 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. Welcome back to HP Discover, everybody. This is theCUBE. Jeff Frick and I are really pleased to have Michael Juan, who's the Senior Director of Global Alliances for HP Networking. Good to see you again, Michael. You too. You too. So last time we were in Barcelona, I believe, we were talking about SDN and what's new in the last six months? Well, I'm actually very excited to come back because in the last six months, our SDN App Store has a huge stride in terms of progress. I believe when we talked, we have just launched the App Store for two months. We launched in last November and at Intel New York. Back then, we had six applications in the store and we have about 40 ecosystem partners. And today we have 18 applications and we have more than 80 partners. So we have actually tripled the number of applications in the store and we have doubled the number of ecosystem partners. So maybe you could talk about the objectives of the store. Let's sort of recap that. What are you trying to accomplish? Absolutely. HP's SDN approach is an ecosystem-based approach. We have all the different layers of SDN. We have the infrastructure layer, as you know. We have over 35 million ports SDN enabled in the switches and today they are on customer premise and we can turn it on. And we have an enterprise-grade controller which can program the network but we believe the value, the business value that the customer can have are through applications and we don't want to do it alone as big as HP. We believe the innovation should come from the industry, coming from the developer community and the ecosystem and the app store is our way to do it. Okay, so it was so new when we last talked. What kind of progress are you seeing? Can you get, what's attraction look like? Yeah, absolutely. So we, in the past six months we have focused our efforts in two regards. One is really focusing on driving use cases. What are the most compelling use cases the customer want to have? And I think back then you asked the one question is what is the killer app? I think we have emerged as three killer app categories. The number one is actually security. SDN give you the unprecedented capability which you can essentially turn the network fabric into a intelligent security appliance and you can inject the security safeguard into every single port of the network and you can enforce security policies into the network. That you cannot do with the legacy network. Traditionally you do it with appliances and we see that a lot today as a main use case for SDN. Number two would be optimization. I think we talked about this like the application we did with Microsoft Link we can dynamically adjust the network for real time traffic. And number three is orchestration and the visualization of the network because you have now the big picture of the entire network and you can go really deep. So Michael, without sort of SDN and this sort of application killer app that you're talking about I would have to put in a separate appliance piece of management infrastructure, a separate physical hardware cost associated with that. And then I would, what? I would achieve sort of a similar business capability. Yeah, maybe I give you an example. From the customer, it's a South Washington school district 30,000 users, 31 sites, very big school district in the U.S. And they have a huge challenge on security because the mobility user just grown exponentially. Four years ago, 2,000 users online, now 30,000 users, 10 times. And the problem is they have a huge security concern. It's all BYOD devices, right? You can't put any software. So the way for them to do is somehow find a way to protect the network. The appliance way is you put appliance in front of every switch, in every site, very costly, very difficult to manage. What we can do with the SDN application from the store, we call SDN network protector. At the back end is the tipping point DV database. Basically, we know what are the mailware sites, where are the phishing botnets. We block any malicious DNS request at the port of the edge switch. So you have the entire campus protected and ROI for the customer, they compare the cost, they save 90% of the cost. So the control is now behind the port instead of in front of the port? It's at the central place, but you don't have to pull the traffic to a central place. Essentially, you're extending control to the existing network that you have today. So, okay, now this app leverages tipping point. Yes. But it's not an HP app? It is an HP application. It is, okay. We have the partner application in the security category as well. So that's why I'm not talking about single security application. We have a category of apps. I think we have six to eight security applications. For example, one of them is from iBoss. What iBoss is doing is when you have a breach, I think it happens sometime, when you have a breach, what it can do is leveraging SDN to prevent an affected node to infect the other devices in your network. And that is the leveraging SDN as well. So these are applications that are developed by developers in your community that may be leveraging, presumably they're leveraging HP, tech dioxide, tipping point, whatever it is, but not necessarily. So they only leverage the HP networking platform. So essentially the HP networking switches, wired and wireless, as well as the controller. And this is the platform we have. It could be their own security. And the secret sauce of the security is coming from the developer. From the developer. So they preserve their security source that they have, and they extend their controls through the network. And that could be yours, it could be somebody else's. It could be for any open flow enabled. So these apps are sort of down and dirty infrastructure type of apps, right? We're talking, so then the other is optimization. Maybe give us an example of optimization. Yeah, absolutely. So a couple of examples. One is Microsoft Link, real time communication, right? For real time communication, 80% of the time, the performance of the link is caused by problem of the network, not the application itself. Because the traffic is encrypted. It's very difficult to understand when the traffic is coming in. And if you do the traditional ACL, QoS, it's very manual and it's very fragile. A lot of the time you're making mistakes on the fly. And what we can do now is what I call deterministic networking. So essentially through API, our controller is talking to the link SDN manager itself. And every time it initiates a new real time communication, it tells the controller and say, hey, I'm starting a new session from user A to user B. And we have the topology viewer understand which switches and devices it is going through. We're telling all the switches on route and say prioritize this specific traffic above anything else. So we maintain a bandwidth, a priority of this real time traffic. And the beauty of it is we can do it dynamically. Once the session is done, we tear it down and return the resource back to the network. And then the third killer app is talking about visualizing my network. Yeah, think about SDN, right? It's a high level view, not a device by device view. And you can go flow based control as well. It can go deeper and very granular view. That's something that as a monitoring and visualization application can really take advantage of. So what else is going on? What's next in the app? So you said you have 18 apps and 80 partners. Did I get that right? Yes, more than 80 partners. I think 86 partners. 86 partners, so what's the role of a partner? Maybe describe that a little bit. Well, the role of the partner, first of all, they have to have an innovative idea of the application. They know exactly what kind of customer use cases they have. They bring the idea to us. We have a team who's working with you, let them understand the capability of the network. We actually have business onboarding to understand the use case and we have technical onboarding to understand how we can work together to make the application happen. Okay, so 18 apps, 80 partners. You obviously have a lot of apps in the pipeline then. We have quite several, yeah. Over a dozen in the pipeline, in the making and we're still signing new partners. But a lot of the efforts today is with customers because I truly believe after many years of SDN, we have reaching the stage where customer adoption is going to ramp up. I really see this year could be coming a very significant year for customer adoption. And the partners are both developing apps and reselling and distributing apps, is that right? Or are they primarily- They are reaching to their own customer base but for HP, our sales folks are actually not going out there and say, hey, you want to buy SDN switches. We're going there to talk about these applications because that's what the customer care about, right? What are the business case? What are the benefits to me? And we are going over there and talking about these partner applications. And when we are delivering, we're delivering the overall solution. The application, the controller and our switches and routers. So I'm curious about kind of the profile of the people contributing and the types of applications that they're coming in. Obviously there's big problem application that you described with security. Are there any really nichey things that you've got a particular developer who's got a very particular use case and this is now enabling them to build a very specific something that probably doesn't have real broad adoption but it's the thing for that particular use case. We have quite several of that. In the security area, we have a little startup from Israel and they are creating a very interesting security application where is also after the network kind of a security parameter is breached, it can control the damage in a certain area. And as a matter of fact is when the hacker comes in with SDN, it can dynamically route the traffic to a controlled server and monitoring what they are doing with the network without the hacker knowing so that they can actually trace back and understand who is hacking the network and how to kind of remove the risk from the network. So we see a lot of, this is where the innovation is coming from because I think with the mechanism we put in place, we will be able to reap a lot of innovation that we probably have not think of today but this is the right way to do it. And it's the classic app store dynamics, right? Those guys have to worry about developing a great app. They don't have to worry about necessarily building a big company, building a big sales force, building their channels, et cetera. They're using your infrastructure backbone to really focus on their piece of the value. They focus on the innovation of the app. We help them with the global reach and services as well. Right. So what are the goals of the app store? I mean, where do you want to see it? You got 86 partners, 18 apps. Do you want to? So at this stage, I'm actually not too keen to grow a huge number of apps. So focus on quality. I'm focusing on quality. I'm focusing on customer adoption of existing apps. So I'm putting a lot of efforts in the go-to-market level with my team, our sales force, and the partners, sales force and team, we're going together to the customers and making sure that they have a wonderful experience deploying these apps. And the reason I'm saying the adoption is picking up is last year, we see a lot of the typical early adopters like the universities. This year, it's different. We're seeing like South Washington School. It's a K-12. It's a K-12 school district. And we are seeing another company, for example, Obama Company, they're on stage with me here in the customer panel. And they have deployed the SDN link optimizer with all the HP switches. And what they are is they are food manufacturer, basically all the McDonald's, Apple Pie, doesn't matter where you are. Every single Apple Pie is made and delivered by them. They have global operations, multiple sites. So we are seeing kind of mainstream customers taking notice of SDN. And your goal is to get hundreds, thousands, tens of thousands, what's the kind of order of magnitude? The goal is really to get hundreds of customers to take the solution with the application from the app store. And how does one find out what's in the app store? Where do you go? Well, the URL is hp.com slash SDN slash app store. And you can access from the phone. And we have cloud-based demo capabilities. All our service force go in front of the customer. If you have online access, globally, you will be able to demo the app live. Great. Well, Michael, thanks very much for coming on theCUBE, giving us the update on the app store. That's the end, hot space. HP, big player there. So really appreciate your time. You're welcome. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. All right, keep right there. Everybody, Jeff Frick and I will be back with our next guest. This is theCUBE, we're live from HP Discover in Las Vegas. We'll be right back.