 Live from Las Vegas, Nevada, it's the Cube at HP Discover 2014, brought to you by HP. Keynotes this afternoon, Meg Whitman was just on a panel with Thomas Friedman and Intel and Satya Nadella of Microsoft. Pretty interesting, I'm here with Jeff Frick to note how passionate Meg is about politics and government. Wow, I'm actually comfortable, I'd vote for her. Bobby Patrick is here, we've been drilling down into cloud all day. Bobby is the CMO of the HP cloud division, a lot of new announcements coming out, a lot of action in HP cloud. Bobby, welcome to the Cube. Yeah, thank you, it's great to be here. Yeah, good to see you. Yeah, good keynotes, it was a good refresher. A lot of these keynotes are just products pushing and pushing and pushing, we had some of that earlier, but I thought it was a good eye-opening, refreshing kind of discussion, so it was very worthwhile. But anyway, you're relatively new to HP, very new actually, so how's it going? It's great, it's exciting, I joined it at a great time for the company. We were gearing up for the big launch of our new brand, HP Helion, that was launched on May 7th, so just a little over a month ago, and we hit the market hard globally. It's a complete, pulled together of all of our products and services around cloud, under a single brand. Customers love it, and it's really reiterated our commitment to OpenStack, and it's great, HP announced a billion-dollar commitment to HP Helion over the next two years, so it's backed by some big funding, that's a great time to come in. So I saw that, help us unpack that billion-dollar, it's a big number, it's a popular number, even Warren Buffett, or I say Warren Buffett, he underwrote the whole thing, the March Madness, giving away a billion dollars for the perfect bracket, no longer a million does it, it's got to be a billion. So what is that billion, what does it go to, what does it comprise? It goes to R&D, we're the most active corporate sponsor behind OpenStack, which is the fastest growing open source project on the planet. We have more contributors, we have more team leads for the different projects, and so we're working with the community, we're hiring OpenStack experts, always looking for the best in the world, all around the world, and we're then hardening and curating it and making it commercial now with our support, and we believe it's the underpinning of the future of what we call hybrid cloud, the ability to put some of your information, some of your applications within an enterprise, some in a public cloud, some in different countries that matter for compliance reasons, and to be able to move around between those different clouds in a very easy fashion. So this money is going to that R&D, to the skills, and to truly a global launch. So when you think about the sort of messaging for HP Cloud, what do you want customers to think about in the Helion brand and the HP Cloud? Yeah, the number one thing is commitment to open standards. So we are, and if you heard Martin Fink today talk about HP Labs and their commitment to open source, we're all in on open source, we believe it's a way to deliver innovation faster, we can bring the market, new technologies faster to customers, so we're all into open source, we are committed to the projects that matter to the next 20 years of IT, and so that commitment has to be real though, we have to prove it, we have to say you know you can run our software on other hardware, we think it will have some optimal integrated solutions for you using our entire stack, but this is about eliminating vendor lock-in. It was just one of the biggest challenges that IT departments have faced in the last 20 years, and so I think the commitment behind the open is at the core of our messaging. So we should mention, so Martin Fink gave a, well I really liked his presentation. I have been saying for, I don't know now, four years that HP's got to get back to its roots, which are Invent, and I have not heard until today something that excited me about Invention, and we saw it today, now Invention is not easy, we all, we've talked about a lot that the previous administration cut, cut, cut for the bone, it takes a long time to turn that station, but we saw it today, Fink was put into that job for a very particular reason, I pointed out two things, one, it's a guy who's going to commercialize inventions into the marketplace, and two, there's going to be a heavy systems focus. So he basically showed a little lag on the machine, which eventually is probably going to be powering your clouds, but he also announced HP is going to put forth a new open-source operating system optimized for non-volatile memory, not only a blank sheet of paper that they're going to work on with universities, but also a Linux derivative, a stripped-down Linux derivative, and one for Android, that was exciting. Yeah, I think what's great also is the cloud business actually falls under Martin, so our entire business worldwide and our cloud effort, our R&D, our product development is all under Martin who runs our CTO of our HP Labs, and when you look at the problems he's addressing with the machine and what he's going after, it's going after the massive scale challenges of the internet, right, and the massive scale challenges of the cloud and the day-to-day luge that we're all facing within the internet of things, and so what's great is by being a part of the labs and being part of Martin's organization, we're injecting that thinking into our cloud, we're injecting it into our innovation, and you can see a roadmap here, right, you can see this whole new architecture. He talked about an architecture that's been in existence since 1950, it was called the Von Neumann architecture, all the way to now and with copper at the core, the world's in need of a new architecture, and so it's great to be a part of that. That was a cool talk, he talked about electrons, photons and ions, electrons compute photons communicate and ions store, and that in essence is the future direction of where HP is going with the machine, massive, massive memory, blowing away the volatility hierarchy, blowing away ultimately slow spinning disks using memory store as the platform for future systems. I love it. Yeah, and he mentioned also one thing that's close to my heart is the distributed mesh. You saw that distributed mesh where different hardware, software combinations sit at different points of the network and they work together, compute and data, and that's really hybrid cloud. Hybrid cloud is putting compute workloads in certain areas and having data stored and distributed for maximum availability and doing that with self-service and doing that in a way that IT organizations can scale effectively. Yeah, I think that as a marketing person you realize that customers want to know that you're relevant for their future, and as much as I love things like store wants, it's not the future of computing, it comes out of HP Labs. This potentially is, so that's got to have customers really excited. This is really the first time you've unveiled it massively on a public scale, maybe you're talking, and that's why I joined HP. I saw that coming out a few months ago and the new style of IT thinking where we're saying we're radically going to be at the core of helping IT transition from the old style very inward to a customer-centric style to one where you're delivering the consumer experience in the business world and I saw that with HP and it got me excited and I joined on board. Not upside. Yeah, the other part that Martin mentioned, I don't know if you have the power of HP Labs but leveraging open source as well, which is probably not a tool in the arsenal not that long ago to really bring the power of a large community who's engaged, you can attack specific problems and make that a core piece of the process. Yeah, but think about it. We've got thousands of the world's best developers, right? The millennial developers, these guys working all around the clock working on our core cloud future called OpenStack, contributing to that, including our experts, and then we're taking that and then bringing it to market and then providing that 24-7 support, testing and hardening it, doing the things we need to do to help an enterprise feel comfortable with that decision. You could never do that. We could never do that and deliver that kind of innovation on our own. We couldn't afford it. We wouldn't be able to deliver on it. These are the best minds of the world who are contributing to this and we're all in with OpenStack. So you talked about, we talked about what do you want the brand to stand for and you said open, no lock-in. Can open source innovation occur at a pace with somebody who's got full control of a stack? It's much faster actually. You watch the innovation of OpenStack. It's only four years old. We just had a four-year birthday of OpenStack already that's an entire cloud computing platform. You've got databases and service projects like Trove. You've got object storage projects like Swift and block storage like Cinder. All of these things are being worked on by people around the world. You could never deliver and so what's happening is the pace of innovation with an open source project like OpenStack is like a hockey stack. I think if we did this ourselves or anyone else you would never be able to deliver the kind of innovation that's coming to market now. We talked about some of the announcements, you guys. Why don't we actually go back a month and talk about Helion and then work through today. You've got some HBC announcements. You've got the network for Helion. So start with Helion. What's great about Helion is it really brought together a lot of great products and services in the cloud that already exist and it took OpenStack and it was our first foray to the market with an OpenStack distribution. And what's important actually is we have technology one called HP Cloud System that is actually the most popular cloud platform right now, private cloud platform on the planet. About almost 2,000 users right now. 2,000 companies, third of the Fortune 100 right now using that technology. So what it is is a proven capable platform used by big banks and others. We're injecting OpenStack into that so that you can over time scale that out with new applications. And so the launch really was about pulling all the pieces together, pulling our support and services together and saying to a customer with confidence here's our cloud portfolio and here's how we can take you on a journey at your pace and accelerate that journey to take advantage of that cloud portfolio and that was really the launch a month ago. Today, and it discover, I mean only a month later we've already done a number of great things. One is we brought out OpenStack, the commercial version so we've launched a community one. You can download it. There's been thousands of downloads already. The commercial version's coming out now and we announced pricing. And what we are all about here, this is really, really important, we are about accelerating the adoption of OpenStack throughout the enterprise. We're about breaking down the barriers that have inhibited the proliferation of this great technology. So one of those things today was the price point. We announced $1,400 per year per server, all in price point for HP, HP on OpenStack. And that's critical because this is a scale out product. You're going to have dozens, hundreds, maybe even thousands of these all around the world. And so the price point is it's disruptive, it's the lowest on the planet. And we said it's going to be simple and easy. We're not going to do all of this good, better, best packaging. It's super easy and that's a big part of today. The other part of today is we said, you know what, we're going to work with partners and we're going to deploy this all around the world. And that was the Helian Network Announcement along with AT&T and the British Telecom and Intel. And that's just huge for today. Now Helian comprises both on-premise and in the HP public cloud, correct? That's right. So talk about how that pricing works. I mean, I like what you're saying simple because cloud pricing is really complicated. Yeah, so we use, we're probably the largest user of OpenStack in production today without public cloud. So we use it and people can consume services from that and buy them on a, you know, as you go basis. But with OpenStack, what's really happening is people are able to deploy their own private clouds, right? They're able to, a service provider can deploy and build their own public cloud. So when I talk about the price point, I'm talking about a customer building their own cloud, building their own cloud in a third party data center or in one of HP's 82 data centers. And that price point is, you know, it's easy to use. You can predict it in your business model and feel comfortable about what it's going to cost, you know, two, three, four years out. And so, help me understand, let's unpack that a little bit. What am I getting for that $1,400 per user? So you get the entire, so this is what's amazing. You get the entire cloud operating system called OpenStack, right? You get all of the projects now that are part of the OpenStack build. You're getting an object story. It's, you know, Amazon S3, but in a box called Swift, right? With the Swift API. And you could build that and do that yourself now. You could do that in a way that controls, that gives you full control and full flexibility. You get databases as a service product. You get a compute engine. Swift, Cinder, Grizzly, everything. That's right, Nova for the compute. And so you get all of this in that box. All of this. And you can go deploy this and you can benefit now from the thousands of developers who are every six weeks putting out new code and innovating. So, okay. So all the new innovations will fall under that umbrella. That's right. And any price changes thereafter. You might choose to use, you might say I'm just building a cloud storage environment. You might choose to be heavy on Swift. That's what you're doing. But it is all inclusive. And you can use the entire cloud platform or you can build a storage platform or databases as a service platform. That's a different model clearly. What are customers telling you about that? Yeah, so they, well, they want, they want the control and the flexibility of having their own platform for security reasons, for compliance, they want to put their data in their own centers. But they're also saying, I want to use public cloud some too. And I like the idea that if OpenStack is here and OpenStack is here, right? Same code basis. I can fairly easily take a workload, take an application to go from here to here and back and forth. That kind of flexibility called interoperability. And that's what's coming down the road with OpenStack underneath is something that does not exist today and everybody wants. Make sure I understand. So I'm paying $1,400 per server for that OpenStack instance on-premise and then when I want to access public cloud services, I'm, I'm what? You're paying as, you might want to burst. You might want to just go do, you might have some peak demand. You burst out there you pay for. And I would run that from HP, public cloud, right? Or partner hours. Yep. Excellent. Now you also had some HPC announcements. That's right. So there's a number, what's great is HP now is people are taking Healy on OpenStack and they're putting it in their products. So our HPC group, our high-performance computing group, said, hey, we want to have a self-service mechanism and we want to be able to scale out the architecture people want in that, in HPC. So they put OpenStack inside their solution and launch it today. And so it's, you know, OpenStack and better than HPC. Open, hybrid, simple to consume is what I'm here. That's right. That's right. And predictable. And predictable. All right, good. Dave, Lisa Murray wrote the book on this. So this is great. If you don't believe Bobby, Lisa came by, gave me the book. So it's the OpenStack technology breaking the enterprise barrier. So you've got it. It's one of the best reads on the planet right now. Yeah, excellent. All right. So when does it go to the next level? What is it? I'm just buying computer. Pardon? I'm just getting capacity. If you just want capacity, you might just build a storage cloud yourself or you might use our public cloud storage or with our Healy and Network, our partners around the world will be deploying OpenStack and you can buy it from them. Awesome. All right, we've got to leave it there, Bobby. Thanks so much for coming to theCUBE. It was a pleasure meeting you. Good time. Appreciate it. All right, keep it right there, everybody. John Furrier is in the house. He's back from San Francisco or San Jose. Good to have you back, John. Keep it right there. We're back with John Furrier just a moment.