 From London, England, it's the Cube. Covering Discover 2016 London. Brought to you by Hewlett Packard Enterprise. Now, here's your host, Dave Vellante and Paul Gillins. Back to the docks of London, everybody. This is the Cube, the worldwide leader in live tech coverage. Paul Gillin and I are excited to have a little blogger session here. Bart Junjuns is here. How'd I do? Yeah, that's right. Okay, that's right. And he's joined by Phil Seller, two bloggers, two practitioners. Bart is an IT consultant. Phil is a practitioner in SE, actually. Right. And welcome, gentlemen to the Cube. Thank you for having us. You're very welcome. So you guys have been participating this week in the blogger program. I heard it was pretty animated this week. It had some of the HP execs in. Bloggers love to challenge the execs which we love. So that's why we want to talk about what's happening in IT land, the real stories from IT. So Phil, start us off. As an IT practitioner and professional, how would you summarize the state of IT today? You know, it's, for the last few years, it's really been about doing more with less. And so automation's been the story that I see most often within both organizations I've been working for recently. You know, it's primarily freeing yourselves up to do better, more valuable sorts of activities to innovate and to have time to actually change the IT operation so that it's easier to manage and it's easier to maintain and that you're not having problems with downtime and with general outages to affect your business. But IT has historically been a kind of a no-win situation, right? You know, you call the IT guys when there's something wrong. When everything's running smoothly, they get no credit. As technology becomes fundamental to more businesses, you know, Mark Benioff said more SaaS companies will come out of non-technology companies than tech companies. As that occurs, is the perception of IT changing or do you still get a bad rep? Well, if you follow marketing, then of course, everything is possible and if you have an IT problem, put it in the cloud and your problems are solved. Now, in reality, sometimes it will happen, but also you get to be realistic. It's not always the case, not every application can be put in the cloud. A company that is not even virtualizing yet, yes, they still exist and you want to put them in the cloud, I'm sorry, but that's 10 steps too fast for them, so you got to educate them, you got to train them of what you really want, yeah? So, and that's what we see now as well with hybrid IT. Now, hybrid IT can be anything, yeah? It can be on-prem data centers, it can be in the cloud or something in between, but even then you have to help them assist for their infrastructure, let it be in their own data center or let it be in the cloud because the cloud, yeah, at the end it's a computer from someone else, but it's still a computer and also there, you have servers and storage guys, they need to do their job, right? So you just use the term hybrid IT, which is a marketing term that HP has been using, HP has been using a lot this week. How about some of these other terms that you're hearing? How real are they to you? Let's start with digital transformation. Is this a real concept for you? Yeah, from my perspective, I think that there's nugget of truth in there. You know, it's a good marketing buzzword, but really what it comes down to is modernization of applications. You know, it's adapting to a new way of doing things at scale, writing applications that are easily deployed and automated. I think that's what I see within digital transformation. You know, it's also a company's idea of disruption and disruptive technologies like Uber and things like that. Within the enterprise, more so, you have to worry about those disruptors, but your challenge is adapting your traditional IT applications and things to be able to do the automated scale sorts of situations. Bart, what's your take on that? Well, often when I go to customers or when I'm teaching classes, I refer to Indeed for the transformation like in Uber or Netflix and so on, but not every customer has an Uber application or is the owner of a lot of video content. So you always have to take a look of what's your workload, what's your application today? What are your type of users today and where do you want to go to? If you have a customer with 1000 users, but you know in five years they still have 1000 users. Okay, it's quite clear. This is the infrastructure you need on Prem or over there, but yeah, Uber or now Pokemon as well, it's going up and now they need a lot of servers, but now they need less servers. Okay, we're not going to call HPA, deliver me 10,000 servers and in three months I don't need them anymore. Now it's coming with that flexible capacity and so on, but even then you've got to be ready for that. HP as the company that delivers the material but also the customer is got to be ready for that and that's on infrastructure level and also an application level. Let me ask you, okay, go ahead, finish. Like I said, yeah, not every application is ready to be in the cloud, not every application is scalable, so every situation is different. We've been hearing that from HP as well. I want to ask you one more and on a one to 10 scale, well one means I have no idea what this means, to 10 means I'm very excited about it. Composable architecture, composable infrastructure. You go first. I go first, okay. Well, now for me, I'm quite confident of knowing what is composable. So let's say it's eight or nine. Oh, okay. Yeah, but because I'm a trainer and you can follow these sessions because a trainer also has to learn it somewhere so I have some opportunities but I understand that there's a lot of people that don't know what composable is. But in your mind it's real. Yeah, and that's real. Next Monday, I have a customer visit and they have rack mount servers and now they said, you know what? That's C7000 blade enclosure. Okay, it's still there for a few years but no, no, I want the future. I want synergy. Now. And Phil, Phil, you agree with that? Resonate with you? It does to a degree. I've worked in the mid-market all of my career so it resonates a lot less in that market space and it's because of the scale in the mid-market. We're not large enough to afford multiple synergy chassis and the scale that would be required in a single data center for that sort of model to work. Now, applying composability to hyper-converge that definitely resonates more towards the market segment that I represent. Well, what about that? I mean, you sort of, HPE seems to be positioning its hyper-converged 380 sort of as a lower-end solution. I say lower-end, not super-high-scale, large organizations. Kind of their knockoff on Nutanix and it is also composability. And here's Nutanix, four or five billion dollar valuations, seems to be growing. Revenue, growing losses as well. I saw that yesterday. Kind of interesting, but still define the market, essentially. What do you see as HPE's position in that whole hyper-converged space? You know, it's an interesting space. They have the software-defined storage play with store virtual that makes sense to put into a hyper-converged offering. It works well. It's extremely affordable, which has been where we've been able to sell it. You know, the company I used to work for was a managed service provider. I helped architect some solutions around store virtual. And so, you know, that works from a cost perspective for small to medium customers. And that's really where I can see them getting good market traction versus a Nutanix where the price tag's just going to be cost prohibitive for those sorts of customers. Paul was mentioning hybrid IT. I wanted to follow up on that. One of the taglines is we make hybrid IT simple. We wrote a piece a year and a half ago saying you don't buy hybrid cloud, you build it. And hybrid IT, if we define it as the ability to move applications and data seamlessly between whatever, private, public, and both, however you define each of those, that's not simple, certainly not today. I mean, maybe there's a simplification of the infrastructure occurring, but the rest of it, the processes associated with it. I wonder if you could sort of validate what I just said and maybe add some more on that. Well, I agree in that because in the keynote I saw, I think, a hundred times the word simple, yeah? So, apparently it's got to be simple. Now, I agree in some kind of way the user experience is simple. If I give my smartphone to my six-year-old boy, he can work with it because it's a simple user experience that doesn't mean that that smartphone is a simple device. There is still a lot of technology in there and now, with the cloud, let it be. On-prem, you build it yourself. Now with Azure Stack, I think that's really a cool thing with the Microsoft partnership with Azure Stack that you can build your own Azure, small, medium, big in your own data center. The user experience is similar with public cloud, but at the end you still have servers and you have storage and you have a network and you can have problems with that. Also in the public cloud, you don't see it, but also there, there are problems. You see outages in the public cloud as well. So, it's simple for the user, but you still need people behind it, public or private or somewhere in between, you still need some kind of expert people to support the infrastructure. So, the infrastructure is still important and it's not only the software, right? And that's what we have to educate those small and medium and big partners because I'm also a fan, everyone wants synergy. I'm based in Belgium, we have also small and a lot of medium companies and they want synergy. I said, you're going too fast, go for a hyper-convert solution which is also scalable up to 60 nodes. You can put more than 1,000 VMs on there. It's also simple, the user experience is simple. So, first start to walk and then run before you're going to run a marathon. We talk a lot about infrastructure as code. How hyped is that versus the reality? At this point, from what I've seen, it is a little bit of hype, but there's also a ramp needed for infrastructure as code. And HP's done some really good things around that with their OneView product and being able to call into it using an API and stuff like that and then establishing support with Chef and Puppet and other vendors in the ecosystem to be able to do it. But there's a ramp up and things like the Redfish specification and technologies like that that allow you into the infrastructure to be able to make those instantiations of whatever you're trying to do. I mean, that had to establish first and it needed to standardize to some degree. Each vendor having their own flavor makes it more difficult to support for third-party software companies. To what degree, in your opinion, will the traditional IT suppliers be able to mimic the simplicity of the public cloud? Whether it's HPE or whomever, Dell EMC, Nutanix, et cetera, to what degree will they be able to recreate that experience on-prem and what impact will that have on the market? What's your outlook on that? Well, it will be more on software level, that's for sure. So the customer will need to choose which experience do I want? Do I want to go the HPE or the OpenStack way with or without cloud system? Do I want to go to Amazon way? Do I want to go to Microsoft way? That's more the user experience. And I think that that's important for a company like HPE that they say, yeah, we can do it. If it's OpenStack, we have an API, we can talk with it. We partner with Microsoft. Yes, we can do it. And I think that's important that you're not choosing just for one solution that it stays as open as possible. What do you make of HPE, giving it's OpenStack distro and staccato to SUSE? I can't say that I'm all that surprised, honestly, that it was moved out. With the announcement of basically selling out the software division to Micro Focus, I don't think this comes as a huge shock. The OpenStack distribution, they've done a lot of work around it and they've contributed a lot to the program, to the foundation and stuff. For OpenStack staccato is one that I am particularly interested in and have been for a while because it plays to the automation story that I've tried to create in my past employer. And it's a good product, it's not simple and back to that simple story. Any of these solutions at this point, they're trying to attack and make it easier to mimic that public cloud sort of interface, but they're not simple, they're complex. It feels like IT's getting more complex, isn't it? Absolutely. You're not allowed to say that, but it is actually. You both have significant knowledge and personal investment in HP. This is a company that's gone through a lot of changes over the last 18 months. How confident are you? How positive are you going forward? Coming out of this conference, in HP's direction, that it is heading in the right direction. Maybe you deserve it. To understand this, you've got to come to an event like HPE Discover, okay? I talk with people in Belgium from HPE and you get their view because it's server guy and storage guy and network guy. That's good. And then software, there are some people as well, but to get the overall picture, you've got to come to visit HPE Discover. America, Europe, I go there because for me, this is the place to be to get the information. It's here where you can meet the people where you can see, okay, we're going that way, that's the new technology. And the cool thing is that, yeah, you can talk directly with the program managers, the developers of the tools. That's what I like the most is because it's really the accessibility of all the people. But the question, how confident are you in HPE's direction right now? I'm quite confident. I like the event a lot. I saw a lot of new things. It's still things that I understand and I feel confident for the next year. You know, it's, the way I see it, what's left of the HPE after the spin out, after the software sell out, is the core of what I've traditionally used from the company. It's the data center infrastructure and there's still some really great technology here in the company. 3PAR in particular, the Aruba assets and they're doing some really interesting things for sure. On those fronts, I feel pretty confident for the company. You know, but with the thread of cloud, with struggles that they've had in cloud, I can see concern or whether it should be some concern over their ability to execute. I don't have a crystal ball. Only time will tell with that. But the assets that are left inside the company are good assets from a data center infrastructure standpoint. All right gentlemen, we'll leave it there. Thanks very much for sharing your perspectives and best of luck going forward. Really pleasure having you. Okay, keep it right there, buddy. Paul Gillan, I'll be back with our next guest right after this is theCUBE. We're live from Excel London, HPE Discover 2016. Right back.