 Live from the FIA Barcelona Grand Via Compensator in Barcelona, Spain, it's The Cube at HP Discover Barcelona 2014 brought to you by headline sponsor HP. Here are your hosts, John Furrier and Dave Vellante. Okay, welcome back everyone. We are live in Barcelona, Spain for HP Discover 2014. The European edition, this is The Cube. We are out at the event to extract the sound from the noise. I'm John Furrier. This is Dave Vellante. Our next guest is Paul Miller, Vice President of Worldwide Market for HP Converged Systems. Welcome back to The Cube. Thank you. Glad I would be here. Great to see you. You're looking good. I mean, you're looking good right now. You're feeling good in the morning. What's the matter? Good night's sleep last night? No. No? No. Barcelona, dinner's at 11 and everything starts at 2 and then you've got to get up early in the morning. What time is it? Meeting. So you must be busy. I'll see a customer event here. You must be out talking to all the customers. What's the update? What are they saying? What's going on in Europe? What's going on with Converged Systems? Obviously, it's headlining the show. Cloud, Converged Systems, big data, customers, partners are all here. What's the story? Yeah, so Converged Systems is really hot this year again. We're incorporating Converged Systems in our ES offerings, in our Cloud offerings and then taking it to the next level with the new CS700 that we just launched, I guess, two days ago here. Okay. So we've been talking to folks that we had Neriman on, Jeff Karla came on, Chris from AventNet was here and I wonder if we could just start at the high level, talk strategy for a second. So you think about this whole Converged Infrastructure, Converged Systems play, you guys sort of started that back in 2009 maybe, you and some others, you weren't alone in that vision, but you guys were early, arguably first. There's been a spectrum that's emerged in terms of the flexibility, you know, I was joking, you know, the Henry Ford, any color you want, as long as it's black, it's sort of one end of the spectrum and the other is, hey, this can work and it's pre-tested and pre-engineered, but there's a lot of options, so I wonder if you can help us just sort of understand the spectrum from HP's perspective. Right. So what we learned is that customers don't want just completely fixed, it doesn't meet all their workloads. So what we spent a lot of time is understanding how you could give the value of fast time to delivery, integrated management, as well as the life cycle management, keep those elements that customers want. They want you to manage their software and firmware updates. They want to make sure that there's longevity to the products, but they also want the flexibility because sometimes they're running things like simple workloads like Exchange, which is relatively simple, versus a large database. So what we've done is we've modularized the architecture of the 700. So you have compute modules, storage modules, and then networking modules. By enabling us to do that and then keeping a tight linkage, we're able now to give you an all flash system for, you know, your heaviest, heaviest workloads, and in the same 700 enable you to just stand up maybe static webpages that you're just going to use standard hard drops, but it's all about the processes we've developed and then the magic is the software defined piece of this, right? Convergence started as really people thinking it's all about hardware. The real end game of convergence is how they use software defined infrastructure management to really provide that value of simplicity, of the life cycle automation that customers really see the net value in. Okay, so let me follow up on that. Because HP's been talking about modular components since the mid-2000s, right? So I understand this is clearly different, and your last point was a big difference is the software defined piece of it, and there's probably others. So let's talk about that software defined piece. A lot of people like to think of software defined in the old stove pipes. Oh, you got virtualization, which is software defined for servers, and then you got SDN, which is software defined for networking. Now you got SDS, which is software defined for storage. Is that the way we should be thinking about it? Or is there more of an overarching SDS or SDDC vision? Yeah, so the way we're thinking about it and architecting to is that there's an automation hub. And that automation hub is where your software defined storage plugs into. Your software defined managed networking plugs into. Your bare metal hardware plugs into. It's also where we integrate in with other councils like VMware vSphere, Microsoft System Center, and then up into the cloud. If you're using VMware to stand up clusters, they're very good at standing up the virtualization side of it, but still need someone to partition and provision the underlying infrastructure and make sure it all connects together. So that's when we go down into the infrastructure, whether it be physical or software defined storage, we can do both and then up. So we really see that to pull off the software defined data center of the future, you need this automation hub, the central point that all the other pieces plug into, whether it be third party software or software defined elements, whether it be networking or storage. So you said earlier, Paul, that customers just don't want one thing. And it doesn't give them enough flexibility. Some of your competitors, I mean, we see when it's certainly when it started in Oracle, here's one thing, boom, here's a block or here's a big box. And there's clearly value in that. There's no question about it. But customers were always concerned about the mother of all lock in, number one. And number two, they're concerned about the flexibility. You guys came at it somewhat differently. You always started up with sort of a more open mentality, maybe trading off some of that one color, or Oracle, it's red or black. So what have your customers seen in terms of the value proposition, the business outcome? I wonder if you could take us through sort of where you got started and where you're going now, what you're seeing in the field. Okay, so let me give you a couple of customer examples. A large grocery retail chain. They want to double the amount of storefronts they have. Same size of staff, actually, it's not an all HP shop. But they're looking for a way to take their same staff and be able to put out stores. The faster they can stand up a store, integrating all the inventory, integrating all the points of sale, integrating all the value chain into that. The faster the revenue flows back into the company. So they're looking at HP's modular approach to say, okay, I can start off with my base stores. Then I need to add a small store, add this module, build upon that. If I need to add something, a new application that may require flash drives, I can add that module. So they're looking at this as not, I'm buying a chunk that I buy another chunk. But I'm buying into a strategy that modularly allows me to grow. And they are a Cisco shop and we're allowed to have a Cisco top of rack switch as part of that modular grow path. They're using a combination of both now, but that's where they're going. And because the automation tools extend across that, they're able to stand up their applications faster and deliver that value to stand up a retail store factor. I like that application. First of all, I like it because it's not VDI. So many times I've been there, and I know it's all great, VDI, VDI. It has a block, okay, great. It's really narrow. I like the example because it's an application platform. It's an infrastructure platform that's horizontal. Exactly. It's what everybody talks about, and that's an example of it. Now, so, okay, so timeframe for this was when did this all start, this project? So we're going to make, we announced it here at Discover. It's going to start rolling out in the US in January, February, and then worldwide in the March timeframe. You've announced it here, or are you going to announce it? We announced it here on Tuesday, actually. And did you announce who the customer was, or? No, we didn't announce who the customer was. We are talking about other customers that one of the customers we had talked about is Havel. Havel is a Nordic company. Started 80 years ago selling office supplies, you know, pencils, papers, I guess I don't know, I wasn't around 80 years ago. In the 80s, they started selling computers to small businesses. They bought into our strategy and now have become a service provider, as opposed to an office supply provider, providing applications out to them. Okay. So they've really changed the whole business model from, you know, from once just being an office supplier to second delivering PCs out the door to now being a full-fledged service provider. Now, you guys have made a lot of investments in configurations and solutions around different, you know, platforms, particularly SAP HANA, is one that you're focused on. I wonder if you can give us the update on that. That's something we really haven't talked much about this week. Yeah, HANA is hot. You know, customers are seeing the value of moving to in-memory and the speed of moving to in-memory. And what it's enabling them to do is change their business models, change how they look at data and integrating data around. So it's been one of the biggest things that we've had going. And just give me a couple of different technologies that we're really promoting here at the show is one around the platform of HANA that we built upon, the new Superdome X. It's the CS900, and it's also been known as HANA Hawk in the industry. That's the one that Antonio kissed, right? That's the one that Antonio kissed. Kissing locks. Oh, yeah, we've got, actually, a lot of the sales rough to sell HANA have been coming up and kissing it, too. There's a whole photobombing thing about that. And what it does is that it provides this high availability resilience that only used to be available on Unix machines. So a lot of SAP today is running out of old-style Unix boxes. Now they can move their mission-critical ERPs, systems over, and get that same high availability resilience, same memory resilience, and talking to customers all at the show about this. And they're like, finally, I can get off my legacy systems and move to this. It's got the built-in partitioning. It's going to be a real great start. So HANA is a meaningful part of your business. You're saying HANA is hot? Interest uptake? It's actually the point. Hot in terms of interest? Hot in terms of actual deals? In deployments, yeah. So you're doing HANA deals. We're doing big HANA deals. We're doing small HANA deals. If you look at our pipeline and what we fulfill, we always have a backlog at the end of every quarter of new HANA deals that are going to fulfill. Is this, are these HANA deals from the end customer standpoint? Are they incremental sort of business opportunities or are they sort of baselining their traditional database, whether it's an Oracle or DB2 or even? So it varies. So some customers are doing a complete force. One customer that we're talking to wants to force we've had a petabyte of data that's currently on legacy, legacy systems, right? There are other customers who are seeking value by standing up in a configuration we call a sidecar. They're keeping their existing systems, but they're sucking the information out to get information in seconds versus days and analytics in seconds versus days. So some are just augmenting their systems and others are doing more search. So I've got some chats here from the crowd chat, crowdchat.desk.hpdiscovered, join the conversation. Question for you, Paul. We're hearing from customers about flexibility, existing systems, but the main point in here is from one of the chat members is the market's changing, right? So they need to reduce their reliance on one vendor. That's why open source contractions are on the cloud side. So the question for you is existing investments. How do I use my existing investments? No vendor lock-in, new projects have new tech, new requirements. How do I increase my speed of deploying with lower costs and greater control? That sounds greatly a soundbite that comes in. You hear that on stage, you hear that from customers. That's the choice question. So give us two cents on how you guys are marketing for that. What's the value proposition? That's the reality. I have existing stuff. I got a bridge through the future. Right. What do I do? So when I talk to customers, they talk about existing stuff. Very few of them have existing underutilized assets. When they mean existing stuff is they're talking about, I've trained my people. My people know how to get a system. They have got it in my infrastructure. They're usually adding capacity, but they don't want to throw away that investment training and the interoperability. So that's what we went and made the system. So underutilized infrastructure and practices and processes are what it's like. Yeah, the practice process. So what we're doing is with the new 700, our first step in enabling customers to use their existing processes as well as is the Cisco switch. We'll see us open up the architecture even more. And with one view today, we can monitor Cisco switch so they do get the value of the automation tools, et cetera, that we have here. Do you see the multi-vendor stuff? I mean, Dave and I were talking about EVO rails. We walked by the booth there, saw that. VMware's here, Intel's here, a lot of partners. Is the future more gonna, is there gonna be more integration with multi-vendor? Less integration? We get storage on one hand saying, hey, we're polymorphic. We have one architecture. So the customers kind of need to navigate those waters. Yeah, they do. And we're trying to not have a future where you have, instead of silos of server storage and networking, where your new silos are, silos of EVOs, silos of other convergence. And part of that is our strategy of one view to have it manage all of it. So use one view as the automation tool across all converged systems. So I want to get your thoughts on a concept that we've been kicking around the queue that comes up almost every show, but more at HP because you guys have that a lead on the converged stuff. And that is lock-in, right? Lock-in has been kicked around, and we've been in this business multiple decades. It's like lock-in's back into changes as platforms become more commoditized and tooling and packaging comes important with the cloud and other things. You see that trend. So I got to ask you the question. Let's talk about lock-in. HP wants a lock. Everyone wants a lock-in. If they're in business, they want a lock-in. So let's just say lock-in is having customers buy this stuff and continue to use this stuff. However, lock-in and choice are two different things. The example I use in talking to Dave about this is Intel, back in the PC days. I never said, oh, that's lock-in spec, it's Intel. They have proprietary algorithms in their processor, since it's a hardened type. It just works, functionally delivers value. But I can always get an AMD processor and buy another machine. Is that what we're going? Is that so it's okay to have some proprietary stuff, but if it's hardened and it works well and plays well with others, there's choice still. So how about this lock-in and choice dynamic? So when we talk to customers about lock-in and what they're trying to achieve, quite frankly, they want to move away from worrying about their hardware and their infrastructure. And what they're looking for us to do is integrate with the things that they've standardized on. What you could call is lock-in, vSphere. Lock-in, Microsoft System Center is lock-in. But that's also a good lock-in. Sticky is good. Sticky is good. And what we're trying to do is interoperate with all of those so that if you're going in and you're managing a system with vSphere, you can buy our systems and get that great value of the automation with them. If you want to move them to the future of System Center, again, you're not locked in. You still have the infrastructure support through one DOP. You know, I think that's an important point because one of the things, I'm glad you pointed that out because I want to get that on the table because we're in a very changing market. I mean, it's a massive shift going on and an inflection point at the same time, which is why Amazon is doing so well and some misunderstood vendors come out of the woodwork and all of a sudden they're blowing up in a big way because of the new dynamics, new opportunities like converged, right? Converged, extreme converge to converge systems. So lock-in is not so much the old way. Yeah, that's exactly right. And you bring up Amazon, which is a great point. Because I hear more customers worrying about the lock-in of their data. When they put it in a public cloud, all of a sudden my data's locked in there. That's a harder thing to extract to go to a strategy like HP does. We're going to be portable between multiple clouds. So your data never gets locked in. That's really hard lock-in versus all I've standardized on a system switch type of lock. All right, so I've got to ask you about the developer side because one of the things we always watch as developers because the mobile infrastructure trend is booming right now and you guys are enabling that and we talked to the data center care guys and there's a layer establishing between that and that's kind of a middleware layer. We all kind of know what's the big picture architecture. But I got to ask you, when you talk to customers, they want to get to this agile state of deploying fast because their business is on the line, right? I mean, they have a new style of IT, new style of business. You guys call it new style of IT, Meg calls it that, but the reality is that they have top-line pressure right now. They want to deploy more software on a mobile infrastructure, have it be secure, use big data, all this stuff is reality. So what does agile mean? What are customers doing? Can you point to some quick use cases of they're moving fast, some data around, deployment cycles? Right, right, so maybe just, I think what customers are looking for, right, is the ability to stand up the infrastructure fast but then give them insight into the future. One of the things we announced here also was the integration of HP OneView with Ops Analytics. Our HP Ops Analytics platform enables them, the use case we work with customers on is tell me how my infrastructure before me so I could put my workload in the most optimal place. Tell me how I could re-cause any issue in minutes versus days, right? Customers always have these issues that happen intermittently but they can never find the cause. And they get millions of data points from log entries from all their system. With Ops Analytics now, you can go through those millions of points in actually minutes and find your problem. What that means is you're no longer spending time trying to debunk. They can go off and spend time deploying new applications, deploying new services and they actually then use this to model the future because they've got a baseline on how applications are working. They can model if I want to add way back to our retail, 10 new stores, model it. That's what true business agility is when you can actually give IT a sense of how their applications and their infrastructure are going to perform in the future. So that's built into the platform. That's built into one view and that comes standard in our inverted system 700. And the tech is that homegrown within the group or is it sort of a little autonomy and vertical here and there? This was part of HP software of HP Ops Analytics and you'll see us do more integration on that. Part of the core engine I think is some architectures that we've had. So it's IP that came from HP software that you do. Exactly. Paul, great stuff. Wish we had more time. I want to just highlight that Dave and I were just talking. Tim Crawford was on our crowd chat. He's our kind of remote cube guest. He's out there live chatting with us and crowd chasing the blogger influencer. But great reviews on one view. One view came up multiple times. It's kind of like the hidden gem here at the show. What's the feedback? I mean, it's getting rave reviews. So we have a demonstration booth over on the floor. Customers can actually come and spend two minutes learning one view. It's such an intuitive tool. We built it based on consumer-esque interface like what you do for playing Xbox, whatever. That was our inspiration. Right. Customers can come in and actually learn how to deploy a server, learn how to debug a network in less than two minutes. And then we put them on a race against the clock, right? And they try to beat the time of the next guy. And it's caused a real fury up there. We've got detailed working sessions, but I've had customers come out of this going, I'm never going back to VCE. This is the best experience I've ever had. More power than I've ever had delivering infrastructure. So we've had just customers come and just rave about that two-minute experience to learn a tool. Tell me any other infrastructure management tool that goes across server storage and networking that you can actually test drive in two minutes and actually be put to the test. Well, let's get this, let's follow up. I definitely want to do a drill down. We don't have a lot of time right now. We've got to kind of get the hook here. Let's get the marketing folks' names on there. We like to do a follow-up chat on that. Get some experts on there. Great reviews, so it's one of those things where it's a hallway conversation. It's not the big messaging. Let's get the fifth grader on it. That's what I want to say. Yeah, let's do that. That's a true test. Okay, we'll be right back. We are here with Paul Miller, Vice President of Worldwide Marketing for Converged Systems. It's all coming together. He's got the seat on the bus and the destination's new style of IT. And let's see how these guys do. We'll be watching their execution. Certainly got some great products. We'll be right back after this short break. This is theCUBE. I'm John Furrier with Dave Vellante. We'll be right back.