 John, we have our next guest, Jeff Groden, who's the director of marketing for desktops and thin clients for the business desktop group and the personal systems group at Hewlett-Packard. We're just talking about HP. Jeff, I heard that. Good to meet you. Good to meet you. I'm glad I was saying some nice things about HP. And you have desktop in your title too, so I don't know if you heard our previous guest, David Mock. Well, actually, they actually make desktops. That's true. So that's legit. And tablets and phones. Thin clients. That's another good name that we've had around. We're talking about HP. We like HP. We're big fans of HP, but we're also very skeptical around the consolidation messaging coming out of the company. Obviously, we're watching that closely. We know the new CEOs are taking the helm. Some executives recently have left. So we want to see HP get back on track, because we think HP has all the assets in the tool chest to be successful. And obviously, being in the desktop business and the notebook business for years, you guys are no stranger to what's going on in the trends of consumer electronics. And we're going to be at HP Discover. We're looking forward to that event. We got theCUBE there. There's a lot of good guests coming on. So yeah, we follow HP very closely. It's a company that was overtaken. So we won't ask you about the tablet, because I'm sure you'll get so many questions. But the question about tablets that we're going to ask is, you know, you're talking about thin clients. You're talking about an operating system. You're talking about cloud operating systems. You guys obviously bought POM and integrated that into the organization. Virtualization is an interesting technology. And David and I were talking about the nomenclutching server virtualization desktop virtualization. It's kind of confusing. It's what level of virtualization. It's crazy confusing. But the bottom line is virtualization helps create more resources for abstracting way complexities. And, you know, with Apple coming out with the iPad, it's pretty proprietary closed. Android is open. And you guys have WebOS. You know, there's a role for multiple operating systems and a device down the road. So what's your perspective of HP and this whole edge-based, you know, device with virtualization? Yeah, HP is in a unique position and, you know, an advantage position because we have all the devices. So, you know, the trick, though, obviously is how do you bring together the experience, the optimized experience, you know, across all those devices and bring that together over time. So, you know, as it pertains to WebOS, it's not, you know, in my domain. But I think our execs have been pretty clear that the strategy certainly will be to, you know, broaden the appeal and, you know, where we have WebOS applied. Now, what division are you in? Was that PSG? Yes, I'm part of the personal systems group. And I manage the commercial desktop devices, specifically the desktops and the thin clients. Yeah, that's the traditional PCs and so on. So, HP, yesterday we went over the, and this morning we went over the key megatrends in the industry from our editorial perspective and I'll just go down the list and I'll put a check mark next to where HP dominates. And one, the deployment of ubiquitous IP networks, check. You guys play there. Yep. You bet. You have 3Com, you're kicking butt there, doing it for years. Just lost our man, Marius Haas, wishing him well. We know Marius, he's a CUBE alumni as well as Dave Donnelly, who's still there at the moment. It's trend two, expansion of networked consumer electronics. Check. You have consumer electronics, they are networked. You sell networking. You got it? I agree. Move towards unified communications. I wouldn't say check there, but unified communications being voice, not just voice over IP, but what Skype's doing with Microsoft and so on. Probably more of an integrator role, but yep. You play there. We play there, all the devices will do it. Not a check, thumbs up, but not a check plus. Yeah, agree. Advancement of highly scalable, low cost compute. Cloud. We're doing it. We sell blades. We're doing it. Check plus. Convergence of networks, compute and storage. That's the convergence plate. Check. And then I'll see the last trend was about the economic recovery. And you forgot to kick ass imaging. Well, that's not a megatrend, that's just kind of a commodity. But in those megatrends in the cloud, those are cloud related trends, HP has a major position in all of them. So what's the plan and what's the, share with the consumers out there, you know, how HP views that? I mean, you're in a good position. What's happening? What's coming? I can answer the best from, you know, the areas of the business that I'm responsible for and I put my energy in, which is, you know, commercial devices and, you know, by extension some of the consumerization of IT trends that have been talked about this week. So from a commercial devices, you know, obviously our focus is on making the best devices that can connect to whatever you need to connect to, whether you're connected to the cloud, whether you're connected to the web, whether you're connected to server-based computing, you know, you're connected to your private cloud, your public cloud doesn't matter. You know, our objective on the client side is make those devices, you know, have a great experience with whatever you're connecting to and I, but I think the over the horizon, you know, the vision is, is how do you make those different devices also connect to each other in a common way and whether they're connecting to each other through some proximity experience, like you walk up to your PC with a tablet and you can flip the app you're working on or the document you're working on to the other device, you know, or that, you get that experience through going through the cloud. Hey, maybe it's, you know, my HP documents and it sits up in the cloud and whether you're on your tablet, you're on your phone, you're on your PC, you're on your thin client, you can access those documents from all those devices in a very consistent way. You know, so that's the vision. I mean, the vision, you know, from Leo and others is, you know, it's about connectivity and it's about the infrastructure side, which we, we have a lot of investments in and it's about the, you know, the device side as well. Yeah, and you got to support the all the new software and there's the app craze, everyone's talking about that. And, and Dave, we're going to be at HP Discover. We're going to actually be, the cube was coming to HP Discover. Right next to the bathroom. Right. Yeah, we got, we snuck our way in there. Well, we got, we got a corner, but we'll have some good audience there. Trust me, we'll, we're going to, we're going to scour HP Discover, but I mean, HP Discover is not a consumer electronics event. Correct. What I understand, right? This is all about HP's role with innovation and the enterprise, consumerization of IT. So with, with HP, explain to the folks, just tell us a little about some of the tech involved in making a thin client work. I mean, thin client is kind of an older term from the old days as his desktop, but it means a lot different things now. Can you explain? Sure. Maybe talk a little bit about your relationship with Citrix as well. I mean, I know you're, probably the world, you sell more VMware licenses than anybody. I would imagine you sell a lot of Citrix as well. I have, I don't know what the number is, but yeah. It's significant, right? It's fair to say it's a big number. Yeah, so, role of Citrix and, and, and as well, John's question. Okay. Let me, let me start with the thin clients and I'll roll that into kind of what we do with Citrix. So, you know, thin clients kind of got their start from, you know, green screen terminals where, you know, you, you didn't want to have stuff running locally and you were just accessing some application. Yeah. I can tell you the, you know, the trends on thin clients are certainly trending towards much more performance at the end point. And that's, you know, very specifically because instead of just doing a green screen terminal application, now you're trying to replicate entire desktops in the cloud and stream down all of that experience down locally. Which means it's not just, it's not just DOS based screens and, and, and text anymore. It's video, it's webcast, it's streaming, it's, you know, all kinds of multimedia. And so the ability to, to have these still very secure, very manageable, no moving parts devices is, you know, still very, very attractive. But the market for them is just exploding because we're moving from just doing a few applications to doing tens of thousands and there's customers we're working with that have hundreds of thousands of seats that they want to go move to this paradigm. And to do that, you can't just move your 5k guys that are doing a single DOS based application. You need to move 100,000 guys that do PowerPoint, Excel, video, you know, multi, all that sort of stuff. So, you know, the level of performance we're seeing at the end point is, is going up dramatically because of all that. The other side of it is thin clients still need to be managed. So the, this other trend towards zero client computing and we launched some new products today, two, two new zero clients, we call them smart clients. That let you get that whole experience. Is that a joint release with Citrix? Was that individual HP? It was our release, but these, both of these smart clients are heavily optimized for HDX and again, back to your, you know, how we work with Citrix is, you know, all of our clients and particularly these two smart clients are very much optimized and designed, you know, to work, you know, extremely well in a, in a Zen App or in a desktop environment. So the performance at the end point. Although, so the smart client was one, what was the other announcement? There was two smart clients. That was one announcement. We also launched a new mobile thin client, long battery life, aluminum frame, because we're also seeing this, as you can see from all the devices on stage today. Yeah, tons. You know, this drive towards mobility. So it's a web OS? It's, no, it's actually a windows embedded standard. So a Microsoft embedded operating system device. You know, web OS, you know, it's reasonable to expect to see it on this class of device over time, but that's, you know, right now, web OS is still target focused on the tablets and phones. So Jeff, when you talk about performance at the end point, does that imply not so thin clients or thinner clients, but not super thin clients? Yeah, it's a good question. I think you need to separate the hardware from the software. The hardware is getting, is clearly getting richer, although our thin clients are still fanless, no moving parts, no hard drives, so all of the reliability, security value props are still there. But so the hardware, I would say, in some cases is getting thicker, but the software is actually getting thinner. Yeah, but the disks aren't spinning in the hardware, so you probably use it the right way. Remember the old desktop management task force days back in the old PC days when manageability was a big thing? You guys essentially automate that entire process right now. And that's, I mean, that's, we've evolved from, you know. But it's still, you know, PC's, you're managing whatever, dozens of gigabytes, right, of stuff. Yeah. You're maybe managing one gigabyte of stuff. It's all cloud. All SaaS, all cloud. So you're talking about a lot of the innovations that's in software, right? Yeah, but as zero client, you're really managing zero gigabytes of stuff on the end point, because you've pulled the small OS that might run and you really have it resident on a server and then you can take a new zero client out of the box, out of the cardboard, plug it in, turn it on, it'll pull down its software and... Again, John, what does that do for storage? It just must be a mess. You know, the cloud storage provider's been bulking up. Honestly, the OS part, it doesn't have any impact on storage at all, because you have one golden image, OS, which is... No spindles is all solid state, right? I mean... Well, we're talking about the zero client. There's still zero client, you're pushing everything to the server, right? Let's separate the software from the data. Yep. So the OS is one gigabyte, okay? And there's not one for everything client. There's one. So you can have 10,000 zero clients. Running off of that one gig image. When they turn on, it just pulls down its image and then the image runs locally. So it's very, very small on the storage side. Got it, okay. That's real thin, yep. Now, data is a different story. If you don't have a hard drive. Yeah, you need the data. The data's going to be back there, but this doesn't create any kind of storage footprint by moving to the zero model. The zero client model, that's the way it should be. I mean, if you look at your hard disk and what it's Mac or PC, you say it's all hidden files anyway. Think about your phone. There may be whatever phone you carry, there may be five million of them out there, right? And the way the OS gets, you don't know that the OS gets updated. Just someday they'll push down on OS. Google, the Chrome, the CR-48, I got one when Google announced that because we were part of the media tour. They were doing the same thing. They were powering the OS. I think it was Android and Chrome. But they don't have a different OS. They're not doing it like you are. They're taking away way behind you guys. Okay, but Jeff, what about the data model? How do you see that evolving? Well, clearly, look, I think the data model, the data model, it's more powerful when it's in the cloud. There's no question about it. Particularly, in our view, I think similar to Citrix's view is people are going to have multiple devices. Whether that device is a PC and a tablet and a phone or a laptop, a tablet and a phone, you're going to have multiple devices. And the ability to kind of roam, that data roaming kind of capability that Mark talked about at the keynote is exactly where I think the data is going is. If you want to have access to that data from all your devices, the only way you're going to get there in an elegant way, anytime, anywhere way, is if that data's up. That's great. I mean, that's a great message. Everyone wants that. Okay, but so I can get there today with email, right? It kind of works with email. So it's that type of experience, maybe even a little bit better with all apps. And all data. Okay. You know, whether there's going to be companies that insource it and store all that data themselves and there's going to be others that use public. So I guess what I was getting to is that, that workload model changes, right? Because as a laptop user or even as a mobile user, the workloads that I utilize locally are going to be different than what I'm used to on a server-based or even a cloud-based model. And what are you seeing there in terms of architectures to actually promote that type of model, that cloud-based model that you're talking about? Is it working today? Well, I think, you know, I think we're just at the very sort of tip of that, you know, of that model. But again, Mark showed a great slide, which we agree with, which is the, what is it, the snack, the meal and the create. I can't quite remember the terms he used. But I think, you know, I think devices, people will use devices, will use devices in different ways based on the size of the screen, the size of the keyboard. I think the less so on the size of the local processing. You know, I think that's one of the paradigms that will, I think, will change. What's your advice to Citrix, I mean, or mainly Citrix? Because it's a pretty impressive stat. We've talked about thousands of Macs and PCs that Citrus receiver works on, 149 smartphone, 37 tablets, one billion devices supported. We had some commentary coming in from the web and also I asked them about, you know, parody features of support across, you know, Win32 and Linux. And obviously they have the Apple kind of, like, envy going on with the whole app thing. I mean, you got, you got to support a boatload of devices. And they got a developer community. It reminds me of some of the things Nokia went through with their phone browser. It's hard, right? So you guys have been doing this for so many years at HP. Are they taking on too much? Does virtualization make it less complex? How do they successfully execute in that market? Yeah, you know, I think they're on the right track. And I think the keys for emerging, developing markets kind of the way these are are really, get really intimate with your customers. So you're doing stuff that adds value. So, you know, focus your energy on things that your customers will value and pay for and need. And then similarly, get really intimate with the partners that sort of need, you need to help develop that ecosystem. And so if, you know, if we sit down together and say, hey, we could do a hundred things, we only got resources for 10 between partners and customers. What are the 10 that's gonna knock the first 10 off the Pareto that, you know, most impactful to deliver on this vision that I think Citrix has and I think HP has as well. We're here live at Synergy 2011. We're here at Moscone West with Jeff Gruden of HP, Directive Marketing for a desktop, thin client. Jeff, thanks very much for coming on theCUBE. Great, great to see you. Just a reminder for folks out there.