 Live from the Sands Convention Center, Las Vegas, Nevada, extracting the signal from the noise. It's theCUBE, covering HP Discover 2015. Brought to you by HP. And now your hosts, John Furrier and Dave Vellante. Welcome back everyone, live in Las Vegas for HP Discover, our three days of wall-to-wall coverage. theCUBE, 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. Our next guest is Casey Choi, global solutions architect and engineering, global sales with all the customers here to share with us the data from the field. Welcome to theCUBE. Hey, great. Hey, thanks Dave, John, appreciate it. You know, we love doing the CUBE interviews. One of the most fun segments are talking to customers and our people close to the action. You're close to the customers. You're close to all the action. In this transformation, customers have been road mapping out and looking at the past five years. They saw cloud, they see what Amazon's doing. They see the cloud stuff. They obviously see mobile every day. And so up and down the stack is huge change. So I want to focus in on where the levers are. Where do you see with customers? The main innovation levers or technology enablers? Is it cloud? Is it big data? All of the above, what's your view there? And what are you hearing from your customers? Yeah, so it's a great question. And I think the first place I'd start on that, right, is I think we have to realize that, you know, for the first time probably in recorded history, right? We have a confluence of these things happening, right? I think, especially in IT, we're kind of used to seeing kind of linearity around things that hit us. You know, it might be web or it might be social or it might be these sorts of things. But for the first time, we kind of have a perfect storm sort of a situation occurring, right? With what's happening with mobility, what's happening with data. And it's happening fast. It's happening fast. It's non-linear and it's all correlated, right? So first and foremost, I think it's a very challenging environment for IT organizations, especially those that are more traditional in nature. So I'll absolutely reinforce that. And I think, you know, if you talk about technology levers and what's there, I think there's a couple of things. I mean, that we certainly see as a characteristic of those that are capitalizing on this first. I think first and foremost, it's those organizations that realize that all of these things are happening versus I'm going to attack these things serially. Case in point, for example, if you look at what's happening around security, security in and of itself is becoming a big data analytic problem, right? You can't no longer handle security with a bunch of folks looking for screens, looking for action, looking for activities like that. So I think key levers for us right now are really in what I would call what's happening on the application side and certainly big changes around the velocity and the quantity of applications with the quality still being a key component of that. And then the second aspect is really the ability to analyze and make meaning a large volume of information that is being ingested into the organization. So the lever points are really there, whatever technology you use. And then compute's not going down. I mean, it's more and more compute coming on the scene, more storage needed, faster storage. So like there's an engine of our infrastructure. And then the apps are under a lot of pressure to go faster and be more robust. Well, I think what's happening on apps and I think everything centers back on the application, right? And whether you talk about agile or DevOps or whatever terminology you want to use, the fact of the matter is the velocity of the applications driven by demand and that demand could be mobility. It could be in the area of social, whatever you want to look at. The line of business driven, the business has gotten very used to a application cycle that is much more frequent, which has a much higher velocity than what we've been used to. And that pressure is felt throughout the entire ecosystem whether you're talking infrastructure data. So I got to ask you though, business is used to it? Are they getting comfortable with that? Or are they getting sort of forced in that direction? Because most customers I would say that we talk to aren't there yet. I think it's a forcing function and I think there are certainly leaders in that. What we're also seeing is more traditional industries and traditional companies adopting. And I'm seeing this kind of, really the tip of the iceberg on this, really adopting architectures and methodologies that you wouldn't normally find in a traditional, let's say an insurance company or a financial services organization or a retailer who might be a little bit more conservative. They're not going to be a web scale property, but now what we're starting to see is they're adopting the things that have been taught to them by organizations that are digital native, right? Or have really known, none of the vestiges of the old style of IT. So that combination, that traditional middle point is really where I think the key battlegrounds are, right? Is how do you take more traditional transactional systems of record businesses and combine them effectively with what we're starting to see on systems of engagement. So the born in the cloud digital native guys have, they don't have the legacy, right? And they don't have the profits either, but they're not measured by the same KPIs. So, but then you got the large insurance companies, you mentioned financial services manufacturers, 90% of their application portfolio is that legacy. So how do you help them sort of transition from point A where they are today to where they want to be? Yeah, I think you look for good bridge points, right? Into the organization, taking into account things like the tolerance of the organization for the speed and then skill sets, right? That's kind of the other kind of underrated part of this is, it's one thing to have the technology. It's a wholly different thing to have the experience and really the capacity to do this from a skill set perspective. But I think what you look for is, where are those opportunities to really leverage competencies you've already have? So case in point, a lot of organizations have built up deep competencies in what I would call mode one stuff. So let's take SQL for example, right? There's a lot of good bridging capability that you can use to take that SQL native language and use it for non-SQL or these upcoming Hadoop based environments or Cassandra or SQL type environments, right? It's the killer app for Hadoop. So you look for that, right? So we've got some of that within our product sets like in Vertica and we pay a lot of attention to those connectors or those bridges. So what I really look for and try to advise on is really to try to find those points where you can take native tongues, right? And learn a second language quickly around that. So you don't want to go from English to Chinese, but English to Italian might be a little easier, right? So you look for those sorts of, what I would call phonetic bridges and kind of build upon that. So Casey, I got to ask you about business, new style of business. People are all connected with mobile phones. That cat's out of the bag, it's jeans out of the bottle. Undeal, no matter what people say. There's new dynamics, that puts new pressure. So we hear about things like API economy, notification, more and more data is coming in from a threat standpoint. So the consumer experience has changed significantly. And there's been startups come out of the woodwork, new ideas get exploited and driven, grown fast in the cloud. That speaks to this whole new era. Now, if you look at what's powering all that, infrastructure, it's the software, it's the DevOps, it's the orchestration, it's all that operating system like software that makes it all happen. Horizontally and vertically scalable. So I got to ask you, quiz my question. With all this replatforming discussion that you hear in Silicon Valley, we're replatforming the enterprise, we're going to flatten that out. It's kind of a buzzword, but it means something. It means that we're changing the platform bedrock to enable more agile real-time new stuff. So I got to ask you, from an enterprise standpoint, what does that replatforming mean? Because that is the shift to this new style of business where you see some of the stuff that's happening on the consumer business, not just I have a mobile phone, I want to run apps with APIs. It's a completely mindset shift on how to architect with legacy stuff, and personnel. So what does replatforming mean to an enterprise architect or a CIO or CFO or CEO? Yeah, it's a good question, John. I think the term takes on different meanings. I just heard a presentation the other day by IDC, they call it the third platform. The third platform is this combination of things. I think though, in most of the organizations we deal with, unless you're a web native or digital native, or cloud native businesses, you still have to deal with the fact that you've got a long history of customer information files, transactional records, all those things that need to be integrated. And they're at different speeds, right? And so I think the first realization is understanding that they are at different speeds, and in many cases they're going to require different sets of architectures that will be best tuned or optimized for that particular, right? Time is the equalizing factor and all of that. So again, back to, you know, most of the organizations we deal with, it really has to do with, you know, what are the things that you can help us with to kind of bridge old to new? I don't want to throw it all away. I can't throw it all away from a compliancy perspective. I've got a lot of mine. They don't want to take down the performance. They don't want to take it down. So, you know, we look for specific things that are going to allow for that, for that composable capability within that business. So a case in point. It's a building blocks mentality. Building blocks, I mean things like, you know, container technologies or container methodologies are really hot these days, right? The ability to again kind of carry forward things that I've already been doing, do them in a new way, operationalize them for a different velocity, for a different sort of deployment model. And so we're seeing a lot of interest in that. We're seeing a lot of interest in things like, you know, software-defined infrastructure, programmable infrastructure, you know, the days of buying something that was purpose-built to do one thing is no longer and now you want to have something that will, you know, redefine itself based on the load. I find it interesting, you know, it's the thing that we look at as a whole replete for me, it's just a buzzword, but the themes are all the same. I need to be prepared for change fast. So the Lego block, building blocks, SOA, composable, they have a, it flies in my mind. That hangs together, I have no problem with that. And I love it, because it's, it's also leveraged from a cost perspective. No one wants to drop their compute and storage down. They want to actually increase performance, lower cost, and do all this stuff. I mean come on. John, it never goes down frankly. I mean the idea of scaling back, I mean it's a nice concept, but honestly I really haven't seen much of that unless you're going out of business fast with, you know, you know, it really doesn't matter at that moment. Look at containers, right? So I interviewed the CEO of Docker two years ago and they didn't have any outside funding. Well they were repivoting into their new thing and saw, yeah, we get this open source project and then within a year, that's how fast the native apps started to explode. It was almost like a pressure cooker, just the timing of Docker. Containers have been around. Containers have been around a while, right? What about the timing of that? Yeah, I think it's the open source nature of it. I mean, look at what's happening in cloud and what's happening around things like OpenStack, right? Once that gets out into the community and you get that force and nature starting to happen, and again, driven by a, you know, because not one company's going to be able to do it all, right, but you get that developer community, the open source community active on it, and I think that's what really was a kicker on this, right? It's something, a concept that's been around a long time but now it's got mass. So I'm a customer, pretend I'm a customer for a minute. Okay. I'm scared. That kind of speed radically shifts how I have to do business. I can get fired, I have, I might have, investment, I mean there's a huge amount of cognitive dissonance I might have. So that's the pressure I'm under. I have all the pressure from the business units, not just to run IT, but like, to actually drive top line revenue. I got to get these workloads, I got new apps coming, and now I know native apps, so all this change is making me scared. How do you prepare, how do you talk to me as a customer or are those kinds of customers? I don't mean scared as in like a wimpy kind of way. I mean like the reality is, there's a lot of pressure. There's a lot of pressure, there's a lot of risk, there's a lot of new things, right? Let's face it, even for us, there's a lot of new things there. You know, it's a great question and maybe the way I'll answer it is, I think what you look for is, what are your fast success points, right? We all hear about fast fail. I look for, from an advisory perspective, what are the things that we can get done that show strong progressive capability? Have strong return on investment or business outcome valuation versus let's say doing that next upgrade, right? Or doing that next thing, IT for IT's sake. So, I would say the key aspect here is, look for those things that have measurable impact. Even though it may not be the biggest project, let's look for those things and that can iterate and build on each other. So again, we talked a little bit about it earlier in the discussion, right? I mean, looking for things that are bridged things to the next era. And then look for outside help. Look for counsel, look for those things that have already gone before you, right? And utilize that as much as you possibly can. Reference architecture, success stories, outcomes, and we can help there, right? So I think that's one of the things that we try to leverage as much as we can. Do you see, I mean, what's the bell curve look like? Do you see? So, I see a lot of customers a lot. There's a handful that really are driving for change. There's top-down leadership. They're forcing essentially their people to get comfortable with change. There's a way it is today. It's going to change, get comfortable with that. We're going to go from a situation that you talked about insurance before, where they would roll out a new app, take a year, longer to roll out a new app. Now they're conceiving an application on Monday and it's out, you know, in 10 days. Right, right. So there's that sort of classic customer and then in the fat middle, it's sort of confusion and then there's the sort of hanging on to the past. What do you see as that bell curve? What percent of the customers, you know, got feel, are really in a position to take advantage of these changes and how can HP accelerate that? I think like with any sort of tumultuous change like this, you know, you are going to have a natural distribution of this. I would say, you know, so it's going to follow, you know, traditional bell curve, early adopters. I think, though, what we're starting to see more and more of is the middle has access to things that, you know, traditionally, let's say 10 years ago, was really off limits, right? Or it was hard to find. Now it's very pervasive, whether it be, you know, SaaS or, you know, you're building, you know, past capability or preformed applications, whatever it might be. So I actually see an interesting dynamic happening here, right, which I think, whereas before you had these organizations that had deep resources, deep pockets, deep capability, I actually see the curve shifting a little bit more to the right, at least in the sense that I think the accessibility to what's out there, in terms of the pervasiveness of the expertise, preformed applications, preformed tools. And again, you know, you've got the ability of spinning up things a heck of a lot quicker than where we were before. So the barriers to entry for that are lower now. So in that sense, I think I do see more innovation coming from more of that fat center, if you will. And if you look at what's starting to happen is, you know, you're not only seeing a lot of great startup activity, but you're seeing traditional businesses, you know, realizing and taking a lead and starting to, you know, really get a handle around how do I run at a different speed? And as that realization around that second piece comes into play, I actually see a lot more activity there than what we've traditionally focused on with more leaders. Yeah. Particularly, there's another segmentation which is, you know, size of companies. Like the point being smaller mid-sized companies who didn't have the resources before and now have access to them, that underscores the narrative for the larger companies who might be sitting back saying, hey, stock price is up, we're making tons of dough, we're throwing off a lot of cash. And what's really interesting about this, Dave, is you find companies that, again, you know, I'm not going to name names here, but organizations where you go, all of a sudden they're in a business that is a really strong adjacency, but maybe two years ago they weren't doing it all. You know, so like an insurance company, you know, a couple of years ago we were talking about process efficiency, right? How do I get claims paid quicker? How do I reduce my cost on that? How do I get my EOB statement to look better? You know, these sorts of things? And now all of a sudden you've got organizations that are like, oh, wait a minute here, we've got historical data, we've got intellectual property, we've got trend analytics, we've got these things that can be repurposed in a way that takes us into a business vector that is completely different from what we were saying. And again, these are happening, you know, in organizations that realize that, hey, it's a different business, but it's really adjacent to what we've been doing, right? And now what they've set themselves up for is a very, very, again, different velocity model for that. And again, it's been exciting to work with those because they're coming from all sectors, but again, I would say we're starting to see a lot of, you know, you always look for the startups at this end, and then you've got the established companies, but I'm actually really bullish on what we're starting to see from that. Well, and even if historically, that company had the data and even the tools to analyze that data, their approach would have been, okay, let's order some servers, let's order some storage, let's wait, let's have a development throw the code over the fence to the infrastructure guys, that's changing. It's totally changing. Now you consume it as a service, right? And you can consume it in the way that you want to buy and pay for it, right? And we're seeing that across the entire service spectrum. It shouldn't be any different with what we're seeing in information services and, you know, outcome-based services and so forth. So it doesn't surprise me at all. And again, the way that the procurement is happening, right, and how it wants to be procured and the business model for it, it's as different as the technology changing under it. Who would have thought that spinning media was going to start to go out of vogue within literally a year, year and a half, and it is, right? And so it's similar. I'm glad you say it's next, spinning disk. Glad you're saying that. A lot of people don't realize, HV is one of the few companies who is sort of putting forth this vision of an all-flash data service. Yeah, exactly. That's an example. So you're not protecting the past from the future, which is great. And I think you got managed for somebody coming up after a bunch of years. It's good to see that. And again, I think we've taken a kind of a visionary lead there, and honestly, it doesn't take a lot to figure out that getting things to go faster, like having an all-flash data center, that's a good thing, right? And when everything, like I said, where speed is the common denominator, it's a major factor. And obviously that low latency feeds into the whole API mobile piece. So Casey, my final question for you before we break on the segment is, love your energy and vision because we agree the confluence and first time in history kind of sound by, that's exactly what's happening in many areas. One thing that's a first time in history moment that's going on now that we didn't talk about, I want to get your thoughts to close the segment is, for the first time in the history of modern business in the world, you can actually measure everything. That's technically in theory. That's true. You could actually instrument your entire business end to end. Absolutely. Not like even advertising. Yeah. And mobile devices. Right. The end points are changing. The internet of things. So this is kind of a, I mean, that's profound that if you think about it, you could actually measure everything. So it's not so much the data. It's what do you do with the data? What to look at? This is changing. So what's your thoughts on that? So we can get into a long, moral and ethical discussion about this kind, but you know, as a technology guy right now. Look at three minutes. We've got three minutes. Yeah, I think you're right. There's some privacy issues, of course, but I mean. I think the capability is there, right? I think the thing that will change and change rapidly over the next, you know, probably a few months at the rate we're going in is what I would call the breaks and the variability in that. You know, the capability is there, but just like any road, there are parts where it's a little rough or it's not complete. I think that completeness is really kind of what we're driving for as well, right? Which is, and again, taking moral and ethical things out of the equation, what we're really looking for is how do we ensure that some of the things that we've been doing around things like sensing and monitoring, which is a part of IT, it's not just IT anymore. It's a complete supply chain ecosystem in the end, right? It's from the device you wear to how it then communicates to a device you have in your bag to then how it communicates to your services, so forth. So, you know, our focus has really been, again, and I see where we can add a lot of value from the HP perspective is, you know, from instrumentation to the monitoring to the correlation to the analytic piece. We're one of the few around that kind of has elements of that, right? In its totality. And not to say that it's perfect, but what it does give us, I think, is an appreciation and a vision for, you know, where the breaks might happen and how do we smooth out the road and how do we complete that last mile and so forth, so. Well, I bring it up because it's certainly provocative and intoxicating at some level, so think about the moral and business aspects of that data. Maybe that's a whole nother segment of itself. That's a whole day show. Yeah, you can get another. We can do a whole innovation. You can get another. We can do a whole day cube on just that concept. But it is something that kind of telegraphs what's coming. Sure. From a management perspective and from technology. So, I mean, I want to get your thoughts appreciated. Casey Choi, thank you for joining us on the cube. Thank you guys, appreciate it. We are here live at HP Discover. In fact, you're interested in all flash data center we just talked about. There's actually a crowd chat happening right now with all the influencers with the new executive Minish Goyal on crowdchat.net slash all flash. Or go to hpdiscover.socialour. Engagements site and hub for your experience, keynotes and chats are there as well. This is the cube. We'll be right back after this short break.