 Live from Las Vegas, Nevada, it's the Cube at HP Discover 2014, brought to you by HP. Hey, welcome back everyone here live in Las Vegas where HP Discover 2014, this is theCUBE. We will go out to the events, extract the signal from the noise. It's always fun to have great guests here. And you know what, we don't really care who comes on theCUBE. Executive CEOs, entrepreneurs, we want to go where the action is and we're excited to have two great guests here. David Spector, who runs all the social media here within the HP Cloud group. And the Cloud Don, Shiran, welcome to theCUBE. Guys, welcome to theCUBE. Thank you, this is great. So what strategic M&A deals are going on within HP? Tell us, what is Meg thinking? Well, we have proposed several deals but they just never seem to listen to us. Guys, excited, one of the things that I love working with you guys on is also we did some crowd chats and it was great to meet you guys on there, very engaging, but social media is becoming a big part of it. And we've been at Discover, I think this is our 50th season with you guys. Social media is now a big staple part of HP's business. Social business is hot. You have the big studios in the blogger lounge. The blogger lounge used to be some tables and then, you know, get internet access and some free food. Now we've got theCUBE here. You've got this multiple studios over on the other side. Just amazing content generation organically. Absolutely. What's your take on all this? Has it resonated internally? Like are people like noticing the results? So I can tell you one of the things is this is my third HP Discover and I'm a bit infamous because wherever I go and my previous jobs, I bring my flip camera and I'll just go flip. I filmed everything. I filmed interviews, I filmed sessions. Wherever I was, I was filming video. And I'd throw in these videos. Some of the videos and without telling them, right? But they're very famous. People would know my videos and people were like, that's fantastic. And it took enough notice that the, you know, my executives, the teams I work with said, this is unbelievable. Why is this guy not have a film crew? And now I have an entourage at the OpenSec Summit. We ran some tests with an entourage and I think I have like four people following me with cameras, audio guys. And I tell you the content we can produce here is everyone's here is fantastic. If you can't make it here, we bring the event to you and that's really been a new change for me. Well, you know, we're biggest bigots on social. We love theCUBE. And you know, one of the most rewarding things, we're first of all, it's fun. Yeah. And it's fun to talk to people and capture the moments. And that's what I love about the social side of it. But what's rewarding is like, I had one guy come up to me a couple of years ago, this is when I'm like, we got to go all in on theCUBE. You really changed my business. That interview you did at VMworld with my company, you got me on theCUBE. We've closed multiple seven figure deals because of that video. And I'm like, really, what are we talking about? No, we just had a great chat and people came up to me and said, I really liked you. I liked your style and what you were saying. So it was a really interesting thing. It wasn't like a puff piece or a PR driven kind of thing. It was really more of just authentic data. Yeah. There are a few things that's driving this, right? Of course, I mean, everybody's attention time is very small these days. You're trying to squeeze in more data in one for the characters. And as much as people are talking about it, writing about it, it is difficult to capture someone's attention with long posts, long form posts. So videos will be great, short tweets will be great. So naturally they are getting more attention. And also we have people trying to be more creative and more expressive. So there is not just one venue of white paper or research. As much as I can talk about it or in a different way to capture your attention, the audience's attention, I'm going to get more audience. So it is obvious that any such a video that you're doing or anything like this is going to get us more business. And it's also personality is matter too. Like one of the things that if you're open, you guys are obviously big open source. I want to talk about that in a second. The more open you are, the more stuff flies around. It's a frictionless distribution system. And the people are talking to their friends, right? And they're sourcing the same data, like if I'm a buyer or mission something purchasing or getting information, they're still going to scour the web, but it's not like reading the web page of the long form. You're going to get the snackable bites to get a signal. And then they lock in on the peer groups. And it's who do you trust? Who do you feel comfortable with? Through social media, it's still a relationship. And that's why we have the Cloud Don. I mean, I think it's fantastic. He's the Cloud Don, he's got his hat. He's a character, but you know what? He knows more about cloud than most people do. The amount of content he pushes out is fantastic. People can identify with him. People connect with him. And it makes my job easy to push out the HP message because I can work with people like the Cloud Don. Well, let's talk about the Cloud Don. So the crowd father, who also has his own little mom. Yeah, we see him. We see the crowd father. I don't know who it is. Yeah, we'll have a debate. We'll see who that is. I want him to come out of the closet. It's about open source. I want to talk about open stackers. That's really kind of another hot area. The social media stuff, we can have a Kool-Aid. Do you see in other hot areas? It is the hot area. The hot area. But talking about social media, the same stuff that's happening in open source is community driven. You're talking about organic construction of data. People coming together, sharing information and really doing something productive. And I think open source has proven that and then social has been a favorite. But open stack is right now the hottest social organic platform because it's a lot of money at stake. So there is some significant transformation going on in open stack. And I've always been critical early on when I saw people land grabbing it because nothing happens when people start to control things, right? So I first got to ask you, Cloud Dawn, open stack, are people trying to grab too much? I mean, HP almost has half of the project leads in there. It's not going to start yesterday. That's 50% of the project leads. Do they buy that? Do they earn it? Explain to the folks out there. I have a different perspective on that one. It's not as grabbing open stack. It's not a land grab within the open stack community, but it is about getting more customers, right? Ultimately, they're delivering a platform based on open stack, helping some end customers. So that's a win for open stack, that's why I say it. Whether it's HP open stack or Red Hat open stack or anything, ultimately it's open stack resolution. So it's overall win for open stack. Second part of it is HP having a land grab by having six technical leads. It is showing their commitment and intent, right? So they're putting their stake on it. Hey, I am committed to open stack. I am pumping in money. I am having a strategy based on open stack, but I'm not just pushing in money. I'm not just buying anybody. I am committing resources to the development. Without code, nothing is going to be open stack. If you want to have something enabled there, if you want some feature up there, you want to code it there. So that's what they're doing. So let's talk about, let's talk about. I want to add to that because I think people misunderstand what it means to be a project technical lead. Project technical lead doesn't mean, on the PTL, I control this. This is my domain. It's all me. That's not what it's about. That means that for that six month period of time, they're the one responsible to make sure all the code comes in. They're following all the blueprints that people want to build. It's still an organization. It's actually a leadership role in terms of coordinating and making sure everything moves forward. It's not a dictator role. And it is actually showing your additional commitment. You are doing your regular code development. You're doing your code reviews, but you are providing a leadership for that specific feature. But how about the role? So how do they get in there and how are they managed? Pretty much they're voted out if they screw up, right? It's all up for grabs. Every position is always challenged. Every six months, the developers can vote for the leads, but you can only vote for a lead if you're a developer in that particular project. So it's not like a voting is open, not for PTLs. For PTLs, you have to be a developer and they have to actually have submitted code. They had not just submitted code, but the code has to be accepted. That's a pretty high bar. So that means if you've got code submitted in OpenStack, you get a vote. And that answers your question, right? It's not like they're being bought. So if I want to be a PTL, I need to have established already, otherwise nobody's going to vote me first, right? If Cloud Done is coming for the first time and hey, I want to be a PTL for Nova, nobody's going to vote for me. Yeah, and I think that's the best way to do it. When they shift it to that governance model of community driven like that, ultimately the value, you can't just post garbage, right? I mean, you'd be reviewed on that. So you have to post some goodness. It's like a combine workout at football. Throw the ball, that was a tight spiral. Okay, you're a quarterback, good, you're in. And you don't get to have your private ones. Oh, you suck, go, you're out. You don't get the private ones with your own receivers, that nonsense. Johnny Menzel at OpenStack. Private menetocracy. But having said that, if a PTL decides to change companies, that's a different story. Really? Well. So if I change companies, do I lose my PTL position? Well, I'm not sure of that one. I don't think I will be losing that. You won't lose it? I am contributing to the OpenStack, right? So it's Sri Ram, our cloud don who is the PTL. Will Cloud Don work for Cloud Don on HP or Red Hat? That could change. And there are examples. We have a PTL now who used to be a PTL, worked for IBM and he is now working for HP. Most likely he will become a PTL again. But I think a lot of the open source developers at that level in the community, they work for companies like HP and IBM. But they're a true committed, OpenStack is what their life is about. And so they're not getting orders from HP. No one does that. If you saw that, those people would, they're gone. It doesn't work that. You just an honor system there that you really like. Don't. Absolutely. And if you go to the design sessions, right, they are not divided by the companies, but they're purely looking at the code and functionality and the coding philosophies, right? So two developers from two different companies could have a different coding philosophy or same philosophy. That's what is uniting them. I think the self-governance stuff is so fascinating because it's so efficient. It works. Okay, it does work well and it does tease into some of the things we talk about social, but I think that's more interesting is that with open source, you're seeing self-governance be that next generation of scale. I mean, I love open source. We use it for our prize for CrowdChat and for less than a million dollars and we built a massively scalable, highly elastic platform. That's just unheard of. And we love that. At any level. And we will certainly endorse that product. I'm a huge fan of CrowdChat and we've run some of our best chats that we've had using that tool. I appreciate it. It's fantastic. We'll give you the plug for you guys. A little pimpage there. Humble brag, that's not so humble. It's real hardcore, but DevOps is the future. And one of the things that Dave and I were talking on theCUBE, Don, I want to get your perspective on is the developer market. Clearly, the transformation on the business side and our architecture is completely reconstruction and there's been new engines of innovation. That's great. That's a complex, great opportunity. But the people that are going to actually do it are either old school, large scale guys, right? And the new school coming in. The new school coming in, they've never loaded Linux. It's always been there, right? They've never done patches. So that's a new, different breed. New breed of dudes. How do you make it simpler? How do you make DevOps simpler? For the guy, you know. 30 seconds in real dissociation it has to be in 140 characters. You know. It's a difficult question, but I think we can kind of segregate here, right? I mean, there are certain kind of, there are certain applications, certain kind of classification organizations, old school. It is difficult to move them into a new way of thinking, new model of IT, a new style. So it probably is not worth spending a lot of cycles on trying to, so-called legacy applications of legacy lifestyle, right? So anybody who's embracing the DevOps or the agility or the modern way of developer driven application development and deployment, it is natural for them. So probably it's, there's still a lot of things to be done. And even enterprises that is set up applications that are coming along or looking at it, they all can move there. And eventually like the old school can follow or choose to follow, but probably like I think we should start with the modern way of doing things. And whatever we get a win, it's pretty good. But that's my take on it. It's pretty complicated. HP offers a lot of services, a lot of trainings to help people understand it. But it's such a different dynamic, it's such a different way of approaching it. It's redefining your role in IT. And that's a challenge for a lot of people. I know the DevOps movement's quite large. They have meetups, they have events, all the time, all over the place. But I still think it's really early in DevOps. I don't think DevOps has reached the enterprise people. I think they look at that and say, that's a bunch of hippies out there talking nonsense. But I think as cloud begins to more and more become a part of their data centers, they're going to understand why DevOps is so important. And that's where companies like HP, I'll get my, we come right in. Well I think one of the things that you guys are doing that's an indicator of this, I believe that DevOps is going to be abstracted away. Because it's right now, DevOps are guys with E-class fit nails, they're hardcore, and they're just a unique breed right now. Some of the best guys out there are all pretty much contributing to Office Stack, as we know it. But the average IT worker is like riding a horse and now they need a Ferrari. The new engine. So what Tom Joyce is doing at Converge Systems is a great example. He's putting together some really, really great Converge infrastructure. Some of the stuff you guys are doing at cloud, I know you can't talk about it, but I've kind of got that. Well they don't tell me I'm social media, so they keep me out of it. I've heard some whispers about some real high-end engineered systems. I think the engines will be abstracting away some of the heavy lifting, automation or frustration. Those are areas that need improvement. That's true. But even there's another part to it, right? It's not about the abstraction layer of technology, the developers or anybody who wants to do it or who gets it with do it. Maybe a difficult way or hard way. What needs to be doing is like a high-level education on the high-level or C-level execs. And that's happening. There's a lot of CIOs and CDOs get it and they want to move that. Maybe whether we are ready for that movement quite yet or what needs to be done, that's debatable. But as long as the high-level execs get it, the odds will move towards that one. And it's happening. So you guys really aren't the ones that I was ranting with Dave in the early intro segment this morning around developers. Because we've heard developers, I hate the word, I want to win the developers. It's not like they're animals. It's like they're human beings, right? And they're doing it for love, sometimes for money, right? So it doesn't matter. I thought robots are coding away. What are they talking about? I thought they're self-coding computing systems. Yeah, that's exactly, Google's working on that. The thing though is that HP's opportunity is the developers. And I have yet to see a leader within HP come out and saying it's all kind of siloed. You've got the software group, you've got the cloud group and you've got OpenStack. Obviously, you guys are engaging developers. I want to see HP's best people working on developers because I think the next innovation in the enterprise will be the onboarding of new development. The development processes are changing. Then DevOps we talked about. So what's the developer action look like? I know OpenStack's huge, but tell me, who's leading the developer charge? I'll let Stephen answer that one. And I have a take on that. Go ahead, please. No, you go ahead. Well, in my role, that's a bit outside my scope. So to be answered, I don't know. My answer is, I assume we're doing something. I know that we have a huge group working on helping people leverage our Helian Cloud products, developers how to work with it, how to integrate to it, how to test it, things like that. That's all coming very soon. I don't know how much they've told you about. So I know dates, which it should never be dates, but real soon there's a lot of developer progress. Well, we heard August Sar said August. Some stuff's coming on you. So the question of taking that and putting it across all of software and stuff, I mean, I think that makes a lot of sense, but does discussions have higher than me? But I'll let you- Bob Don, what's your take on the developers? I have expectations, I have expectations. We talked about HP Helion developer platform. I'm hoping it's going to abstract away and it makes development things easier. And they have right pieces in place. They have Cloud Foundry in picture and OpenStack at the bottom. So I personally wanted to win and I'm hoping that it's going to win. That's one more take. What about trust? I mean, the developers I talked to, like, I don't trust IBM or HP. They're not really cool enough for me. I use Amazon and Google, maybe Compute Engine, Google and Amazon are completely different, but startups, developers are more startup guys. You know, how do you know? Is that- What developers- Again, there's not a big sample size in that question, but the point is HP's reputation, I give them, they're the big guys. Oh my God, they're the big blue chip enterprise companies. Why should I trust them? There's a lot of enterprise developers who will be writing software to run on HP solutions, but because we're using OpenStack, because we're embracing Cloud Foundry, those are the cutting edge open source technologies. We're presenting those an alternative to build solutions on top of those technologies. It's not your HP of old where this is some sort of proprietary thing and if you learn it, there's nothing else you can ever work on. That's the end of your career. I mean, we're presenting the latest technology. I think what you guys do in OpenStack is really between the winning formula right now. I think this may or may not have traction across the company, but you have a self-governance model where there's a trust equation built in, so that's a check. Two, developers care about distribution. They want to win, I mean, either for the love or for the money, for both. So they got to know, okay, if I'm going to work with HP, is there an addressable market I can put my product into? And are the people cool to work with, right? So I think, can you put that pan HP to the software group and others where there might be a little bit of legacy? But at the end of the day, I think that's it. I mean, OpenStack, you guys are doing there, leading, Monty Taylor and I mean, one of my favorite interviews of OpenStack. Real presence there, and I think you guys earned that. So question is, how do you get to the next level? So again, the developers not having trust on the big companies, right? Just the developers that you're talking about DevOps and those kind of developers, not the traditional enterprise developers, right? They would be trusting big platform security. And these developers, they want your commitment. If you are committed in there, if you see action happening from you, you're not just giving, you're paying lip service, they're going to follow you. They're going to kick you out. That's pretty much like, that's about it. The DevOps is like fashion right now. Yeah, that's it. This coolness of DevOps, that's, so you don't fight fashion, right? So you got to be cool. But like our community, hey. But our community addition for OpenStack, you know, we just put our next release out today. So we told the community, we released it at the OpenStack Summit, we said in six months and six weeks, we're going to put another release out. We did it. When you meet, you tell what you're going to do, you do it and you deliver, that begins to set that trust. People will begin to leverage it. And they see that our interest is OpenStack, not necessarily HP first. And that's what's important. And just to add to that one, right? HP is not, like, I've been monitoring the community activities for more than two years. And maybe the helium cloud is the recent announcement that HP has been contributing for more than four or five releases. And they've been doing in the top three, top five consistently. So it's not newcomer. Some of the initiatives might appear to be starting late in terms of other players. Like the distribution came along later than other major distributions. So with the developers trusted, I think they clearly know that HP is contributing and it's not a question of developer trust among OpenStack community. So the question, real question is like, the enterprise customers or the customers are they going to trust that? How HP is going to win their trust? That's the important question from the product standpoint. Guys, I really appreciate you coming on theCUBE and thanks for doing a drive-by and it's like to get you guys on. I'll give you guys a final word. Each of you should tell the folks out there in your own words. Why is this HP Discover so important of all the other activities going on in the world and other HP events? From my perspective, from the helium perspective, is we have our message. We have our products. We've told everyone, look, we've committed to OpenStack. It's going to be our platform for our cloud and we've come out with our development platform and we said Cloud Foundry is going to be our platform for our past. These solutions are going to come together. We're putting the contributions. We're putting the engineers in place. This is the future of HP and cloud. It is around these two open source projects and the products that are coming and then the level of talent that are coming up. Not just the executives. There's lots of people behind this engine ever see but we are assembling a lot of great people here to solve customers problems and really help them transform their IT. Your team is impressed. You've got some nice high-end capability and a lot more people in the Army, so to speak. What's your take? Yeah, this is my first HP Discover and as an independent blogger, analyst, my expectation was to learn more about the HP Helion Cloud plans. I came from OpenStack back on so I was trying to focus on that part but not only that, I get to hear about the much wider HP portfolio and how this new HP Helion Cloud plays along with, for instance, the old Cloud's CSA offering. So that gave me a good perspective of how they are planning ahead. I see a lot of things, right things in place, like great execs for HP Helion Cloud, great developers, a lot of investment and management support, and good plan in action. And the way that they are defining the community edition and the commercial edition, I see good planning ahead on that part. I wish them all success. So that's why my take from HP Discover is like, my things are in place and I see them actually executing upon that. Guys, thanks for coming on. It was, again, great to meet you guys on the crowd chat. It wasn't for the crowd chat. We wouldn't have got to see what the group's doing and it's great to meet you guys there and have you on theCUBE and looking forward to continuing the conversations. This is HP Discover, this is theCUBE. We'll be right back with our next guest after this short break. Stay with us. Thank you. Thank you for the opportunity guys. Thank you.