 Hi everybody, we're back, this is Dave Vellante and this is SiliconANGLE.tv's continuous coverage, non-stop coverage of HP Discover. We're here with folks from the non-stop group at HP. Randy Meyer is to my right and Rick Lewis is the VP and General Manager of the non-stop division. Gentlemen, welcome. And Randy's Chief Technologist, you've been on, you're a CUBE alum. You were last year at HP Discover, we were talking about that. And, well, we're here again. Yeah, thanks for having us. Fantastic event, you're welcome. I was over at your Pavilion a little bit earlier, last couple of days, actually. Good action going on, really passionate group. Lots of people, a lot of people. Partners, you know. That's a great word, passionate. The partners are just excited about what's going on, the customers we're talking to, tremendous amounts of traffic, tremendous amounts of buzz in terms of what's going on, the overall excitement about HP and the excitement about what's going on in our business as well. So there's lots of excitement. And I'll just talk about cloud and big data, you know. The core mission critical stuff tends to get lost. That's got to hurt a little bit, but at the same time, you can draft on some of those trends, can you? Oh, I mean, absolutely. Turns out that things like cloud and big data just play up the need for systems got to work all the time. I mean, in a world today where everybody's got a smartphone, everybody's got a pad, everybody's got a tablet that they're carrying around, it's always connected to a network, whether it's Wi-Fi or 4G or something else. So if you're running a business, when's a good time in a world where everyone's connected like that to not be available? Right. So Rick, give us a business update. What's going on in the division? Just take us through that. So, and I'm relatively new to non-stop. I started there in January and a couple of impressions that I've had so far now leading the business, business is healthy, non-stop's been doing great the last couple of years showing growth in the sale of servers and associated services and software, et cetera. So, very happy with the business. We're riding a couple of technology waves, the rollout of 3G going to 4G where we're a dominant player as well as financial payments. Dominant player there as well and those businesses are booming and non-stop's the preferred solution in those spaces. So, we're doing very well. Customers are excited, customers are passionate, like no other customers in the world. That's another thing I've noticed since being here. So, going very well in non-stop. Yeah, so the history, I mean, you mentioned the telco infrastructure, that can't go down, right? I mean, so the 3G to 4G roll, it's got to be fantastic. Where are we at with that? You know, it's hard for consumers sometimes to get lost in some of the marketing. Everybody always says, oh yeah, 4G to 4G pops up in your phone. How much of that is really 4G and where are we at and what's the opportunity look like for you guys? I mean, I think you're on the front end of that, right? Everybody's building out the networks and then they're getting all of that where it's built out, where it's going to get more stable. They're going to add capacity, they're going to add coverage and then on top of that, you're going to see more and more services coming on, right? You're going to get a really full-featured, high-speed broadband network that's out there. So now you're going to watch the provision of all sorts of services, frankly, some of which are really cool today and some of which people haven't even thought of yet and as you get more coverage and you get more access, you're going to see tremendous amounts of data, video, pictures, integration of location information. By the way, that stuff's going to integrate with the back-end systems too where you say you're walking by something and an ad targeted to you pops up to give you a coupon for the restaurant you're right in front of because they know where you are and they can get it to you right now when it can influence you. Talk about the total available market that you guys serve. Is the total market for applications that require no downtime growing? People don't think of it as a growth market but when they connect it to a product, like a mainframe, for example. But when you think about the number of apps that require no downtime, do you see that exploding, growing, what's it look like? So I mean the market, it's multi-billions of dollars in size, right? And it's actually growing but not in the way you'd think. What's happening is applications don't exist as monoliths anymore, right? You'd think of them in the old mainframe days or whatever, you'd build an application it all sits in one place. Applications now are pieces and parts and services from all over the place. So you say I've got to show what my inventory looks like and I've got to take the payment and I've got to create the ability to link that to knowing if I've got it in my store or it's somewhere else and I got to ship it somewhere and I got to calculate shipping costs. All these things are sitting out on different parts of applications, some of them are in traditional IT, some of them may be on your private cloud environments sitting on different technologies. Some of you might go get from the public cloud or just the public web somewhere. The application exists only in your browser there, right? There's all these pieces and parts. So guess what? There's a lot of pieces of that application that you say I got to have them there all the time. If you're trying to sell somebody something and you don't know if it's in stock, you might sell the same thing four times. So you get different needs of that. So our job is to find the pieces that say which of those are fundamental and critical versus you say I can distribute or maybe I can get it from somewhere else. So we're actually seeing kind of this renaissance availability matters to people. It really does in terms of how they build their applications but it's about putting the ecosystem together and some of it's on nonstop, some of it might be on a Linux farm, some of it might be on HP UX doing different pieces. How do you integrate that into one seamless, complete whole that says this is what my application looks like to the user? Because availability is at the user level. It's not measured at some server level. Not the light and the disk drive. No, it's not the blinky light on the disk drive. Can you buy that product? Can you make your phone call work? Can you send that message? Can you get cash from the ATM? Think about it, the ATM, back in the days when I started working, ATM was a single function device. I could put money in, I could take money out and it had a little green screen. Now it's a full function PC that can do everything from let me do all kinds of banking transactions to take out a loan to send me ads for things that are there. It's a completely different paradigm. So the reason for my question is I mean you see these web giants really innovating through huge scale, you see the Amazon phenomenon, retail is just amazing and the premise is it's putting pressure on traditional IT to respond and I'm just wondering if it has a ripple effect on your business. Well, the ripple effect is positive. I mean at some point you got pay for it, right? You're buying something on Amazon, you bring up your webpage, all that. Eventually you're going to use a credit card. Those credit card transactions are mostly processed on nonstop systems, so it just helps our business. The big trend in the broad swath of IT is to virtualize applications. Is that not happening in your world because people just don't want something getting in the way? Well, we've actually been virtualizing applications since about the mid-1980s. So glad everyone- That's the mainframe, right? Well, we're actually kind of glad everyone's come around to understanding what it really takes to do that. You think about in a nonstop world the application is virtualized. If I need more capability, you gotta say just spread it out across more processors. If I need more storage, just go grab the pieces that you need that are configured in there and add it there. If I need to go do work in parallel that all the processors in the cluster go do the work, it's funny. People think of us like we're a mainframe, but in reality, we really look like a big parallel cluster, almost a grid, and have for 30 years. That scalability's always been designed in, hasn't it? So what else has changed in your business in the last couple of years or since we last met? Yeah, well, I mean, boy, what's changed? I'll tell you a couple things that haven't changed. So we talked about passion of customers, passion of the team that supports a nonstop development environment. The engineers and their unbelievable dedication to the customers and resolving issues and figuring out new places to go. The other thing I would say is modernization, right? Standardization and modernization. For a long time, nonstop was on its own custom hardware. In the last several years, we've moved that all to standard hardware. It's the same hardware that we sell our UNIX-based billing systems and things like that. So the hardware is standardized. In the software arena, we've been on a modernization journey and the software is now modern. We support Java and all kinds of the latest, greatest middleware, and that's really opened us up to new ISVs, new applications, new things that fit well with our core value proposition. Things that build on the financial payments, adjacencies to that, things like fraud detection, et cetera. All of that is now ported to nonstop and so the value prop just continues to broaden. So when you think about credit card transactions, you just mentioned fraud. It's a big push these days, talking about real time. Yep. And I connect with those themes that you just mentioned. I want to talk about real time and from an architectural standpoint, I want to talk about flash and how that fits into. Yep. And I define real time as when my colleague David Floyer really gave me this. He said, it's before you lose the customer. You can react and respond. That's what really matters. Absolutely. In today's world, customers don't wait, right? If you can't serve them, they're one click away from going to somewhere else. Or if I can't get cash from this ATM, literally the last time I went through Heathrow, there were five ATMs lined up, one from each different bank, by the way, all my customers. I could pick any one of them. I chose one of our customers. If that ATM hadn't been working for some reason, I'm going to the next one right now. I'm not waiting for those sorts of things. So it really is. It's about real time. For me, it's the betting machine at the racetrack. Yeah. That was 20 years ago, actually. Put money in and take money out. I can't bet anymore. I got better things to spend my hard earned money on. We're in Vegas. You bet on anything you want. It's been a long time. Like I said, I got four kids. But it's the interaction. It's that moment of interaction with a customer. If you're there, not only do you get the business, right? You get the transaction fee, or you deliver whatever it is, but you build loyalty. You build goodwill with that customer. It takes days, weeks, months, years sometimes to gain a customer. You can lose one in seconds. So I think last time we might've talked about I.O. architectures, my old friend Derek Ginger, who taught me many, many things about storage when I was a young pup. But so now we're seeing this notion of flash permeate on the other side of the channel, a persistent resource. How are you taking advantage of that to affect real time? Well, and so that's a great opportunity. We just brought out a whole series of new products to leverage some of the flash things that are there in Solid State Drives to say there's a certain class of customer, a certain class of application that say I really need to drive down some of the latency. So if you're one of the stock exchanges in Asia doing some trading where you say I've got a hot stock all of a sudden, right? I got to go deal with this and go manage all of those sorts of things. You want to go eliminate as much latency as you can in that space. Same thing if you're doing a parallel database query. So okay, if it's in flash, I can go eliminate tons of the time it takes to go find the data and then assemble it back quickly. So we're seeing lots of customers wanting to move that direction to say I can increase my throughput at the same time as I'm decreasing my response time. So I can get my performance up in both axes by leveraging some of that technology. And we'll see more and more of that. You're seeing larger memory. You're seeing larger cache sizes. You're seeing solid state drives. You're seeing, you know, all of these elements saying how do you go respond even more quickly? The other change back from way back when when we were doing IO architectures, many of the things that used to happen were human beings talking to the machines, right? Human beings response time is measured in seconds. Now there are machines talking to machines. And guess what? Machines measure response time in milliseconds. So completely different paradigm when you're thinking about that. Yeah, I think it was, I think it was Goldman Sachs who said that for every millisecond we can shave off our latency and our applications, it drops a hundred million dollars to the bottom line. Yep. So people always talk about how flash is more expensive than spinning disk, but if you can shave a hundred or drop a hundred million dollars to the bottom line, I don't think people will mind paying a 30, 40, 50, 60, 60 million dollars. It's not about what it costs. The value it generates. Yeah, I mean, that's always been your business too, right? Absolutely. So Rick, you said you're new, but you've been at HP for a while, right? I've been at HP 25 years. Yeah, okay. Up through the R&D ranks from chip design, all kinds of chip design, system design now, at the same time, leading hardware and firmware development. So what's your goal with the division? Point. Near term and midterm. Yeah, I often get this question. Hey, did you come into nonstop to radically change the strategy or something like that? No, not on a radical strategy change. We were going to refine our strategy, get more clarity, make sure we're catching the right waves around things like the cloud, around information optimization, continue to improve our security, all the themes that Meg's talked about in her keynotes here at Discover. And really just be clear about what things are we focusing on and how are we going to continue the health of the nonstop business. So no major strategy change. Hopefully in the near term, we can keep the growth that we've had going on right now and make sure we're still thrilling our customers because that's really what it's about. We've got passionate customers, we're adding customers by the day. If we can get those as passionate as the ones we currently have, you know, we'll work wonders. How's the go-to-market work in your group? Do you have a specialized sales force? Yeah, so the go-to-market is almost all direct sales. You have a specialized sales force paired with solution architects that are a big part of that, working with customers because we're not selling boxes. We're selling solutions to business problems, right? So it's all about how can we help them go take payments faster, take them more cheaply, move the messages around the telecoms networks, et cetera. So that's all there. We also have a large ecosystem of both what I'd call applications ISVs that are specialized in those places and tools and infrastructure people that help us complete the solution. So this is about direct sales, go-to-market that way with solutions architects helping them, but at the same time leveraging all of our partners who have application expertise, tools, infrastructure expertise, and then we obviously leverage the power of HP's services organization to say, a lot of times you need deployment services, design services, application services, and we can bring that to bear as well. That's part of this, the broader HP really helps us from the standpoint of partners, technology services, and being able to put that together for a customer and make it sing and dance. HP nonstop, the infrastructure behind all those credit card transactions that you do, the phone calls you make on your cell phone. I always really love and enjoy talking to you guys. It's really a pleasure. Thank you very much for coming. Thanks for having us. It's a great pleasure to meet you. You too. Thank you. All right, keep it right there. We'll be right back with Bethany Mayer and keep it right there. This is SiliconANGLE TV.