 And now, SiliconANGLE TV and Wikibon.org present a focus spotlight. Live from Las Vegas and VMworld 2011, host John Furrier and Dave Vellante, a human being. Cloud Conversions will support from HP Cloud System, the most complete integrated platform for building and managing clouds. Okay, we're back. I'm John Furrier, the founder of SiliconANGLE.com and we're here inside theCUBE with my co-host. I'm Dave Vellante of Wikibon.org and we are here with a couple of cloud advisors from HP, Archie Reed, Cube Alum, Archie, good to see you again and Charlie Bess. Charlie, I don't think you've been on theCUBE before, right? Is it your first time? Well, welcome. It's your first time. All right, good to see you guys. We're talking cloud, you know, cloud advisors. Archie, we talked last year at Oracle OpenWorld and sort of had a good intro to what you guys are doing. But why don't you start by telling us briefly what the cloud advisor group does at HP? Cloud advisors are basically HP's sort of best and brightest, the folks that... If you do say so yourself. If I do say so myself. This is the way they describe us. We've just fallen into the model. And essentially our goal is to try and help people work out how to work with HP, how to deal with all these things that are going on. And we do a lot of different things. We have a lot of varied backgrounds in the cloud advisor program. And it could be from labs, it could be from security, it could be from the business units, but generally with a senior technologist over the cloud for HP. And if you've met one cloud advisor, you've met one cloud advisor. Each of them has an area of specialty like Archie's with security. I'm more in the services space, so. Oh, okay, great. Two great topics that... So the question that's come up is obviously VMware is the center of the show here. It's VMworld and virtualization. Network virtualization, SSD, storage, big data. All of the security questions came up and how to get to clouds. We're seeing a trend where there's more demand right now for actual cloud solutions, not so much future tense kind of conversation. So last year was very much lay out the architecture. This year it's like, who's delivering? And the products are starting to come in. So the question I asked SHI was, the balance around architecture and design and delivery, compliance and doing the right thing. Because they're different. Yeah, you're absolutely right. Over the last year we've shifted the conversation from a little bit about what is cloud, what can it do for me to the point of really trying to have people understand what the benefits are for them as opposed to what everybody is telling them what cloud is. So understanding the architecture, understanding the risks. And we've moved it to a discussion about how do we actually do this? Which is things like, how do I move data securely to the cloud and what is the process for that? Identifying what's appropriate, what are the systems I need to put in place to do it? And obviously we have a lot of management tools to help people do that. But it's the journey, right? It is the process that we put in play with a lot of customers. Example being, I'm out in Australia right now, we've got a very large company in Australia, one of the top 25, who are spread across the entire country. They're dealing with regulatory issues. So we've basically gone through a data classification exercise. They've gone through an exercise of what do we put into cloud versus what do we move in our data center? So we've gone through various app to cloud, app to virtualization, what's appropriate, what's not. And some of it doesn't belong in the cloud for them. And then we go through the other side, which is how do they communicate to that? Putting it all into the cloud doesn't mean it's accessible to everyone in their organization. Because while here in the States, we've definitely got a lot of high-speed communications, that's not necessarily the case around the rest of the world. So it isn't just, how do you move to the cloud? But what are the changes to how your employees, your customers are going to access the services that you still have to provide? And those are the real things that we're driving for these customers right now. And you brought up the whole issue of the architecture side of it, because the architecture is at least as much a business issue as is a technology issue. And the fact that you want to integrate the data and have the, so the word customer, or the data for customer is consistent, whether it's in a hybrid environment, inside or outside the data center. And then pulling together the user interface in many cases, because what you don't want to have happen is, I say you use the software as a service interface, you have your internal interface, you might have some other things from other providers, and that you accost the user's attention span by trying to integrate it in their brain, because that just frankly will not work for very long. And so thinking through the whole architectural implications of how this is going to generate value for your business for each particular role is key. Yeah, and we were talking about big data as well, and you know, you got Cloudera out there, we talked to the co-founder, my friend, Admiral Adallah. And we heard, it's easy to set up proof of concepts, the NetApp guys like, hey, I can use commodity hardware and set up a proof of concept, but that homegrown hits the point. So that's kind of one discussion. And the second discussion is, and we heard from last year of the Mworld, HP's customers, Carnegie Mellon and Dallas Cowboys, where they were just banging out some real cloud, which essentially some provisioned resources. So what's changed this year around cloud deployment with HP, Solutions Cloud Systems, and the stuff that they have? And two, the role of data, because you can't just whip up on the cloud, you got to take into account the data component. And that's not much big data, but it's just data mobility, data security. Here we go. Let's take the first one on the second. So I'll give you an example of what's changed. So for some of the customers, they've realized that things like cloud bursting, the things we were talking about last year, the ability to move back and forth and basically snap this up, snap it down at any point in time, it's actually a really hard thing to do. It isn't just the fact that you can run up a CRM system and suddenly support a particular marketing effort or something like that. There's all the data that goes behind that, there's all the processes that go behind that. And this analysis of what the data is behind the scenes is actually quite critical to whether they can put it into a service provider's cloud, even whether they can put it into their own clouds. And what we've seen with a lot of customers, I'll give an example of a large financial company we're working with, they've realized that they essentially, this is something we've been advising a lot of people, have to become the broker and understand themselves what all the implications of those systems are. They don't necessarily care about the systems underneath anymore. They really want to deliver business value. And that is the change for IT that we've seen over the last year with a lot of companies. I think as the organizations have begun to get experience with it, they began to understand the pitfalls that are out there, began to work around it and look at it from a much more holistic perspective of how, as Archie pointed out, how is value generated for this? Because frankly, the flashing lights and spinning disk drives don't generate any value. It's the actual usage of the information to make better business decisions and reduce that time to decision that's critical. Well now, it's SAD, SSTs now. There won't be any more spindle. That's right. We've been having a lot of SSTs. If some of the guys around here have their way. It's about usage too, right? We need to have that usage today, not tomorrow. There's problems on the table today. And you also have to have that relationship management aspect that CIOs may not have had to have quite that level of relationship management understanding and development because it's not a case that you can dictate necessarily to the cloud provider of this is the way this will work. No, it's the self-selection kind of aspect of the cloud providers want to specialize in a certain way, optimize their environment for a certain client class. And if you don't fit in there, you probably want to go to another cloud provider, find another person, sort of like in the old ERP days. If you have to make a whole bunch of modifications of the ERP system, you probably picked the wrong one and because it's not going to be sustainable over the long haul. Yeah, so that touches software, that touches your policies. I mean, what have you seen in the customer base with regard to say things like a security incident, how it's defined, what's reported? How much flexibility is there? This is a true challenge when you start thinking about public cloud especially. And no customer that we talk to of any decent size has just said, yep, everything's going into the cloud. And when they start to think, okay, what can we put in the cloud? How are we going to deal with the issues? Not just understanding what data we want to put out there but what happens when it goes wrong? So another aspect of what we do, a lot of, is work with the standards communities worldwide. It isn't just US, it's Europe, it's Asia pack, everywhere. And we spend a lot of time with organizations like the Cloud Security Alliance, trying to rationalize what it means in terms of audit, security response, incident response and trying to come up with ways that actually make sense. So you can deal with the problems when they occur. And most cloud providers aren't there. So to Charlie's point, when you want to select a certain cloud provider and you've got the criteria that you want, can you find anyone out there who meets at 100% today? Probably not, but I'll give you an example of something we demonstrated here, which was being able to provision to a government cloud. We partner with Harris, military grade. And they've basically signed up and said, yep, we're compliant with all of these things. And that can be a policy you can put into our management system and say, if this system must only go into this type of environment, can I flow through? Can I follow that process and deliver what I need to do to the business or the organization with that public cloud? Or does it have to stay within my control? Charlie, I wanted to ask you about services. It's an area that John and I have been talking about a lot. In fact, SiliconANGLE recently launched a new publication called Services Angle. John and I joked last year, John made storage sexy. I think services is becoming sexy. So the whole thing that the theme we've been talking about is the intersection of traditional IT services and transformational services with new web services. When you say you focus on services in the cloud, what are you talking about? What do you see as that intersection? And how is the services angle changing? Well, the services, I've got 30 years of experience in the services space. So I've seen a lot of different flavors of how we've approached services all the way from the infrastructure as a service or ITO kind of things all the way up through the business process outsourcing. And one of the things that's changing is the sophistication, I would say, and the dynamic nature of the delivery of services. People do want to spin things up on a moment's notice. And we're not talking about just spinning up disk drives, but whole organizations to meet new product demands or new relationship demands and then be able to spin them down at the same rate. That's a much more dynamic environment, I would say, than services has had to withstand in the past. Yeah, so it sort of changes the notion of traditional IT services and evolves that into one that's much more in line with what we think of as web services. And when you think about the whole concept of cloud is turning many things into services that are multi-tenant and leverageable, et cetera, with the kind of controls that Archie was talking about that make it so that you can do those quick things in a reliable, repeatable way because frankly, all this automation that's in cloud can let you do stupid things just as fast as it lets you do smart things. So you need that checks and balances to prevent you from doing that. So I want to ask you guys because I know we've talked about in the past, Archie, but brings up the data and the highlights of the HP offerings because you guys have some impressive offerings. We want to get that out there and get that out of the way because you guys are doing some good work. Obviously the search is to back it up. Just get that out there. So if we start from the top down maybe, certainly on the services side, we have a raft of migration transformation services and probably we're overusing the term services here but essentially going through all the aspects of what's required to get this app into a cloud format and you can't just lift and shift a lot of the applications. So we have application to cloud, application to virtual, all those sorts of things and transformation of IT into the cloud. Moving down the stack, you've got the management software, the cloud service automation software which has all of the policies, the automation, the orchestration, making sure that when things are breaking or they need to be rolled back, they can be making sure that they happen as fast as you expect them to and within all of that, there's all that policy management as well. And then you should have moved down into the stack and a lot of what we've announced here at the show is the new cloud system capabilities in terms of what we've got, blades, all those capabilities in terms of being able to do flex fabric storage. You move down into the actual security aspects of the network and we've got tipping point, we've got our virtual security framework and that's essentially how do you plug into the hypervisors which a lot of people are still concerned about and be able to protect them in much the same way that you've done with the physical world as you move to that virtual or even a third party's cloud, can you back to the audit piece, can you actually find out what's going on? And then you piece all that together and you can get all of that from HB or don't forget, we partner really well. So we have a raft of partners out there that we do with Checkpoint, Samad Degh. And we also have a whole research organizations that's looking to where things will be 10, 15 years out and doing demonstrations and integration across those activities as well. Archie and Charlie, we're out of time. Thank you very much, great content. You guys are the best and brightest. I'll second that. So thank you very much for coming on theCUBE and sharing your knowledge with us and with our audience and we will be right back at VMworld Live 2011. Thanks guys.