 This is Stu Miniman with wikibond.org, SiliconANGLE TVs, live coverage of HP Discover 2013 here in Lost Wages, Nevada. And what we like to do at these shows, of course, is help extract the signal from the noise. One of my favorite things when going to events is finding those smart people out there where you can just have candid conversations about what's happening in the industry. And for this segment, I'm happy to bring what I would call a Clouderati chat into theCUBE. So joining us for this segment is Tim Crawford. He's a strategic advisor to CIOs, here checking out the show, really an expert as to the reality of what's happening in the cloud and how companies should address these new technologies. So, Tim, welcome to theCUBE. Great. Thanks a lot, Stu. I appreciate the invite to join you here on set. Yeah, so one of the things I love hanging with the Clouderati, of course, is half the time we don't even talk about technology, whether you're talking about travel or how you're doing on the tables last night. But here, we're going to focus a little bit about technology. So can you tell me what's your impression bit of the show and HP's overall messaging? Yeah. I think that kind of using some of the vagus analogies, a lot of folks in the business would say, leveraging IT today is like rolling the dice. What are you going to get? And especially with some of the new fangled technologies, when you talk about cloud and big data and whatnot. Here at HP Discover, one of the things I've found is that HP actually has some real interesting stories to tell. There are definitely some gaps in the mix, in the messaging, in the solutions that they're providing. But I have to say, it really isn't the old tired company that some of us might have thought of in the past. But they definitely have some work to do, too. So when we talk about kind of making big bets, if I look at the overall messaging from HP, two things that keep coming back to me are convergence and open. I wonder what's your take? What does that mean to a CIO in today's environment? Well, there's a difference between what it means today versus what it's meant in the past, too. And I think you have to put a time continuum on this as well. What it means today in terms of openness is having the flexibility avoiding things like vendor lock-in, which everyone wants to talk about as a concern. But it's also trying to find ways to work more effectively, work more efficiently, leverage a multitude of different solutions from different providers, and ensure that they are going to work together, that it's not just bucket of parts that you're then left to have to figure out how to assemble with your own team. And the reality is that's a lot of work. On top of an already overflowing plate that all of us have had as CIOs in the past. Yeah. So when we talk that openness a little bit further, OpenStack is pretty critical to HP's strategy. I want to get your opinion on, first of all, where is OpenStack maturity? How should enterprises look at this technology? And then the follow-up of that is what's your take on HP's involvement in that? Yeah. Really good question. I've long since felt that OpenStack has just a ton of potential. I think there's a real question as to whether the enterprise is the right place for it, especially as we start thinking about through time. So what you use today in a commercial offering like VMware or some of the alternatives. So I wonder if you could just clarify for us, Florida, and when you say that. So were you saying that really service providers and large web-scale companies should do OpenStack and enterprise use services? Yeah. That's exactly where I was going. I think for a lot of enterprises, the question is do you really want to get into open source? Because it is not free. There is a requirement. There's a significant cost associated with managing and getting involved in open source movements. So are you prepared to do that? And that's more than just paying a bill. There's some staff and knowledge required to do that. So some enterprises will decide to do it. But I think a lot of folks will say, you know, I'm going to sit back, wait for the dust to settle and figure out, you know, kind of how this plays out. The service providers, I think, are a completely different perspective. Having worked with a number of service providers and helping them through this kind of thought process, I would say that OpenStack is a great opportunity for service providers because it provides you the ability to customize your offering, provides something that makes sense for the market that you're going after. But at the same time, you have the scale to be able to dedicate those same kinds of resources that you need in order to really engage and take advantage of an open source solution that's as complex as OpenStack. Yeah, no, no, great point. Wikibon, what we tend to look at is really these massive scale environments, you know, are growing so much and they buy so much equipment that they are willing to spend time to save money. So they have the people that will program their environment and code things, and they really look for defriiled infrastructure, as opposed to the enterprise people, they don't have necessarily the skill set and they don't have the time. They're so burdened with what they have today, so they will spend money to save time. We're starting to see some of those methodologies from the hyperscale bleeding into the enterprise. Are you seeing that? I'm not seeing that as broadly as some might tout. From a real standpoint, you'll see it in pockets. You'll see pockets of folks that are starting to kind of explore the open source world, maybe play with it in specific areas or specific use cases, but I'm not seeing broad adoption of it. I'm seeing far more conversation around how could I take advantage of that, or how can those benefits that open source, something as complex as OpenStack, could bring for me through the service provider channel. So if you think of it more as a channel, how can the service provider take advantage of the benefits of something like OpenStack and then pass that down to the consumer being the enterprise? Yeah, I guess where I poke on that is not just outside of open source. If you look how from an operational model, how these giants manage things, it's moving some to say kind of a DevOps environment, but that organizational structure, CIOs in the enterprise today, they're spending way too much on what we would call undifferentiated heavy lifting. We like to poke at Nick Carr's seminal. Does IT matter? We think IT can really be a differentiator today if you start talking about things like big data, and where's value creation that IT can help? Okay, let me push back on that and clarify a little bit because I think if you look at it as traditional IT versus the new IT model, traditional IT is dead. For the vast majority of enterprises today, the traditional model just does not work moving forward. And we're starting to see the evolution of that starting to take hold. The new model, which is still in its infancy, we haven't developed that really well, is here to stay. So if you were to say generically IT is dead and we're basing that off the traditional model, I would completely agree. I think that model is dead. But IT as a general foothold within the organization in terms of both the breadth and depth of access that it has and ultimately the value it can provide to an enterprise, oh my gosh, we haven't even tapped the potential yet. But only for those IT organizations that are willing to go through the transformative stages from the traditional model to the new model. Yeah, so some great points there, Tim. I wonder if we could touch on big data. What's your take on big data in general and what have you been hearing from HP? Is that a bright spot for them? It is a bright spot for HP. I've had a number of conversations here at HP Discover talking about cloud, talking about big data, talking about converged infrastructure. I will say that the announcement and discussions around haven and how autonomy and Vertica play into that as well as some of the other components that are going to bolt on in the ecosystem they're starting to build, I think becomes pretty interesting for a lot of enterprises. The question is, are we actually going to see that play out? And that's when the execution starts to play a pretty significant role as to whether HP is successful or not. Yeah, great points there. I'm wondering, sometimes we talk about where is the intersection between cloud and big data? Soundbot I love from Wikibon co-founder Dave Vellante is actually big data gives the cloud something to do. Where do you think? Yeah, I think of it a little differently. Big data gives IT a future. Cloud is just an enabler to quickly get there. So there are a lot of folks that are still kind of battling swords or whatever analogy you want to use. What's the latest and greatest bright shiny object that are newest technology that we can start to leverage? I think when you start thinking about bigger problems that we're trying to solve within an enterprise and big data being one of the opportunities in that you start to go, you know what these smaller issues or these other issues that we were arguing about really aren't as big as we thought they were. We've got bigger fish to fry later. So how do we start to leverage the cloud, adopt the cloud much more quickly and then move on to more interesting things around big data? Because I think that is really where you start to talk about the intersection of where technology and business really hit head on. Yeah, one of the challenges I look at HP, they joke when they put up a slide that says, we wish we could have used two point font because we have so many solutions out there to fit this market, especially even when they were talking about cloud this morning and the keynote. When we boil it down, what's your message to CIOs? Is cloud predominantly changing an operation model? And if that's the case, where does big data fit? It's a new value creation, new ways to leverage their data, how do you boil that down? So first off, to one of your points, having that breadth is both a good thing and it's also a bad thing because how do you sell it? If you get focused though on cloud and big data and those particular solutions, I think cloud gives you the opportunity to leverage different operational models. But one thing that doesn't often get discussed but can also lead to success or failure is how well are you thinking about your process and governance changes? Because those play a pretty distinctive role when you start moving from that traditional model to that new model and start putting cloud into play. So let's assume for a minute, for conversation, you're addressing that, you're addressing the technology pieces around cloud. Now you can start to build an operational model that can take advantage of things like big data. And the other thing is it refocuses your IT organization, right? So instead of being this technology organization, you truly are moving more in the direction of being a business organization, which is ultimately what they've wanted for how many years now, right? A lot of years. Yeah. Okay, so Tim, at Wikibon, we usually like to give advice to CIOs and I know that's what you do. So can you tell me what's kind of the biggest misconception you think CIOs have today? Have they gotten beyond just reading about cloud in the magazines and the online journals? What would you say is their biggest hurdle or misconception for them to be able to move forward to take advantage of what's available today? Well, I think the first thing is you have to take the old paradigms and throw them away. The way we've managed IT for the last 20 years, and I've said this before, but the way we've managed IT for the last 20 years or so, it's not going to serve us while moving forward. So we need new paradigms. And that's where starting to leverage new models from cloud and big data make a lot of sense. The other things, start looking at the stack. Start at the bottom and work your way up as quickly as possible. Look at your data centers. Why do you have your own data centers? Why are you running your own email platforms? What's differentiable about that from your business to your competition? And it's not until you really get to, above the platforms and into the applications and really the line of business apps that it gets really interesting in that conversation. Everything below that, it's table stakes. It's really just table stakes. So how do you quickly start to evolve? And again, I go back to, it's an organizational shift. It's a process shift. It's a technology shift, right? So people process technology is still well and live. It's just taken a different form. So I often like to ask what's the coolest technology that you've seen? But if you talk people process and technology and the people in process side, where should people be going to learn about this? How do they learn from people that have been there before? Where do you point people and what's a cool way to do that? Is this where I offer my phone number? No. Absolutely, people like that. No, I think, when you look at the problem, and I think it's important to understand the problem first. The problem today is not a technology one. The problem today is an organizational one. So how do we help people through the organization? To your point, is it a training issue? I don't think so. I don't think it's a skills issue as much as it's an organizational paradigm. So how do we start organizing our IT organization? And that starts from the top down. I don't think this is a grassroots bottom-up effort. I think it starts with the top and works its way down to start to organize in such a way that you are best aligned with the business and what they're trying to do. And what that means is you're looking at business strategy. You're understanding what the objectives of your company are. And then you're saying, okay, what are we doing within the IT organization to be able to support and align with that? And if we are doing something and it's not aligned with that, I think you really have to have a heart to heart and ask yourself, why are you doing it? So the issue for CIOs today is it's not just about cost savings. If you're in that cost savings mode, you're in the wrong mode. You need to be focused on how can you deliver greater value? And when I say greater value to business, what I mean is how can you position yourself to be able to, if you're the CIO, to carry a P&L, carry responsibility for a new line of business for the company. And that's a very different world for most CIOs than just being a technology support work. Takes a lot of work, but I think it starts at the top and works its way down and it's a mindset, it's a cultural shift more than a skill shift. So, you know, we've off the top there, there's kind of the maintaining the business the CIs do, how do CIs grow the business, how do they really transform or innovate for the business. So, you know, what do you see, you talk about kind of the next generation of CIOs, what are they going to look like in your mind? Yeah, the next generation of CIOs not going to be a technologist. And in fact, we're seeing this today in some Spartan areas, but the new model CIO is not a technologist. So, I think that kind of becomes a wake up call for those of us that might be coming up through the rank and file and aspiring to be CIO, how do we get there? And it's exposure to the other lines of business, exposure out into the business in terms of what do they do? So, what does marketing do? How can I start to do things for marketing that they haven't even asked me for? And it's important that we start to kind of think in that realm, but it's the new CIO is a combination of a business leader that has some technology background, but it's not a technology leader. All right, hey, I did remember one bit of news that we heard early this morning talking about the cloud wars. Amazon's really the elephant in the room here and HP fired a salvo that workday is moving over to the HP cloud. Wonder your take on that? Yeah, I think this still kind of fits in with the question around, so is Amazon a place that can hold production-based applications for a long period of time? Is it really geared for that or is it better served as a sandbox environment? There's nothing wrong with that. It's just let's be honest about what these different services are best served for. What's also interesting about that is when you look at some of the HP solutions, like I've spent some time looking at Moonshot that they've been talking about and announced several weeks back now. It's a really interesting platform, but it's not a general purpose server. It's not a high performance general purpose server. And so once you start to understand what pieces fit where, then you can start to pick and choose, okay, I need X, let me leverage that into my bailiwick of different components. I need this, let me pull that in. And then you start to put together a real interesting story to be able to solve your problems. Actually, quick clarification for you. Moonshot was actually announced back in November of 2011. It's actually a GA product now and I agree it's built for certain applications. We're getting slow on time and there's one thing I totally forgot to ask you. If you look at that cloud war, especially how HP and Amazon have been looking at things, they've been fighting over service level agreements. And you've got an interesting take on SLAs. Could you share that with our audience? SLAs are dead. Can you elaborate? SLAs are dead. I mean, the purpose of the SLA really has to evolve and it's no longer a service level agreement. It really should just be an expectation setting device and nothing more because at the end of the day, and I know others have different perspectives on this, but if you think about it, you spend a lot of time negotiating SLAs. What do you get out of it? You might get some percentage of the value of the contract if you experience an outage, but usually the responsibility centers around the customer proving that there was an outage and proving that the provider had failed in their duties and their contractual obligations. And at the end of the day, that percentage of the contract value pales in comparison to the impact to the company. So I think you go through that and then at the end of the day, you're probably looking for another provider anyway, so what have you really gained? So I think SLAs really aren't that valuable. I think it's more important to think of it more as an expectation setting device than an agreement. Well, Tim, I spent hours talking with you and luckily I have had a lot of time to talk with you. This show has been one of the highlights for me, really digging into the reality of Clouds. CIOs are addressing it in kind of those new models. So I'm at Stu on Twitter. You can also reach me Stu at wikibon.org. Tim is at T. Crawford, what's your vectors? Yeah, at T. Crawford's best way to get me on Twitter. And for the non-Twitter people? Yeah, you can get me on the web at timcrawford.org. Well, Tim, once again, really appreciate you coming on, having this Clouderati chat in person. Look forward to seeing you at some of the other events. This is SiliconANGLE's live coverage from HP Discover 2013 and we'll be back with our next guest after this break.