 From London, England, extracting the signal from the noise. It's theCUBE, Cover, Discover 2015. Brought to you by Hewlett Packard Enterprise. Now your hosts, John Furrier and Dave Vellante. Okay, welcome back everyone. We are here live in London, England for HPE Discover, HPE Enterprise's first event as a newly split company from the HPE Consumer HPE Inc. This is theCUBE's SiliconANGLE's flagship program. We go out to the events and extract the signal from the noise. I'm John Furrier, the founder of SiliconANGLE. I'm John Michaels, Dave Vellante, co-founder of Wikibon.com. Our next guest is George Ferguson with HPE Enterprise, workplace productivity, welcome to theCUBE. Thank you very much. So you are part of the pillar, one of the four transformation area pillars, workplace productivity. This is really about user experience apps, agile programming, but enhancing the overall environment around just how people interface with technology. Absolutely. A little DevOps feel to it. There's a lot of DevOps involved at this show. A lot of stuff going on around this. Can you unpack what this means? Because at first glance, it's the future of work. It's also productivity. Is it VDI? All these things are kind of now back on the table. How do we think about this? Okay, let's talk about it from several different aspects. One aspect, intelligent workplace. How do users get support when they need help? Whether that is setting up an email environment, getting assistance when something doesn't work with their PC. They're very traditional ways and there are very next generation ways of doing so. We'll explore that in a minute. Communications and collaboration. Yes, encompassing email, but also definitely Skype for business. Different ways of communicating, presence, video. Very cost effective means of communicating that may not have been available a few years ago. Next area, wireless workplace. Can I move around the workplace? Do I have to stay within my cubicle to maintain connectivity? Can I walk anywhere across the campus, through an arena, through a museum? And finally, digital user experience. The seamless bringing together of the physical world and the virtual world. So all of those are part of enabling workplace productivity. It is a big area, you're right. And as an IT CIO and or CXO in a company, obviously now the focus is on growth, revenue opportunities. You're seeing the tsunami of new creative lightweight applications built on the cloud or on prem. But it kind of turns upside down the older notions. We're talking with Elaine or Elaine earlier about the servers, how these to be high-end mission critical servers and then general servers. Now that's completely changed. You have general purpose, mature servers and then specialized kind of use cases. So how does that translate into some of the older paradigms like unified communications presence? I mean, that's an older concept been around for a long time, but that ties into mobility. That ties into voice communication, videos conferencing, social media, omni-channel connections. How does a CIO figure this out? What are some of the things that you guys are doing with customers to help them make sense of these older patterns and make them more modern? Fundamentally, the business needs stay the same. I need to improve my employee engagement. I need to improve my employee productivity and I need to better instill loyalty among my customers. Now there are some definitely some new ways of doing that. As we talk about instilling customer loyalty, there's an opportunity to reach out to customers in ways that simply were not available before to bring together the experience they have on their mobile device with the experience that they're having in a brick and mortar store, walking through a museum, attending a sports game. All of those can be looked at in new ways because of the technologies that are developed. So how do you actually measure workplace productivity? Is it revenue per employee? Is it to depend on the industry? I mean, how do you measure it? Or how do your customers measure it more importantly? It depends on the various different aspects of it. Certainly, minutes saved is simply one measure that we look at for our implementation of Skype for Business within Hewlett-Packard, combined Hewlett-Packard Enterprise and HP Inc. We saved 18 million minutes over one year with our deployment. That was a time that was saved because in the past we needed to go through and key out. Here's how we connect into this conference line. Here's the pass codes. Now we can do that with one click. That's actual savings in terms of productivity. Now, the other aspect to it is what's the cost of doing that? And that's the question people ask. People want to have certainly productivity gains for their employees, but they say, oh, but if this is going to cost me a lot, can I even afford to do that? Yeah, how do people pay for it? And the interesting answer is that in most cases, we can achieve the productivity gains and at the same time, cut costs. That's an amazing sort of thing to most people. But for those same savings that we're talking about with Skype for Business, savings can be $1.5 million according to Forester for just 1,000 users. Per year. So through a variety of different means, automation, self-service, we can actually make savings and improve productivity. It's a great combination if you can do both together. But there's still going to be a capital outlay. Is that fair? We can use HPE financing to basically eliminate the capital outlay. We can use consumption models, whether through finance or through the cloud, to actually make this, okay, you spend the money as you use it as opposed to the upfront expenditure. Sounds too good to be true. It does. Now what about this notion? You mentioned a digital user experience before. What do you mean by that? Okay, the real idea is we would like to have a seamless experience as people move back and forth between the virtual world, typically on mobile devices and the physical world. I'll give you an example of in the negative first and then in the positive. Back a few months ago, my wife and I went into a major department store. She'd seen an online ad for a particular, I think a blouse or something and walked into the store. Oh no, we don't have that. That you have to get through our dot-com interface. That is not a seamless experience. What we instead would like to have is an experience where as I walk into the store, it knows that yes, I was searching for something on their website. It'll actually direct me to where that particular piece of clothing is and it will also give me the same discount that I could have gotten on the dot-com site. That's a seamless experience. A seamless experience is presented today during the main stage event. People walking into the Museum of Fine Arts of San Fernando in Madrid, Spain. They can go and use their smartphone to say, okay, I'd like to take a tour for one hour. That's all I have. And by the way, I have a 10-year-old child that's going on this with me. The app can go and tell you, okay, here's the path that you're going to take. We're going to skip you over these areas. We're going to have you go to these areas. Step by step, it'll give me directions. As I view a particular sculpture or painting, it'll tell me about it. That's a seamless experience between both the virtual world and the physical world. That's where there's excitement. That's super cool. I mean, that's real cool stuff. And obviously Oculus Rift and these new VR environments are going to create that user experience. And a lot of developers are looking at this as an opportunity. This comes back down to the composable mission, which I love, by the way, love the word composable. Reminds me of service-oriented architectures with now with microservices. A lot of great opportunities. So developers are going crazy for Oculus Rift. These new experiences. Talk about the role of the developer in all this. Because at the end of the day, this is the opportunity to kind of bring it all together. We have a variety of different tools for developers, App Pulse Mobile, Mobile Center, so forth, to help them first in the actual development exercise, but then in terms of measuring the performance, testing of it, handling the security aspects of the mobile apps. Each different aspect of the application development lifecycle is assisted with various tools from HPE Software. And what traction do you guys have with developers? Can you share any anecdotal use cases of how you guys are onboarding developers, some successes you've had? Can you share any data on how the workplace stuff is kind of this, the new millennials? For instance, they love video, right? So we see that, obviously, here in the queue. But what are some of the things that you're seeing developers uptake on in terms of this new workplace environment? I would say there's a great appreciation for the, particularly for the aspects of the performance of these things. That's where I would say there's the biggest uptake. If you have to wait three seconds for a mobile app to respond, you're going to go to a different mobile app. We have the tools to help a developer to see, oh, this is what I'm really going to get with this app. This is what's going to make it successful. Yes, it's, of course, the user experience, is not just what you see on the screen. It's the performance that you actually have. Yeah, so, go ahead. No, please. What's the top conversations you're having with customers around this area? Because this is an area, again, it's exploding. A lot of creativity, new solutions are hitting the market. What are the top three conversations that you're having with customers around this? As they say, help me, I need to figure this out because I got these young guys coming into the audience from the user base coming in to work for us and they don't want to have three phones. They don't want to have a desktop desktop. They want to have a seamless experience like Snapchat, Instagram. Right, right. And so, what do you, how do you help me? Well, the way you presented that was excellent. That is oftentimes how we start the discussion. Users are used to a consumer experience with their smartphone. They're used to being able to support themselves in getting applications, support themselves in terms of getting assistance. They're used to operating system updates that just flow to their smartphone. It's a consumer experience. And then they go into the enterprise and, oh no, well we can't do that. That'll happen in six months. That'll happen a year from now. Oh, this application, well it's what we use. What we're trying to do is to reduce that gap between the consumer experience and the enterprise experience. And we can do a great deal for that. It's critical for IT to reduce that gap. If not, what users will do is go around IT. Yeah, the shadow IT market is a great R&D opportunity. It is, and unfortunately it causes huge security and compliance issues that IT does care about. So we've got to provide the means to help them have the security and compliance they want and get the consumer experience. I'm a CIO, George, help me with my problem I have. I want to close that gap. What do I do? I would talk through the same four areas we talked about earlier. For starters, I would talk about, okay, what is the provisioning and support experience for users? In the past, what that has typically meant is a very ugly phone tree with somebody who may or may not speak your language very well. Instead, we can make that and so come into a walk-in support center. It might seem counter-intuitive, but we can actually do this at less cost. Walking in, users love it. HP has used it. Hula Packard Enterprise now uses it heavily. We're deploying these for our customers. Now this works great if you have a couple of thousand employees at a site. What if you don't? In that case, we can provide you a video virtual agent that you can talk to, have locker systems that the video agent can go and unlock to give you, okay, here's a loaner PC while we're working on your PC. Here's this help. Yes, I can go ahead and take control of your PC. We're demonstrating this over in our Naval Workplace Productivity Area with a video agent talking to people. We can handle a number of sites in this way in a very automated, cost-effective means. That would be one example, and it's only one example. So what do you actually sell in that example? Do you sell a solution to a specific problem that involves infrastructure hardware and software, or you bring in a partner network? Can you describe the transaction if you will? How does HP make money at that? Two different places. First, we provide software, so we certainly provide software like Propel that can help provide that self-service experience, make it very easy for users to get the information that they need. Service-anywhere, similarly can provide assistance for that self-provisioning sort of measure. Now, embedding that software, so some companies say, okay, the software solves my needs, I'll handle it myself. Great, if that's where they want to stop, that's okay. If they would like Hewlett Packard Enterprise to provide the full support experience using that software, we can do that on a managed basis, and so we actually provide them the workplace support services using those various different pieces, and there will be different means. Certainly, sometimes it'll be totally automated, sometimes it'll be self-service. Yes, we will go back and have real people that you can work with if that's what you need, but we're going to try to develop a variety of different means to interact with the user so that it's less expensive and yet provides that superior user experience. So you mentioned workplace support. Sometimes that has negative connotations, you know, help desk workplace support. How are you addressing that? All I can tell you is, here's my personal experience. Back a few years ago, in a cost-cutting frenzy, yes, I used to go through that experience. It was bad, I know it as a user. Now, if I have a problem, I walk over to our walk-in support center, yes, I do my badge in to show, okay, here's my issue, pick from a couple of options. Typically, I have somebody helping me within probably about two minutes. It's very genius-bar-like. It's like a genius-bar, yes. And wow, it gets fixed. I'm a happy user. I'm back being productive again, and yet we managed to reduce the support staff to do that by about 75%, and yet made the users a lot more happy. We go and actually help companies set up that sort of genius-bar or walk-in support center, and can then- That's a big solution right there. That is a big solution, yes. Real aspirin and a vitamin at the same time. Gives them a little relief, but also sets the table for the next generation. I like that. Aspirin and a vitamin, I think I need to take that line. I didn't say vaccine, but that seems when you really need some grip, and the paddles come out later. George, thanks for sharing. One more question. So you laughed before when I said revenue per employee, but ultimately doesn't, isn't that the metric that gets affected? Because if you're, people generally don't want to fire people, but they want to redeploy them. You always hear that. No, maybe they do. Absolutely. So isn't that driving more revenue per headcount? I mean productivity in the U.S. anyways, going through the roof. No, certainly as I... Good point. If I have time savings in terms of doing these administrative tasks, I can put more time into my job. And yes, that directly then relates there to revenue growth. That's how you pay for it. So that's how you pay for it. From a cost center to a profit center. Absolutely. George, thanks so much for coming to theCUBE. Really appreciate it. Thanks for sharing your insight here on theCUBE. We're getting all the data. That's where we're data-driven media. That's theCUBE. We are one of our transformation pillars of data-driven social media. Well, thanks for sharing the insight. We'll be back with more live coverage from London, day one of HPE Discover after this short break.