 Hi, this is Stu Miniman with Wikibon.org with SiliconANGLE TVs, wall-to-wall coverage of HP Discover here in Las Vegas. We're going to talk a little bit about networking here. And we've got, a couple of weeks ago, it was actually four weeks ago here in Vegas, Interop was going on. Big cloud and networking show, those in the industry will be familiar. Interop has been one of the key networking shows. And HP had an announcement, a new kind of strategic partnership with F5, and we're going to dig into that today. So we've got Jeff Cable from HP Networking and Jeff Sathadas from F5 here to talk to us. So gentlemen, welcome to theCUBE. Thank you very much. So it's the first time for both of these guys on here. So just for those that don't know, theCUBE is where we try to find the brightest people out there, try to extract the signal from the noise and share with our community what's going on. So in the networking space, F5 really understands the application space. So I'm a traditional infrastructure guy. I spend more of my time around kind of layer two, layer three, I can talk cabling for an hour if you want, but when you get up to the load balancers, firewalls, really understanding the application, how that works in the network, that's really F5 sweet space. So Jeff, could you just tell us a little bit about what you do for F5? Absolutely. So I'm a solution architect with F5 and what I do is basically develop solutions with HP and things that we can take to market for both services and solutions, anything integrated worldwide within all of the business units of HP. I focus on moving those forward. Okay, and Jeff, you're with the HP Networking Group. What's your focus? I'm a global product manager for HP and my focus is on data center switching architecture. So data center top of racks, which is anything that really is the data center edge products really fall under my jurisdiction. Okay, and can you give us kind of the short and sweet, what is this announcement that you guys made about a month ago? Basically what we've done is we looked at our portfolio inside of HP and we realized that we have a lot of layer two and layer three applications, but we really didn't have that complete portfolio solution set. So we decided to search and look to find who's the best of the best to partner with and we came up with F5. F5 is the industry leader in layer four through seven services and really it was just a natural fit for us to bring us together and create solutions and then make sure we have this partnership. And what give us a little bit of the meat on the bone? Is this just kind of a statement of direction or are there any solutions available today? We're working heavily with F5 to help develop validated solution sets, basically taking different validated application solutions such as an exchange solution or a VMware solution and having HP ratified solutions. We've also put together our services portfolio, trained up our people to make sure that we can support, install and completely provide a validated solution to our customers. And then in addition we're doing co-development as far as integrating F5 into our Intelligent Management Center Management solution, making sure that we have hooks into the APIs for F5 in order to be able to manage and monitor and control. And it's really, we're tying F5, the products and the solutions into our overall application network solution in order to be able to provide a template driven set that we're creating. Okay, Jeff, maybe you can set up for us a little bit. What are the kind of key applications? Where do you guys really see kind of the burning need in the marketplace that you guys are helping to solve in this partnership with HP? So within F5 globally what we find is really anything within an application, any area of growth application, anywhere growth area within the application market. That's really where F5 is getting a lot of growth. Where we sit within HP Networking's portfolio is a nice transition between the application and the networking. And so what that does is it allows our relationship to help build on that where we can focus on the applications, the networking admin can focus on the network with HP Networking. And what we can do is meet in the middle between the applications and the networking. And that's really where F5 sits and that helps simplify the network and the deployment of applications for customers. So I know virtualization is a key piece here. If we looked at kind of, at a high level, virtualization kind of blew up some of the original silos that we had. And a lot of the things that I knew how to do for an application broke when I virtualized the environment and the storage industry's been fixing things and networking industry's been fixing things. But it's making sure that I can really understand, backup, secure my application is something we need to do. So is that one of the things that you guys are doing? Absolutely. And as you start looking at virtualization and the transition model from strict hardware devices and silos of deployments of applications, that's really where this relationship has been able to build on and we'll be able to provide that solution for customers where now you're not looking at just deploying this hardware, you're looking at rolling out a networking infrastructure or an application infrastructure and then having to deploy all of those parameters and each of the touch points that you would have associated with that. What we're doing is with the virtual application networks, marrying that with iApps, which is a technology, a templating technology for applications that F5 provides. Being able to provide those to customers jointly from a single source intelligent management center will really allow us to take advantage of that for our customers and allow them to deploy those applications so that if somebody wants to deploy SharePoint across their network for different business segments within their organization, now they can roll out SharePoint in a templated fashion and be able to deploy those instead of a matter of weeks applying new infrastructure, they can take that virtualization model and deploy that across the network seamlessly and quickly without having to touch each individual device. Great, we had an early discussion with Paul Miller on camera talking about really the application specific pieces of converged infrastructure and so it sounds like that ties into it. The other thing at the show today, there was the new announcement on Converged Cloud and I think F5 is, I believe, part of that announcement. Absolutely. Give us a little bit of color on that. So not as a pertain to that announcement but in general what we're doing is the relationship that we have within HP overall through the cloud organization. There's a number of touch points and we're a part of each of those different touch points from a cloud perspective integrating with the different HP software as well as the networking piece. Also with technology services, the ES organization, within all of those, bringing all of those together within F5 is a strength point for us. Jeff, maybe you can give a little color as to how does the networking kind of span into the convergence in the cloud with the solution? You know, what's interesting is is networking traditionally has always been the plumbers. We're the guys who connect things together and what we've done inside of HP is we've connected our servers with storage, obviously networking, services, everything together in a cohesive solution set. So when we talk about our virtual application networks, we're putting together the intelligence that we have from the server guys knowing how applications work, to the networking guys to understand how it transports across the infrastructure, taking F5 and their expertise in the application optimization and the layer four through seven services and creating standardized templates for our customers to be able to use. So when we work with people in the cloud services group and we're putting together this cloud announcement, we're able to take something that's designed in the enterprise and marry that into something that's designed in the cloud and allow us to seamlessly migrate something from an enterprise to a private cloud to a public cloud and basically work together with those. So we're working on common APIs, we're working on common templates, we're working on common best practices across the board. So that's really what the value that this whole partnership brings to the table. Okay, can you share with us a little bit as to what we expect to see over kind of the next 6, 12, 18 months? Absolutely, what you see today is validated solution sets. So we have solution guides, we have information on how to implement appropriately the different types of applications. I think there was Exchange, there was VMware, there was, forget some of the others, SharePoint. So leveraging the HP networking solution as well as the F5 solution, how we implement that to give you the best solution based upon the size of your customer or of your employment. On top of that, we have a full services portfolio. So our TS and our ES organizations have a full services portfolio to help design and implement and support those types of solutions. And then on top of that, today we also have integration into IMC to be able to initially provide visibility into the F5 solution set as well as some management capability. We're going to be expanding that as we go forward. Now in the future, there's a lot of activities that we're doing as far as integration work that we'll be talking about the later day. Okay, great, so we've actually had a couple of end-user CIOs on today. And one of the things that you should find heartening is when they talk about working with HP's networking, they feel the love from your services. They said that they just get the phone number for the person to call, they have people there. I think it's really overlooked so much is that, come on, if we talk, from an Ethernet switching standpoint, everybody switches work. It's the business relationship, technology's important, but the full relationship's there. Can you say, you said there's some kind of cross-training and field engagement, what's the field going to say from working with F5 and HP together? What they should see is just the joint solutions that we're bringing to market, the ability to leverage HP's expertise and see basically the rollout and the ability to consolidate the delivery of those applications. Whether it's a managed service or it's a customer-owned environment, what we hope to facilitate is the ability to be able to enhance the customer's experience in the delivery of those applications. Yeah. Anything else you want to add? One of the things that people don't realize is HP's been doing multi-vendor services for years. We're one of the largest outsourcing companies in the world. We have a lot of multi-vendor capabilities, not just within our products, but our services people are, we've got a ton of CCIEs and other people are certified. F5 is a natural solution that's already been part of our portfolio, we're just formalizing that and really pushing it out there to let people know that we have that expertise. So it's really taking that to the next level and really getting our people ready to roll and letting our customers know about it. Great. What are you guys working on at the show this week? What are people coming to see? What are the biggest questions you're getting asked? So what we're focusing on is the delivery of the announcement that we made at the interop. And so what we're doing is continuing our efforts and evangelizing the reality that from an HP networking and F5 joint solution, we have the virtual application network and we also have the IAPS. Being able to deliver those to me is very visionary in terms of the technology, but also from a solution perspective will really help customers understand and be able to deliver those applications quickly. From the networking space, anything hot that you're covering this week? There's a lot going on in the networking space. I mean, between the virtual application networks and our integrated solutions across there, we've got IMC and the integrated solution with IMC. Talking about IPv6 and what we're doing to pioneer IPv6 as far as the standardization of IPv6 readiness. We have the chair of the IPv6 readiness forum actually at our booth hosting the IPv6 session. So there's a lot of activity and a lot of buzz going on over the internet. So your touch management is obviously critical, especially in the networking space. Where are the tie-ins today? And is there more development going on between F5 tying into HP's management? Oh, absolutely. And what we're doing is as we move forward, you'll see the F5 solution become a part of that extended template solution when we put together our virtual application networks, what we call our templates or our connection resource manager templates, we'll have the IOPS, the ability to tie that IOPS application layer template into that and really bring it together in a seamless solution. So when I go to deploy a new server, I can say select this template and now it'll automatically deploy not only the network, but also the server and the application. Does this tie into the cloud maps that HP has? It will tie into the cloud maps, yeah. So it is a part of that as well, it will. It's kind of like a little enterprise cloud map but the extensions are there to tie into the full-blown solution. So we'll see that soon. Great, so, you know, Jeff, you know, how long have you been working with HP on some of these environments? So I've been with F5 for two years and my life at F5 has been focused strictly on HP. So for those two years, I've been focused on HP and really enjoyed that relationship and just to watch the growth and the expansion of the solutions that we provide, it's been pretty exciting. We're glad to have them. I'm glad to have them. Excellent, we're turning it into a Barney segment. We're going to watch out for you, we can guard you on that. Excellent, so we're going to have a lot more coverage on the networking side. We've got Bethany Meyer on to talk about. I'm sure we're going to talk about the virtual application network van. Of course, yeah. And what's going on here. But, you know, Jeff and Jeff, I appreciate you coming in the queue, talking about the partnership. Look forward to watching as this thing develops over time. I expect we'll probably see more of it to be on World and some of the other shows. Absolutely, yes. This has some direct applicability. Yep. But this is Stu Miniman with Wikibon. We will be back with SiliconANGLE TV's continuous coverage from HP Discover after this break.