 to deliver to them in a way that they can consume it. We can't be just exposing. Okay, we're on. Okay, we're here live at HP Discover. I'm here with Sard Gilai, who is the senior vice president and general manager of Converged Cloud. We are here live at HP Discover. This is Silicon Angle theCUBE. This is our flagship program. When we go out to the events, extract a signal from the noise. Independent media company in partnership with Wikibon.org, our research team. Dave had to step out to do a breaking analysis on some news around HP, the tablets. Their business. And Sard, you and I are going to have a conversation around Converged Cloud. The SVP and general manager of all of the clouds organizations. And that includes, we just talked to Biri about his cloud. ES has their cloud systems as all of them. Can you explain the cloud's focus across HP? Sure. Well, I mean, I think the main thing we want to talk about is that as we discussed, and some of the presses we discussed, the main important thing about cloud is cloud is about hybrid delivery. People are going to consume cloud in different ways. There's no one solution for cloud. And so if you look at what HP has, right? We have different cloud of clouds depending on what consumption model you have. If you want to build a cloud, we have a cloud system you can build a cloud with as well as our HP software solutions such as CDA and CSA that you can use to manage the cloud and provide cloud and use that. If you want to consume cloud, we have HPCS, which is what Biri has, where you can consume cloud services. And if you want to have a managed cloud, we have ES and they provide managed cloud solutions. Now, the key here is that all this has to work together, have a common architecture, a common consumption model. And that's where Converged Cloud comes in. And so Converged Cloud is about really building a holistic solution for customers to use these services. Yeah, so that's a good explanation. So that clears it up for me because like the big data focus, which is now kind of sprinkled throughout HP's DNA, everyone's talking, we have autonomy, we got vertical, we got some HP labs. That software now is kind of making its way, it's kind of native across HP. Cloud now seems to be a focus across all of HP. That's what really you're looking over to make sure that there's no inconsistencies between the enterprise group and other groups, right? So this is about architecture and messaging or just architecture. Well, you have to go back to the use case and the customer. The key thing is the customer, right, as we discussed, right, we're trying to build the cloud enterprise can rely on. And the idea here is that no matter whether the customer wants to consume a cloud, wants to build a cloud, manage the cloud, we're going to give them solutions that do that using a common architecture and a common experience. And to do that correctly, right, from a customer's perspective, he just wants to consume something. He doesn't have to understand exactly how we're building it in HP or which organization is doing it. And so the key of Converged Cloud is to provide him that framework where he can choose what he wants and also to provide him the flexibility. So if he wants to, let's give you an example, it's a customer wants to do some development and so they use public cloud to do development because that's easy and they can quickly get up and running, but when they actually want to deploy, they decide actually, you know what? Because of certain restrictions and so forth, we actually want to do that in our data centers. They want to use a private cloud with our technology because Converged Cloud is a common solution. They can take what they develop in public cloud and now run it as a private cloud. And then they could also burst if they want to have extended capabilities. And let's say if they decide now that, you know what? I actually don't want to manage it. I want someone else to manage it for me. Then Enterprise Services will manage that for them. Same technology, same experience, same solution. I really am impressed that HP's on the same page now across the groups because it's been kind of incoherent over the past around, okay, look, someone just a little bit over here, just it's always been hard to figure out what to touch in which group. I mean, it's pretty clear you can buy servers in the server group and software over there. So that's very big positive. But I want to talk about the products in the customer environment because, I mean, HP, they don't really cater to the startups. They cater to global companies, right? So there are issues that need to be solved. Can you just walk through like the top check boxes that you needed to do to have a Converged Cloud? I mean, you're talking about requirements that are sophisticated. You have multi-tenancy issues if you're going to have in the public, you're going to have workload specific infrastructure and apps. You've got developer issues, you've got automation. What were the key, what's the key guiding principles or requirements or the table stakes that you guys had to tighten up to get to this point? Sure, no, that's a great question actually. I think the key is if you look at, as you mentioned, right, we cater to enterprises and we have tons of experience in enterprises, probably building solutions for enterprises, building services for enterprises, managing service for enterprises. And so when we look at the cloud, we look at, okay, what do these people care about? And there's certain things that everybody cares about, like scale and horizontal capabilities and so forth, but there are other things like SLAs, support, consultancy help, where do I start? What do I do? Sovereignty issues, right? If I'm in a multinational company, maybe I want some of my data not to be able to leave certain countries because those countries have sovereignty issues. So I have to have data centers in very specific areas and I have to have rules. I can't just deploy it and say it could be anywhere where it wanted to be because some countries have that. So bridging to your traditional infrastructure, one of the key things is, there's billions of dollars invested in traditional infrastructure, right? Most enterprises are not going to just flip the switch and move over. They want to have the ability to move jobs around, to be portable, to leverage your existing infrastructure and so forth. And so when we look at a cloud, when you look at Converse Cloud, we look at it as much more of a holistic problem that we have to work on and an holistic journey for our customers. Whereas if you have a startup sort of a green field, they're just going to go and do something, you know, it's very small. They don't have all the same problems. They may have a large or maybe consuming a lot of services, but they don't have to worry about all these types of problems. They don't have offices in every country. They don't have to worry about these things. Whereas in enterprise, they have a different level of expectations. I think that's a key testament to what you guys have done here is that in order to get into the business with Converse Cloud the way you're doing it now, you need to do a lot of work. I think a lot of people don't look at that. So I wanted to highlight that. Let's talk about some of the clouds. You guys, this new cloud is a compute cloud. So what is compute cloud? Sir, compute cloud is basically the ability to do compute across the public cloud. So on demand compute resources. Do you want X amount of VMs on demand? Do you want to be charged for as many as you want to use and so forth? That's what compute cloud gives you. Good, so well Google has a compute cloud. They announced it now, so they haven't really done anything with it. They didn't select bigger clients like some of the big financial companies. So we have yet to see that, but that was a nice trend with Google IO. We covered that trend and so we want to see that. Now the area that I get a lot of questions on that we're reporting on and we're trying to find a solution for is big data. So in the big data space, this is not about the software side. Infrastructure's unique. So a lot of the folks who are either startups and or big companies are doing a lot of proof of concepts. So the cloud makes a lot of sense to do stuff in the cloud because I don't necessarily want to stand up physical infrastructure to do it for big data projects. But the problem we've seen is in big data is that it's expensive to go to Amazon for example and spin up a bunch of RAM and a bunch of compute and then have the data come flowing through there. So when we actually priced out Amazon, it was like very expensive to move the big data project because of the data and the RAM and the CPU because it's really CPU and RAM intensive. So most people are doing these proof of concepts are standing up hardware and or tearing them down or abandoning them. So the question is is that as those workloads change, what are you guys doing in that requirement? There's a lot of enterprises. They want to do the test dev. They want to actually do app development. They want to have the hardened apps on the security side. Security's a big thing and they don't want to go to the cloud and not have the enterprise ready. So Viri was talking about public cloud is enterprise ready. So can you expand on that? Is that truly ready with the security and is it costly on CPU and those dynamics that Amazon really has fallen short on? Sure, well I think one of the things that we've been doing a lot in the industry if you look at some of the things we've done in our managed cloud is that not all industries need the same thing. It's not one size fits all. And that's part of the problem with big data which is one of the things that we're doing, for example through our ES services, we actually have an airlines cloud which is optimized for the types of things that airlines need. As you probably know, it's very difficult to actually print a ticket without HP touching it in the US. And so when we look at cloud and this is part of enterprise focus, we're not looking at it's just going to be this one blob and either it fits for you and it doesn't fit and you just all have to use it, it's not suboptimal. There's going to be subsections and industry type sections, industry solutions that are specific. If you have big data, we may have sort of optimized cloud where you have optimized machines for big data. If you have something else and so forth. And if you look at what Viri's doing what's really interesting is they're taking the best of what we already know for enterprise and applying it to public cloud. And so then you get the best of both. You get the benefit of public cloud in terms of you have horizontal scaling. But you also get the SLAs that enterprise provide. And as you know, we are isolated 100% better than anything else available there. And the other thing you get which is really important people forget about you can pick up the phone when there's a problem. You know about it. You can't do anything to get an email or you can actually pick up the phone and we will help you develop in that environment. So let's talk about now back to the customers. And you're focused because I want to tease this out because I think this lends a lot of clarity. What is your role as the GM? What are you managing? What are the day-to-day? Are you managing architecture? You managing people? How big is the organization? What is your job and role look like in Converse Cloud? So again, the key thing is let's talk about what is Converse Cloud give our customers, right? Converse Cloud gives our customers the cloud enterprises can rely on and they can build it, consume it or manage it. Depending what kind of model they want. And my responsibility is really to work across all the different top pieces of HPE so that we build a consistent architecture that has the right capability of scale that we can use across all these different models so that basically from a customer perspective it's a seamless experience. And so what does that actually mean? That starts from product definition. So ensuring that when we're defining the products, we're looking at the whole spectrum of them and we're not doing them in silos. Yeah, yeah, that's good. To when we build the solutions, solutions have to be tested together. So the first time they work isn't when a customer uses them, right? So working on solution, testing, working early on on architecture, so making sure we have a consistent architecture and so on. And so I have a team. But really the work that my team does is really across all of HPE. And again, it was a focus on holistic solutions because what we found is that unless you have dedicated focus on it, the silos themselves even with the highest interest they may have won't get around to it because you have to have somebody who every night goes to sleep worrying about is our solution holistic? Will customers have portability? Will they have what we promise? Will a customer who is developing something on private cloud be able to seamlessly migrate to the public cloud and it's all going to have a seamless experience? We had Michael Callahan on earlier from security and that was a big focus. He was kind of the same way. It's own little division. Meg Whitman had three priority areas. Cloud security and information, right? So okay, he gets his own little bucket but yet he works across all the clouds, groups. You guys are the same way. Cloud is a big focus of HPE but your job is to make sure that the experience with a customer at all levels is consistent. Pretty much. It's also looking again, looking at the use cases of what customers are doing and looking at it from a lens of the whole solution as opposed to looking at a customer and saying, well, this is the private cloud so let's go do that. Really what we want to do at HPE is again, we don't want to bias a customer to one solution or another, we want to figure out a solution that works for them and when so you have a holistic view of it from the total portfolio, it's much easier to sort of work with the customers and sort of tailor things for the specific journey that they're on. So we're also working heavily with the sales force to make sure that we have that approach. So let's talk real quickly about openness. HPE has built their business around openness and interoperability. It's been one of the core tenants for going back since I can remember when I used to work there back in the day. And with the cloud, hypervisor issues is interesting. So how do you approach the hypervisor issue? And I want to make sure that the consistency, did you just pick up with VMware? Are you open across the different hypervisors because the virtualization piece is critical in this aspect? Well, as I mentioned before, part of the things that we provide is we provide a heterogeneous environment and we're not biased to a hypervisor. We have to support VMware, Microsoft, and now we also support KVM. And so really our view is that the customers have to be able to choose what's hypervisor they want. We're not going to bias them. And other parts of our solution as well, if the customer wants to use other hardware or software solution, we will support that because in our view, the best way to support our customers is to give them choice. How about when different hypervisors are in play? If I got a Microsoft Hyper-V over here and I got VMware over here, part of the organization, how does that, are you agnostic on that? Is there interoperability across those hypervisors? So we have products such as CSA for orchestrating across different cloud solutions. Obviously there are limitations to what you can do which are not specific to HP. But in general, we will support multi-hypervisor environments. The key is providing the necessary management and abstraction layer so that the customer doesn't have to worry about it. And they have the choice to manage the war HP can manage it for them. Absolutely. Okay, I'm going to get that point. Okay, final question, we've got a break. Love the cloud story coming together here at HP. What's next? So give us the quick, I don't need futures to know HP is going to talk about futures, but I want to really just get your vision of what's coming around the corner. What's the next six months look like to you guys? Next six to 12 months as you guys go out and plow the fields in this kind of, converge enterprise-grade cloud offering. What's the task that to do this? Well, I mean, there's obviously a lot of work to do. Cloud is moving very, very fast. I think the adoption, the pickup rate in cloud is much faster than we all expected, which is great. But, you know, we got to get ahead of it. I think you'll be seeing some interesting things from us in terms of we talk a lot about how we use the common architecture and so forth. I think there's some things that we'll be seeing that will make that much real, much more real for people in terms of how that plays out. And I think over the next six months or so, you'll be seeing some things from HP about how that's all going to play out across the architecture. Okay. Sarki Lai, thank you for coming on theCUBE. Appreciate it. Senior Vice President and General Manager of Converged Cloud. He's the person looking out over all the different groups, helping them understand the consistency issues and making sure everything is consistent with HP. You're kind of like involved in everyone's role and make sure they play nicely in the sandbox to ensure that the customers have a great experience. So nice to see the HP Cloud story coming together. See that merge. I know it's a big move for HP for you guys at this size to come out and bring a global product to the market. It's a huge accomplishment for the industry and I hope it can continue to do that. So we're gonna be right back with our next guest after this short break here at HP Discover Live in Germany. Thank you.