 Live from Las Vegas, Nevada, it's theCUBE at HP Discover 2014. Brought to you by HP. Hi everybody, welcome back to Las Vegas. This is Dave Vellante with Jeff Frick and this is HP Discover, this is theCUBE. theCUBE goes out to the events, we extract the signal from the noise, it's our live mobile studio. Bill Vectius here, he's the Senior Vice President and General Manager of the HP's Enterprise Group, former COO, ran the cloud business. So you've had your hands in a lot of pieces, great keynote yesterday, a lot of energy, very well received by the audience, congratulations and thanks for coming on theCUBE, appreciate your time. No, thanks for the opportunity. So you had a lot of energy yesterday in your keynote, really enthusiastic and it was genuine, I can tell. Why are you so enthusiastic about where HP is in June of 2014? You know, we laid out a transformation and that transformation is taking hold and you can feel it in our innovations that we're bringing to market, you can feel it in the courage and confidence of employees and best of all, we're here at HP Discover with thousands of customers and partners and they can feel it and it gives them confidence that we're solving their toughest problems as we move to the new style of IT. One of the things we've talked about, we've been tracking the HP turnaround now for quite some time, one of the things we talked about is customers want HP to win. You can sense that, you heard that in the audience when they were clapping, when you say we are back, we are here, we're executing Australia, but how does that make you feel? You know, yesterday at the opening of my keynote, you know, we are celebrating our 75th year and what makes companies truly great is not only what they do for customers in the moment, but how they do it and as a result, it gives customers and partners confidence and you know, there's a value system. This is a company that will go the extra mile to support the customer, go the extra mile with a partner to create the right outcome and it's evident, I mean, you're exactly right. It's, you know, you can sense it in my energy on stage. It's fun. It's fun to be able to see an opportunity, imagine it with, for example, yesterday we had a huge announce around high performance computing with Apollo and that engineering team sat down with the National Research Energy Lab and they said, we see an opportunity, can we do it? And yesterday, we did it. So you run an interesting business. It comprises the large server business, the storage business, big acquisition of 3PAR many, many years ago, which is, I call it the gift that keeps on giving and obviously the networking business, which is doing well. So, and the services piece as well, correct? So big business, parts of it that are declining, parts of it are growing. Why did you take this role on what was your thinking in coming in? Were you excited, nervous? Was it trepidation? Was there, you know, we're going to take over the world. Talk about where your head was at when you took over this role. You know, the reality is HP is a great company and we've all got to do our part to make sure that it is just that. And when I was out with customers, you know, the foundation for the new style of IT in some fashion is going to be the infrastructure. This will be an app down, app driven world. But if you do not have the infrastructure that can deliver higher performance for big data, that can create greater virtual machine density, not only in compute, but also bring virtualization to storage and networking, that takes work in the physical infrastructure. And so as I was out talking to, frankly, the employees in that group, I saw an incredible innovation engine that had a vision and strategy, whether it be a round converge infrastructure, the software defined data center, the work we were doing on cloud, and I saw an opportunity to accelerate. So how do you think about those businesses? They're both individual, they sort of stand alone businesses with best of breed components, but at the same time, HP is such a massive company, you can leverage the better together type of theme, bringing with it, whether it's converged infrastructure or greater levels of integration. How do you see that business shaking out? Are they sort of largely independent businesses with separate business plans? Are they going to come together, or is it a sort of a hybrid approach? No, it's a great question. The reality is, as we show up and have conversations with customers, and I've had dozens of them here at HP Discover, they have to have confidence that when they choose HP, they are getting best of breed components. Components and capabilities that will compete and win because they offer a better outcome for those customers versus what a Cisco is of offering them or an EMC or other players. But those best of breed components are no longer sufficient, and this is where HP is unique versus other players in the market. We've got modern architectures that then we can deliver as integrated solutions. Last week at SAP Sapphire, we delivered the highest performance HANA system in the market. We did that through partnering, great innovation engagement between SAP and HP, and then we went one step further. It wasn't just about servers and a separate piece around storage. It was an integrated solution to deliver on the opportunities that HANA affords. The final piece of it, and you touched on it earlier, is what we do around services, which is that customers want to know that we're not only delivering, here's widget X or widget Y, but that we've got the right support and maintenance, the right advising and the right consulting to ensure that they have the fastest time to value with the lowest risk possible. This is an interesting time in our industry, isn't it? You've been around, you've seen a lot of changes, but I can't remember a time when there's been so many disruptions, there's riverbugs, there's cloud, big data, mobile, social, et cetera, but at the same time, the whole co-opetition thing is fascinating to me. I mean, we had Tom Joyce on yesterday. We were at EMC World Broadcasting. We're in the audience, and there's Pat Gelsinger up on stage at EMC World, and there's Tom Joyce on stage, talking about the HP, SAP, and VMware partnership. And I'm laughing, I mean, this is amazing, right? I've never seen such an interesting time. What do you make of all that? You know, I think, and this is, again, HP and its core DNA is a partnering company. And, you know, just this morning, I had a wonderful session with some of our partners around the globe talking about what we're doing together. And in this world, we're very comfortable on a set of dimensions partnering, and then on another set of dimensions competing. The part of the asset and the opportunity for customers with HP is the breadth and depth of our portfolio, but that means that as we have a relationship with VMware, in some ways we're gonna compete with them, in some ways we're gonna partner with them. We are their largest route to market. We do an enormous amount of support and maintenance, and we do a lot of engineering with them. Well, I mean, HP decided a long time ago that it would be partner-friendly, and so the ascendancy of Microsoft and Intel, HP embraced that. You don't really have a not-invented-here syndrome type of mentality. We do not. And a key part of that has got to be your supply chain. I mean, you've got a massive, I don't know, $60 billion plus supply chain. How do you leverage that for competitive advantage? Well, we had a great example yesterday, you know, with our three-par asset, we are fundamentally changing the economics how people think about their primary storage platform and sands. One of the things that has been a real opportunity is can you deliver a truly all-flash array, question number one, and question number two is can you do it at high performance disc prices? And we announced both yesterday. We announced an all-flash array and we broke the $2 per gigabyte price barrier. How were we able to do that? We were able to do that because of our supply chain. Okay, I want to talk a little bit about cloud. I said earlier, you helped architect the cloud business. You see Amazon very high growth, starting to be large, meaningful. So a lot of people say, okay, well, that's going to eat that. Now you helped architect HP public cloud, but also now you're seeing Helion come into play. So you've got that piece, potentially super high growth, your core business, your core install base, parts of it are growing, parts of it are shrinking. How do those two pieces come together? How does that new cloud world and the traditional install base, the 19 year old legacy applications, how do those two worlds come together and how do you make them a growth business? You know, as I'm out listening to customers and partners, the reality is what they want is they want a hybrid world. What the cloud is, is it's a way of delivering IT, a way of delivering the promise to self-service, self-service to the developer, self-service to the end user. It offers the opportunity to have much greater multi-tenancy and of course it is about a business model shift as well, outcome based and OPEX based versus CAPEX and Gear based. And so as we think about the opportunity and what we hear from customers and what they want is they don't want just a public cloud, they want to take those constructs and move those capabilities inside the firewall and how they deliver IT as well. And so our approach and what we're doing with HP Helion is giving them the opportunity to have a cloud that enterprises can truly rely on from on-premise to managed all the way to public. And as we do that, we're doing that in a common architecture and in an open based way. We were the first large-cap technology vendor to bet on OpenStack and we are building a singular architecture and a singular platform that enables customers to have greater control, greater visibility and greater flexibility. You have a very different outlook than say Andy Jassy who runs AWS. He says that very few companies will own their own data center in the future and essentially if I can interpret your strategy, you say very few companies are going to put everything into the public cloud. With two ends of the spectrum. Who's right? When I go back and I talk to customers, what they tell me is that some of the data is going to, a lot of that data is going to continue to reside at the company. And that might be for regulatory reasons. It might be for national security reasons. It might be because that's how they've got to run the business today. For traditional apps as well as the next generation apps. So what I hear from customers is they do want that full continuum. So I want to talk about open source generally and it's such a disruptive factor. OpenStack is a huge opportunity we think obviously for HP and it needs leadership. Can HP emerge as a leader, maybe even the de facto leader of OpenStack? Does it have to do that? Talk about that a little bit. So first of all, OpenStack is a community. HP is an important contributor to it, but is a community of incredibly talented people committing, committed to fundamentally advancing how infrastructure in the platform is managed and delivered in the future. We see a critical role for HP to help do their part in that community, but it is community. It is thousands of creative people around the world united around a common opportunity and a vision for what we can do together. Have you had a chance to look at this relatively new, I don't know if you've seen it, this Docker container technology, essentially open source container technology. We had Pat Gelsinger on at, I don't know, one of these events and he said, hey, we got the best container technology out there, but you see this open source movement essentially aiming at things like VMware. What do you make of that, specifically or even generally an open source? So I think part of the question you're asking is how and when do you think about open source? Open source is a very efficient developed model. And in some cases it works incredibly well and in other cases it doesn't. We see in the investments that we're making around OpenStack is we see a vibrant community. It's the fastest growing open source project in the history of open source. And that opportunity is something that is open to a broad community of people. In the case of Docker, look, the container model is something that's going to be very important to solve. Application developers, web service developers, if there's a single easy way of containerizing and applying it across platform, that's very compelling. I know you're super busy and got to go, but I've just got a couple more questions. Sorry, Jeff, I'm dominating the conversation here. That's all right. I want to ask about Bill. Go, Dave, go. Bill Vecti's fingerprints on this business. What do you want to achieve specifically? What are you bringing to the business that observers like us, independent observers, should be paying attention to over the next 12 to 18 months? You know, at the end of the day, it's what we do for customers. Can we deliver the right foundation of infrastructure for this new style of IT? And that foundation is about technology. It's about route to market. It's about business processes. And what you saw yesterday was not only me, but you watched David Scott on stage. You watched Antonio Neary. We have the privilege of being the front end of thousands of passionate and committed people here at HP and then, frankly, in our ecosystem that are committed to delivering that foundation. And I hope when we look back a couple years from now, people say, wow, what they were able to do is create not only a great set of innovations that help customers on this journey, but an operating model and a group of people that can sustain it going forward. All right, last question. So the truck's pulling away from HP Discover 2014. The bumper sticker. What's the bumper sticker on the back of the truck say from your perspective? Solutions for the new style of IT. Meg's been pretty clear on that message and it seems like you've got the whole organization behind it. So congratulations on the progress that you've made. We'll be watching and thanks for having us here. We really appreciate it. Thanks for coming with you. Thanks for the opportunity. All right, Bill Vecti. That's a great segment. Keep it right there, everybody. Jeff Frick and I will be back. This is theCUBE and this is HP Discover. We're live in Las Vegas. We'll be right back.