 Live from the Sands Convention Center, Las Vegas, Nevada, extracting the signal from the noise. It's theCUBE, covering HP Discover 2015, brought to you by HP, and now your hosts, Dave Vellante and Jeff Frick. Hi everybody, welcome back to HP Discover. This is theCUBE. This is actually the final HP Discover that we'll ever do and it's really our pleasure to have Calvin Zito here. Calvin, this is your first time on theCUBE, isn't it? I am, I'm a CUBE virgin. I don't know how I'd get away with this. How did this happen? You've been doing this for over five years now. You've never been on theCUBE, I'm shocked. Well, we were always working to get other people on there that knew something, and so, you know. Yeah, you know a lot, and we're thrilled to have you on here. So, at Calvin Zito, formerly at HP Storage Guy, used to have it on your shirt, and you were pretty famous, got a zillion Twitter followers. Why the change? I wanted to have a way to sell my shirts and maybe give a feed to Craig and the rest of the management team so I brought all the old shirts and gave them away since they wouldn't have any value anymore. Now, with the split, there wasn't a lot of clarity to me in terms of the exact branding we're going to use and Hewlett Packard Enterprise Storage Guy wasn't going to work too well as a Twitter handle, so I thought, you know, it's just easier to, for now, create a brand around Calvin Zito and because, you know, people that do social media. You know, there's a bit of a brand around what you do. And so it just seemed like now is the right time to give people some runway to figure it out when we get to the split. So you must be excited about the split. What's take us inside the conversation inside of HP with the enterprise? Yeah, I'm excited. I actually, you know, I'm getting the messages from Meg in the progress of what's going on, but what I'll say is kind of my personal view. I don't know if this is what it is, but to me, you know, I think what it does is it lets Hewlett Packard Enterprise focus on what we do. I mean, focus is a good thing. I read a lot of the security analysts who are out saying, oh, this is a bad thing and how bad it is, but I don't see how this could possibly be a bad thing. It's going to allow HP to focus Hewlett Packard Enterprise to focus on what we do. You know, it's going to allow us to do things with profits that align to the gross margin of that business instead of having to look at a lower gross margin business and potentially holding back on investments because we have a broader portfolio that they have to manage financially. So to me, from a storage guy standpoint in enterprise, I think it's a smart move. You know, I've, we've been saying it's inevitable. I mean, it's absolutely the right thing. Two different gross margin businesses you sell on the ink on one hand and then talking superdoms on the other. It's just, maybe there's some synergy there, but not a lot. And so we're actually excited too, but there's risks involved when you do that. And it's, see, we heard the presentation from your head of operations yesterday that it was interesting how HP took us inside of what's going on. How does that affect you guys day to day? You know, I've, I've seen zero impact to me so far, except for one thing. And you know, I'm from Boise, Boise site. It's got about eight, eight buildings started traditionally as a, actually the traditional original printer. Shinden Boulevard. Yeah, that's right. It was originally that's where laser jets fired up. But what a lot of people don't know it's also where storage started because HP used to have a dismanufacturing business and that's where it was. So it was not evenly split, but it was pretty close. It's mostly an HP Inc site now with the eight buildings. There's enough enterprise people that we're getting two buildings and they're starting to do the things to, but the security door is in place and we'll share the cafeteria. We'll be able to badge into the cafeteria, but you won't be able to go through out the other doors of the cafeteria. And for me personally, I just got moved into the enterprise building. So for me, that's the biggest. So that's it. That's it. I had to put my stuff in a box and put my PC back together on the other building. You know, the next day. So the big story here, certainly within EG and most definitely within the storage group is three-par. We had Milan Shetty on earlier today and he took us through sort of the history of what happened after the three-par acquisition came in. I learned, I didn't know this, you guys started working on Flash like very, very shortly after HP acquired three-par. You bet. That's cool. Yeah. I mean, I think, you know, the development of that stuff actually does take time. I talked to CMAC, I did a video with CMAC that's already actually up on YouTube and CMAC, of course, is the chief software architect for three-par. I kind of talked to him about, you know, three-par and Flash, why does it work? I mean, I think there's some inherent things with three-par that make it ideal for Flash that people don't understand and especially competitors try to say, oh, no, there's a legacy. When they design that controller, and you guys know this, I mean, it's a mesh-based controller that basically they designed it to do two things. Serve IOs as fast as it can and protect the data. That's what storage is about. That's what a storage system is about. It didn't care what was on the back end. So it's a great platform for doing, for whether it's Flash or Spanjists. Well, and there's a lot of intelligence in the system too. You know, what people now refer to is machine learning and big data. No, wait a minute, it's autonomic, remember? Yeah. It's autonomic. And it's polymorphic. It's polymorphic. So you must miss Dave Scott just a little bit. I did. Just a Manish Goel, we love you, great. Good to have you on. Let me talk about, you didn't ask the question, but let me answer the question. I love David. David, I worked for him at HP before I left for three par and I was really bummed when he left and when he came back. In fact, I think you were in Barcelona when we did that first event announcing David as the head of, and David the kind of guy was. I mean, I walked into the hotel, hadn't seen me in 10 years and David calls me over and we ended up sitting there talking for about an hour and a half about what was going on, how my personally. David is great. Nobody could be more personal than David. I have been super impressed with Manish. I don't think they could have picked a better guy. I mean, I brought him into the bloggers a couple of days ago to talk to them. They're blown away by him. By far and away, every, all the bloggers I've talked to said best session for them. So what was that conversation like? Is the bloggers, they go hard at it. You know, they don't pull punches. What were they asking him? Yeah, you know, some of them, a lot of it was just kind of him talking about why he came to HP. So I won't play that back. I think you guys actually talked to him. So I'm sure you've heard some of that. Some of it was technical. The big thing that I think came up that I know Manish is thinking about is that the big trend in storage now seems to be around analytics and how do you, you know, do more with the information and the data versus just, you know, putting a box that spins or flashes and does it fast and protects it. And Manish is already on that. I think what they were most impressed with is only being on the job for two months. He really gets it. I mean, he already gets HP storage. He gets what we're doing. He's, you know, I'm sure there's going to be things. He's going to maybe change up a little bit. We'll see, but he really gets it. And they were really impressed by that. So you're a guy, you see you in Twitter all the time. You're not afraid to sort of mix it up with the competition. You have relationships with your competitors. Yep. What gives you confidence about HP's competitive position right now? Well, I kind of feel almost a little bit like a broken record in three parts, a big part of that. I mean, it's an amazing platform for what it does. And you've seen that from introducing the 7,000 from a platform standpoint or from a part of the family and what that did in terms of taking it down to the mid-range moving then from now, we've got the 20,000. And of course, all flash in the middle of that. It's an amazing platform for what it does. And again, it goes back to it's built us serve IOs and do it fast. And it's built to protect the IOs. And there's a lot of startups popping up and you know that they don't have all the data services that three-part does. It really is, it's a kind of a buzzword and it's a marketing term, but it really is polymorphic. It's an amazing platform that it was built to do IO where a lot of other people are building an array, for example, to optimize for flash. Great. It's a great array, but it doesn't do everything that people and customers need. There's obviously other pieces from the convergence standpoint. Nobody in the industry has the assets that HP has to do hyper-convergence, for example. And I think you guys agree, that's going to be a huge trend. It's a huge direction that the industry is going to go. Oh yeah, I mean it's the whole market. Yeah. And I think you're right. I think within a number of years, we're going to see it's going to be the market. That's what we're going to be talking about. Because people, of course we have affinities to the servers and our server vendors in our storage and our storage, but ultimately people don't want to be doing that heavy lifting, it's just not productive. It's an analogy I heard yesterday. It's like people wouldn't even buy a car. You don't go buy an engine and some tires and some, you know, a steering column and some seats and you don't go then build it yourself. And I think as vendors we haven't, I won't say we haven't done the right thing by customers, it's what the technology was at that time, but we got into our silos and built our servers and we built our storage and we built our networking and we made infrastructure harder than it needed to be. So you've been observing the storage industry for a while. What's your take on some of the startups? I mean, you got, last independent really is of any size is NetApp. I mean, I don't consider EMC an independent storage company anymore. They're sort of federation. You know, you got the startups, I mean, look at 3PAR. 3PAR struggled as an independent company. It was hard for them to make money. You know, Isilon, okay, you're compelling. Okay, but they all sort of, they could never get what David Scott, they got to escape velocity so they could get to IPO, but and then to get to that next step, the next NetApp, do you see that happening in storage again? I think it's going to be really hard to get there as a new vendor that comes in and then suddenly becomes that vendor. I mean, maybe I'm wrong with this, but you know, you've got the big vendors like IBM and Dell and HP and you know, you think of the big kind of system vendors just go throw into that, although they don't actually have a storage business yet. Maybe they will someday. Throw an Oracle in the mix. Yeah, and throw Oracle in the mix, absolutely. I think the only way the startups are going to make it is if they've got a compelling, you know, whether it's storage or a converged system or whatever it ends up being that one of the big guys want to buy. I just think it's going to be a hard business for somebody that's a startup to come up and run up and be an IBM, be an HP, be a Dell. The only way that I think those companies are going to make it is to get bought up. Yeah, I mean, the scenario I've said is the rich get richer. And you know, sometimes you say, geez, I wish there would be another exciting startup to emerge, but it's hard to put that scenario together because you know, companies like you understand disruption. You know, everybody, the old waves would expect, oh, TG, even Sun, Sun was kind of the last great company to serve, but the large companies now have cash. They got resources. They got paranoid executives, you know, that are smart and they don't sit back and wait to get crushed. And I'm sure you guys have been talking about it. I mean, there's inevitable consolidation that's going to happen. I mean, we get to talk about the flash startups. You think of a pure, I don't know if pure's aspirations are to just go IPO and stay that way and never get bought up. I've heard some people say that's what they want to do. Not sure I believe it, but I don't see pure making it unless they get acquired by somebody. They're not going to be a standalone business. Scott Deetson has said, we want to be the next DMC. And wow, I mean, that's a grand bold vision, but it's hard to see the steps that... And I personally would say I think that's impossible and I think it's impossible because they're very narrowly focused on what they do. Is that the only thing that a customer is going to need from now in the next 15 years from a storage perspective? Is that two controller, active passive controller that does flash pretty well, does some optimization, even with able to tweak it and make it better over the next few years? Is that really the only thing that a customer is going to need in storage? No, it's not. I just don't see that happening. I see that for them to make it for any of the flash startups you might bring up, they're going to need to get acquired by somebody. So, I mean, when you think about it, to me, I agree, and I think I agree for another reason, which is the structure of the business. And so, the ascendancy of EMC and even, it's certainly NetApp, and even HP to a large extent, certainly HP was created after the mainframe, you know, the vertical integration. Everything happened on these lines of competition that were focused. Cisco, that's how they emerged. Certainly HP, I think, you know, took advantage of that, not only printers, but servers. EMC and storage, Intel and microprocessors, Microsoft and software, and the world's different today. It's this integrated world, not totally reintegrated to vertical integration, but more integration. And that seems to give you leverage. That's what customers want, isn't it? Yeah, absolutely, and I think through that whole conversation we were having, and my mind's thinking about EMC, and they really are the one anomaly we can bring up over the last 20 years of a company that really came from nowhere to be a major player in IT. And I may be wrong in this, but I think a big part of why EMC was successful. Is storage or an IT? No, no, but finish that thought, because I know where you're going. A big part of why they were successful is because they had a relationship with HP that walked them into the door, and they got a huge install base because of the former reseller relationship that HP would have had with EMC. Honestly, I don't think they would have made it if they hadn't done that, because just getting into accounts like they can do now, they would have never had that initial open door that they got because of the... I thought you were going somewhere else. I thought you were going to say VMware. Well, VMware's accelerated, absolutely. Take VMware out of the EMC equation, what do you got? Bigger NetApp, with a more complex portfolio. With VMware, it's an interesting company. At least the one thing to EMC's credit, I guess I shouldn't be too hard on NetApp, is at least when they realized they didn't have something that they needed, they went and bought it. NetApp seems to kind of want to play pat firm with FAS and keep trying to make this as... I mean, they bought in Genio, but that's a bad example. And I've talked to NetApp executives about this, they got to get into software, and they didn't. And so you're seeing, it's hard to count NetApp out, but boy, you kind of wonder what's next for them. I mean, they've been down and out before and come back, but again, that was in a different environment today. It's, they're up against you guys in VCE, in Oracle and Converged Infrastructure, big players with significant advantages where they just tough. Now, we love the innovation, we love the startups, love pure storage, great. And as a vendor, as one of the big vendors is there, we love it too. I mean, if there's something else, like with 3PAR, if 3PAR hadn't been there, I don't think we'd be selling EVAs today. So, I mean, as vendors, I mean, I'm sure that on, let's see it work. And if there's something that HP needs, that they've innovated on and... HP gets a, I said HP gets bad rap in acquisitions, made some great acquisitions, made some not so great acquisitions. 3PAR, obviously a great one. Ruba, the interesting I was saying, could that be the next 3PAR for HP? But the other thing that large companies, not just HP, get criticized for is the inability to do organic development. 3PAR, all flash array is organic development inside of HP that has been extremely successful. Yeah, there's certainly some things about the architecture that enabled that to happen, but 3PAR, clearly, I mean, aside from the scale of HP, 3PAR wouldn't be what they are today without the infusion of technology and engineers and things that have happened in HP to make it the product that it is. Yeah, the most significant, certainly from a storage standpoint, organic development since EVA, which at its time was kick ass. I mean, it was ahead of its time. And then, you know, let's face it, Herd squeezed the R&D spigot, and that's what happens. And then you lived it, it's very hard to recover. And IBM's living that now in storage. Yeah, in fact, I've told the story a couple times. In fact, we had a partner panel last night and had Manish tell his story of his success at NADAP and looking as an outsider at HP and thinking, this is not any place that ever come. And after he was done, it's something hit me. It's like, I want to tell that story that Manish just told, but from inside HP. And this relates to, you know, Herd squeezing, Carly squoze a lot too. I mean, Carly made some pretty bad decisions like getting rid of storage specialists because she thought generalists could sell storage. Between that, those two experiences, I mean, obviously storage was down and out. And part of the story here is that three years ago, I was walking into actually Meg's keynote here at Discover and I got a call from some folks on ODMC saying, hey, we know HP's offered in early retirement. Maybe you want to take that and come work for EDUC. Three par, the portfolio leadership that we had at the time, like David and Tom Joyce and having a strategy and a vision of where we were going. And all my years at HP storage, we'd never really had a strategy, vision and a portfolio that could lead to success. You know, there were times in that where like you said, EVA was a strong product and it looked like it was going to be a good product. Even when we had the EVA, there really wasn't a strategy at HP storage of what we were going to do. It was, let's go sell this great product. And you know, when you're competing against EMC and they're out there with a vision and a strategy and you're the number two or three guy in the market, you don't have a lot of success trying to go into customers with pitching a product. And in fact, I probably shouldn't tell this story, but I'll tell you another one that'll be really controversial. Herd came to Boise once and it was just when the market was turning south and they were doing a bunch of layoffs and he got done with us, you know, he was talking on a flip chart about, you know, all the economics of why we were laying on a bunch of people off. He got done and we'll take questions now and nobody in Boise is raising their hand. And I've got like six really hard questions I want to ask him and Mark, I got a question. Mark, you know, most CEOs have a tenure of about two and a half to three years. You've been great. You've got the operational stuff in order, but we don't have a vision. When are we going to get a CEO that's got a vision? That's literally what I said. I mean, it may have been a little bit softened, but it was, it's funny. I tell people, it's like Moses in the Red Sea, everybody parted and left me alone with the spotlight on Calvin Zito and Mark Herd just took his fingerprints. We don't need a vision. We just need to execute on strategy. I totally disagree. And I had people come up to me saying, man, you got big Cajones asking Mark Herd that question. I think it was the right question. I'm thrilled of what HP is now. There's actually a vision of what we're doing, especially storage. There's a vision of what we're doing and customers that aren't thinking or looking at HP. Now's a great time to be looking and talking to HP. Well, if you don't have a vision, you're not relevant. And if you're not relevant then customers eventually are going to go somewhere else. Well, and especially when you're not like the number one product pusher in the market, you know, what's the reason to look at you if we've already got EMC and you can't tell me where you're going. Why do I want to talk to you? But HP's got leading, probably one of the things I, so we've been kind of debating all week, John Furrier and I in particular, the whole notion of the idea economy, which I said ideas are the main spring of the digital economy. So I was okay with it. John was sort of sort of nailing Jell-O to the wall sort of kind of, but the one thing I did say is HP is still a product company. And the advantage that I see HP has over, let's say for instance in IBM is you have leading products. I can name a lot of leading products, not just in printing, you know, there's three par, you know, gen nine, you know, et cetera, a lot of leading products. It's your product company. Yeah. You've got to be excited about that. Oh yeah. And the fact that we're now taking the products and you saw Meg's keynote and there's a vision of where, you know, we're going to play and how we're going to play. To me, it's the most exciting time. I mean, go back to that history. I've told people, there's maybe some times where I should have left, but, you know, working for HP, having been here at the time for, you know, 25, 30 years, living in Boise, it's like drug money, I'm staying. Until I got to go find another street to Pimp on. That's a good gig, right? Yeah, it's a good gig. And the thing is too, you've got the social gig too. You had a lot of latitude. I mean, you come on here. We're freely talking about the competition. Well, hopefully I'll be here after, you know, after we're done with this, if any of you guys watch it. But you've got the, you've got somehow, you've got the, you know, the license to do that. A lot of, you know, a lot of executives, they don't like to talk about the competition. That's cool. But this is, these are the conversations that customers are having. It's the conversations I have when I'm on Twitter and talking to, or on LinkedIn. I mean, this is real life, right? You know, you could put a marketing spin on it and just do whatever it is you do. But I'm, you know, my objective is to be credible, real and honest, biased. Everybody knows I'm biased. And I kid people internally, they probably shouldn't say this, I'm a pimp for HP, I am. But I'm an honest and I assess what I see and I give people honest opinions of what I think based on my bias. You know who I am, you know where I'm coming from, and I'm going to be an honest guy. But you've also cultivated the blogger network and that's something others do it, but you've got a real heavy focus on that content angle. I think I'm right saying that I think we were the first technology company to ever do anything like this. I mean, I remember like it was like six years ago, we called it a tech day and we brought a bunch of bloggers to Colorado Springs and guys like Chris Evans and Nigel Poulton probably even Foskett came to that first one. Yeah, I think you basically created Foskett's model and he sort of took it to an independent. He tweaked it and I think he probably would say yes. It's similar to the standpoint, but it's different in that what he does is obviously brings a bunch of different vendors in and does what we did with one vendor. But you proceeded the tech field days. Yeah, he did his tech field day. It's his credit. He saw an opportunity and went at it. He's created a great model for him. No doubt, but yeah, I'd say EMC did it internally. They had, you know, with Barry and those guys and Keniston was there at the time and they did a lot of blogging internally and they've done a very good job. But you've done that external outreach and maintained it. That's the difference. A lot of blogger relationships have gone poof. Yeah, a lot of work to maintain. Well, it's a lot of work to maintain, but it's also what happens in a lot of these guys. I mean, they get some credibility and some visibility because of what they do and then suddenly they get hired by a vendor because, you know, so it's really hard not only just to maintain but the population shrinks and suddenly you got less people and I view my role as in what I do is let's help build more of these guys up so they get some more credibility. So, you know, you got to raise some new plants and then some of those, you know they're going to go work at somebody else and you're going to lose them. But to me, it's about, you know, creating new faces with fresh views that hopefully you increase their visibility and credibility and keep that cycle going. Hey, right, it's hard to make money as a blogger. I mean, it is, you got to hustle. Most of them probably don't make anything doing it. It's because they got a passion and that's why it's a cool and really great place for customers to find, you know, kind of the information that we do with these guys because they do it because it's a passion. Most of them don't get paid anything for doing it. They may put some ads on their site and they may, you know, make a couple bucks because somebody clicked on an ad. It doesn't even pay their hosting bill. It doesn't even pay their hosting bill. That's right, they do it because it's a passion. Yeah, great. So, we're excited about the upcoming whatever what's going to be called, Discover in London. Yeah, I can't predict what it is because I don't know, and nobody sent me the official message but I, you know, a good guess might be Hewlett Packard Enterprise Discover. I hope they figure a way to shorten that up but there's no way to shorten up Hewlett Packard Enterprise that I know of. So, it'll be interesting or maybe Discover Hewlett Packard Enterprise. That might be kind of interesting, right? So, we have a great to have you on in our last official HP Discover Cube segment. I apologize, it's taken so long to have you on. It's great. Yeah, I was starting to feel like kind of ticked off, Dave. Anytime. See you at the storage party all the time and we talk for hours and then you never ask me to come on. Anytime, you're welcome back. We'd love to have you back and love the collaboration. You guys have been really supportive of us and really appreciate that. Thanks a bunch. Great to be here. All right, so listen, that's a wrap. Day three, three days of wall-to-wall coverage. HP Discover, thanks everybody for watching. We will see you next week in Miami, San Jose. We'll see you next time. Bye for now.