 We're here with Prith Banerjee, who is the Senior Vice President and Director of HP Labs. A very smart man who has all access to the keys to the kingdom at HP. Prith, welcome to the show. Thank you very much, John. So, obviously you run HP Labs, you're super smart. So you have a lot of smart people that work for you, and you see everything. You see the future, you play with the future, and you have to work with the management team at HP about what's going on in the present and help them guide them over. So, first of all, tell us, one, where we are now with HP Labs. You guys had a reorganization a couple years ago around organizing all your themes and getting run focused. Give us an update on that, and then let's talk about kind of where we are today. Then we'll talk about what's in the future. Great. So, as you know, John, HP Labs is a corporate research arm for Hewlett Packard. And I've been associated with HP Labs for now about four years. And about three and a half years ago, HP Labs went through a very interesting strategic transformation. And as you mentioned, around eight themes of research where we took the creative energies of all the smart people at HP Labs and focused them on about 20 high-impact research projects around these eight themes. So, the themes just to recap the themes there around print and content delivery, where the future is going towards sort of moving from the analog world of printing to the digital world of printing, work on mobility and immersive experiences, sort of the future of mobile devices, and how the way you interact with technology will change in the next several years. A theme on cloud and security, you can see cloud and security becoming very, very important now. This is something that we started working on four years ago. A good call back then. Very good call. A theme on information analytics. It's around structured data, unstructured data, big data. Another good call. Very good call. Seems to be very relevant today. Technology around intelligent infrastructure. A view where we are going to collect a lot of information through nanoscale sensors, collect the data, store the data, process the data, and essentially create a very intelligent infrastructure for our customers in the future. That seems like a good call also. Research on networking and communications. That's kind of the core foundation of how connectivity is actually brought from mobile devices to the cloud and so on. A theme around services, around looking at the kinds of how can you use technology to provide much better quality services in the future on certain verticals. The last one is around sustainability, which is something that we felt was so important to society. Lowering the carbon footprint, lowering energy consumption, and so on. We have been at it now for about three and a half years. We have had very significant progress. The good thing is that as you know, Leo announced the strategy for the company around seamless, secure, context-aware experiences for the connected world. It's around pulling in cloud computing, which is the enabler in terms of computing storage and so on through all the billions of mobile devices that will be there. What are you going to do with this? You are essentially analyzing information. You look at our eight themes that are so well aligned with HP's strategy. Of course, as the forward-looking part of HP, that's our job, but we made some good calls. I got to say, for the folks out there, I met with Prithwin two years ago when SiliconANGLE was just me. We had a conversation, we had a chance to tour, HP Labs talked to you, some of your top people. Time to go and tell. Yeah, I'm talking about sustainability. You guys really, really made a good call. Not only is it matched up with HP's strategy, it's really lined up with the mega trends right now that is lifting us out of this recession into a massive IT global and global economic recovery. It's super exciting. You have all the elements covered. They are good calls. I'm really excited that I had a chance to see it early. Let's talk about today. You have a new CEO who is an innovative guy. He likes tech. At the keynote, he said, technically cool, like three times. I like that. He's got the pro innovation. How do you feel about that? You must be like, yeah, okay, mandate. Absolutely. He has been so supportive of innovation and HP Labs. In fact, I remember the first day he joined HP, he came over to HP Labs. I invited him to come over. He talked to me, the senior fellows, and talked about technology and he has been extremely supportive of HP Labs. In fact, in the summit on March 14, in his introductory paragraph, he talked about the innovations, innovations coming out of HP Labs. He named the store ones, the deduplication technology that came out of HP Labs. He named the sense technology or sensors, nanoscale sensors, trying to help one of our customers in the oil exploration area. He talked about the work on memristors. These are things, innovations that work that we started at HP Labs. They are now in the process of being transferred to our businesses in the hands of customers. And here was Leo, in the first day of the summit, he talked about it in his opening paragraph. I felt really good about it. It's really impressive and how does that energize the team, your team? By the way, this guy gets it. They energize. What's the feeling inside HP Labs? They are so excited about him. In fact, he's coming to Labs again for his other sort of deep-dive visit. He's been doing that. He has been very supportive of all the research. The Labs people are very excited and they can't wait to show things to Leo. I mean, I just was talking to Chandrakant. Chandrakant had some interactions with him. Again, he had a chance to talk to Leo about some of the sustainability ideas. And he said, just go and do it. When Leo was in India, my HP Labs director, Sudhir Dixit, asked Leo some questions about how can we bring this to market. And he said, Sudhir, just come on, bring it to market. So extremely supportive of innovation. I'm excited for you and I'm looking forward to digging deeper with HP Labs. We'll get a chance after the show to visit you guys down the street, Palo Alto. Let's talk about Labs in general. R&D has been stories of cutting R&D. Now you've got a CEO who's going to prop up some of that, energizing the team. But in a lot of companies, R&D kind of sits out in the fence and they're out tooling away on the future, working on some crazy ideas, some applied research, some good research out in the edges. But it doesn't always make it back into the business. So that's changed under your leadership. And I've heard a rumor that based upon the big data pillar that you had a couple of years ago, you were pretty peaked on some of the trends in your research. And then all of a sudden, Leo comes in with, I believe, Shane or some other folks and said, hey, I want to get Vertica. Buys Vertica, pops out of the market, takes that up the table. And I heard a rumor that now they're working with some labs teams and some analytics labs. I mean, the team put together. Is that true? Can you confirm that? Yes, and we are very excited about it. So let me talk about the information analytics agenda from HP Labs and then I will tell you how we are syncing up with Vertica. So the problem that we identified is about what we call big, fast, total data. So anybody can analyze a gigabyte of data. If you do a thousand gigabytes, that's a terabyte of data. You take a thousand terabytes, that's a petabyte of data. A thousand petabytes, that's a zeta byte of data. So you are talking big data, lots and lots of data, and can you analyze it in real time as it comes in, right? So the fast data is trying to analyze the stuff as fast as your business is running, so at the speed of business. So people in the past have done business intelligence, trying to correlate statistical correlations between all customers who bought bounty paper towels also by charming bathroom tissue. At the end of the week, end of the month, end of the year, do those analysis. That's not relevant anymore. You need to do it at the speed of business. The third thing is around total data, which is structured and unstructured data. If you look at the amount of data that is being generated today, it's doubling every 18 months, and 80% of the data is actually unstructured data. So you look at this, big, fast, total data coming at you through a variety of sources, these billions of nanoscale sensors, the tweets that are happening on Twitter, the social media, the Facebook updates and so on. How are you going to analyze it all? So within labs, we have three projects, one of these three big-bed projects, one on what we call taming the information explosion, trying to extract metadata about the data, essentially looking at unstructured data and trying to put some structure to it and then storing it in the structure's forms of data. A project on live business intelligence, looking at the amount of data that's coming in very fast and analyzing it at the speed of business, applying it to domains like what we call live operational intelligence, live customer intelligence. And the third one is around IT informatics, looking at the large amounts of data that the IT industry creates, server errors, this thing, server going down, this network thing popping up, looking at all this data within the IT world, doing data mining on it and helping the CIO making better decisions. So this was the research agenda for labs, right? We were looking at, if you're trying to build a thing like this, you need sort of a higher level integration layer, a layer that will sort of talk to the customers through the interface layers and so on. You need a analytics layer, you need a storage layer and some sort of the servers and architectures to build on it. So when we are looking at the kind of storage layer that we need, we were following up what is going on in the area in terms of columnar stores and data stores and in-memory database and so on. Looked at Vertica, obviously, like the company, it made a lot of business sense for the company, liked it. Vertica is actually being incubated. It's sitting under Shane Robinson. It's under Shane, that's right. And I report to Shane, Chris Lynch from Vertica reports to Shane. So Chris and I had a good conversation. The engineering teams have got together and we are trying to align our ducks. Basically, you confirm that there's an initiative underway with Lazer School, great. Also, Vertica is too important to just give away right now to what makes sense to a division maybe. There's a bigger picture there. So you got this ARC, you got this Vertica. You can do things with it now. We heard from ESSN as an appliance. Paul Miller came on, talked about that. Dave Donatelli talked about that. So they instantly grabbed the big data piece and actually shipped the product in like two months. But it's still kind of hanging out there. What is the big story with Vertica? That's a big asset for HP. What's the vision? Can you share with us the future of what Vertica could morph into? Is it an arms dealer to every division for big data? That's a business recession. So what I can tell you about is how excited we are from a research perspective to work together with a vertical team and bringing outstanding technology in the hands of our business leaders who will then figure out the business models to bring it to market. Great. Well, that's exciting. So a couple of questions I have for you. This is part of the way. This is very exciting. We're here with Prith Banerjee who runs HP Labs. A storied, a great set of smart nodes. People in there doing some great research. All focused under some cool themes. Some good choices all lined up with the big trends. Operating systems. Every time a new trend comes in it's a death of something. It's been the death of the mainframe. It was death of the client server. It was death of the PC. And it really never changes. No one ever dies. It just kind of morphs into a new form. But with cloud and big data and mobility, say cloud and mobile and social. Those kind of mega trends. What is the future that you see in those areas? Because they're changing, right? Cloud is now going mainstream. Steve Jobs announced iCloud. That's going to take the nomenclature to a whole other level. And so is there a cloud operating system? We've talked about the data center operating system as with some of your folks. How's the system's architecture going to change in the future? Is it going to be distributed? Is it already distributed? How do you see that kind of forming? What does some of your research tell you about the future operating systems? So again, my team at HP Labs, they are working on the same exact topics that you talked about, right? So my cloud and security lab, they are working on some very, very innovative IP in the form of... So people are now convinced that cloud is a very interesting business model and instead of trying to own your own IT assets, you should sort of pay for it as you go. So you do compute as a service, storage as a service and so on. So you see some initial versions of sort of public cloud offerings from a set of vendors. But we at HP Labs sort of recognize that the real opportunities in the enterprise, in terms of the amount of data that's out there, you need to deliver it in a very secure manner, very highly reliable and highly available manner, right? So at Labs, we are building this sort of enterprise-grade cloud platform, our internal name for it is called Sirius. And essentially using virtualization technology, we allow sort of application developers to create these virtual compute cells, storage cells, and by having what we call network virtualization, we are able to enable customers to have these multi-tenanted applications so that the applications are isolated from each other and that's extremely important in the cloud. You don't want my application on the cloud impacting your application running on the shared infrastructure. So that is a very, very key thing. Along with it is sort of programming environments and so on, but there is a desire for enterprises to use the hybrid cloud, which is private cloud for most of the computations and storage, but periodically when you need to flex your needs, you can go over to the public cloud. How do you do that in a very seamless manner, going to the hybrid cloud? Again, those are technologies that are being worked on at Labs. Security is a very, very key enabler. Every person you talk to says, we are really scared about the security, what I do here impacted, right? Then you talk about how people access the cloud. It's essentially through these end terminals. So the connected devices that tens of billions of smartphones and tablets and PCs and notebooks and printers and so on, all of them, again HP's bet is around WebOS. The same seamless experience on these multiple touchpoints, accessing data, computations, et cetera, on the cloud. Now the real deal is that people have these two lives, right? We have the personal life. We do things as a consumer. We are playing games, mafia wars or angry birds on our smartphone and tablets, and the same device we would like it to also do things on the enterprise. Now, typically CIOs and enterprises, they do not want to allow these devices in the enterprise network. So for the enterprise, you have to use a PC. For other stuff, you use your smartphone and tablet. We think it's the same device. It should be the same device. So we at Labs... And the consumer does too. They want it to be the same device. So at Labs, for example, we have an effort called Manage Cloud Communities which will enable CIOs to manage your same devices, right? You as a consumer can use your device for whatever consumer applications you want. And the CIO can enable you to do the enterprise applications and the two worlds will not hit each other. Those kind of isolations are going to be so key. So those are some of the key IPs that are being developed at Labs. And it has to be abstracted away. The complexity has to be completely abstracted away, right? Including intelligent. It cannot be user interactions. It's got to be completely under the covers. And it's the future of technologies around how humans interact with this technology, right? I mean, the reason these tablets and smartphones have become so popular is, I mean, cell phones a few years ago, you had to use a keyboard to dial a phone, right? Now use this touch and these incredible ways you can just expand, delete, move things around, right? That you can see in operating systems like WebOS and others. But we at Labs are thinking about where is the future of interfaces? So we have a project on rich intuitive interfaces where you can use gestures, gestures and speech, combine them together, essentially making it so much more intuitive it's like two humans talking to each other. I tell you, we could put a cube in HP Labs all day long broadcasting 24-7. It would be very exciting. It's so much excitement going on. You guys are really in the right spot. You have the energy, the senior vice president who runs HP Labs, we're inside the cube. We extract the knowledge from the smartest guys in the planet and we's one of them right here. One of my final questions is mobility. Obviously, you guys saw it come and you had an initiative in place. Is there anything in the mobility side that has surprised you or has changed your agenda on research? Obviously, the app craze, but it's creating new data. I mean, is it all of the above? How has mobile changed your agenda and has anything surprised you on mobile? HP Labs, when we picked our research agenda for years around those eight themes and so on, I mean, the mobile immersive experience was the front of it. We saw it come in. So it actually didn't surprise us from a research perspective. Now, bringing it to market, obviously, there has been some very successful installations of devices and so on that we see. We are very excited about it. Our research agenda is working on those same kind of technologies. I think where we see the opportunity in mobile is how people today see all these apps in the consumer world. You download this app, that app on your favorite smartphone. We see a similar way of downloading apps in the enterprise setting and a way to actually provide that seamless experience across the consumer apps and the enterprise apps on the same mobile device. And you should be able to leverage off the consumer world and the enterprise world. But the key thing is how you keep these two worlds separate and isolated. So what you do in the consumer world cannot, in any way, impact or hurt the enterprise world. Final questions. I know you've got to go see Leo and Keynotes and all the things you've got on your agenda. I really appreciate you spending the time. You're really busy and spending time with us is fantastic and I'm glad to share it. My final question is you mentioned sustainability, which we had more time. We could talk about another half hour on that. And changing the world. So the final question for you is more of a personal question. With all your knowledge of what you're seeing within HP Labs and the work you've done to kind of straighten that agenda and get it focused on the mega trends and to line that up, what you're seeing internally at HP and what you're seeing externally outside in the world, how is technology going to change society on a global scale in the next decade? That's a really good question. In fact, our sustainability research group by Chandragant Patel, a senior HP senior fellow is looking at exactly those kind of societal challenges. So within the sustainability group today we have a project on sustainable data centers which as you and your readers probably viewers know that data centers in the world of IT consume a lot of energy and that's the reason why these large data centers are located in certain regions of the US where the energy costs are quite low. But we believe in what we call zero data centers. So the over a say three year period or five year period the amount of energy that will draw from a public electric utility grid is zero. So essentially we have a our approach is to look at a demand side view and a supply side view. In terms of supply we'll have electric as one of the supplies but we're looking at solar we're looking at biofuels we're looking at in fact there was an interesting article on farm waste and converting that into this and so and clearly you have to there are parts of the day when you'll have more solar energy and you'll have generate more energy than your data center uses. So you'll need to store that energy and give it back to the electrical grid other times you'll suck energy from the electrical grid. So we had proposed a net zero data center and that design has been completed Chandrakant's team, Cullen Bash and others have done it. We are now thinking about the future how we can apply the same sustainability techniques to the city scale and design of future cities. Societally the kinds of problems that we'll face are resources issues about energy, about water and so on. The world is going to run out of clean water to drink in some parts of the world right. So how can we use sensors and actuators to actually do a very good area of match supply and demand and come up with much more sustainable society. These are societal problems to solve HP Labs is working on them and we believe that once you solve the societal problems, the business results will follow. Crisp energy, society is changing there are big problems that are being solved HP Labs is doing some great work thanks so much for coming inside theCUBE. Great to see you again and thank you very much. Thank you very much John.