 with us. Thank you. We're coming back with Katie Curtin Mestre who's the director of software planning and marketing at HP and we're going to talk about the business critical system software strategy and roadmap. Now you want to do a reset here, Michael? Are we good? Should I keep rolling? Okay, good. All right, good. So we're here live. This is Dave Vellante of wikibon.org and we're here live at HP Discover and Katie, come on in and we'll kick this next segment off. This is SiliconANGLE's continuous coverage of HP Discover in Las Vegas. We're on our summer. It's Katie. Welcome. Nice to meet you. Thanks very much for coming on the Cube. What's going on? You got that cool button that's going. HP UX has integrity. Yes, and I brought you one in case you want to wear it. Oh, fantastic. Thank you. I'll definitely wear it for this segment. So tell me, what's going on with HP UX? It's the famous operating system still doing pretty well. You guys cranking right along? Yes, HP UX continues to crank along. In fact, in the most recent UNIX preference study done by Gabriel Consulting, HP UX came across, came in as number one in multiple categories from best in observed availability, best in observed reliability, and best in delivering customers the best TCO. So we're really happy with the progress that we're making with HP UX and also very happy about the news that Dave Donatelli unveiled today during his keynote that we're delivering VPAR 6, which is an enhancement that a lot of our customers have been waiting for. So talk about that. What's in there and why does it matter? Sure. So with VPAR 6, we're bringing the performance and scalability of VPARs to our entire product line from our RX product line to our integrity blades to Superdome 2. With VPAR 6, customers get all of the performance and scalability of traditional VPARs with the flexibility and mobility of being able to integrate their VPARs into the conversion infrastructure. So it's a great step forward for our customers and we'll be starting to roll that out in the Q4 time frame. So talk a little bit about, you know, we hear a lot of messaging in the industry around cloud and big data and mobile. How does HP UX play in there? HP UX is very well integrated into HP's overall strategy in the cloud. With converged infrastructure, customers can implement a single infrastructure for their storage, their servers, and their networking to include both their X86 workloads and their mission critical workloads running HP UX. So customers out there who are implementing private clouds can move forward knowing that they can have a single private cloud infrastructure for both their mission critical and their X86 workloads, all with a single point of management with our matrix operating environment. So would you consider running HP UX on a pure Intel platform? Is that something that's entering the discussion? What are your thoughts on that? Well, currently HP UX does run on the Intel platform. We run on the Intel and itanium processor chipset and we've had a lot of success with the reliability and performance of the itanium chip and that is our plan going forward. Right. Okay. So HP UX, now talk about the workloads that HP UX supports. What makes them unique? What's the classic HP UX workload if there is one? Sure. The classic HP UX workloads running on integrity blades and Superdome are your mission critical workloads. These are the workloads for customers that quite simply cannot be down. So for example, telecommunication workloads, workloads for customers in financial services, as well as in healthcare, the common thread throughout throughout all of these industries is the need to have the best performance, scalability and availability. Well, we recently did a study with Forester and they found that customers are continuing to deploy UNIX systems such as HP UX for the reliability, availability and security that these platforms continue to provide them. I remember everybody used to say the mainframe is dead and now everybody wants a mainframe, right? They want they want the manageability, the reliability, the availability. And it's interesting that I mean UNIX is not the highest growing growing area of the market, right? But it's reached a robustness. What is it about our industry when we once we get there, and we get all the features and capabilities everybody wants, we move on to a new platform. Oh, now let's go to Linux or let's go to some mobile operating system. Why do you think that is? I'm not sure why that is, but certainly HP UX and integrity are continuing to deliver the goods for our customers for their mission critical workloads. And we foresee that customers will continue to stick with integrity and HP UX for many years to come. Well, I think the customers understand that the, you know, the value that they get out of the system compared to the, the cost, risk, and an end state of a migration just doesn't make sense for a lot of the workloads. Do you feel like do you feel like the base of HP UX, the stable base that's there, understands that? Or do you get a lot of, you know, some new CIO flies and it says, Oh, we got to move to whatever XYZ hot operating system there is, do you still get a lot of that in the base? Or do you think people really understand the life cycle value, if you know what I'm saying? I think the majority of our customers understand the value that integrity and HP UX are delivering to their mission critical workloads. Certainly there are cases where the CIO is going to come in and ask, ask the IT team, you know, to look at alternatives. And as I mentioned before, with the Gabriel consulting study, we came in number one in terms of lowering customers, you know, TCO. So CIOs can rest assured that by staying with integrity and HP UX, they not only have a solution that delivers the reliability, availability and security that they need, but it's also a solution that's very cost effective from both the CAPEX and OPEX, you know, perspective. So questions certainly do come up, but we feel that we can address them and really help customers understand the value of staying the course. Did you compete in a sense with the mainframe class applications that are out there? Or is that just a whole different market segment? We certainly do compete against the mainframe. And in fact, in the last quarter, we had over 100 migrations from both mainframe platforms, and competitive platforms such as Celeris in the last quarter. So certainly, we have seen some migrations from the mainframe to integrity and HP UX. What about licensing, right? So we all know how Oracle is approaching licensing and they're trying to make Spark really attractive and trying to make, you know, you know, your platform less attractive. So what do you what do you think about that? What advice do you give to customers that are saying, Hey, you know, give us some relief on licensing. How can we, you know, optimize the return on investment of our platform? What are you telling those people? I think what I would tell those customers is that we're going to work with them to make sure that we have a cost effective solution relative, you know, to our competition. And, you know, they're really, of course, corner cases, but there really shouldn't be cases where customers have to walk away from integrity and HP UX because we can't deliver a cost effective solution to them. Do you see licensing models changing or are they pretty much stable? I think licensing models in our space, you know, have, you know, been, you know, pretty stable. One of the things that people really appreciate about the licensing model that we've taken with HP UX relative to our competition is that we offer bundled configurations where everything has been preconfigured, pretested at very attractive price points versus forcing the customers to kind of build their solution, you know, a la carte and leaving a lot of the testing and integration work to them. So when you talk about you mentioned the study, who's the group, the Gabriel consulting group doing the TCO analysis. And I presume they're looking at the entire stack. Is that right? I mean, the hardware, the software, the applications, is that right? Or correct. So I've heard from customers what's happening is that certain ISVs, I mentioned Oracle before, but perhaps others are starting to charge on a per core basis. Have you seen that? And does it force HP to, you know, give relief in other areas? Or is that not prevalent? I think our licensing is very competitive in the industry with other, you know, competitors. And we're certainly aligned with kind of industry best practices. So again, we're pretty comfortable that we can compete with any of the vendors that are out there from both CAPEX and OPEX perspective. And just to speak again on the the Gabriel result, this was an actual survey of customers who have deployed UNIX. So really gratifying to see them select HPUX as the best solution in terms of delivering an overall TCO to customers. This is a real install base study, looking at the big picture. Yeah, looking at all customers who have deployed all the different flavors of UNIX and which they believe to be the best. So what's what's ahead? Can you can you share a little roadmap with us? I mean, what are the things that customers are asking for that you got your best people working on? Well, we're continuing to do a lot of work in the area of mission critical, you know, virtualization. And so we announced VPAR six at during Dave Don't tell his keynote, and we'll continue to deliver enhancements in that area. We really want to make it possible so that customers can virtualize workloads of any size type or criticality, and be able to manage those within a private cloud context. So these are some of the areas of focus for us going forward. So you see the HPUX as being a critical component of those mission critical private clouds, right? And and and what about the hybrid cloud? Are you starting to see demand for that? Or is that sort of not materialized yet? Yes, we're certainly starting to see demand for private clouds and customers want the, you know, ability to deploy their workloads into the private cloud and then be able to burst to the public cloud if they need, you know, additional capacity. So we're certainly starting to see, you know, some interest in that area. And the advice that I would give to the UNIX customers out there is, you know, talk to the people in the IT organization who are architecting the private cloud initiatives and make it very clear that you can integrate HPUX and integrity into your private cloud alongside your X86 workloads with a common hardware platform and with common management. Okay, we're here with Katie Curtin Mestri, Mestri or Mester? Mestre. Mestre? Yes, very good. Oh, wow. I love that. Is that Italian? No, it's Cuban. Cuban. Oh, great. Mestre. I'm Italian. So we actually a name of a town in Italy, too. Katie Curtin Mestri. Where is it? North or Southern Italy? Is it, you know? Of Italy? Yeah. I don't know. I have to go and check it out personally. Are you going to wear the button? I couldn't open it. Come on. It's too secure. Katie Curtin Mestri from HP's Business Critical Systems Group. We're talking, see, it's not that easy. You guys have really locked down that HPUX talking business critical systems. Okay, I've figured it out now. That's right. Now you have no excuse. Great. Okay. There you go. So one last question. What's the strategy for new HPX installations? Is there one or is it primarily going after the install base? I've got a pin here, Katie. I got to poke it in my suit. Okay, I'm going to try. Alrighty, there you go. I'll speak to your question while you're doing that. We're very much focused on our install base, but also on competitive migrations. And in fact, we've had over 1000 migrations from mainframe and alternative platforms, primarily Solaris. So you know, we're definitely focused on customers who are looking to consolidate their UNIX environment. Many customers have a mix of HPX, Solaris and AIX. And we certainly have a compelling value proposition for customers who want to consolidate to a single UNIX vendor. And we think HP is the best choice for that. All right, good story, Katie Curtin Mestri. Thanks very much for coming on theCUBE and sharing your HPX story and your vision. Appreciate it. All right, and very nice button.