 Okay, we're back. This is Dave Vellante of wikibon.org and this is theCUBE, siliconangle.tv's continuous coverage of HP Discover. We're covering it wall to wall. Check out the videos on siliconangle.tv. Go to youtube.com slash siliconangle. You'll see the playlist from our recent events. We were just down at the IBM Edge conference. We're at EMC World two weeks ago. We're at SAP Sapphire. We're now here at HP Discover and we're here with Brian Cook, who's the vice president and general manager of the travel and transportation business at HP. And I'm also joined by Jeff Kelly, my colleague who's very active in services angle. So, first Brian, welcome to theCUBE. Thank you. Thank you very much. Appreciate you coming on. So, first of all, HP Discover. Big event for you guys. A lot of your customers here, I'm sure. What's the buzz? What's the buzz out there? A lot of big announcements, a lot of excitement about what we're doing in cloud and what we're here to talk about in the airline space. Cloud is real. We've been calling 2012 the year of the cloud for a while now and it's, you know, they got in a hype cycle. It's beyond the hype cycle. It's real. Customers are doing it. So you're doing this in airlines. We're doing it in airlines. Yeah. How's that work? Well, it's working great. I mean, it's the first, I would say it's the first truly global, vertically focused cloud offering that you'll see in the market. And it's probably a unique offering for HP. Not a unique offering for HP. The unique offering that HP can bring to the market because we're combining some of our traditional data center services, ITO and some of that with our expertise around our SaaS offerings, our core big system passenger processing systems that we run for some of the world's biggest airlines but that we also run for ourselves, right? And our platform offering, we're combining all that together with our industry expertise in taking this to market. And there's no other organization in the world that has all of those assets. So you said the first truly global, vertically oriented cloud offering. Right. So I'm trying to think of it. I know CERNA has a health cloud but that's really not global. I know NICI has a cloud for financial services. I'm not sure if that's global or not. So what did you mean by that? Clarify that a little. So global because we leverage our global footprint, right? And global because airlines are, by nature of a global business, right? And then when we talk about industry, it's not just cloud for an industry, right? It's cloud with services that are related to that industry. When I mean services, I don't just mean kind of general IT services but specific platforms that we've built for this industry and specific software that we offer for this industry. You know, great big passenger processing systems that allow airlines to check in passengers, ticket passengers, board passengers at the gates, those types of things which are, you know, multi, multi, multi million dollar investments that we've made. So why airlines? Let's talk about that a little bit. Why airlines? Well, probably what's not well known is that HP processes about 500 million passengers on an annual basis. It's around, it's about 20% of the traveling public worldwide. So why airlines, right? We run systems for some of the biggest ISVs and some of the biggest airlines that give us that number of 500 million passengers. So, you know, what does that work out to? About a million and a half people a day depending on HP services to be up and running in the environment that airlines need, which is available, reliable and scalable. And, you know, that's why airlines because it's a logical extension of where we were running the traditional ITO data center type systems, right, in applications to now, you know, move forward with this cloud offering. So it's an HP cloud, you're the cloud service provider. We're the cloud service provider. So, you know, when I talk about the cloud offering, it's at a base level, it's what we offer to everyone in terms of our cloud offer. It's the HP, you know, converged cloud. That's what it is. That's the foundational infrastructure. The raw materials. The raw material, right? All right, and then on top of that, you're building industry-specific services. We're building industry-specific services starting with our platform as a service, which is our AirSowa platform. And in that platform, we've built out a lot of industry-specific messaging. So, we're driving standards in the industry around web services exchange. So, the scheme is to support industry web services. This industry is raft with a set of relationships between all the different providers, ISVs, and airlines talking to airlines, airlines talking to alliances, and working within alliances. So, we've built out a full set of capabilities around those web services, so that an airline that wants to consume that platform as a service doesn't have to invest in doing that from the start at the get-go, right? We've also invested in building out security as a service with full PCI compliance so that an airline can take that service, take that PCI service so they don't have to invest in PCI. And what we do is we capture the credit card information in that kind of industry message exchange before it hits the airline's data center and we tokenize it. So, they don't have to worry about it anymore. We've got that, right? We've taken care of that. And we did that by leveraging our agile card framework, which was built for the financial services sector, and we kind of put an industry wrapper on it. And what about applications? So, in terms of applications, as I said earlier, we offer our SaaS platform, which is one of our industry-leading passenger services systems. As I said, it does all the passenger processing, check-in and all of that. And what we've done is we've made it cloud-like. So, we've wrapped our AirSow infrastructure and built out a set of industry-capable APIs, web services, right, with all of the security that you need, right? And we've also leveraged some of the other assets in HP to start allowing airlines to build applications on that platform or under that platform, however you want to describe it, so they can do full solution lifecycle management. We've got ArcCyc and Fortify for monitoring and security and all of the testing and the build-out. It's an open platform, so you can, it supports Java, C++, it's running on Red Hat. And we're building our new generation airline applications on top of this platform using this architecture. So, we're really eating our own dog food in this case. We're drinking your own shit. We're drinking my own shit. Hey, I like that about it. Yeah, drinking my own shit, thank you. So, this is reservation systems, reward systems. What about the mission-critical part of the airlines, like the parts maintenance and things like that? Does that seep into the cloud or are customers saying, oh, wait a minute, we need to carve that out? Well, you know, all of the systems that sit in airlines are mission-critical if you've ever been a passenger stuck in an airport and you're lined up for hours trying to get through the queues and the rest of it. We are working in some areas on flight operation systems. We're working with crew scheduling systems. And this is a long-standing, some long-standing skills that we've had running these systems for many, many years. So, we are modernizing them and making them operate in the cloud. So, we're not afraid of that at all. And we offer the SLAs, as we do with our passenger services system, we need multiple nine availabilities, millisecond response times for transactional latency, and we do that through our distributed cloud. Right, that's not the starting point for the cloud, but you're saying that that's what you're evolving to, right? It's not the starting point. Well, today we do it today, right? And as we build out these cloud, these applications, and as we enable airlines to build these applications, it's the minimum entry point that we need to support this industry. So, virtually every app that you've supported on-premise, you feel you can move that to the cloud. Is that a correct assertion? You know, I don't know that I would say every app, but in this industry, with the expertise that we have, there are a multitude of applications that we believe we can support through our services organization, the transformation to take these applications to be able to run in the cloud. The vast majority of them. Vast majority, I wouldn't go every, I never say every, right? But so, but from a value standpoint, the vast majority of the application portfolio can be run in the cloud. We believe so, yes. And so, what's the driver for that? I mean, I guess they're the same as ever, but talk about from an industry standpoint, there's a lot of turmoil in the airline industry, you know, you got some upstarts, you got consolidation. I mean, it's a very- But that's the driver, right? I mean, isn't, you know, the challenges in the airline industry, I believe they lend themselves to cloud computing in terms of the reduction in CAPEX, right? The reduction in OPEX when you talk about some of the shared services that we're building. Yeah, the unpredictability of that business is- An unpredictability not only at a business level, but at an operations level. I want to introduce a concept called storm computing. You know, you're, I don't know how many miles you travel a year, but I'm a big frequent traveler. And I've been stuck on the West Coast when there's a snow, sorry, on the East Coast when there's a snowstorm, we don't get too many snowstorms on the West Coast. On the East Coast when there's a snowstorm, I was stuck in the ash cloud in Europe. And we call this concept storm computing where all of the airline systems hit red line. They get, you know, you get your foot to the floor, the systems are at max capacity, right? Because they're running a traditional environment. And so we look at the opportunity here with cloud to be able to offer that dynamic or scalable infrastructure so the applications can deal with these storm issues, right? Or these irregular operations we call it. And so they can, you know, expand that, that their capacity, their IT capacity to support this operation or to support this irregular operation for the period that it lasts. And recovery, by the way, takes weeks in some cases for, you know, for a weekend snowstorm, you could take weeks in an airline to recover, right? So we'll run these systems and we'll run these systems on the extended capacity for several weeks. And then when the airline says, look, we want to go back to like normal operating mode, you know, we're over, we'll shrink it back down again. And isn't that what cloud's all about? So help me understand that dynamic. So you got snowstorm on the East Coast, so planes get grounded, everything gets backed up. Right. But you're saying with the additional capacity, you can, what, do analytics to provide? Well, there's analytics, but, you know, just because the planes aren't on the ground doesn't mean that the airline's not going at a thousand miles an hour trying to find solutions to the problems that their passengers and their crews are facing about getting to their destination. And they don't have the capacity, it's a ripple effect that just, you said you can't do that. Well, yeah. I mean, planes on the ground, that means you've missed your flight. That flight no longer exists, right? So all of the future flights, which hopefully are full, right, doesn't mean that you can, you know, we could just say let's put you on another flight tomorrow because by the way, that flight was already full, right? We hope we're running at 80 or 90% capacity. So there's the whole area of re-accommodation and rescheduling and re-booking, not only the passengers, but the crews and the aircraft to realign that schedule. That's why it takes some cases, you know, weeks to recover, you know, and you've seen people sleeping at airport for days. Why didn't you just put them on the next flight? Because the next flight was already full. So it's that type of compute power that we believe can come from cloud that will really help this industry. And that's, you know, hundreds of millions of dollars at costs for these airlines when they hit these storms. You know, you can, an airline can lose profitability for a quarter because they run into a couple of weekends worth of, you know, storms. So who are some of the clients? Can you talk about that? Who are some of the clients? You know, we, I guess the best thing to say is we run, you know, because we haven't got clearance to talk about any one particular client, but we run some of the biggest airlines in North America. And in Europe, and we've launched, I think at this press conference, we've launched a cloud service with Interjet in Mexico. And they're using the product to do scheduling for their pilots and their crews for simulator, sorry, their pilots for simulator training. And that's another application that lends itself well to cloud because, you know, when things go on normally, they just do kind of recurring training and so on. But then because of labor rules, they get an opportunity to change aircraft or change where they sit in the aircraft, left seat, right seat captain, you know, co-pilot. And when that happens, then there's a massive rush on the scheduling tool to realign, you know, all the training and then we just allow them to burst and then go back to normal. Interesting, I lived that example last summer, the VM world, going out to VM world, there was a hurricane in the East Coast. You're based in the East Coast, Brian? Atlanta. Yeah, so the hurricane in Boston area. And so I was flying out Sunday. So of course everybody's saying, you got to fly out. Monday, Saturday, because you knew the Sunday flight was going to get pushed to Monday, but of course no flights. So I'm panicked because I was doing the YouTube there. So I'm pounding away, looking at all the websites and trying to find flights. There weren't any flights. And then all of a sudden, a flight from Delta came on and it was empty. So Delta had the analytics, maybe the capacity, maybe they're a client, wink, wink, I don't know. So that was impressive to me, sort of an old line airline that was more responsive than to that disaster than say JetBlue or Southwest. And I presume that's the type of example that you're talking about here. Yes, absolutely. Yeah, so that whole industry as we were talking about before just is transforming. What do you see as the big trends in airline traveling? Well, I mean, we see it today and you experience it when you travel and you check in that extra bag and you've got to pay a fee for it. So we see airlines needing to drive ancillary revenues and bring the products that deliver not just the extra charges, but the extra value to the customers, whether it's ancillary revenues, personalization, I want to sit in the aisle C, I don't want to sit in the middle C, these kinds of choices. So it's about delivering these ancillary revenues. It's also about information analytics, right? That these systems that the airlines operate have a ton of data about the passengers in them. And they really need to start looking at that data as it relates to you as an individual, not you as a market segment, a business traveler or a leisure traveler, but really you and your preferences as a person. I think that's going to come out. You're going to see that really becoming more prevalent now with the tools that are coming into the market, with the ability to do this as a service, analytics as a service, data as a service. These transactional systems have been hampered for a long time because you didn't really want to interrogate them while you were running your airline and now that we're able to take this data off these systems and run them in the cloud, you'll be able to do this more in real time. And not only the structured data that you have in your airline systems today, but what's happening in the social world. What's the conversation that you're having with your friend on Facebook about your experience on that airline and then kind of monitoring that and creating what we call social intelligence or the ability to market socially by combining your structured data, what you know about your customer in loyalty and what he's done in bookings, whether he's been disrupted in the past and marry that to what he's saying about you and then come out and make a very specific offer that's really geared to what he wants and what he's saying he wants. So that sounds great and I was going to ask you about data and where data plays and I think you touched all the bases there. Are you seeing, and I know you can't name names, but are you seeing certain airlines ahead of the game there that are actually doing that today or is this more sort of content? We do, we do, we see airlines that ever, and we're actually working with several carriers in North America and in Europe to define the use cases because there's so much opportunity, this is such a data-rich environment, right, that we've got to really think about the use case, the application of those use cases. So we think that the airlines were obviously working with our head of the game because they're using some of our products and services. Jeff and I have been working on this premise, Jeff's a big data analyst at Wikibon working on the premise that big data practitioners are going to create more value than big data technology suppliers. And so to the extent that you can find the customers that are actually using big data and monetizing big data, those guys, their stock price is going to go to the roof. Well, if you look at the airlines that we support today and the systems that we run today that are so data-rich and the tools that we have, you know, with autonomy acquisition, with Vertica, and our capability around industry, around let's say airlines itself, you know, having, you know, being involved in this industry for, you know, 20 plus years running these great big systems and knowing about these great big systems and the industry expertise, you start pulling those assets together, right? And you see a unique offering where it's not just about being the tech provider or the tool provider, but you've got, you're able to have that conversation with the airline at an industry level that really changes the game. Because you know the systems and you know the business processes. All right, HP's airline, Cloud, Brian Cook, thanks very much for coming inside theCUBE and sharing that unique vertical industry perspective and congratulations on all your success and good luck going forward. Appreciate it. All right, take care. All right, keep it right there. We'll be right back with our next guest.