 So Paul, welcome to theCUBE. Thank you. Okay, so what's happening? Sorry to make you wait there. No worries, no worries. Giving me the eye daggers over there. I thought you were part of this and you were kind of bounced out, my apologies. No worries. Glad to have you inside theCUBE. So tell us what's going on with you. So at the event here, we announced our strategy around convert systems. And convert systems include the app systems, which Vertica is part of, our virtual system, and then our cloud system. All these are prepackaged, optimized solutions, delivered for customer's key workloads. Cloud is the hottest thing out there today. And with our cloud system, we enable customers to buy a single SKU and have a complete cloud environment for private cloud delivered right to their doorstep. Virtualized systems are big also. We launched our new virtual system, which enables the same thing with a virtual environment, supporting an open environment of VMware, Citrix, Microsoft, whatever the customer wants to run on there, prepackaged, optimized for virtual environments. And then our app systems, which are highly tuned for dedicated workloads like Vertica, where somebody wants to run on a dedicated machine and have the highest performance, lowest latencies. We have app systems with Vertica, as well as across the board of Microsoft appliances, such as SQL Server and Exchange. So we provide the best performance for SQL Server and you can set it up in literally minutes versus what usually takes months. So the appliance trend is the rage right now. So you're seeing a lot of prefabricated, putting all the complexity in the box, very similar to how a PC and the old days servers, you put all the subsystems under, you wrap it up and you sell it, turn key. So that's cool. And let's talk about that in a Vertica, because Vertica is a new acquisition from HB, sitting up there in CTO office. All the CTOs are mind melting, trying to figure out where it all fits in there and the bigger story with analytics is obviously it's very sexy, it's a lot of sizzle to it, but a lot of meat on the bone with Vertica as we were talking about. But ESSN, the conversion infrastructure group, they just went ahead and we're going to do an appliance. So walk me through that process, because Vertica is like this Indian reservation right now in HB, it's sitting out there, a lot of asset capabilities, you guys took it right in, take us through one, the process and what you guys have. Okay, so a lot of our conversations that we've been having with customers, it's all about data and information, right? When I go out to customers, there's two big conversations. What am I going to do for the cloud? And what am I going to do with all this data out there? And as we were bringing Vertica into HB, we saw a tremendous need for some appliance that would go across, not just like our competitors out there, one stack, their stack, but could go across all stacks and suck in not only traditional data, structured data from CRM systems, ERP systems, but also reach out into unstructured data, web clicks, medical imaging, et cetera, and be able to be that unifying, next generation data source. So it's based on just the customer conversations we have that said, I need a solution like this. And what we did is because of the converged infrastructure, the ability to package this up and bring it to market in record time is all because we have this known entity of converged infrastructure, quickly working with the engineering team to optimize it and then get it out for customers. So let's drill down on that, because that's, we say dog fooding, but we heard from the SAP guys is drinking from your own champagne bottle, but a little bit better reference I guess than dog food, which is more of a Silicon Valley term where I live. But that's an interesting thing. Vertica gets bought, they get left alone, try to figure out, you guys see that and you go, wow, you went to integrate it in, and that's in a way how you guys talk to your customers, that's what you want customers to do, is to think the same way. So how long did it take from Vertica entering, walking in the front door of HB to turning around the appliance? Less than two months from when the first walked in the door and we could actually get the engineers to talk together, less than two months. And the most of the time was actually spent in getting through our manufacturing processes. So that when a customer orders it, it's guaranteed that they get the order correct. Delivering that around the world across multiple different supply chains, isn't as always seamless and easy as it sounds, but a lot of the time was spent in that as we were tuning and optimizing this. Because we had already worked with Vertica for more than two years on our blade system, and they had about a 50% share of Vertica on HP, we already had done a lot of that tuning work. So the most of it was just packaging it, and now we're getting our sales force educated in line, trained to go out and deliver the message and actually execute proof of concepts to get customers up and running quickly. A lot of people was trying to figure out the conversion infrastructure. We were reporting here on theCUBE and siliconangle.com and wikibond.org, our research side. We talked about when we put the group together, essentially all three divisions of HP kind of cobbled together under Donatelli. Okay, that's great. The execution's been pretty phenomenal. So you worked with Vertica, you plug it in, obviously pretty excited by Vertica sounds like, and looks like, obviously through the execution, you guys are really gelling. So talk about how the converged infrastructure teams use that Vertica example and other examples and how that differentiates from, say, the competition. Okay, so when you look at, in my role, actually, within ESSN, is that leg which takes the converged infrastructure from infrastructure of server storage and networking all the way up through the application. And that's where customers are really looking for. Tell me what you're doing to optimize that application stack. And that's, I think, what we're really differentiating is it's just not about running an application on the hardware, but we understand the dials to get the optimal performance. Because it's based on a converged infrastructure, there are technologies such as thin provisioning, such as autonomic storage, such as our virtual connect technology, which enables you to seamlessly add blades. So if you look at Vertica, for example, Vertica software enables you to add and grow nodes from 10 to 100 dynamically, but you also need a hardware that can automatically add nodes without taking any bit down and be part of that same pool. With converged infrastructure and our virtual connect. We see alternative for the customers. Obviously, the customer environment's not always as easy as it sounds, right? So take us through that scenario. You guys have the building blocks. What's the alternative? If they don't have HP convergers, what's their choices? So their choices are competitors like Oracle, right? Which doesn't scale seamlessly and is very expensive and has an army of DBAs to go figure it out. On the virtualization slide, it's guys like Vblock, which are very closed to one solution. Our alternatives are we're open. We support Microsoft, VMware, our own technology. We're going out to Marketplace with a value prop that says, what's your environment? Are you a Microsoft environment? We'll work with you. You need something new? We'll bring that in. You're an SAP environment. The mostly vendor environment story is strong because you guys have all those partnerships. You mentioned Oracle, right? So let's talk about Oracle. Oracle is a lock-in spec. They're evil, right? They do all these things. But in the way the market signals today are coming in, what we're seeing, what we're reporting on is the notion of a DBA is going away. I mean, in terms of a DBA, database administrator is changing. They're moving away from that. So they want more DBAs, but yet with Hadoop and big data and kind of these turnkey appliances, that's against the grain with IT. So talk about what you see in that area and what some of the trends that you see. So what we see with the DBAs are the DBAs want to spend more time with the line of business and understanding what's the value of the data and less time tuning and optimizing, getting buried deep into the knobs, right? So if we can do the knobs and they can spend their time understanding with the line of business, okay, what queries? How do you want to extract? How do you want to go optimize around these points of business? That's where we see the line of the DBA in the progressive companies changing. Okay, so this begs the next question. If the role of the DBA is changing given the nature of the landscape within the IT organizations, what's the next DBA? Because when you bring in, like, say, Vertica and big data, you have a whole different disruptive element going. You got DBA, data warehousing, business and challenges, markets changing rapidly. You also got the scale out cloud component you mentioned as demand for cloud. What's that guy doing? I mean, is there a next? What DBA was for old school, I guess, we call it old school or a decade ago, three years ago. What's the new DBA? Is there a new role? The new role of the DBA is to look across all the data sources out that are available and understand how to extract and pull that data in in the most optimal way. It's no longer about, hey, it's just my data that's parked in my enterprise data warehouse and I'm going to get faster queries on it for you. It's looking at how you mesh it with Hadoop. I mesh it with medical data. I mesh it with surveillance data. That's what's going to change the DBA when they become the asset broker of data that's within their own walls as opposed to data that's out in the general public. And that changes your business, how? That changes your business because it can help them make better decisions faster. When you can integrate data from trends that's happening across the web and being able to push a offer to a customer based on something that's happening in a Twitter storm and target it to somebody on a cell phone to go acquire something or push a coupon. That's where somebody can change and add new business models because that's what it's all about. The DBA. How does it change HP's business? Because you guys, or hasn't really you're in a good position. You've got the appliance approach which you're managing as your groups. How does it change you? For us, it's moving the conversation from having conversations about my hardware moves faster than yours. I've got bigger clock speeds, bigger IO, to I can help you make more money as in business. I can help you change your business model. I can help you look to bring in new opportunities that you couldn't before. So going up in the stack, our sales force is working to have a higher level conversation about those opportunities. Business agility is a hot topic and being, you know, scaling up without a lot of change and ripping replaces a good approach. Paul Miller, thanks for coming on theCUBE. One final question. What do you think about the show and your role here? What's been the feedback? So the show's been great and the feedback's been great. A lot of customer interest across all the appliances, the virtual systems. We see a huge opportunity and what I'm hearing from customers is, wow, I wish I would have known this about this earlier. So it's really bringing the awareness to a lot of customers. Thanks for coming inside theCUBE. We really appreciate you sharing your knowledge and the update on the business and I love this whole DBA's kind of changing role. Love the appliance strategy. Love what you guys have. You guys really executed here in the ESSN group. Congratulations. Great, thanks. Have a great day.