 Okay, we're back live, Las Vegas, California, SiliconANGLE.tv, theCUBE, our flagship teller. We go out to the events and talk to the people, the thought leaders, the CEOs, the entrepreneurs, the executives, the marketing folks, developers, engineers, anyone we can find, extract a signal from the noise, all available on SiliconANGLE.tv or YouTube.com slash SiliconANGLE. That's our channel on YouTube. I'm John Furrier, the founder of SiliconANGLE. This is our day two wrap up. And joining me in this segment of wrap up is Dave Vellante, co-founder of Wikibon.org and Stu Miniman, analyst at Wikibon. Guys, great day. Yeah, I made some good guests. HP Discover, what'd you think, guys? So I think, to me, it's two days here. I was here yesterday. It's the good, the bad, and the ugly. The good is, I think HP's refocusing on the enterprise, which is really where it belongs. And I like that messaging from Meg. I think that's their strong suit. Yes, it's got these other divisions. It's sort of the printing division and all kinds of other cool stuff. But really the enterprise at the core, it's where HP, most of the customers here are really in the enterprise. So that's the good, I like that. The bad to me is HP's in a turnaround situation. Meg Whitman comes in, she's the only eight months into the job, second CEO, and a couple of years. It's not a great situation to the top. And she's even said it's going to take three to five years to turn this thing around. So that's the bad. And then to me, the ugly is there's still a lot of dissonance. You hear about HP's cloud strategy. They're talking one side's talking OpenStack, the other side's talking, you know, invented here. I mean, there's still some inconsistency there. But on balance, it's HP. Yeah, I agree. I mean, I love HP. It's one of the exciting shows to go to because the conversation range is very good. I mean, we can talk about, they have a lot of smart people here. We talk about anything. We had the printer guys in, which is exciting. I think you're right on. I think Meg Whitman is clearly playing the, I don't want to be Gil Emilio, which for those who don't know, who aren't old enough to remember, he was the one who was in charge of Apple and had a, he went out to the press and said, I have a hundred day plan and it killed him because in a hundred days, nothing changed. So, you know, Meg is a little more conservative. I think she's laying down four to five years as a turnover. I think that is too short. I think she's just trying to not get caught into that statement and she's messaging and she's very well scripted. She's only talking to press that are asking very basic questions. She's not feeding the press much. She's not really having any candid conversations around what her plans are. So obviously very well scripted, setting the expectation four to five years. To me, I still think that's too long. But I think, yes, I think she will turn this thing around because that's kind of a good conservative sign for her. I think so too. I think you're right on. So that was cool. And I think the marketing challenge continues at HP and they have so much to talk about and such a short forum in terms of timeframe with this event. And it feels to me like it's like, everyone wants to have their hand in something. So you have a slew of announcements, at least it's not that many than as last year. But there's always, just messaging is just not tied together. And in the cloud in particular, I just see just some incoherent messaging around what they're really trying to say. But if I had to kind of pick kind of a sentiment, Dave, I'd say clearly the converged cloud is coming across louder than anything. And that is that we're doing it, we're with customers, we're servicing it. So that I think is risen up above the noise, but there's still some other noise in there, like the public cloud stuff. I know Bree Singh is doing some great work there, but it's really a developer focused environment with OpenStack and I applaud that efforts. But really just not much there, I can get my arms around. And all the other stuff seems just peripheral and kind of thrown in there. Yeah, John, if I could say, you know, Dave Donatelli, I've been watching him do keynotes for over a decade now. And he's very good at what I call the justify the portfolio presentation. There's a lot of things out there and a lot of different pieces. And as Dave pointed out, there's a lot of change going on in HP. I think we've seen a solidification of the storage message for HP. It's very clear. Three-par and store ones are out there pretty strong. Three-par's doing well in the market. It's now HP's number one selling storage product that they have and store ones, they believe they have some arrows in the quiver to be able to go after data domain. Cloud is early days. Everybody's trying to figure out which solution it has. HP's very disparate, all the different pieces. And I think it's early days, but Oracle's out with their announcement today. Obviously we'll talk about that in a minute, but they have to show leadership. And customers want leadership. And I think you mentioned storage and storage is at the center of all the action that we cover and around cloud. And I think clearly HP is jumping on the big data train they have to. And that's a really important message that we're seeing here. It's great to see that big data messaging come in, but we were talking on one of the breaks, Dave, about the autonomy. And I think autonomy, well, I don't think, I know they have some good technology with all the debacle of the management team and autonomy leaving. It's interesting to me that I'm seeing an excitement amongst the different groups of integrating autonomy. So we were talking, is it because they pay just a big price for it? Or is it legit? I mean, the printer guy's saying we've got autonomy announcements. So it is really going through the organization. What's your angle on that? If I may, if I just close the thought on cloud, if I can, because last November, no, two years ago, November at the analyst meeting, Leo talked about cloud and that they were going to do a public cloud. And then last summer at HP Discover, we heard that they were going to do cloud. And remember we said, what are they doing? We had no clue what they were doing. This year, at least it's clear what they're doing. They have an offering, they're selling stuff. And they have multiple offerings. And they have multiple offerings, right. And it's not just sort of private. It's a real public cloud. So that's goodness. I think it's got a long way to go and it's got a mature. On the issue of autonomy, you're absolutely right, John. I'm sitting there wondering to myself, is this stuff real or is it just marching orders because we paid $11 billion for it? And speaking to Pauline Nist off camera, and I really have a lot of respect for her, she shared with me some of the capabilities of autonomy that I wasn't aware of. So I think there's some value there. I think that it's starting to make sense to me why they got to rope that in. It makes sense to me why they purchased autonomy. I'm not sure I understand why they paid $11 billion for it. But it seems to be a real asset there. There was the breakup clause that was just really so huge. I just think they bit the bullet, but what, you know, and there's two ways that can go. You swallow it in and you kind of absorb it and kind of floats around. But this genuine, genuine excitement. I mean, I think the shining light to me was the printer conversations, believe it or not, because the printer conversations really have to become an enterprise solution. They're going that way. But the autonomy component actually enables them to do that around information governance and adding that as a gateway to the cloud. They can pull that off. That's exciting. But other groups, we've heard the same thing. There's a lot of autonomy integration going on across all the groups. So, again, you're talking about converged infrastructures too. I want to talk about that because it's hard for me not being an expert in that space to really squint through the offerings. HP, I heard a couple of things from HP which intrigued me. They said they were first. Is that true in your mind? So let me walk through this real quick. So if you look from a messaging standpoint, absolutely. HP, very much a leader in the blade server market space and pulling together the compute and the storage, they pulled that together. What's a little bit vexing for me is if you say, okay, what is HP's converged infrastructure offering? They don't have a single B block. They've got cloud system and virtual system and app systems and other ways to get into convergence. So, when we talked to Dave Donatelli yesterday and said, how do I measure how successful you are in converged infrastructure? He said, well, we've got server, network and storage. I said, right, but I don't know what percentage of that. So you're saying they do sell a single SKU? What's it called? They do. It's the cloud system. It's called the cloud system. But you're saying they don't break that out. How successful that is is we have anecdotal data. We've heard it's not being adopted broadly. Although we heard yesterday that there is some uptake. So what we always look at is the converged infrastructure is kind of the tip of the spear. You go in there and you pitch this as the vision of where you need to go. But upgrade cycles, budgets and silos make it very difficult. So customers instead are saying, I might not be able to go full in on this kind of block today, but I can start positioning myself for that. Even when we look at like VCE, it's you position converged infrastructure and then you start building some of the pieces. So you say, okay, but from HP standpoint, I go in with three par now and then I upgrade to Gen 8 when I have a chance. And eventually I've built some of the pieces, but it fits into what our bucket would be the reference architecture more than the single SKU. And I heard somebody said that Vblock doesn't scale. That surprised me. Yeah, so Vblock does scale, you know, so. All right, so fun. Now let's talk about Gen 8. Now Gen 8 I think is a real bright spot in the portfolio. We had Jim Gunthea on, John, I'm sure you were disappointed you couldn't be here. He's always a great interviewer. I love Jim. We asked him about Gen 8, you know, what was known as Project Voyager, what's the uptake venue, lit up. You know, you were on that interview. A lot of uptake there. You know, really solving that IT labor problem that we've been talking about. Really the mundane management task, all those things and all the clicks you got to do to get a system up and running. HP's really attacking that problem. As is IBM, by the way. I mean, I think HP and IBM have a lot to lose if they don't attack that problem. Can you talk about the ARM based stuff at all? Yes, he did. Because we've been hearing a lot about not a lot of availability for benchmarking. He did. Of those units. Let's see uptake on the ARM. So, you know, remember, I mean that's sort of in concept disruptive to his business. And so I think right now, so I think actually, I think his response to me confirmed what we heard about not a lot of uptake on that because he didn't seem at all paranoid about that. He was actually very complimentary. It was innovative. This is what we did. It was almost too good. Yeah. That product almost, the moonshots, that was almost too good. So I think that we're seeing a lot of talk about that. We're seeing adoption at Dell. And so we're seeing the OEMs. Dell has the copper solution. So Dell's obviously coming out with their moonshot version of ARM based servers with copper. So that's disruptive. Either way, the market will be disruptive. The question is, do you disrupt yourself and how long it's going to take? Polynesia is going to take five years. Within five years. So Intel's got a lot to lose there. So she's admitting that. The other thing that we, now I want to have this conversation because I think this is really important. And we didn't get, in my opinion, and I'm not surprised a good answer from HP, but we asked them, how do you essentially balance, going after market share? We're not going to lose on price. I asked that question several times. I asked Donatelli and I asked Jim Gante. How do you balance that with chasing profits? And basically Donatelli said, you got to balance both. First of all, we don't bomb pricing. We don't always just, we don't just take a deal for any price. We balance it. Now, in the marketplace, you see companies like EMC for example, they will get very aggressive on price to maintain that footprint. And then they will sell a boatload of software and services behind that. They'll sell solutions and services and software's like bananas and bunches. And I think they've perfected that model. And I don't know why other companies aren't as good at it, but they're not. Stu used to work there. So maybe you have some insights on this. Yeah, I mean, wrapping a bowl on the kind of the converged infrastructure discussion, services are such a critical piece of it. And we talked to HP a little bit about what, latest with VCE and the IBM's recent announcement and where we see some of the kind of next generation architectures coming. And the two pieces that we need to make these solutions really hum from a customer standpoint, from helping that management and operational challenges that we have today are the services to help customers do this and the software. And I don't think we've had too many deep discussions on theCUBE about HP's got IMC and they've got other tools. They're tying in with vCenter and Microsoft, but it's that software layer that is really going to be the differentiator. Guys, let's talk about here, wrapping updates you. Let's get a little philosophical about, because it's theCUBE, we want to mix up a bit. Let's talk about HP's challenges. Where do they need to really work on things? Because they do have a lot of good things going on. Let's say HP, I'm bullish on HP. I think it's a stock is a long, buy that long. I think they will simply turn it around. But what do they need to work on? I mentioned marketing, I think acquisitions they could have bought Cloudera, but they would agree with that. My number one is software strategy. I mean, I just think HP's software strategy on balance is deficient. I mean, HP is the largest computer company in the world and it's, I think, the number five or number six software company in the world. I mean, to me, that's deplorable. Meg Wickman, your number one priority should be to really increase the software content at HP. Now she said, we're not trying to become a software company. Okay, fine, don't have to become a software company. I don't really care, I think you really need a more coherent, more compelling software strategy. Why? Because it adds so much value. It's how you differentiate, especially when you don't own a hypervisor and I think it drives profitability and margins and it's sticky. It allows you to sell other services and more hardware and it really is the key differentiator. So that to me is number one. Dave Dave- Hold on, hold on. I just want to get Dave's comment. So we've heard this before about HP being viewed as a very tactical vendor. They're a supplier, but being viewed as not so much strategic. So are you saying that software will make them more strategic or more sticky? Can you explain that? Dave- That's a really good point and yes, I am saying that. And I just think- Dave- Think what? Sticky or- Dave- That's sticky and strategic to me or they go hand in glove. So I think that the autonomy acquisition was very clearly an effort to increase the software content, but it was, I think it was somewhat misguided by Leo on the price. That's fine. So they have autonomy. Autonomy is a great asset and it looks like they're leveraging that, but there's so much more in software around middleware and tools and database and applications and infrastructure management. HP software and around infrastructure management pretty good. I think they do a good job there. But I think they do really have to identify some other opportunities. To me, the number one opportunity there is big data. I mean, I think HP really has to get smart about its big data, software portfolio, Vertica, another great asset there. So I really think it has to continue down that track. Yes, I hear Meg saying we don't want to become, we're not trying to become a software company. Fine, but I'd like to see the be more aggressive there. What do you think? Dave, absolutely. I heard some good messages from HP, the things like their cloud maps, things like their application and where configurations. We heard converged infrastructure looking at things like SAP HANA and Hadoop. So HP is making progress in some of these spaces. As we said, the challenge is they've got so many different components and so many pieces, it's tough for people to kind of boil down to what's essential for them. Okay, this is Dave here, that's a wrap up here. We are at HP Discover 2012. HP is unifying their message. The overall vibe here is completely different than last year. I think that HP has more energy this year. I think Dave, I think you made some great points, but I clearly see stark difference between last year. The Leo year was really weird, it was a weird vibe and everyone was kind of walking on eggshells. Not this year, people got a spring in their step. I think they all recognize what they need to do on the marketing side, tighten it up and I think that's going to get taken care of. But overall I give them a really positive grade on this guys and I think there is a spring in the step here at HP. There's good, great conversations. You've seen some coherency around across the board. Still a lot of work to do. So we're going to be back here tomorrow at 10 o'clock for more interviews. 10 a.m. Pacific time will be going live, day three. This is theCUBE from SiliconANGLE.tv. That's a wrap here from HP Discover in Las Vegas, Nevada. For all the interviews, go to SiliconANGLE.com or SiliconANGLE.tv. Or if you want to go look at the archives of two years of our CUBE events, go to youtube.com slash SiliconANGLE. And of course, if you want the open source content on wikibon.org, that's the analyst firm with all the free content, go to wikibon.org and use the search function there. Type in some keywords, some great data in there. First ever market study on big data. Go to wikibon.org slash big data. Tons of content there. Conversion networking. David Fleurer's got some of the most progressive work around IO and Flash and IO architecture and storage and big data. So a lot of great stuff. We'll see you tomorrow.