 We discover this is Silicon Angle in Wikibon's theCUBE, our flagship program. We go out to the events, expect a signal from the noise. I'm John Furrier, the founder of Silicon Angle. I'm joined by cohost Dave Alonzo, the co-founder of wikibon.org. And we are live in Barcelona for HP Discover exclusive coverage here in Barcelona. Our next guest is Johan D'Shefli. Did I get that? How's that? That's perfect, thank you. Not easy. Well, you're a big wig at HP. SVP of NGM of HP Technology Services Consulting. Really big job within the company. Thanks for spending the time with us. I know you got a lot of customer visits. So, welcome back. You've been on before, CUBE alumni. So we're glad to have you. So give us the update. What's different now since our last chat in Vegas? So it was a different marketplace here in EMEA and Europe. So, clouds different here, right? So, different requirements still? Clearly what we see is that the level of maturity and the level of trust of the customers in moving towards the cloud is increasing significantly. I mean, when we met six months ago in Las Vegas and now you see that customers really are convinced that cloud is the way to go. And by the way, you don't look cloud in an isolated way. You need to look at it from what are the opportunities that are being brought by big data? How can we bring those opportunities through a mobility approach to the customers? And you of course need to have a very strong compute platform under it, which can move from traditional IT to hybrid cloud. And I think that the evolution customers are on right now. One of the things that we've been talking about now for the past year, even since HP Discover in Vegas, we've been to Amazon re-invent. We've done a bunch of open stack stuff. We've been deep in the cloud. We're going to be covering the cloud. Again, Amazon, all the open stack events. HP, VMware, EMC, IBM, all the top companies. It's clear unanimous for customers. There is not traction but mandate to have an architecture in place to enable this new preferred, new style of IT, as Meg Whitman calls it, but reality is it's the modern business, right? So that's big data analytics. That's the edge of the network, internet of things, mobile devices, but under the hood, an enterprise is moving from, I don't want to say stone age, but old legacy stuff, servers and racks and stack to fully integrated operating systems of the data center, cloud, workloads, integrated applications, you guys have pods, a lot of complicated stuff. So we're hearing yes, yes, yes, we got to do this. Now your job is to say, okay, let's sit down and build an operator, just sit down and construct those architectures. So I got to ask you, what are the top three things that you're seeing from customers right now in terms of the needs that they say help us with? Yep. So clearly, as I mentioned, customers are convinced that they need to move towards the cloud. You know, this is a journey. It is not something that you turn off. You know, customers move from consolidation into virtualization and now they go into the cloud. And depending on, you know, business units, kind of service they need to deliver, they are at a certain point in that journey. And what we have done within HP, we have developed a set of seven services, seven services that start with an assessment and that end with a management solution. But all of those steps are built in such a way that the output of one service can be used as the input of the other service. And it's really, really, really important to share that with our customers, because that means whatever point they are on the journey to cloud, whether they are on the traditional IT, whether they are on a private cloud, whether they want to move to managed cloud or to public cloud, we can hook in their journey and give them the right level of services. We provide advisory services, strategic services. Of course, application transformation is important. Design services, that's why we are here today. We help them implement, we help them operate and we have the educational services around it. Because whether it's cloud or mobility or big data, this is different compared to traditional IT. And that means that our educational offering needs to evolve along with the new capabilities that are offered. Yohan, the average age of an enterprise app, based on the work that we've looked at in Wikibon communities, almost two decades old. So that's got to be a challenge in terms of designing a cloud roadmap for your clients. You mentioned application transformation, but of course transformation, for the sake of transformation, doesn't make any sense. So I wonder if you could talk about, is that a trend that you see in the marketplace, that sort of average age, can you validate that? And how do you help customers navigate through that challenge, particularly as they're going to cloud? So I think one of the richnesses we have within HP is that we have a service catalog that is extremely broad. We have a service catalog that is really linked to the product that we bring to market. You know, service storage networking. We have a service catalog that is linked with ITO outsourcing, but also around application and around application modernization. And that means that our colleagues from the application modernization business, they can really help customers to build those new applications. You know, and like with cloud, it's not something that you turn off. You have strategic applications that you want to let involve, but you also have strategic applications that you want to write completely new. And I think what we can help, where we can help a customer as well on the infrastructure side, as on the application side, is to build a plan on how you move from legacy to new. And we can do that because we have done it, A, internally, and we do it with a lot of customers outside there. And we can do it in an integrated way because we have those infrastructure services, we have the application services, and we have the software management services to help the customer build and manage what he needs around the clouds. Okay, so you go in, you do an assessment, you help the customer's plan, help them figure out where they want to go, what the best roadmap is to get there. You actually do a design. What's the outcome of your services? Is it a full-blown plan? Tells you exactly what to do, what to buy, how to... So there again, let me come back to the journey. And depending on where a customer is on that journey, we can come with a high-level plan or with a more detailed plan. I would say the first thing a customer needs to know is what is the strategic approach he wants to take. And then we can take that strategic approach which is reasonably high-level, which is probably more targeted toward the CXO in the company, and then we can turn that into a more conceptual. I would say the first one is like, what do you want to achieve? The second one is, how do you want to achieve? The first one is more high-level, the second one is more detailed. And when you go into the detailed plan, you look at the plan, you link it to where the business needs to go, you build a proof-of-concept and you help the customer to understand how he can move to hybrid clouds. Now, when you get to the point of the customer say, okay, great, I love the plan. Thank you, wonderful, I like the design. Who implements? You know, when you have a big master plan, clearly what is happening, not only from an executional capabilities point of view, but also from a financial point of view, the plan is cut in several pieces. And one of the things we can really assure to the customer is that, for example, what needs to happen around the data center, we can help them with that. You know, what needs to happen around the network, the connectivity, the mobility, we can help them with that. So, once you have a plan, you need to identify, you know, what are the different steps in what priority do you need to take them? What is the cost? What brings return very quickly? And you make an assumption of all that and then you make a proposal and you go with the customer. But the good thing is that within HP, we have a lot of capabilities ourselves and on top of that, we have an attitude of partnering with other partners out there or other providers out there. I mean, it's the DNA of HP to work with partners. So when we go into a complex project, we see where we can add value, but we also align with partners where they can help value. And I think that's one of the tremendous attitudes that we can bring towards the customer. There is no lock in, it's a very open approach. So we talked with Sargillai many times. We love having him. He's so good on theCUBE, trying to get him to come by. But I always ask him the question, it's so confusing on HP Cloud. It's, could you like straighten it out for me? Like, and he did a good job and I want to put it out there. If you build and operate, a bunch of HP people get involved. If you're consuming, it's managed Cloud or public Cloud. Pretty much that's simple. Do you agree? Is that a good way to look at it? That's absolutely the case. And when you look at the keynote speeches that Mac and Bill, Vecti made, it is around the fact that we can help customers or build an environment where they consume IT, or we can help them to consume the IT that we deliver for them. And this build and consume ID is supported by hardware products that we can deliver, software problems that we can deliver, and then the services that come or from TS Consulting or from ES. And I think it's one of the richnesses that we have is that we can build that end-to-end approach. And honestly, we have a very, very deep belief that as we move forward, hybrid Cloud is the answer to the issue because like customers do not move from day one to day two into virtualization, customers will not move from day one into day two into the Cloud. It will be gradual. How do you move traditional IT into private Cloud? How do you move from there into managed Cloud? How do you move from there into public Cloud? And for many customers, it's going to be a combination of all that. And I think one of the values that we can bring is that we can not only have an idea about it, we have a point of view, but we also have the different resources, the different products, and solutions within the company to bring that. Okay, so let me simplify it then. So customers, developers, startups love Amazon because it's like a single product. They go there, they log in, they do some development dev ops, if you will. They build their app. They mostly developers, not hardware guys. They love the appeal to Amazon. And then they grow and then realize they got to host their own stuff and then may use some Cloud. So it's a very simple model to understand. Enterprises are different. They're very complicated. HP has a diverse customer base. So everyone kind of knows that. It's kind of known. She had a diversity of customers that all have complicated stuff. There's no one enterprise that looks and tastes the same. So what you would agree with probably. So assuming that, how does the HP's approach work for all these different sets of customers? Is it the modular approach? I mean, do you get involved on the front end? Take us through how you guys attack that market. Knowing that almost every customer is not the same as the next one. We attack that market in the following way. So within consulting, we have three types of services that we deliver. We have a kind of advisory services and we deliver those advisory services to experienced workshops. From advisory, we move into transformational and from transformational, we, where we help the customer build their Cloud, we deliver the integration services. Let me come back on the advisory services. What we have done is we have created a structured approach. It is a three-day deliverable where we have an experienced workshop and we go in with a proven methodology. We go in with different entities of the customer, IT, the business and finance and the outcome of such a workshop is a plan on how to move forward and we have those structured workshops around Clouds, around mobility, around connectivity, around big data and around information management. And so that is the starting point and the output of this experience. And that's a menu though, that's a menu item, right? It's not a comprehensive thing. It is a menu. It is a structured approach but the content of the structured approach is really customer specific. So what we try to do is because we focus on the enterprise business. You know, we look at the specificities of a certain enterprise but we put it in a structured program so that we can execute in a structured and disciplined way and we know that after a few days we come with outcome that is usable by the customer. And then from there we can go or to integration or we can go to transformation. Tell me about transformation. Transforming IT, it's been an abused word. I was on a crowd chat yesterday at the Gartner data conference that last night discussing this with a lot of the thought leaders around transformation and it's being kicked around as a buzzword. I don't want to say buzzword, an over abused word. It's a punchline now but so let's go down the realities of transformation. Describe what that means specifically that you get involved in. Yeah, so transformation can mean two things. It can mean a transformation to the business and we strongly believe that IT can be a very strong enabler to influence the results of the customer. Whether it's growing the top line, whether it's managing cost, whether it is mitigating risk. But then when you want to implement you need to do it around certain platforms, around certain topics. And for example, for us also transformation is when we help a customer to move from a legacy storage environment to a three-par environment. When we help a customer to move a full legacy networking environment into an HPN network environment. And clearly what you need to do there is you need to assess where the customer is, understand the readiness, build a plan and implement it step by step. And I think one of the very good examples we can bring forward here, I proposed it or I talked about it at the innovation theater is that the smart learning project that we implemented in Dubai, where we brought together the capabilities of what we have in mobility, in big data and in cloud to build an education platform for the country. And it's really a nice example. You know, the country has an objective, how can we build the next group of leaders for business and for the country. And so they started to develop a very ambitious plan and they wanted to roll it out. You know, we met the customer at Discover in Vegas about six months ago. You remember that that was June timeframe and the new solution needed to go live in September with the new school year. And with very strong program management, with a very strong plan, together with the customer and with a number of partners, we managed to implement a completely new education system based upon the usage of tablets, based upon digital content, based upon, you know, analytics to see how pupils evolve in that system. And I think that is a really good example on how- It's almost two and a half months. That's insane. How did you do that? You know, I don't talk about two and a half months. It's 72 days. Oh, man. So, and I mean, it was a very structured, a very disciplined approach as well on the customer side, as on our side. We put an extremely experienced program manager on it and we put someone on it with a lot of tenacity. Someone, you know, who really wanted to move forward who had made his personal pride to make that work. And the good thing that I had, has a feedback from the customer yesterday. You know, the customer director general of the customer said, you know, it felt like this person was part of our team, not of HP. And those of us who work with consultants, that's always a very good sign. I mean, that's, I mean, just, whether it's 72 days or 90 days or 180, still those are ridiculous time frames in terms of old school metrics. You go back to, you know, consulting projects back and you just go back 10 years ago. You know, you're looking at, you know, next year, you know, second half of the next year, you know, these are, and those were shortened down from the three year rollouts of the old SAP days, if you remember those days. So I got to drill on a couple of questions on that. Okay, so if you're looking at 72 days deployment, okay, there's the intensity on the team, you had great expertise, unique stars lined up, but still that's a good time to market, time to value. So the question Dave and I were talking last night, so Wikibon's some contributors and CIOs and Dave's organization were talking with us yesterday last night. And the question came up and said, new technology eliminates roles because of automation, that's a good thing. And sometime they said, so the key to success is eliminating the tools, the legacy tools that were for those tasks or roles. So with automation, with cloud and service catalog and all the greatness that's happening right now, you're seeing new value chains, if you will. So, okay, some things are being automated away, abstracted away with technology. So the question to you is, what are you seeing being abstracted away, automated away, and if those things exist, what are they? And two, what are the legacy tools that are going away with it? Because a lot of customers are holding onto legacy. Can you share perspective on that? You know, I think it's as much a question of mindset than of tools and of technology. You know, the business, not the IT business, but the overall business around us is moving very, very fast. And that means that the customers really need to develop new applications to address new business opportunities really, really, really fast. And that you can only do that when you try to reduce complexity by making choices. And that's what we advise customers. By the way, that's also what we do in our business. When we say that we are focused around cloud and data center consulting, that we are focused around mobility and networking consulting, and that we are focused around big data and storage consulting, you know, we do not want to be everything to everybody everywhere. It is simply impossible because you need to simplify and you need to be focused. And when you simplify and when you focus, whether it's on tools or on methodologies, you know, you can have more people that understand what the possibilities of those tools are and you can develop quicker. I also believe that, you know, it is more important to have people to understand where the business is going and how you can translate that into IT opportunities rather than focusing too many people on the tools and on the systems to realize that. This is our job. This is where we can help customers. You guys have an amazing bench of people to bring to the problems. A lot of your customers are here at Discover. A lot of energy and a lot of solutions. As Meg said, you make it, you support it and you service it. So I got to ask you, you know, last question. Share with the audience your perspective, you know, take your executive hat off, put your industry hat on. What's the experience like here at HP Discover Europe? What's the focus? What's the vibe? And just put a bumper sticker on the show here. What's it all about? Is this an extension of Vegas? What's the, summarize what's going on with the show perspective. I think I've been to all Discover events that we had so far. And you know, I really have a good feeling about this Discover because you see that, you know, it's becoming better event after event. And I think it's not only the feeling that we have within HP, but you also see it on the customers. By the way, we have a record number of participants in this Discover, which means that customer comes back, which means that they see value. And I think one of the unique things we can have with Discover is that we can show everything that we have in one HP, going from what we have in the printer business, the PC business, what we have on the server business, storage, networking, all the services around it, whether it's software service, whether it's EG hardware services, or whether it is outsourcing and ES services. So I think, you know, for me, it is really a boost. And I think, you know, there are not that companies who can bring that many things together, who can bring so many customers together, who can bring so many HP people together. I mean, we have a few thousand people of HP here to support the event. And I mean, the feeling I get and the feeling I believe our employees and our customers get is that this is fantastic. I mean, this is something that is really boosting the company. And by the way, I think when you compare HP to where we are today, compared to where we were a year, a year, two years ago, I mean, you can feel the vibe. And I think this is really the thing that I would like to conclude with on this, Discover. It's a top event. Thank you very much for your time. I know you're super busy. And thank you for sharing your experiences. You know, Dave and I always say the time to value is a big metric. You know, you're seeing acceleration with software and technology of time to market, time to value new apps, new disruption, new economics, just new value. So it's super exciting for us to hear that. Thank you very much. This is live inside theCUBE. I'm John Furrier with Dave Vellante. We are live here at HP Discover for exclusive coverage of HP Discover 2013. You'll be right back live from Barcelona, Spain after this short break.