 Live from Boston, Massachusetts. Extracting the signal from the noise. It's theCUBE, covering HP Big Data Conference 2015. Brought to you by HP Software. Now your hosts, John Furrier and Dave Vellante. Hey, welcome back everyone. We're live here in Boston, Massachusetts. This is theCUBE, our flagship program. We go out to the events and extract the sizzling noise. I'm John Furrier, the founder of SiliconANG. I'm Joe Mykos, Dave Vellante, founder of wikibon.com research. And we're proud to have Maribel Lopez, founder of Lopez Research. We've got a lot of founders here, all analysts. Oh, I'm kind of camouflages an analyst, blogger, Kupos. Welcome to theCUBE. Good to see you again. Great, great to see you. All right, so this is what we had fun. The analyst segment, Dave Maribel, I'll get you to take. I was blown away by how candid HP was because HP, they got the split going on. They're kind of operating pre-SEC regulations. And then November 1st, the fiscal year, they're going to be split. HP Enterprise focused highly cohesive organization. That it is. What was your take? They were impressive. I thought it was pretty cool. But the haymakers being thrown out there, a little dig at tableau. I heard them twice in the keynote, they're not here. What's your take? Yeah, I think it's really interesting to see HP and the separation think about where are we going to make money, right? What's important in the enterprise? What do people really care about? Who are going to be the big players in the enterprise? I think they realize that, hey, this whole market's in transition for everybody. We've got lots of startups nibbling at people's heels. But a lot of my enterprise customers are looking for who's going to be my strategic partner. And I think HP's making another play to get back in the ring to do that. So I want to get your take, Maribel, specifically because you have your research and your focus is at the practitioner level, right? People want real solutions. So what do you think of HP's messaging of kind of like playing the, hey, get rid of the highs. Actually, we're pretty explicit, BS. Don't believe the hype from Mike Stonebreaker, Callimony, real practical message. Young John's was up there saying, hey, let's get to the practical thing. So what's the reality of what we're customers are? Yeah, sure. From the hype to the reality. What's your take? I think we spent four or five years with the hype, right? And we threw around lots of turns. We threw around big data, mobile, IoT, sensor networks, and I think everybody's like, does any of this sell the business problem? I don't see the business problem. I don't see the business value. I can't spend any money on it because I can't tie it to anything. So I think everybody's really retrenching and saying, okay, nobody debates about big data now, right? We know there's going to be lots of data, but nobody knows what to do. So I think my customers are paralyzed. They're like, okay, big change coming. Lots of ender transition. Don't even know where to get started. A lot of volatility, certainly on the underlying infrastructure, right? So you mentioned mobile, right? So you've been covered mobile pretty extensively. VisaV, infrastructure, SAP, Oracle, databases, software. So you've got the software market in transition. The underlying technology under the hood, convergence, virtualization. How do you talk to the customers? Do you say, if you don't invest here, screwed? I mean, what's the, I mean, what do you, I mean, I would say that, you would say. I tried that, it didn't work actually. It's not good for sales. But I mean, are they feeling that? What's the sentiment of the customer base? They certainly want the business value. I got that. Where's that, what's the feeling right now for them? Yeah, I think the sentiment flip flops around a lot because I think they basically rotate through what's the technology trend to ensure that they have to go through, right? So a year or so ago it was mobile. Like first it was cloud, then mobile hit them. Then they went to big data and now they're back on security. So they just keep rotating. And when you think about it, every single part of the IT infrastructure is in flux right now. And they're just putting out fires left, right, and center. So I think they are still looking for cost savings. I think they're still looking for somebody to help streamline the fact that all the IT stacks seems to be changing over for them and how are they going to do that? I think they're still looking at their big vendors to say, how do you take this stuff that I still need to run my business? I can't get rid of it and make it work in this new world. So I'm just checking out your 2016 predictions blog, you know, which is great. And of course we're seven, eight months in now, so it's good. And it looked like many, if not most, are going to come true. The one that stands out is contextual services emerge and flop. And your reasoning is that data is still in silos. And this is what, you know, Stonebreaker was talking about in the keynote today, is trying to solve with Tamer. Talk about that prediction and why you think it's going to come true. Yeah, so we spend a lot of time, particularly in and around mobile thinking that I'm going to deliver you targeted advertising or the right information exactly when you need it. But everybody's still hoarding information. Nobody's connected their internal data silos, even if they're not hoarding information. So I think there's this illusion that we get all this data in and that we'll then be able to translate that into contextual services. But bare minimum, people just don't have the right analytics framework to do that right now. So if we look at it, you know, we talked a lot about structured and unstructured data. HP talked about human data, machine data, and our existing corporate data. I think people are still dealing with existing corporate data and they haven't been able to figure out how to bring in the other data and then how to analyze it in a meaningful way. Yeah, I mean, just putting aside for a second the form factor challenges of mobile. And you think about non-mobile contextual services are not that great. I mean, Google is the gold standard and it's kind of junk. So do you see any examples of that? I mean, even snippets of hope. Yeah, I think you mentioned one of the snippets. We've had, I think Microsoft, Google, and Apple are all trying to deliver us what consumer contextual services are looking at. I think we're starting to see some of that in terms of enterprises being able to help their field service people figure out who's a customer, what's the problem, gather more data. Right now, we're still in the gathering the data though. We're not in the making it intelligent and predicting based on it. So the fundamental challenge, I mean, I see like because I see people talking about the problem. And if they're actually talking about the problem, they have the chance of finding the right solutions to put to that problem. But right now it's still, how do I get new data in? And what does that look like? I wonder if we could pick your brain on sort of just native mobile apps. Yeah. Organize, okay, we need a mobile app and they go out and develop a mobile app. How are organizations or how should organizations, what should they do beyond that? How should they organize to be successful? What other things, sort of, out of scope prerequisites that they're not thinking about, should they be thinking about? I think we're really doing ourselves a disservice with talking about as an app economy as the first thing, right? Not everybody needs a mobile app. Like some things need a mobile app, some don't. But more importantly, if you're going to build a mobile app, apps were silos. You went to five different apps on your PC and you got a number from each of them and then you sat around and thought about the number and came up with your own answer, right? Mobile forces people to think about the workflow. What is the workflow? What are you trying to accomplish within this task? It might need eight pieces of data from eight different systems. And this is where I think it started to get really interesting. Because before that, we talked about this concept of predictive and intelligent. And now I feel like, oh no, people actually want that to happen on a device and they're not willing to go in and out of an app, in and out of an app, and write it down on a sticky piece of paper. It's like, it forces them to really drill down on value, it's like the old expression. Try to write something really short versus a long thing. Mobile forces them to get real. Like you can't screw up in mobile because people won't use it, right? So it's one of those things you got real estate scarcity. But now the data variety thing's interesting. I find that hard. So what's your advice to your clients? How do you talk to them on mobile? How should they proceed? What's the general kind of consensus? I think this actually applies for all technology when I say this. I think there's a start small and grow big and grow fast, right? So when you're trying to do something in mobile, the idea is to figure out what's the one thing that that person absolutely needs to do on mobile. And then once you do that one thing, they'll say, you know, I'd really like to do these four other things. And then you prioritize those four things and you roll them out and it's iterative. I think we've had such a waterfall approach, such complex systems that we built where we've tried to boil the ocean and an app doesn't come out until it has everything you could possibly imagine. I think we're really starting to rethink that and say, you know, the world is micro moments. And how do you actually take this concept of what I need to do absolutely at the right time I call it, right time experiences, deliver that and then just keep adding more value and more context to it over time. Maribel, I want to get your take on startups. Because here are some startups here, right? So we're in the Bay Area. Yeah, of course. And composite apps, composite apps. You guys are. Yeah, we live there now. It's a hotbed of innovation. Certainly compared to Boston, no offense Boston, but this is more action going on there. Our startups doing things differently because we're seeing startups here, actually OEMing Vertica. Yeah, that's cool. You don't really know, I would say I'm an OEM, a big block of technology and build a startup on top of it. Seems kind of a dangerous way, the old way. What's happening in startups and our customers recognizing that startups are viable if the big guys don't move fast enough. Okay, two very separate questions. I will say the first thing is, I think that one of the things that makes startups in Silicon Valley very interesting, they're very specific about what their value proposition is and they're willing to partner with people for everything that isn't their core value proposition. And they're actually willing, very willing to partner with each other as startups. So it's a bunch of startups partnering and then maybe startups partnering with bigger firms. And that's how they're successful because they create a self-fulfilling ecosystem. So I think that's important and I think it continues to move on. And I think a lot of the traditional IT infrastructure vendors are the foundation of what we call the startup community. All the cloud computing that they assume, all the SaaS that they assume themselves and then they create SaaS on top of that. Now, this second question was? Was the startup ecosystem in terms of customers accepting that? Oh yes, great. It used to be in the old days. Oh, I'm going to buy from Oracle or HPE. Startups are too risky. This guy didn't bring up the bubble bursting content but there's a lot of non-bubble growth going on. So it's legitimately good growth. Are customers willing to accept a startup in? And what do you hear? I think they do but I don't think they put it at the most core strategic part of their business, right? They're willing to take a risk but it has to be a risk that if it fails they can recover from. So this is part of the start small concept as well. And if you get enough success with a vendor then maybe they're going to end up growing and you can actually tell your strategic vendor you want them to partner with them. So I've seen a lot more companies looking at startups for ideas, looking at startups to try a new project on, slowly maybe migrating some of their existing services over to what that would be. I will say it's not without its risk. I just had a call last week with somebody whose startup is failing and now they're in the process of figuring out how do I migrate those services. Fortunately they did the start small so they could easily migrate over to another startup vendor actually, ironically. But it has its joys and its sorrows. Okay well we're getting the hook sign here so I want to ask you final question. Thanks for, first of all, thanks for coming on. Your take on this conference, what's the vibe? How would you put it in terms of it's not your typical HP conference. It's like you need a little DevOps here, you got a little experts over here, engineering, customers, what's your take on here and what's your view of what's happening? It's the most practical HP conference I've ever gone to. They're actually real customers here talking about what they're doing. They're talking about the challenges and how difficult it is, not just because of HP but just in general to make this work and to make a difference with it. So I think that's heartening because everybody feels like it's just me. So we've got a lot of real practical nature going on. I like it, I'd love to see more of it. I'd love to see the down and dirty with the business model combined. I think that's what we're starting to get the vibe up here. Yeah it's micromoments, it's like your micromoments thing going on here. All right, Mirabel Lopez founder of Lopez Research. We'll be right back here from Boston Messages Live after this short break. Thank you.