 This is HP Discover. We are in Las Vegas for day two of three days of live coverage here at HP Discover 2013. Place where all their top customers, partners, tech gurus are all here. And it's great and great environment. I'm John Furrier, the founder of SiliconANGLE, and I'm joined by co-hosts. Hi everybody, I'm Dave Vellante, wikibon.org. Roger Levy is here. He's the general manager of HP's cloud services. Roger, welcome to theCUBE. Well, thank you. Great to be back again. Yeah, so we're talking off camera, a lot of action. Obviously, you guys hit the heart of it with OpenStack, we're really excited about that. I mean, we had theCUBE at OpenStack. I was watching all the videos, I was salivating, I wish I could have been out there with you guys. So Dave, we had him on theCUBE, but he also was a cloud service provider. He's been in the cloud business for years, so he knows a little bit about cloud. So we had a good chat. So what's your takeaway with the OpenStack here? So I was just on Twitter yesterday, Roger, commenting that it is being talked about a lot here at HP Discover, more than I would have expected, I would have expected, given that it's such a big show for HP across their enterprise customers. But cloud is super hot here at OpenStack. They're both super hot. I mean, the real issue, I mean, for us is cloud is one of our major strategic pillars for the corporation. We have, I think, a tremendous opportunity at this show to talk with our partners, talk with our customers, and really let them see what we're doing in the cloud. And that's really across all aspects of cloud, public, private, and managed in our full hybrid solution. And OpenStack's a huge piece of it. As we talked about up in OpenStack in Portland, I mean, we, as HP, looked at this promising but unproven technology two plus years ago before a lot of people were signing on board, made a major commitment to it, a major investment to it, not only in the financial sense, but certainly also in the strategic sense and in the area of committing people, committing code, and really working to make OpenStack a very successful community. So talk about, I want you to comment, if you can, and candidly around HP's personnel. You know, David and I love to use sports analogies. The team on the field, the cloud team. You've got Tom Joyce now as a GM. You're out here. The team is pretty well stacked. It's just to put some color around it. What's it like internally? You've got some people who know what they're talking about. How's it shaping out with the team here at HP? We've got, I mean, we've got a dream team. I mean, we have a set of folks who have been in this business in one way or another for quite a bit of time. We've all had experience in both large companies and startup companies. I've been in startups, you know, came out of the telecom space, spent time in the enterprise space, spent time in the past space. SARS got an amazing background in networking, now, you know, coupled with the work that he did in Cisco, in 3Com, then into HP. I mean, we have built power. And, you know, I guess really the behind the scenes aspect is, as you can imagine, lots of discussions, lots of opinions, but, you know, the reality is, it is great. It's great debate. And at the end of the day, we are making tremendous progress. So I'm just thrilled to be part of this team. So tell about what's going on in your world right now. So the teams, I agree with you, by the way, I'm really impressed. And holistically, I think what's happening is that you have a holistic management structure where you have someone looking over the mining the stores, I, who's always the same, someone's mining the store, both at the top with SARS, and then underneath, we just had Bethany Mayeron. She's mining the store from the networking fabric side. So you've got the fabric covered. Absolutely. You've got the top line air show covered, the ground game covered. So you get everything in the now in the middle. That's cool. And by the way, great, great thanks to Bethany. I mean, one of the things we just announced today at the show is the virtual private networking capability on the public cloud based on SDN. That was done completely in conjunction with Bethany's team in HP networking and with HP Labs. You know, just a great teamwork effort. SDN is complex. It's really hard stuff. Don't forget the data stuff too, Dave. We just talked about tiering and data management. It's huge. Absolutely. Well, you know, we love sports analogies, Roger and theCUBE. All right. So it's like the horses are coming around the track on the far turn. And all of a sudden, you know, in the horse racing process, they say the red seat parted. And all of a sudden it's like, here comes OpenStack. And it was like, it's an amazing time in our industry because you know, let's talk frankly, when VMware messed up its pricing two years ago, customer base said, whoa, uh-oh, lock in. And all these alarms went off. And then of course you got Amazon doing its thing. It's like a wake up call to CIOs. Hey, coming into the enterprise. You guys are very comfortable not having to own the operating system and the platform you've proven that you can make money there for years. So OpenStack was sort of a natural tendency for you. And so it's like, like I said, that red seat parted and all of a sudden here comes OpenStack as a really viable contender with all the development, developer momentum behind it, some proof points, some real action. And you guys are sitting in a good spot right now. I think absolutely. One of the key observations I'd make on OpenStack is early on it was a vendor driven activity. You know, the vendors really got together. They were, you know, some of the primary people in moving it forward. The thing that really I think is interesting and certainly very pleasing is we're seeing more and more of the enterprise customer and the large enterprise and small enterprise actually now getting much more actively engaged and driving OpenStack. And to me, that's a major point of inflection in an open source project like this. Yeah, it's serious cloud service providers and the developers are voting with their hands in their collects. People are tired of closed proprietary solutions. They see what happens. There's limited choice. They are pressed on the economics of things. They don't get the portability that they require. They don't get the mobility they require. And they do see OpenStack and other projects like it as the way to go. And I think because of that, OpenStack is now the fastest growing open source project in history. Well, we were just debating about the cloud stack and OpenStack and to me, ecosystems always win. At the end of the day, ecosystems are what make it. Markets, obviously, I have a market. I think the cloud market is pretty wide open at this point. But the ecosystem is pretty strong. But I want to get your comments here. Here at HP Discover, you said, great place to meet customers and parties all in one place. What's your days like here, Tim? Walk us through what you're doing here. I mean, not- My days have been long. Let's put it that way. Are you announcing new stuff? What kind of customer conversations are you having? Just share some of the inside baseball of your world. No, it's a fantastic question. So we've really been doing many things all together here today. We had a series of announcements this morning. We had the press briefing and press announcement across all of Converge Cloud. And for the public cloud, we announced a series of additional enterprise grade enhancements, things like what I call, we've supersized our compute instances. 120 gig, 16 CPUs. You bring us the nastiest, most data-intense, analytics workload, we got an instance for you. We introduced VPN on the cloud. We introduced our bulk import service. Customers have been coming to us saying, we want to bring terabytes and petabytes to the public cloud. But the bandwidth we have from our premise to you, kind of limited, going to take us a while. So now they have the option of actually shipping us physical media. We take secure control of it, and we get it very quickly onto a high-speed link into our object store. How about that? Chevy Truck is faster than the network. You got it. For this, it absolutely is. So good part of the day has been with press, with analysts around our recent announcements, and then big piece around customers. We had a good customer lunch. And what I really loved is we asked the question of about 30 people sitting in the room. How many people have or are working on a cloud strategy for the business? I think every hand but one went up. And I think the one hand was sort of an HP person who was there. And then so much of it has also just been meeting with all of our great partners. We have a large number of our key partners here. Folks like Panzura, folks like Clicker, and others. And just getting the opportunity to understand what they're seeing, what they're hearing, how we can work better together, both technically as well as on go-to-market. What's been the most exciting feedback you've gotten from either press analysts or customers to the news you were launching? I think the most exciting thing, and it just resonates with my own belief system, so it's exciting, is we are the enterprise cloud. People are getting the message. They understand what we mean. They understand what we mean technically, and now they're beginning to understand what we mean by business practice, that we're going to be open, we're going to be transparent, we're going to be flexible, and we are going to make a public cloud experience similar to what they can do within their own data centers and give them that flexibility, not take it away. What is the preferred expectation of the clients for enterprise cloud? Because obviously Amazon's kind of lumpy, they have SLA issues, and it could be fast one day, slow the other, but it's different, smaller markets, developers, and they're going, they're trying to go the enterprise cloud. You guys are in the enterprise cloud. You're in touch with that. What is the preferred expectation and service level agreements for the customers? So the service level agreements are important. I mean, we have some of the highest level with 99.95, but what we're actually finding is that's not the key things. The key things is ease of use. It's clearly what we're doing around security, and a lot of it comes back to business practice. Are we really willing to treat them like enterprise customers? I'll give you one example. One of these other big providers, typically when you buy reserve instances, you're locked in, you're locked into the availability zone, you're locked into the region, you're locked into the instance size for one or many years. Well, if you were in your own enterprise data center and you wanted to change something, you go change it. If we want to bring the enterprise experience to the public cloud, well, we have to allow our customers that flexibility. So we allow, if you do a advanced purchase reserve instance model with us, and you say, look, you know, I bought size X and I need double X or five X, our new instance size. No problem. No problem. We will work that, because that's what you can do with your Roman data center. And so translating the experience means that. So it transcends just the technology, it transcends things. So the customer benefits with clouds, obviously the economics around OPEX versus CatVex, and economics around new applications. Is there anything else that I missed there? Well, that's, I mean, from a financial point of it, that's a piece of it. I mean, obviously the, you know, the ability to take advantage of peak goodness, to take advantage of seasonality is a big piece. But, you know, what's really been interesting in the last three, four months, we've seen a shift in the conversation. When we launched public cloud about a year ago, customer conversations were around purely economics. That's changed. Economics, still an issue, but it's number two or three or four on the list. Number one is, how can you make me more agile? How can I use the public cloud to improve my time to market for new services, to allow my internal users to be able to get workloads faster, to be able to replicate workloads faster, to be able to have better, you know, high availability, disaster recovery, business continuity. And always, the cost and the economics, always going to be a factor. But it's no longer the starting point of the conversation. Yeah, and you know, I totally agree with that, Roger. I mean, in fact, the customers I talked to, I mean, they sort of beginning to understand that rental is often a lot more expensive than owning. You know, from an outlay standpoint, but from a business cost and an agility perspective and how fast you can actually do something, it's driving revenue, so it's not even a discussion. It's all about business outcome. If you can help achieve a better business outcome, faster with more flexibility and still provide the appropriate economics, it's a win. And that's really what we're doing within the public cloud. So when I was at the analyst meeting, I think it was in March in Boston. Oh, snowy Boston. Yeah, you were there, you were up on stage, and I, you know, I'm an analyst, I'm asking, I have an obnoxious question. And when I asked, I said, you know, see, I always talk to you there, and you're looking at Amazon as another arrow in the quiver, and where does Amazon fit? And then I loved your response, and I said, well, that's true, Amazon is an arrow in the quiver, in the CIO, we're trying to be like, I think you said like the nuclear weapon in the arsenal. And so what did you mean by that? And how do you make that reality? It really comes back to this nature of enterprise grade. I mean, our large customers, our enterprise customers really need something that mirrors what their expectations are inside of what they can do in their own data centers. And, you know, there are going to be people who are able to provide large, high-scale mass market solutions, and that's great, the industry and the market needs that. But what CIOs need is they need that better weapon. And in my mind, that better weapon is the combined power of our hybrid solution. It's having private cloud, it's having public cloud, it's having managed cloud. And today we announced probably the most significant thing, which is the overall introduction of cloud OS and the fact that cloud OS will be running in all three of those solutions. To us, that's the missile, that's the weapon that the CIO will be able to benefit from across our hybrid solution. I think the cloud OS message is really fantastic, and I think you guys got to amp that up because the data points that we're hearing is the data center is an operating system, and the cloud is essentially the data center. It has to run like an operating system. So if it's going to be software-led infrastructure, it has to function with all of feature functions within the operating system. So I think that message resonates. You guys find the same thing with customers? Absolutely, I mean, I think the two key things that have been really resonating, one is the cloud OS discussion, and the other has been the moonshot discussion. And when we look at how we really improve the economics of public cloud, moonshot is right up front. So these are the things that are going to continue to provide us that next weapons grade level solution. Yeah, so you can pick off the workloads that are really appropriate for moonshot, drive your costs down and pass that on to your customers, and that's a unique advantage that you have that a lot of people are poo-pooing about you. We talked to all your competitors, but yeah, moonshot, we don't really get it, but you guys get it. We get it, I mean. Savvis gets it. It was great when Meg during your keynote said, look, the thing draws the same power about six household light bulbs. It really just explains the advantages. And yes, we can partition off certain level workloads that will be very appropriately served within moonshot, save the footprint, save the power, save the cooling, and pass that improvement on to our customers as we scale out the public cloud. So tell us what's on your roadmap. Obviously, we're talking with Margaret and your marketing team. Your objectives, tactically, you said, Hong Kong, you got an event. What's the battle plan? Take this to market. So really what we're doing is, this is a great piece of getting our message out. A large piece of it is really just continuing to get the story out on what an enterprise cloud really is and how we fulfill that. And then working through our partner ecosystem, as you mentioned before, ecosystems are critical in open source communities. Ecosystems are obviously critical to us. We have a fantastic partner community, a fantastic partner and channel resale, and it's really working with them to reach out very, very broadly. Okay, Roger Levy here, inside theCUBE, CUBE alumni, and again, we'll go down in history. He was on theCUBE at OpenStack when we were there for the inflection point, as I'm calling it, this past OpenStack summit was really, to me, the change over the crossing the threshold where OpenStack's community really stood tall and crossed over to what I see as a clear path to a rallying cry in the cloud, open cloud market, open source, people working together, build the code, why build your own scoreboard when people are bringing their own scoreboard to the game as the owner of the giant said, and Open Source is a great way you guys have been very successful, and you got a good team, and you know what, sometimes the stars line up, we follow in you guys, so we follow in the HP's cloud. This is theCUBE, we'll be right back after this short break with our next guest. Stay tuned.