 We're back here at HP Discover in Las Vegas. This is HP Discover 2013. This is Silicon Angles theCUBE, our flagship program to go out to the event. Extract the signal from the noise. I'm John Furrier, the founder of Silicon Angles. I'm George, my co-host. Hi everybody, I'm Dave Vellante of Wikibon.org. Sargillia is here. He's the senior vice president, general manager of HP's Converged Cloud. Sar, welcome back to theCUBE. Good to see you again. Great to be here again. So, lots been going on in your world. Oh yeah, we're having a lot of fun. What's the most fun? theCUBE, right? Coming to these interviews is the most fun. I always look forward to coming here and hanging out with you guys. Okay, that's a sound bite. We'll take those and test them out. The cloud's an interesting place. It's moving at very high speed. I think we are at the top of it. We're at the front end of the innovation. We're working on OpenStack and our cloud of whistles announced today. So I think it's a lot of fun because it's very dynamic. It's always fun to be in an environment where things are moving very fast. And then cloud, everything is moving very fast. So it's fun. So what's the meaning behind Converged Cloud? Talk about that a little bit. Sure. Well, we've talked about this before, but in general, when we look at how cloud is going to evolve, we believe that the world's going to be a hybrid world. We don't believe that there's going to be one deployment. It's not all going to be public cloud. It's not all going to be managed cloud. It's not all going to be private cloud. People are going to have a hybrid environment. And so when we talk about Converged Cloud, what we mean is that you have one architecture, one experience model across the entire gamut of deployment models, whether it's public, private, or managed. And so that's the right, the meaning of Converged Cloud. Now, the good news from HPE is we actually have solutions across all of that, whether it's services to get you on the cloud, a cloud system for private cloud, our cloud services business unit that gives you public cloud, or our enterprise ECS public cloud. So we have solutions for all of them, but the idea of Converged Cloud is to have those solutions be holistic based on one architecture. So customers have portability and a common user experience. So the value cloud is what we were talking about it here in theCUBE earlier. Also when Jeff Frick and I were at OpenStack for three days of live coverage, unfortunately Dave didn't make that amazing show. It really was a flash point for us. We saw the community and the ecosystem of OpenStack really standing tall around coding, software development, but creating clouds for enterprises. So enterprises want reliable and they want expectations to be met and service level agreements is classic, right? So talk about your progress relative to the product portfolio and your solutions that you're putting together in context to all the momentum around OpenStack because that has been a consistent theme here, Sarr. Here at OpenStack, being discussed a lot from a lot of folks. Sure, no, I mean, so the good news for us again is that we started on OpenStack a few years back. We put our full weight behind OpenStack. We helped get OpenStack to where it is today. We were founding members of the OpenStack community. We helped set up the charter and so we've been, we're not newcomers to OpenStack. We saw this a long time ago and of course we built our public cloud on OpenStack. One of only two public clouds really that are operating us in Rackspace. And so we have a long history with OpenStack and we made a decision as part of our focus on having a common architecture. And as far as being open to use OpenStack as the kernel of that architecture. And so as we announced in OpenStack back in April or so, we already have that capability on several platforms such as cloud system. However, OpenStack is just the kernel to really be enterprise-grade, you know, additional capabilities and additional things. Easier installation, better application modeling, better hybrid support and so on. And that's part of the things we've done here with CloudOS is it's sort of we've built a wrapper around OpenStack with additional plugins and so forth. But the beauty of it is because OpenStack is an open system it doesn't actually change any of the APIs and so we don't lose any of the compatibility and the capability. But we do get now enterprise capabilities while still leveraging the immense innovation and speed of an open source project like OpenStack. So you and I have talked in the past about Meg's interest in cloud. And she's dialed in to cloud big time. A lot of conversations on stage yesterday was very clear to her. She gets it, right? She knows cloud's the big bet. She's been pretty consistent. You guys have been pretty consistent. However, the business is growing and changing. You've got a new organization, new business unit down at Telly. You still have your converge cloud. Any changes to your role in terms of what you still overlook? Because you were kind of overlooking multiple units. Can you just share kind of how you're organized? So, no, I mean, first of all, yeah, Meg is, you know, definitely gets it. And she's been, ever since I started this role about six months ago, you know, she's been on board 100%. And, you know, I've met with her and built it back to the regular basis. And the only question is, what do you need to move faster? That's pretty much the only question. Gas on the tank. Yeah. Good tires, gas on the tank. What do you need? And they're very flexible. They're very aggressive. She understands. So my role is only expanded in terms of that. We're just, you know, as we're doing more and more things, cloud obviously becomes more prevalent. There is a new business unit in the EG called the Giverds Systems that Tom Joyce is leading. And that's actually going to be very helpful for my business, for my, for cloud, because they're going to help organize some of the solutions from EG for the cloud and help deliver on that. So, it doesn't actually change anything from my perspective, but theory, and hopefully, right. And certainly I know Tom very well. So I have a lot of belief in him that it's going to make my life better in terms of being able to deliver some of these solutions. Let's talk about going faster now. That's a good, first of all, great mandate you have in the mission to go faster. But, you know, you got to see around the corners. You don't want to be doing 100 miles an hour at that hairpin turn or even, you know, slight turn. So what do you see around the corner? What are you watching as the executive? You know, what are you looking for that you're managing from a risk and competition? Market forces, can you just, you know, share your vision? Sure. Well, I think it's interesting. I mean, if you go back at 12 months, right, what are we talking about now and what did we talk about 12 months ago, right? We're not asking if OpenStack is real. We're not asking if people are going to move to the cloud. We're not asking about. So, I mean, it's moving. The funny, the interesting thing about cloud is it's moving faster than we thought. I mean, really, it's moving so fast. And what we're looking at really is, you know, what is it really? How are our customers evolving? We're looking to see the customers who are implementing cloud. What are they doing? What's working for them? What's not working for them? What are ways to make it easier for them? And this is, by the way, where we've now put a greater emphasis and you saw it in our announcements today also in terms of having better, easier to maybe order and get cloud services for people in terms of professional services to help people on works up, help them how to get to the cloud. But I think in terms of what's coming, I think again, this is a common theme is, I think people are going to become less and less, I would say, focused on the specific cloud delivery model and more about a solution, right? Today, at least last year and even today, like is it public cloud? Is it mad at cloud? Is it this? Is that who cares, right? I mean, your architecture shouldn't force you into those decisions. Really, it's more about, okay, what is the problem you're trying to solve and how are you solving it with a cloud model? And then how are you evolving that cloud model as your business grows? And so I think, you know, if you look back 12 months from now, I think we'll be spending a lot less time talking about private public banners. We'll just be talking about, okay, how do you have this solution? But part of the reason why people cared is because the cloud was so accessible to so many more people. So in 2008 and 2009, when the economy tank, people said, all right, let's go try the cloud and the public cloud and go to a variable expense. And then you had this sort of shadow IT movement come along and now it seems like, clearly IT, CIOs are embracing the cloud. You know, you think back to the distributed computing age where it was almost like CIOs are trying to fight it. I think it feels like, and I wonder if you can comment on this, they're not fighting it, they're beginning to embrace it even after a little bit of friction up front. But what's your take on that? So I think it's like anything, it's always a mixed bag. I mean, I think they're starting to realize the benefits. And you know, one of the things that IT is realizing, and I frequently give us opportunity, you know, back in the day when wireless was coming out and people were doing rogue APs, the time I was selling wireless at some networking company. And we told people, look, if you don't want people to do rogue APs, give them wireless, okay? I think people are now realizing IT is realizing, look, if you don't want shadow IT, then make IT flexible, give businesses what they want, become a partner with a business or give them cloud, whether it's public be a broker to public cloud, provide a private cloud. And I think IT is now realizing the best way to get ahead of it is to actually get ahead of it, not to block it. You can't block this. Camp, I think you're right on that. I mean, it's really, really great comment because shadow IT actually is innovative. And they're just innovating to get what they need, the solutions. And so if IT can't fill the void, you know, they're going to, you know, can't deliver the solution, they're going to go around them. And I think that's what I heard yesterday from Meg that was impressive, this, you know, her mission statement, and it was kind of a, an underhanded diss to the press, you know, because she got slammed for the NPR interview about, you know, when she just started, I don't know if you remember, but when she started, she had to make a, she was asked to take the mission of HP and she was like a long-winded HP. And yesterday it was just like simple, making IT. And that was really an awesome mission statement. So with that speed, you have to then integrate other parts of HP autonomy. So you're, you have other elements. How do you manage that? And how do you deliver that solution to the customer? Well, first of all, again, I mean, this is one of the reasons, for example, we chose a plug-in architecture like OpenStack that allows people to operate at a different rate. I mean, if you look at OpenStack, the CloudOS is based on it, right? It's designed to have many people working and plugging into it at the same time, right? So you have to have a system that is not monolithic, right? And the other thing is you have to have a common understanding of a strategy and what makes sense. And Meg's done a great job in aligning everybody around that. And so when people are on the same strategy, then it makes it easier to work towards common goals. Now, having said that, right, you don't want to try to blow the ocean, right? You're not going to solve everything in one day. We're working sort of in a pragmatic fashion and getting solutions to place. And you use the customer as the key element, right? We're not trying to do integrations where they don't make sense. We're trying to see, okay, can I, is there a problem that customer's having? Or is there something I can help a customer with by integrating these two products better together? I'm not going to integrate two products if it doesn't give the customer any value. And so you really have to be focused on the use case and what the customer is trying to get out of it. And that is a great barometer for you to know what needs to be done first, what needs to be done later. You mentioned boiling over the ocean, which is a great phrase for basically biting off more than you can chew or whatever metaphor you want to use. And that is, you can't build it all by yourself. So one of the core things they teach in business school is don't outsource your core competency. And if it's not your core competency, maybe partner. So how do you look at your mission? You got to move fast. You got to deliver a really elegant, clean solution that's modern. What's your core competency and what are areas that you partner on? Sure, that's a really good question. I think at a high level, right, the ability to really provide enterprise-grade, enterprise capabilities, what enterprise expect, anywhere from technology to go to market to just interaction, expectations, business continuity, that's a core company's rates queue. We've been doing this forever. This is what we know how to do. We know what enterprises want. We know how to deal with enterprise or enterprise grade, even if it's service providers or a government, but we know how to provide that level of service that customers expect. However, we're very flexible. I mean, one of the things about cloud that is a flexible model, and if you can even see, our first sort of partnering activity would say, hey, let's use OpenStack because why should we write everything if the community is writing part of it? But we also partner with service providers. You know, we have our cloud ads out program, for example, for customers who buy our equipment and put out public cloud services, we will support them. And we're looking at other opportunities to partner as well. We have lots of different players that are hosted on our public cloud to provide various solutions, whether it's active state or so forth. And we're definitely looking to partner with people where possible. I mean, it's definitely not one of those things where you have to build everything yourself. I think our benefit is that, you know, we're global. You know, people talk about cloud and then they say, well, okay, what does that mean, man's cloud? Well, I don't know. We have 80 data centers spread across the entire world. How many people have that? So we have a global scale and we really understand how to work with enterprises. And we also have some very, very innovative technology, especially in terms of managing applications. That's something that I think HB has a lot of history in. But we're definitely looking to partner with folks. And I said, we are partnering where it makes sense. So you're open-minded to partnering. You're comfortable in your own skin in terms of what value you add relative to the partners. Your tone regarding OpenStack earlier was a little bit skeptical about the latecomers. I mean, you guys were there from the beginning. People coming in now, the kind of bow guarding like, hey, great party. We want to come in too. What's wrong with it? We have more people contributing to open source. Doesn't that just help you? I think the more the better on open source. I don't have a problem with that. I just think that the question then is, okay, so fine. But what does that mean in terms of the solutions? How are you going to offer solutions? Besides saying, okay, I'm an OpenStack, I'm contributing, what are you going to do to customers leveraging that, you know, to give customer solutions they can use? And what I'm meaning is that, you know, OpenStack is not this simple. And so, you know, you have to be there for a while, understand what's there, what's not there, and how you can help customers. So these people who are coming and trying to sort of, you know, use OpenStack, that's great. We love people, you know, the more people who come in and contribute, it's fantastic. But actually building solutions for customers with OpenStack is a bit different. And, you know, I think that's not something that you do by just putting out a press release. Yeah, but to the point, isn't that your competitive differentiator, right? Because you've got proof points around that. Well, I think our competitor, that is part of a differentiator around OpenStack. I think our overall competitive differentiator is understanding how to build solutions that customers require, enterprises require, you know, what do they feel comfortable around security? What do they feel comfortable in terms of manageability? How do they want to use their applications? How do they want to migrate from the old world to the new world with our services? So having that holistic view is really where we are beginning to welcome our value, as opposed to having very siloed views that says, well, I'm solving this problem. Sorry, I got to say you have really exciting jobs. It's probably intoxicating on many levels. One, you got to go fast. It's very relevant, a lot of demand, and under a lot of pressure at the same time. So I have to ask you, what is your metrics? When you look at, whether you personally and the business both, how do you look at your dashboard of key metrics for success and how are you going to measure yourself in the market? Well, my overall metric at the top end is how many of the core customers, the core top customers in the market, but by definition, most of those already HP customers are journeying with HP to the cloud, right? There's this huge transformation to a new style of AT as customers are getting on this journey to the cloud. And my goal and my metric is I need them to journey with HP, that's the metric. And that means that it's everything from services to go to market, to marketing, to solutions. You're paving the path. It's everything, it's not, just having one nice, beautiful product doesn't help me. If I don't have the right service portfolio to help them with that product, if I don't have the right go-to-market, it doesn't solve the problem. So my metric, that's why I'm sort of pan-HP. I'm looking at it from Bill's perspective, makes perspective, okay, do we have the right portfolio, the right solution, the right engagement in order to help customers move to the cloud with HP? That's really the metric. So are you the general contractor paving the road for HP customers to go to the cloud? And then it's great that you have a good view across the whole company, because that sounds like it's a full portfolio. Everyone we're talking to is super excited about the cloud efforts within HP. A lot of consistency from different groups. So congratulations. This is the cloud, Converge Cloud's tour is hot at HP. Obviously OpenStack is a key differentiator and data point. Open communities are developing code, just as a comment we had Jed York on theCUBE at Sapphire, SAP Sapphire. And he said, why should I pay $60 million for a scoreboard that's going to be obsolete in two years when everyone brings a scoreboard to the game, the phone? And by the way, they pay for that. So why don't make that better? So going to open source, like you mentioned, that's already happening. That's a good decision, I think that's good. So sorry, thanks for coming on theCUBE. We'll be right back with our next guest. This is theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Wikibon. I'm John with Dave Vellante, we'll be right back. Thank you.