campus. Huge refresh opportunity in campus networking right now. And wireless is seems to be the top item for all user experience. Yes. Does that on your, clearly on your roadmap right now in terms of delivery? Cause I can imagine the refresh cycles from remotely connecting with wire to wireless now. I mean, nobody's running wires anymore. So, but yes, the refresh, the first placements, stadiums, places where you were lucky if you could have a cell phone signal. People want to show up and they want to watch the replays on their device. And they, you know, it becomes an immersive experience all enabled through technology. I've Scott, I know you got another appointment and really appreciate you taking the time. Great insight on IoT and as usual, great insight across more. Thanks for sharing the insight here and all that big data coming in there on the cube for your and the services. Love the services led. I really believe that we are now in a services led infrastructure because the infrastructure is in different than every company. So there's no boilerplate anymore. It's harder for you, but get those reference architectures to be more of them. Congratulations on the split. Thank you. Scott Weller, Senior Vice President General Manager, Technology Services Group here. Enterprise, HP, Enterprise, HP, we'll be right back with more from the cube after this short break.