 Okay, we're back here live at HP Discover 2012 in Europe and Germany. I'm John Furrier, the founder of SiliconANGLE.com. This is theCUBE, our flagship program and go out to events where the action is extract the signal from the noise. This is part of our SiliconANGLE.tv. Independent editorial coverage. We love going to the events. This is our third HP Discover and we'd love to talk to anyone who's got the signal from the noise and my guest here is a good friend of SiliconANGLE and also social media buddy on Twitter, Sam Johnson at SamJ. Sam, welcome back to theCUBE. John, good to see you. You're a CUBE alumni, as we say. You've been on theCUBE before. Also, you're what we call a tech athlete. You're one of the Mavericks out there who actually is out in the trenches, rolling up your sleeves, getting the job done, playing with technology, deploying stuff, also communicating with that. Obviously in social media, you have a great fan base. You're part of the Twitterati and the Clouderati and very active. So it's great to see you and great to have you on theCUBE. You've also worked at Google and their data center storage servers, all that good stuff and now at Equinox doing a lot of, you know about data centers. We don't want to drill into the whole Google thing because I know confidentially a lot of stuff there, but I do want to pick your brain for this talk here at HP Discover to try to kind of extract the signal from the noise here. And obviously HP as a company has a black eye right now. Destruction of stock value is well documented. Huge tornado of crap right now around HP. But outside of that, you know, that putting that aside, HP's got some really cool technology and they're playing in a lot of big areas. Obviously they're big data part of autonomy and some other parts of the group. And obviously they have infrastructure and they got, you know, obviously computing products, personal products. And so they're poised for a comeback, on my opinion. Some people may debate that, but happy to do that on another forum. But I want to talk to you about the data center because that's where the action is. On the consumer web, as you know, on Twitter, RIP, Frothy Times, TechCrunch wrote an article. Oh, it's the world's crashing. Well, their world's crashing. The consumer web is kind of going through a thinning of the herd, as they say, in the VC market to the consumer wraps or more lifestyle business. Not a lot of Facebook's out there left. But on the enterprise side, it's booming. A lot of reconstruction, a lot of transformation, a lot of build out going on, real business being done. And the action's really at the data center. So whether you're a cloud provider or whether you're an enterprise or anything, there's some stuff to do. So let's drill on that. So what's your take on the data center? I mean, in our little world, VMware bought Nacera for a billion dollars. And that was Game Changer. Cisco kind of fell back out of their chair. That on the networking side certainly raises some eyebrows. You've got hypervisor vendors. You have independent people like HP who are agnostic on the hypervisor. You've got enterprises. You've got software defined blank. Everything's now software defined. The queue we can call software defined media. I don't know, it sounds good, but a lot of hype. Where's the signal from that hype? I think at the end of the day, in terms of HP's place in all of this, when you walk through the data center, and especially in any of the enterprise cages and so on, you'll often see a lot of HP kit, both in the compute side and in the networking side as well. In terms of what's going on in computing, I mean cloud really is the transition from product to service. That's really, when you boil it down, that's what's going on. And that's a fundamental shift for a lot of vendors. Some are doing a better job of it than others. You see vendors like Microsoft and so on who traditionally have offered software as a product and now offering software as a service. You get these new generation of vendors like Salesforce who actually have always offered software as a service. So it's a very interesting place to be. The analogy I use, people complain about this, is about electricity. We used to buy electricity as a product, now we buy it as a service. And those who are worth their salt will still exist in the new world order, I guess, and those who aren't will go and move on to other things. So there's a couple of key trends that we're following at SiliconANGLE Keep On. One is obviously people are building their own stuff. So all the large scale infrastructure guys like Facebook and Google and Amazon now, we've been reported following Google's footsteps are building their own, right? Because there's no one's delivering anything. And we've heard stories of vendor, big vendor, X got booted out because they build their own equipment. Not a lot of banks or anyone will do that, but eventually that's an indicator of what's happening in the marketplace. How do you take what Facebook, Google and Amazon are doing from a quote, business model perspective, and how does that translate to someone who's buying gear in an enterprise, a big bank, big healthcare, these big industries, they're not going to build their own data centers. They're going to outsource here, they're going to have a hybrid, they're going to have some private cloud. What does that tell us about what's going on in the data center? Yeah, I think what we're doing is moving a lot from heterogeneous systems to homogenous systems. So you'll see racks where everything in the rack is the same. Whereas 10 years ago you'd look in a rack and there'd be five or 10 different logos. Another trend is that, I guess one of the enablers for that is that we're now putting reliability into the software rather than the hardware. Because while it may cost millions of dollars to build a platform like the Google platform or the Facebook platform, once you've built it once, the marginal cost of that is zero. Whereas the marginal cost of reliable hardware is linear. The more reliable servers you have, the bigger you get, the more it costs. So I think that that's one of the things that these, I guess the pioneers like your Googles and Amazons and so on have created, but it is also available through software like Hadoop and through commodity PC hardware and so on and it is actually available to these customers now. And they're increasingly starting to use that as well. I want to ask you a question, just kind of change. And we'll come back to some of the data center conversation. You're on Twitter, very vocal. Fun to follow because you get good content as well as some entertainment as we say on Twitter. It's always fun to have those conversations. But there's a lot of hype. I mean, you see the gimmicks all left and right and from a marketing perspective, company, you know, I'm the leader in this and in marketing all these new concepts. What's your take on that? I mean, obviously, from the perspective of we're in a massively changing marketplace, you don't really need to market well, market craziness when there's massive demand. So the question is, what do you think of some of the marketing out there and where is the real demand happening in the marketplace? Is it everything, apps, mobile, cloud? So marketing hype and gimmicks to what company should be doing where the real demand is? Yeah, I think what you hear people talking about versus what people are actually doing are two very different things. I also think that a lot of the marketing is kind of misplaced. So no SQL, for example, and big data are, if anything, misnomers. But there is still this big shift and I'd call it more of an evolution rather than a revolution. I mean, big data in itself really is looking at data in different ways such that you need to re-engineer your systems to handle the volume, velocity, or variety of that information. Similarly, no SQL, it had nothing to do with SQL. It was all about the relational structure of databases. And we're starting to see not only companies like your Googles and Facebooks and so on, but then also companies like Netflix or rolling out Facebook's Cassandra. That stuff is starting to penetrate the enterprise as well. A lot of enterprises have Hadoop up and running. And so, again, very interesting to see what people are actually doing rather than what they're talking about. Let's talk about Amazon for a minute because obviously they just had their Invent Conference. NetApp just announced a deal with Amazon, which is allowing some storage on that, which might be a nice pathway for some hybrid for NetApp as they kind of try to kind of change the rules a little bit of the game. What should take of Amazon? Obviously we had Adrian on the Cube at Cassandra Summit and he was telling me that he had the SSD version of the cloud. So what's going on with Amazon? How does it relate to some of the more practical reliability and security issues that people need in the enterprise? Well, I think that at the end of the day, your availability is your problem. You own your availability. If you can use software like Cassandra and so on to be able to leverage systems like Amazon, that's great. But really the way that IT is going is a hybrid IT. So, if you ask Gartner, they say that the hybrid IT is the new IT and it's here to stay. What we mean by that is using legacy when it's appropriate, using private cloud when it's appropriate and using public cloud as well. And what I spend a lot of my time doing is actually working out across over 100 data centers around the world. How do we connect this stuff together? How do we enable customers, companies to connect to public cloud providers and back into their head and branch offices and make all of that work seamlessly? So let's talk about agile IT. I was just talking with Tom Norton who's at HP Global Services. And he's awesome and he just had a great conversation around big data and how he's delivering to customers and essentially what we were talking about was the businesses are driving the requirements to IT kind of like they used to but now at a larger scale. So IT has to be always on and turn key and push buttons. So they have to be very responsive. How do you build an IT organization? How would you advise folks out there who have to essentially be scalable, flexible and agile? I mean, because you want to turn on some public cloud, you push a button. I want to have a hybrid cloud or I want to turn on a mobile app. But I want to have to do a huge DevOps roll out. But I have DevOps. So there's a lot of moving parts here. How do you look at that and how do you advise companies? So I think one of the big trends you need to look at is deprimitrization. So what that means is the old ways have an office and build a fire all around it and you had to come in nine to five to access the IT systems. Nowadays, even the smallest of companies maybe you've seen the HSBC ad with the lemonade stand. Even the smallest of companies are multinational. They deal in multiple currencies and they, to quote the CIO of Bechtel, he talks about rather than pulling the network to the data, I'll put the data where the network is. I don't, for my first year or two at Equinix I never actually had to connect to the LAN or the WAN. Everything I did was through a cloud desktop. I could log in, go into Salesforce and so on from there without having to dial in. That was really helpful. We've just got an expense reporting application now I do have to connect to the LAN for the first time. So I'm not very happy about that but I think that's a very important thing is enabling people to work from home, enabling people to work from their own devices I think is a very important trend which isn't just hype. And moving the center of gravity of the IT to the center of gravity of the user base which is effectively out there on the internet. How much reconstruction does IT need to go through in your opinion over the next decade from where it is today to be truly agile? So I think that the, we're looking at the second major paradigm shift in IT. The first being from mainframes to client server, the second being from client server to cloud. And in order to do that, you need to move, virtualization isn't just about hardware it's about storage and networking and so on and eventually about data centers as well. So I think the best thing to do is to establish a homogenous private cloud architecture in a multi-tenant data center and then start migrating applications over to it. Connect out to public providers like Google and Salesforce and Amazon and so on when you have to. But use the right tool for the job. I think that's the best way to do it. Let's talk about applications because obviously I totally agree with you that transformation mainframe client server you had computing and you had apps. Granted they were on top of those platforms. Now you have cloud which is a whole not a level of infrastructure conversations so I'm going to find data center, et cetera, et cetera but now apps are mobile and we mentioned expensive ports everything on top of that. What's going on in your opinion at the app level right now? How early is it? What are the key issues? Is it still Clujie? What's your view on that? So 20 years ago you'd look to businesses to see what was coming next. Faxes, international director, they had it first. They had the money, they had the infrastructure. Nowadays to look at what's happening next we look at the consumers. This is the consumerization of IT. So we look at things like Skype and Facebook and so on. If we look at Gmail and Facebook versus say Microsoft Outlook it's a completely different interface. It's all web based. It's delivered from a global platform of servers. It's high performance. It's highly secure. It's highly available. That's the difference. Let's talk about another disruption area. Outsourcing, obviously HP is a huge outsourcing. They took the write down on EDS which is they swallowed that thing and had to let a lot of it out. A lot of hot air in that deal. But you got other big firms out there that have been handling all the roles for companies. Capgemini is some of the big names I've interviewed on theCUBE and those are big monster companies. And then we've got guys like Randy Bias, the cloud scaling friends of ours that are building these startups boutiques that are going to grow and be the new guys. So let's talk about the new architecture of outsourcing or managed services. What do you think of that? I mean what's your, because it's, you got the old way kind of the Capgemini. I want to run everything for you and then that doesn't really give you a lot of flexibility and then you're going to have a lot of more of the nimble guys. What's your take on that whole market of outsourcing and any predictions you can share? Well I think we used to talk about application service providers and the problem with that was that you'd have somebody else running your IT in the same fashion that you were using the same technology at the same scale, single tenant, but then charging you like a premium on top of that utility premium if you like. And this didn't really add a whole lot of value but if you moved to like for example a generic service like email, you moved to a service like Microsoft Office 365. They get the economies of scale, you've got your multi-tenancy. So that's kind of I guess the end game of outsourcing, right? You don't have to have people running servers and doing backups and all this stuff. Running email is not something at the end of the day which gives you a competitive advantage. So the people in the IT who are worth their salt really will go on to applying IT to business problems rather than this $8 in 10 of keeping the lights off. So I think it's a natural progression. So it's about the business value. Exactly. Right, final question for you is your take on software defined networking. Obviously the NSEER acquisition caught everyone off guard really, it's category now and not a lot of research out there, not a lot of data. I mean, I was talking to someone and we have, oh I think we have the best data on that category through our unique proprietary tool that we built but you know, you can't just call a survey house and say hey, give me a panel on what people think about software defined networking. It's so new and so disruptive and emerging is not a lot of data on that. So I want to get your opinion. What do you think of software defined networking and how that relates to what HP's talking about here which is software defined servers and software defined now storage as David Scott announced yesterday. So HP's looking solid there but specifically the networking. That's a big part of it. What's your take on that? So I think virtualization was a big deal for hardware. I think virtualization in networking is a big deal as well. It certainly is interesting for dealing with those kind of edge applications like storage where you need to have the high performance and so on. There's a lot, Ethernet is a non-deterministic network so you need to have a whole lot of things around that to make that work properly with applications like storage. I spend a lot of my time working on how to connect these cloud components together and a lot of that is through network virtualization, things like VLANs and so on. So you can currently come into the Equinix marketplace and find a cloud provider but how do you actually connect to them? That's I think where a lot of the value is in wiring all of these hybrid IT systems together. Actually I have one more final question. I think we have a little more time here. I just want to drill into the virtualization. Obviously virtualization, let's take VMware for instance as a random example. I mean, start out as a completely different company and then now it's morphed into a completely different direction. A lot of speculation around what's going on there. They're still doing well. But what's happened in virtualization that has caught you off guard or that you've predicted? And then the second half of the question is what do you think of virtualization going forward? How that will morph? So can't it tell me what you think you got right about the virtualization market and what caught you off guard? Wow, I didn't think that would happen, if anything. And then how it morphs going forward? Yeah, so I think the main thing that's happening in virtualization is the commoditization of the hypervisor. There's a bunch of different ones. Now you can't really get any value from selling a hypervisor. A lot of the activity there is in these cloud management platforms. I think though that the big one that's kind of got me is in the standardization of it. You know, I've been established the open cloud initiative and so on. So this is a big area of interest for me. I kind of worry that we're going in the direction where we'll end up with a word document of the cloud. So I would really like to see us focus more on- What do you mean by that? Well, you had Office 97, Service Pack 2, and you could only open that word document if you wanted it to work properly on Office 97 with Service Pack 2. You had a bunch of open office and stuff but if you tried to transfer the documents it never really kind of worked properly. And I worry that we'll have the same thing in the cloud space. And I really would rather not see that. Relative to the hypervisor or apps? Well, I mean it's mostly about the height of the virtual machine format and so on. But what I'd really like to see are going back to the hybrid IT side of things. It's one thing if you can connect all of this stuff together, but I want to be able to seamlessly, like literally drag and drop or ideally automate the migration of a virtual machine from a private, you know, on-premise or hosted infrastructure to a public cloud provider like Amazon and vice versa. I think that's a very important question. Well, that's David Scott was pointing to that and I know there's a lot of work going on University of Illinois around kind of, with compiler technology around virtual support ability. Well, one of the things that I'm working on is like an SMTP for the cloud, but for cloud workloads, like a simple workload transfer protocol. So watch this space, we might come up with something interesting. Okay, at Sam Jay is his Twitter handle, at Sam Jay, follow him on Twitter, great person to know, doing some great cutting-edge work. Thanks for coming on theCUBE, great to see you again. This is SiliconANGLE.tv, SiliconANGLE.com's CUBE coverage of HP Discover in Europe in Germany. We'll be right back with our next guest after this short break.