 Live from Las Vegas, Nevada, it's The Cube at HP Discover 2014, brought to you by HP. Welcome back everybody, this is Dave Vellante and this is The Cube. We go out to the events, we extract the signal from the noise. We're here at HP Discover in Las Vegas. We've done a number of HP Discovers. This is HP's big customer meeting. We've been documenting the HP turnaround over the last several years. This is the networking segment. We're unpacking a lot of the innovations and advances in networking, talking to customers. Eric Papyrus here is the Director of Global Technical Marketing for HP Networking, and Jason Cohen, a Cube alum with Dazz OpiniCom, he's a CIO. Gentlemen, welcome to The Cube. Thank you for having me. Welcome back, Jason, good to see you again. Thank you, good to see you. Okay, so, Eric, I want to start with you. You guys had some announcements today. A lot of talk about SDN, HP's networking business is growing, which is good. One of the spots that Meg calls out and the quarterly calls, so things are good right now. Give us an update. Yeah, no, everything's very good. I actually just got back from APJ, a two week tour, and things are really good globally for networking. It was exciting to see, for some good reason, Australia seems to be a good pocket for SDN, so I visited a couple of customers out there that are really on the forefront of SDN from an application development perspective, and really some of the key customers that we've been talking about as this SDN journey continues. Is that where all the action is right now? Is it sort of the development community, and how are you reaching out to those guys? Yeah, it's across the board, so we've been kind of hitting all the different areas, and one of the key things is we've done some developer days as well. So we have kind of done the grassroots effort and brought in some developers into different areas and across the globe to start developing SDN applications, but it's also helping enterprises prepare for the SDN journey, so it's not just about developing apps. So Jason, we were talking off camera last time, we talked, you were planning this big merger, it didn't happen, it was obviously well publicized, but you were saying it actually worked out quite well for you, why? Well, we had done a tremendous amount of work prior to even the announcement of the proposed merger. We had taken the diversified agency services, or DOS group of companies, and consolidated their technology from about 100 specific entities into a central data services group. We call it CDS, and CDS provides technology shared services for all of the DOS group of companies, and we basically have that into kind of three buckets. Data center, so we have three plus state-of-the-art data centers all built proudly with pretty much all HP equipment. We have our shared services, which is local resources, we're building our help desk applications, and then finally our people, and merging them all together into one shared services group for a customer of about 25,000 people. Okay, so essentially you're delivering IT as a service? Correct. But you have 70 organizations dispersed there? And it's a private shared service, and it really gives us the opportunity to give our agencies the opportunity to be customers, and so if we can deliver to them top-notch service, they will be able to deliver to their clients. So you say private, so it's a private cloud, essentially? It's a private cloud, it's private services. We exist strictly to support the DOS group of companies and other Omnicom entities, but we are not out in the marketplace. We exist just to service our internal customers. You know, I have to say, so if I talked five years ago to a classical IT practitioner, and I would not put you in that camp, they would roll their eyes if you said cloud. I, we've only known each other a few years, but I get the sense you were a person embraced the notion of cloud. Are you at a point where your on-premise infrastructure is comparable, let's say, to what you think of as the public cloud in terms of agility and cost structure and other benefits? Absolutely, now listen, you know, being honest with you, I always have to decide what am I going to trade in order to get somewhere. Agility is critical, but customer care is just as critical. So while I can't be all things to all people, I have to support all of my customers. But have we embraced the cloud entirely? And what HP is doing today with networking and their announcement yesterday will give us opportunities even beyond where we are today. Places in networking that would take days, weeks, months are moving into the immediacy and that will allow me to service my customers even better. What is it about that HP's doing? There's a lot of confusion in the marketplace, right? You got VMware out there talking about SDN, buying companies. You got Cisco coming up with it, you know, its version. You know, HP's obviously a player there. What is it about HP that is alluring to you? It's the ecosystem. It's the ability to pipe together each of their offerings into a singular platform. And I don't mean platform as in applications. I mean platform in my data center, platform in my campus, platform in my office. Knowing that I'll use it old term, one throat to choke or one back to pat. And I will tell you the back to pat's been a lot more than throat to choke. The opportunity to singularly work with a group that gets it, that is not doing something as an add-on, a new technology, something new is very enticing to me. With all due respect, Cisco's great company, VMware's a great company. HP provides the professional ecosystem that draws me towards them for my professional goals. Is it true that it takes 10 pat's in the back to make up for one choke? Is that the other? Not necessarily with me because I'm a little dramatic, so it might be a little bit less. You just get it all out. That was the other same way. You get it all out there and that's it. You know where you stand, there's no game. So Eric, we talk a lot about SDN. I asked this question a lot, but I want to ask you, why SDN and why now? Why this point in the industry's cycle? I think that the networking industry has been looking for something to kind of take it to the next level. And what we've seen happen in the server business and in the server world, as far as the whole virtualization thing, is just ripe and kind of the timing is there for us to move into that from a networking perspective. So I think a lot of it is just kind of the sequential, kind of following what the servers have done from a virtualization perspective and just moving that into networking. And I think that the pace of networking has finally changed. Besides, for years, I've been around and networking over 20 years and we kind of just moved from 10 meg to 100 meg to gig to 10 gig. It was just kind of bigger. Bigger, faster, better iron. Exactly. It didn't change much beyond that. So finally, we're getting to something, as Jason was just mentioning, where it's the immediacy. It's being able to do things in real-time or near real-time, measured in minutes rather than months or years. How much does mobile play into that? Oh, it plays tremendously. It has a driver. Talk about that a little bit. What are customers telling you? And then we're going to ask Jason. So mobility is key, especially as a driver for SDN. One of the things that we announced actually back at Interop is basically, it's a proof of concept for an application called Smart Shopper. And I'm not sure if you heard about it. It's basically, the technology behind it comes from HP Labs and it allows you to get your indoor wifi accuracy down to one to two meters. Most vendors in the industry are at about four to five meters. And what we're doing is, on top of that technology from HP Labs, we're actually developed a Smart Shopper application for the retail business. And what it allows you to do is actually, let's say you're shopping in Bloomingdale's and you're a blue tie guy. As you're literally walking down the aisle where the ties are, you may get a promotional message that says, and also based on retail analytics and knowing that you've bought a ton of blue ties before, we're going to go and make you a special offer on blue ties. So having that kind of information, and that's an SDN enabled mobility application that we'll be bringing to market. That's scary. It's interesting, but it's scary, right? Okay, so that sounds like a combination of your networking technology, but also you've got some analytics there. Maybe there's some autonomy there. Maybe some vertical action going on. That's game changing. All right, so Jason, I want to ask you about the mobile question. How is that, people talk about the network hierarchy and that flattening. You're a pretty decentralized organization. So maybe you started flat, but talk about how networking is changing and specifically how mobile is affecting that. So mobile is our business. I mean, if you look at most of the content delivery today, it is on a mobile device. You know, your phone, your tablet, your laptop, your device that is probably with you more than almost any other appliance or technology you might have is predominantly the piece of technology where you're getting information. So mobility is a good portion. Remember, we've spent the last five years merging from analog to digital, right? We went through that period over the last five years where it was a little blurry. You had both, now everything's digital. And now that everything is digital, content, which is always king, has to be able to be delivered real time to almost any device. And truthfully, any device is not just mobility like we think of a handset. Mobility is your laptop. It is your tablet. It's your television in some cases. It is your device that's delivering information regardless of where you are and how you need to get it. So talk about the impacts that has on application development. Well, the application development means that you need to start thinking about Nimble. You need to be very selective about the types of information that you think both your customers and you can deliver. I mean, at the end of the day, we used to all, I mean, I did some application development probably about 20 years ago. And we used to throw everything but the kitchen sink into there because if you accessed it, you accessed it. There was no, well, maybe I could do it via cell phone or I could do it via tablet. You had one device. You had one sort of way of connecting. Now you have to be selective. You have to be choosy. You have to be able to say, what's the most bang for my buck? With the technology advances HP talks about on the HP SDN, I become less choosy. Now I have more options. The layer on top becomes easier to manage because of this technology. What's your biggest business challenge right now? And then I'm going to ask the same question around your network. I'd say our biggest challenge, excuse me, our biggest challenge is ensuring that we provide safe, secure data and content to our customers. That is our biggest, our goal in the Dove's Group of Companies is to ensure that anything we do with technology is safe, secure, top of line, strong business for our clients. And what are you hearing, Eric, from customers, when you talk about the challenge, eventually you're talking to, right? CIO is going to have a higher level perspective. The networking guy is going to have a different perspective. What are they telling you? I mean, most of, a lot of the networking folks are just saying, from an SDN perspective, they're figuring out how to prepare for it. And especially I find the larger the company, the more work and the longer the journey is going to be and the more detailed the journey is going to be. But what we're finding is a lot of our kind of small and mid-sized customers have completely embraced it. Some of them have completely embraced what they have and are going forward with SDN in usually in a niche or specific application environment. And then beyond that, I think some of the larger customers are really just starting the journey and looking at how they can prepare their environment and get it ready to become a full SDN environment. It's obviously going to be a journey. It's going to take time. It's going to be a hybrid approach for a while, but looking at their networking infrastructure and environment and how they can leverage it today with SDN. So when you talk to your networking folks, Jason, what's their biggest challenge? You know, before I get to that, I want to make one point to expand on, this is a game changer for small to mid-sized businesses. Large entities that had capital before were always able to invest in networking. It was always a little bit of, oh my God, it's a lot of money or the pre-fill I have to get are all these scientists. This is a game changer. So the tech was stacked for those guys. The tech was stacked, that's right. This is going to give small to mid-sized businesses an opportunity to play like they've never played before, which is why I think this is huge for HP. In terms of what my networking people are challenged with right now, is more and more, more ports, more technology, more solutions, faster content delivery. Basically, be ready right now. What used to be a request for information is now, I needed it five minutes ago, and they're serious this time. Are you changing your organization as a result? You hear a lot about this converged infrastructure. Are you changing the organization to accommodate for that or are you looking at that in any new ways? We are, but we're adapted. We are basically taking our skill sets and applying them across this spectrum that allows for cross-pollination, but also gives the opportunity for folks in different groups to experience how each other work. Because the interesting thing is all of these technologies are great, but they all, the last key step is integrating all of the groups, the application stack, the networking stack. So cross-pollinating to me is going to be my goal for the excellence campaign for the next six months. That's a lot of how you spend your time, I would imagine, taking away from those organizational issues. That's right. How is the CIO role changing with a lot of these disruptions going on? And specifically, how are you responding? I think CIOs are business men and business women. They're no longer technologists. I think they are being asked to contribute to the business. I think they're being asked to provide real solutions to help guide the business. And I think the men and women that make up the CIO camps are now welcome additions to the management team that are being embraced as key members. I think our day-to-day jobs have changed because we're no longer tinkering, we're connecting. We're basically taking what used to be very old, archaic, difficult technology, and rather now combining what's state-of-the-art and making it all happen. So that business acumen is interesting. How and why is Jason Cohen qualified to walk into a business person's office and have that discussion? Well, I would hope that, as an example, I've been with Omnicon for 20 years. I've been under the tutelage of the chairman and the CIO of the DOS Group of Companies for about 17 of those years. And he, Dale, has taught me pretty much what I need to do to be a better business person. And by allowing myself to experience that, I'm just simply taking that and applying it to the technology world. It's a challenge every day. He'd probably tell you it's a challenge every day. But getting, being responsible for other people, being responsible for customers, being responsible for customers of customers trains you real fast on business. All right, Eric, I'm going to give you the last word. Talk about the future a little bit. You're talking to a customer. Customers want to know that you're relevant to the future. So layout, where HP, you know, in a sort of bumper sticker fashion, where is HP going and how are they going to support my future in networking? Yeah, so as Jason was saying, I mean, he's a very good example. He's seen what the power of putting all the HP, you know, one HP together and being able to see that solution across, not just networking, but across the whole picture, including services and all the other pieces. But I think going forward from a, from a networking perspective, really, what we're going to see is we keep, we always say that SDN is a journey. And this is really the beginning of the journey. We talked about Gartner in their hype cycle. So in VoIP they started in 1998, they became kind of mainstream in 2008. So that's a 10 year window. Now these windows seem to be shrinking, but they just started covering SDN last year. So again, we see SDN as a journey, but what's really important is that we are at the forefront of this journey. And we've already started, Jason mentioned the ecosystem. That's really what's going to help us be successful and be the winner in the SDN marketplace. Eric, Jason, thanks very much for coming on theCUBE. Appreciate your insights. All right, keep it right there everybody. We'll be right back after this world. We're live from HP Discover and this is theCUBE.