 Live from London, England, it's theCUBE. Covering Discover 2016 London. Brought to you by Hewlett Packard Enterprise. Now, here's your host, Dave Vellante and Paul Gillis. The mighty banks of the River Thames, down at the docklands in London. This is theCUBE, we're live here at HPE Discover 2016. Chris Cozopis here, the vice president of marketing at HPE Aruba. Chris, good to see you again. Yeah, great to be here. So good, the keynote this afternoon was all Aruba all the time. You know, I know you had your hand in that, so congratulations. Thank you. Came across great, crisp story. I think the audience liked it, they stayed, place was packed. Yeah, yeah. You know, day two, sometimes you lose people, but you know, they were there for the duration, so congratulations. Thank you. So, take us through sort of the highlights of the keynotes and then we'll get into it. Yeah, well so today was really about talking about the intelligent edge. And obviously for HPE, we have a rich history of hybrid IT, right? And we talked about that extensively yesterday, but ultimately it's about how do we extend that out into the edge. So the new focus for HPE is really all about the intelligence at the edge. And you know, the way that we define this is ultimately around this concept of convergence of people, places, and things, right? So a lot of people, a lot of things now coming onto the network with IoT and of course the place where they are, right? And ultimately for us, it's about how do we capture insights from the convergence of people, places, and things and then use those insights to abstract information and context that's relevant to transform experiences. Because at the end of the day, information or insights doesn't do us any good unless we can do something with it. So that's really our whole push around the intelligent edge is people, places, and things, insights, and then transforming experiences. And that's what today's keynote was about. Now from the Aruba perspective, what new products, what new technologies are you developing to enhance this goal? Yeah, absolutely. So, you know, our mandate I would say for the company is a number of things. First of all, it's extensive connectivity, right? So we start at the foundation around how do we connect, whether it be wirelessly or wired, right? Or in many cases, extend connectivity over third-party networks as well. Think of like emerging IoT networks like Laura or think of LTE or cellular networks. And once we have that extensive connectivity set, robust, secure, reliable, it then all becomes about the software. And at the heart of things, HPE Aruba is really a software-defined company. I mean, we think about this as the software layer that essentially can be modified, changed, opened up to a broad base of ecosystem partners to then deliver apps and services. So I've got my little list I was talking to you before about let's try to make it real and sort of help people understand what we're talking about here. Indoor navigation is something we've been talking about people don't want to know, here's the cube, boom, there it is. Tracking of assets, employee tracking, proximity services. You want to give somebody an offer when they're coming by a certain retail operation. Keyless access, these are just four or five of the ones that I've been picking out over the last couple of days. And there are many more. So talk about how organizations are applying these attributes and how it's changing their workplace. Yeah, absolutely. So the workplace used to be just about driving employee productivity, right? You come into your space, you work from nine to five and then you leave, right? Increasingly now with the power of location, right? Which is the service that's essentially at the foundation of all of this. We can now start to personalize your experience, right? So the whole concept of wayfinding getting from point A to point B is personal to you, right? That's your wayfinding, that's your directions that you're engaged. The idea of promotional push notifications or zone-based marketing, for example, is personalized to you. Again, based on your location. So what HPE Aruba provides is the infrastructure and the apps and software that makes that possible, right? So it starts with the concept of Bluetooth, BLE Beacons, allowing us to get that real accurate location capabilities. But then, ultimately, the intelligence and logic behind this is really through an open-based software platform that works with the broad base of partners. So let me give you an example. So we work with a partner called Robin, right? And think about Robin as, in many respects, the Uber experience of conference rooms, right? When you want to go to and get an Uber, you pull up your smartphone, you pull up the app, and you find a car that's closest to you and that then guides you through and you get the car and off you go. The same with Robin provides that app experience within the facility, within the workplace, that allows you then to see and locate conference rooms that are near you. Now we take it a step further. Once you enter the conference room, we know your presence because we know your location. So we have the ability then to change the reservation of that conference room to make it now booked and ensured and take that even a step further to actually kickstart the collaboration experience with Skype for Business or other collaborative apps that now connecting all the people that you had predefined as being part of that experience. So this is kind of the example of workplace experience and transforming that workplace environment based on the idea now that I have this personalized information about you, your user identity, where you are, the app that you're using, pulling that all together. Again, I mentioned people, places, and things and you can start to see that's a real tangible example. Let's talk competition. Now you're up against the gorilla, Cisco, and I'm sure in just about every sales situation, what is your distinguishing, what are your distinguishing features? Yeah, the biggest one and very simple is you can come to HPE and get a single end-to-end solution and what that means is you can start really with a single architecture. So start from one access point. If you're a very small business or if you're just doing a proof of concept, you can start with a single access point and then grow that over time up to thousands of access points, all with the same system, the same management structure. What you'd find with the gorilla down the road is effectively multiple different architectures that actually are not interoperable one to the other. So you may actually, as a smaller company or in a branch environment, have deployed one system and then you're stuck when you need to integrate that with a larger campus environment or try to upgrade that as well. With HPE Aruba, it's a single seamless infrastructure. The other point I will say is we fundamentally believe in openness here and I've already kind of alluded to this idea of open APIs, but the power and the speed of innovation should be at the speed of the ecosystem, not at the speed of one single vendor. And so this is a key defining differentiator for HPE Aruba is the openness, the open APIs, working with the broader ecosystem, whereas again, down the road, you'll find much more of a focus on end to end closed systems as opposed to that open structure. I want to be sure I understand what you mean by openness. Now does that mean you are adopting open standards wherever possible or that you are publishing your APIs? Yeah, so both actually. So we are always predisposed to adopting standards and actually we drive much of the standards process in general, right, as it relates to infrastructure standards and software standards. But in this specific case, because we're talking much more about software defined as kind of the key point that most customers are focused on, the APIs are really that key differentiator and then the ecosystem of partners that we bring into that environment as well. Does software defined ultimately make the hardware a non-issue? Not entirely, no, because there is a lot that we do in hardware, especially when you're talking about connectivity that's very important, right? So take for an example, an access point. You could go and you could buy a consumer grade AP for $30 off the shelf and bring that into an enterprise environment. But the second that that microwave oven turns on and it emits radiation and interference in that environment, your whole network is gone. Even if you're running a little bit thin layer of software here on top of that, right? So we invest a lot in R&D in that hardware side for things like radio optimization and RF propagation, right, that is so critical. And that extends really from all of our access points into our switching infrastructure. But then ultimately I will say it is true that we want to abstract much of that complexity from the view of the customer so that ultimately the infrastructure is there, it's functional, it delivers all that it needs to and then really it's just programmable to adapt to the changes that that customer has. Chris, you were talking before about openness versus sort of closed, proprietary, whatever terms we use. Openness has a flip side, which is choice means a lot of choices, a lot of complexity, a lot of permutation. How are you addressing that? Yeah, I think, first of all, we have a very, very strong focus on industry segments, right? And addressing kind of who are the key customers that are really working with us? And I would say that heritage of vertical focus comes actually really out of the wireless business because if you think about how wireless started, you know, it was in the inventory management sector and retailer, it was in the distribution sectors with barcode scanners, right? So already wireless emerges from a very kind of vertically kind of focused environment. So that kind of heritage moves up into the present time where, you know, when we're talking about, you know, asset tracking in hospitals, right? That's a very industry specific type of use case. So we spend a lot of time articulating use case and solutions, documenting those solutions, working with our ecosystem of value-added resellers and distributors to make sure that as they go to market, they're not just taking a product or they're not just taking a piece of software, they're taking an actual documented defined solution and representing that to the customer is something that can solve their problems. Okay, we talked about workplace transformation. Let's talk about brands. So, you know, we talked about digital transformation a lot at these events. And it seems as though a lot of the brands have sort of trying to get back some of the advantage that they used to have. The brands used to have all the information about pricing and competition the web changed that obviously. And now the consumer has the advantage. And it feels like the early days of mobile were all about the brands trying to collect some information not really putting the customers first. And I think brands are starting to realize, wow, we have to actually put the customers first. You seem to be at the center of that. How are brands taking advantage of your capabilities to really deliver value and obviously help themselves? Yeah, yeah, this is a really rich kind of topic here on this one. So if you think about, let's take retail as kind of a first stop of brand discussion, right? So you saw the shift in the retail industry from brick and mortar to digital, right? Everybody raced to e-commerce and to go digital. The interesting thing is now that most or many kind of smart retailers are realizing it's actually about how you bridge the physical with the digital. And let me kind of explain this. So the power of Wi-Fi in an on-premise environment allows us actually to understand who has come into our venue and actually where they have gone. We have a large retail mall customer that 50% of their interactions with their customer actually happened over Wi-Fi based on the fact that that customer had downloaded one of their apps or their app, their shopping app. Every time that customer came into the shopping center, they could identify the time when they entered, when they left, and actually where that customer went. And then map that back to actually their digital presence. And so one example was customer came in, went actually to the hair salon, went back at home that night, googled or searched on their shopping center website, found a different hair salon, and then two days later, went back to that different hair salon. What do you conclude? Customer wasn't happy with their first experience, right? So here you see an example of how this brand can actually capture digital information with physical information, blend that to get a much richer profile of that customer, ultimately then delivering much more value and engendering more loyalty. Now using that example you just gave, where does Aruba sit in that? Are you span that whole realm of that application? So we play predominantly in the presence in the physical environment, right? And so what we provide through an analytics capability, so an analytics engine, is the ability for our customers to track through Wi-Fi that connectivity experience and to aggregate that, right? So nobody's personal data is ever compromised or delivered. It's viewed in an aggregate that we can then pass on to the retailer in this case, right? So we provide that physical connectivity and the analytics that go behind that. Okay, third layer is operational, right? So the stuff that maybe not everybody sees and touches. So how are you affecting that? I mean obviously IOT plays into that. Very much so. But let's unpack that a bit. Yeah, so this is a, as you say, it's kind of an area, it's a bit more in the back office from the consumer side, but the key thing that's happening in this environment is really a convergence of what we call IT and OT, or operational technology. And think of OT as what's happening on the shop floor, what's happening in an oil rig or a gas environment, or all of these very kind of operationally-centric environments, industrial-centric environments. And the reality is there have been things that have existed in those environments for decades, right? Technology is not new in that environment. What's new is this convergence with IT. And the fact that by adding sensors or temperature gauges or thermometers or all of these various kind of sensor capabilities, we can actually bring in more diagnostics about what's happening in that operational environment. So let's take kind of actually what was demonstrated in the keynote today around an actual production flow where we can detect anomalies and actually predict that there's about to be an outage based on sensors that are now in that production flow feeding back data into the network. And what's unique about HPE is our ability actually to leverage the heritage of strong computing storage from a data center perspective and extend that to the edge through a new product portfolio called Edgeline as a new solution said. So that when all of that data is being generated in real time out at the edge, this production flow, we can process it without the need to backhaul to a central data center or to a cloud environment somewhere. So here you have the idea of sensors and things being connected through a network, process that data with analytics and compute power right at the edge to make sure that we have some sort of outcome then that can avoid potential downtime or problems. What about the power issue? As you get more and more things connected, a lot of these devices will be small. It's not going to be practical to connect them to a power source. Is that an area that you're working to solve as well? I'm happy you brought this up because just today we introduced a new product that's actually an IoT ready switch that incorporates power directly into the switch that senses the thing that is on the other side and can actually tailor down or tailor up the power based on what the thing needs. So if you have a temperature gauge is going to draw much less power than say an IP phone, well for example. So the last thing that you want to do throughout all your switch infrastructure is blast a whole bunch of power that's not being used. And clearly today most companies are very concerned with their green initiatives and so this gives us a way to scale the power budget much more effectively because as you say all of these new things coming into this environment. So this is our new 2540 switch that was actually just launched today. What are you seeing in terms of the organizational issues around IT and OT? Yeah. The IT and OT probably don't talk that much. What are some of the best practices that you guys are seeing and are recommending? Yeah, this is also a big one and here you have two domains that really traditionally have existed apart and now are being brought together. And so I think that this is definitely it's an area where we're learning as we go through, right? And a lot of our approach to market is actually to work with the operational technology suppliers. Companies like PTC, companies like OSISO, companies like National Instruments because these companies have been working in the OT domain for years, right? And they understand those buyers, they have the trust and confidence of the OT individual. But ultimately working with those partners, bringing in our own capabilities around edge compute and networking, packaging that up as a solution and going to market together allows us to break down some of those silos, right? If we are able to break those silos down from a technology perspective, ultimately that makes it easier for the two constituents to come together on the customer side. So what's the sequence? You connect them, you instrument them, you secure them, and then you take action. Yeah, absolutely. It's about unleashing all the insights and obviously the business does need to have some understanding about what it's trying to accomplish, right? Because as you start to connect all these things, the possibilities start to become greater and greater. And this is really where HPE strength within our technical services capability comes to bear, right? So we offer a breadth of consulting and planning services around IoT that allow us to help guide the customer through some of that exploration and also some of the pitfalls that we've seen with other customers. So equally as important as technology is the services element. I have to ask you this. We're 20 years into consumer grade Wi-Fi, widespread adoption of Wi-Fi. In my experience, in most of the hotels and coffee shops that I use, the quality of Wi-Fi is still terrible. Why is that? Because they're not using HPE or Rupa. That's too simple answer. Talk about it. Simple answer, right? From a journalist, my goodness. Is there, are there certain structural barriers that are just really hard to overcome? So I think this comes back to the discussion that you're asking me around hardware, right? And kind of, so if companies or venues go out, Wi-Fi is not all created equal, right? And that is very much the case. So there is a lot to be said about the intelligence that goes into the radios in terms of how signals propagate, the ability to detect interference and to mitigate around that. A lot of the automation there. Those are our enterprise class features. And when companies go out and they buy consumer grade products off the shelf that are designed for a home, not designed for a whole bunch of people coming into a venue or a facility and changing environments and things going on and off, that is the challenge that we see. But I will say we've seen definitely the quality of experience for Wi-Fi grow by leaps and bounds relative to how it has been. I don't think you could imagine today going into a hotel and not having Wi-Fi contributing. And it's not your Wi-Fi at this venue, is that correct? We're working on that, it's true, it is not. Okay, good. Wi-Fi's not so great here. So glad to hear it's not a rubo. But as we were saying, we've done an event at Levi Stadium and Wi-Fi was amazing. So we know that's a reference account of yours. Absolutely. Good deal. All right, Chris, well thanks very much for coming on theCUBE. All right, good deal. All right, keep it right there, everybody. Paul and I will be right back after this short break. This is HPE Discover, live from London.