 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 for HPE Discover, HPE Enterprise news show here, part of the new split of HPE Enterprise. This is theCUBE's SiliconANGLES flagship program. We go out to the events and extract the signal from the noise. I'm John Furrier, my co-host Dave Vellante. Our next guest is Majod Nair, VP of Products, Converged Data Center, Infrastructure. Welcome to theCUBE. Thanks, Dave. Great to have you on. I'm John, that's Dave over there. So we've got him all right. We've got him laughing already. Product management, big part of your job. You run the software side, you run all the product management for the Converged Synergy and all the other products, which is the hot set of products here at HPE. Not the hardware, which is Neil, Michael, all of those guys. Software is where the margin is. That's where the money is. And also manageability is a big part of it. Give us an update. What's going on in your group? What are you guys working on? What are you guys talking about here at HPE Discover? Sure. So I think the big thing we're talking about, as you know, is our composable infrastructure. We announced that at the last Discover in Vegas. As the first proof point was just around software-defined operations. And that was really part of OneView, opening it up, integrations with the ecosystem API, so integrations with folks like Docker, Shaft, Puppet, VMware. We just announced Microsoft yesterday. But that's been the starting point where we believe the first stage of that composable journey starts with the software-defined management and intelligence that OneView brings. So in the show here, we have just talked about the next phase here, where we have built the first platform, designed ground up for composability, which is HPE Synergy. And OneView is the engine and the heart of that intelligence now embodied, combining that with the platform advantages that Synergy brings, right? So it's really bringing, instead of defining infrastructure traditionally, a software, you know, storage, compute, network, it's an infrastructure-building block. We love DevOps. We love infrastructure as code, so it's music to our ears to hear those kinds of words coming out of you guys. It's good to see Docker here. Do some deep integration there. What's your role with Docker? They're here at the show. Do they fit into this equation? Absolutely. So Docker is one of the core partners, design development partners we've worked with as far as the composable infrastructure. They are one of our ecosystem partners. And if you think about what Docker is trying to do for DevOps, typically people are using containers. They deploy it on a public cloud because it's very easy to define the underlying infrastructure. And developers really don't want to think about infrastructure and all the details underneath that. And you know, to do that on-prem was much more complicated. How do I specify all these different things that infrastructure requires? And that's something that for Docker, that's the advantage where we've jointly built a Docker machine driver that understands composable in one view. So you can just deploy one click Docker containers on the infrastructure. And developers don't need to understand the details of the infrastructure. So talk about the ground up development process. I mean, that means a whole new view. No legacy, understanding legacy one thing, but I'm not saying you're not understanding it, but you want to take advantage of the new market trends cloud native and cloud and big data, all those things that are adding value for developers. What do you guys, does that part of the memster, Neil talked about that it was, you got the machines not shipping yet, but this is the beginning of the thinking. As you guys integrate the design process of software hardware, can you share some color into that roadmap without giving away any secrets? But like, just give some color to what does, from the ground up mean? From a software perspective. I think part of what from the ground up means is that we are really figuring out how to not think about these as different elements that you get the typical layers of management. I got a management platform for compute, I got something for storage, and then I got something for network, and let me put a manager on top of those managers, then I put a director on top of those managers of managers, right? And that's the layer cake problem we're trying to solve. So part of it is fundamentally rethinking this and thinking of what is an application need? What is a cloud native app or traditional app needs? And it just needs to express those things in terms of the app needs and workload needs rather than compute storage and network. So that's part of ground up, starting to design infrastructure management in terms that applications are expressing their requirements rather than the piece parts of infrastructure. As far as roadmap goes, we announced a multi-stage roadmap when we started this journey in June earlier this year. Stage one, as I said, was a software defined management, stage two synergy, just with the final, in an ounce of the show. I think the next few waves you're really taking that software automation that comes on the synergy platforms and the composable platforms to the next level where automation and orchestration become much more integrated. So not just infrastructure management, but how do I do the layers about that to fulfill the vision? Application centric infrastructure management rather than the reverse. That's what we're doing. It should be agnostic, right? Application doesn't care. It just works. Exactly. It's like how does the application actually offer infrastructure needs? That's really what we're trying to do. Sorry. Yeah. Just jump it in. Help yourself. It's great. I mean, he's got his hands on the keys to the kingdom. Product management on the software side where the value will be generated. Not 100%, but that's where the margin will be. Certainly in a software defined world. Absolutely. There's a lot of value there. So I got to ask you, where are your priorities? I mean, as a VP of product management, you're juggling trade-offs every day. Certainly roadmap drives a lot of the guiding principles, but what are your priorities now? I mean, in the short, medium term, are there certain things in the stack that you want to knock down? Can you share some color on, just globally, generically? What are your priorities? Yeah, so taking that roadmap journey forward, the number one priority is, how do I make infrastructure simple to consume, right? The public cloud, I think, has defined and shown people what infrastructure simplicity can be. It is done with armies of developers and side-diperskill cloud providers. Our enterprise customers are saying, how can I do that in-house? And that journey is really the priority for us. How do I make consumption of infrastructure much more simple? How do I make management much more of an easy button experience? So that's the journey we're on, right? So HP has a lot of software assets, for example. HP has Helion and its cloud platforms. You know, a much more holistic integration across all of these different capabilities. So it's just, you know, app needs X and, you know, allow my workload to move to the best platform, right? And that's the vision that we're on, and that's the journey. So let's talk about the reality of where IT is today and where we want to take them and how we get there. So you have this layered stacks, storage, hypervisor servers, database, separate teams for each, like you said before, different management interface for each. And people are not prone to sort of swap out pieces of the stack and slot in new ones. Essentially, you're trying to reduce or eliminate the dependencies on that stack and make it easier to sort of just have that composable infrastructure called beautiful. What's the friction to doing that? And how do we get from point A to point B? The friction has always been there. We saw it with the first wave of our conversion offerings and solutions. And what we see that our customers who understand the journey that they're on and they're thinking about an end state vision, a three to five year roadmap. And I can see a lot of the C level customers, VPF infrastructures I talked to are starting to think about that infrastructure journey. When they think of that, they think of the kinds of solutions we're talking about with composable as the journey they need to be. And what we're helping them with is how do they take the journey without having to do a full rip and replace, right? So with Converged, we started offering the ability to gradually ease in the Converged offerings rather than having to replace all elements at the same time. And the same thing is going to happen with composable. Our customers think about, hey, what's the next new workload? What's the next new refresh cycle? And then with some of the combination of our financing and flexible capacity, we make that friction, which is one of the things is, how do I make this budget flip happen? We take that friction out of the system. The second one is how do I transform my people to so that they're not just siloed operators? And one of our big customers I just talked to said, look, I broke down all the silos. Eventually, I didn't get rid of the people. The people are still there. Now they're cross-train and they're a lot more productive because they can do a lot more with the ease of the software management that one view brings to the table. And so those are a couple of the big friction points that we have some good ways to help our customers for that. Talk about ripping a place. A lot of times people think, oh, I'm going to just pull out a box. And it's more than that. It's not just the asset on the books. It's all the processes and skill sets around it. And so it's hard to get people to change. So are you seeing examples of winning strategies where you've got a leader who says, okay, like you started talking before the three to five year plan. Add some color to that. What is it a successful example of somebody who comes in with real leadership and says, okay, we're going to do this. Take that hill. Yeah, absolutely. I think the big opportunity that customers now see is how do I eliminate operational complexity? This whole concept of the idea economy is a big change driver. IT is becoming the core of the business rather than just supporting business process. And a lot of startups and companies have disrupted traditional industry, have actually taken advantage of technology to do that. That's become the big driver for change inside most of the large enterprise customers. Saying, why can we not leverage technology to get much more analytics, much more intelligence, targeted offers for our users? To do that, CIOs need to have a technology roadmap. And those are the ones we see the most success with, wherever they're saying, I have decided I'm going to become an enabler of the business, a contributor to the business beyond just supporting business processes. So that's at the highest level. And the next click down is okay, now you pick your couple of first success stories. And every company that I know of, and I personally ran a big portfolio that my own developers wanted to go to the cloud. And so you go to your IT department saying, can you offer these things? So those kind of examples, I'm trying to do the next generation application. I'm a customer, I was trying to do a mobile storefront, pick those examples as places to actually start deploying your new platforms. And over time, we have built a platform that can do both old and new. And so that makes it easier for people to do the transition. And we haven't talked about explicitly, but automation, right? And a lot of times, the goal is to automate so you can scale your business. But IT oftentimes is not aligning with that goal. They're afraid of automation. They love to turn the knobs. What are you seeing in terms of the automation holy grail? Sure, I think it's more about this. There's fear of automation because a lot of automation is automation without intelligence. So there's, you know, if you automate a bunch of things that are not meant to work together, you are going to have breakage. And IT knows the pain of something breaking. So I don't think it is the fear of automation as such, but it's the lack of, you know, intelligence of that automation. And I think that is one of the things where we're saying, look, we understand the underlying infrastructure. We're going to make it much more easier. You automate on the basis of what the applications need. And that automation understands the underlying infrastructure, takes care of it. Talk about the team internally. What's the vibe at like the new HP? What kind of tech are you guys working on? You all have big screens. What's the developer environment like? Share for the folks out there, a peek into the new HP. I have a lot of excitement, you know. The split in some ways was exciting in terms of a lot of celebration, but as far as working teams goes, it was very seamless, so very well done. You know, you don't want to see any friction for the developers. We, you know, there was some moving around, some buildings and all that. We have a very open development environment, at least, you know, our group out in Palo Alto. We get to see the Sanford Clock Tower on one end. Are you on Hanover Street? Yep, on Hanover Street. So it's, you know, the new building that you see in the ads now, and... Who got the HP Labs building up on the hill? I think Labs are still there, but HP Inc is part of that, and then I think some part... You know, we did a CUBE event, CUBE broadcast. Yeah, that's a beautiful look. They got a lot of bandwidth there. Yeah. 150 mega. Anytime you guys want to do a CUBE event at HP Labs, we'll be happy to come back. Yeah, so absolutely, you know. Great campus, open environment. You know, we sit in pods where, you know, me and my peers share a pod of four, and, you know, low wall cubes. I love it, you know. I think courageous interaction. Yep, lots of... Great place to work. You get the latest of hardware too, to play around with, right? So I walk around with my new laptop, and the customer says, I want that, you know. Big screen, double screen. Manoj, give us the final word here on the show. What's going on here? What are some of the conversations that we've been involved in with customers? And what are you going to take back to the ranch in Palo Alto and share with the folks back home? The customer vibe is like, look, this is different. This is a different conversation that we're not hearing from any of the other vendors in infrastructure. You're talking about applications, you're talking about, you know, how to make things simple, and it's a paradigm shift. Now I'm pretty sure that a lot of competitors are going to come out saying, oh, sure, we do that too. I think we have defined it in a very clear way. Our customers are educated enough, I believe, that they're going to be able to see the difference. The biggest takeaway is, you know, accelerate the journey, and get to that end goal of how do I make it easier for applications to consume infrastructure, you know, make the infrastructure intelligent, and help IT in becoming a business partner. So are you guys eating your own dog food or drinking your own champagne? Absolutely. Giving an example? We're drinking our own champagne. During the separation, you know, we had to spin up about 200 times more infrastructure than a typical here because of, you know, multiple systems, transitions. RID guys did a very cool thing. You know, they actually, you know, put some growth pros on their heads and showed how to go all the way from a rack that is boxed up to deploying applications and developing applications against the new infrastructure in like, you know, a matter of hours, right? So rack to actual doubt meant a matter of hours before lunch they were done. And that's, you know, so the RIT partners are actually been testing this out for the last few months. And using integrations like Docker to build some of the new apps that we have been, we as employees of HP get to use on our day-to-day, you know, on our mobile apps and all that. And that's been dubbed on-site. You know, a lot of people don't know how awesome HP IT is. I mean, even going back when I worked there in the 90s, first intranet, first, one of the first domains on the internet, hp.com, you know, when Mosaic browser came out, just everything that they did really, really stayed in the art stuff. It's fantastic to all of them partner, you know. So that is great to have, you know, such a, you know. And it's still like that today. Yeah, absolutely. It's better if any, right? Well, we got to talk to get some of the CIO on, get them on theCUBE next time. So HP IT, you're invited on theCUBE next time. Thanks for watching. Thanks for coming on. I appreciate you sharing the insights on the product management vision. Absolutely. Software is the competitive advantage, obviously big data, a lot of big data coming up here on theCUBE next. Couple of segments, you'll see a lot of big data. Stay tuned. We got more coming here, live in London, after this short break. Remember, we have podcasts and go to siliconangle.tv where we have the guests of the week gets its own podcast. And of course, every Wednesday is women Wednesday. We highlight the feature a woman in tech. Go to siliconangle.tv and of course, go to crowdchat.net slash HPE Discover. That's our engagement container. And of course, crowdpages.co slash HPE Discover. That is the new social CMS with a new persona-based search engine influencer ranking that we're rolling out today. Check it out. This is theCUBE. We'll be right back with more after this short break.