 Live from London, England, extracting the signal from the noise, it's theCUBE covering Discover 2015. Brought to you by Hewlett Packard Enterprise. Now your host, Dave Vellante. Welcome back to London, everybody. This is theCUBE. theCUBE is here at HPE Discover. This is probably, let's see here. I think our fifth or sixth year doing HPE Discover. HPE Discover, historically now it's HPE. This is our first H, Hewlett Packard Enterprise. Rob Streche is here. He is the director of software defined storage at Hewlett Packard Enterprise and he's joined by Jonathan Baston. He's the director of cloud service provider, Blue Sky Systems based in the UK. Gentlemen, welcome to theCUBE. Rob, good to see you again. Thanks. Jonathan, I didn't see you last night. There's so many people running around that party, but good to have you on. Thank you. Yeah, so big event this year, 13,000 people. Jonathan, you must be happy. It's in your home country. You know, have to go to Barcelona or Frankfurt. It's even better that I live about 30 miles away. It's very convenient. So that's why I love when shows are in Boston. So what's the vibe like been for you? What's the experience been like at Discover? This is actually my first HPE discovery that I've been to and I'm actually very impressed about the amount of turnout they've had this year. And there's a real good atmosphere of people wanting to find out and a lot of technology and what it can do for the various different markets. So far I'm extremely impressed with it. Yeah, you walk around, it's laid out differently this year, Rob, right? It used to be sort of, we were talking earlier with Jeff, it's laid out by the organization. Now it's got the four pillars. Right, right around the transformation zones that we're going out and looking at a lot of what we're doing on the hyperconverged and software defined side, falls into hybrid infrastructure or enabling end user productivity. So things like virtual desktops and how do you transfer them to on-prem and off-prem infrastructure as well. So, and I want to get into Blue Sky and have you tell us all about it, but you feel like sometimes a fish out of water as a product guy in a product group and now you're asked to sort of participate in these transformation areas or is it a more natural fit? I think it's very positive in how it brings a solution to our customers versus having to pitch a product. And I think that really has helped focus us in a good way at the outcomes for the customer. And we work, I think we work more across business unit than we ever have in the history of HP and now HPE. And I think that's really the key is how do we bring all of the pieces together? You heard about composable infrastructure yesterday. My team actually works as part of that with the synergy team that released their product. So, being that our software-defined storage is inside there, but also the provisioning of 3PAR and things of that nature through the one-view integrations we build with them. So, I think that this is actually the new HPE way of doing things is really cross-business unit, cross-solution. So, let's unpack that from a customer's perspective. So, start with Blue Sky Systems. Tell us, Jonathan, about your organization, you guys, cloud service provider, you focus predominantly in Europe and generally, but UK specifically also, Amia or Middle East. Tell us about the company, what's your story? Essentially, me and my business partner, we worked together with a previous vendor. And essentially, we saw where virtual desktop was going. And for us, we saw a real key start in the education market. And what the education market realized was that the cost of support of a virtual desktop far outweighed the cost of acquisition of the virtual desktop. So, what they were saying is, time to fix rates massively declined, time for deployment massively declined. And not only that, in education, when you're dealing with children, they tend not to always respect what they're playing with. And a lot of occasions, children either broke the software layer or broke the hardware. So, essentially, it's rather than replacing the equipment or re-imaging the machine that could take a day or half a day, they could now do it in a matter of minutes. So, they really saw the benefits before some of the commercial environment. However, the issue that we saw is that a large portion of the UK market is built up of small, medium businesses in terms of total revenue. Sorry, it built up SMB, yeah. Correct. So, what we thought is, VDI is a fantastic product. However, for most businesses, the cost of either supporting it or acquiring it, going long term, isn't really viable for those sorts of businesses due to it scales better on the higher end. So, we then kind of thought about, okay, the one thing about a virtual desktop is it needs to replace your desktop. So, what's in every desktop? Graphics card. What does virtual desktops not used to do? They never had a graphics card. So, essentially, they were always lacking the full capabilities of what your desktop could do. And VDI then released their grid range, which completely revolutionized the virtual desktop for the entire market. So, now you had office usage, which not everyone can know or not everyone does know, that even Internet Explorer uses 3D hardware to render the actual screen quicker. So, essentially, when it was released, we saw that as a holy grail of opening up the market. So, when we- From the standpoint of being able to replicate a desktop-like experience. Correct. But, of course, you still had the cost issue. Correct. Okay. So, we then looked at, and we're fantastic. So, what we can use is the scale of economical and then size it into a cloud offering. So, what we're doing is then making VDI a true multi-tenant system. But, there is a problem. When you're talking about some of the seriously large players in the cloud environment, it's all about infrastructure as a service. It's all about optimization. It's all about website and credit cards. Most small-medium businesses don't have the expertise and they're scared away from dealing with websites in this faceless product. So, what we wanted to do was bring the human element back to cloud. So, what we've introduced is a telephone number for one that you can physically call and speak to somebody. The fact that we will go to see you as a customer and understand how you operate as a business and not necessarily what you have, but also what you require to strive to the next big thing. And that might be increasing your capacity. It might be the flexibility. It might be you have an application that you've never been able to run before because the cost to acquire the hardware to run it was out of your budget. So, what we've kind of tried to do is to consolidate and commoditize the IT environment by utilizing the cloud infrastructure. So, that's enabled the small-medium businesses to rather have this large capex cost and worry about hardware lifecycle to then turn that into a easy OPEX monthly cost. A prime example is we were talking to a civil's company and they're extremely large. They have the money to do it themselves. The problem that they had was is that they need to flex up and down. Without utilizing cloud and doing it yourself, you have to always cater for those peaks and provide all the hardware for those peaks. So, what they decide is how do you annotize those costs and then across your other projects that you have running because a project might run for six months but the harder investment is three to five years. So, how do you have a direct cost-association? With our products being able to offer AutoCAD in the cloud, we then give them a monthly price per user, flex up and down, so that when they then have these projects that kick off and start, they no longer have to invest in the hardware and all the capital costs to go with it. It's literally, ring us up, I want five desktops for this project, have them ready. Make it disposable when they're done with it. Exactly. And you were able to get the cost down in part anyway by using a software-defined storage infrastructure. Is that my understanding? Correct. Let's talk about that a little bit more. Essentially, whenever you go to market with a product, you have to realize what you're selling it for and you have to be very aware of what your general marketplaces are prepared to pay. So, when you're dealing with SMBs, they don't want to pay. The prices at an enterprise may be happy to pay. So, the way to achieve that is by us consolidating our costs and reducing our costs. With any cloud-hosted company, you're all in data centers. So, what you have to do is reduce your data center footprint, reduce your data center power costs. The only way we saw a direct relation to achieve that is hyper-converged. So, to offer hyper-converged, you are then looking at your entire platform being software-defined. So, what HP enabled us to do was concentrate on the storage segments and make sure that the power that we had from our servers wasn't been essentially thrown at storage because you need a high consolidation ratio for the amount of VMs you can run on an individual host. With the technology that HP have offered with the VSA SOAR virtual, is it has an extremely low footprint and how it uses the resources of those servers. So, what it's done is enabled us to maximize the amount of clients we have per server and still have this hyper-conversion infrastructure. So, if you look at a direct math relation, the amount of storage we use, whether it sits in a server or whether it sits in the sand and the amount of space those disks take is identically the same. So, we have actually reduced our data center footprint by 50%. Okay, so you described earlier on this sort of crossover point. You said that VDI traditionally doesn't scale until you get past some number of users, right? Let's say it's 100 users or something or 150 or whatever it is. Yes. You're saying you're able to lower that crossover point or essentially eliminate it, bring it down to tens of users or a handful or was it more the case of giving the customer the flexibility of being able to turn it on and turn it off? So, is it a cost issue or is it the flexibility of the business model or both? It's actually both. We've had clients that signed with us in six months ago and they've doubled in size. Now, when you're talking about a traditional IT infrastructure or volume premise, you're then worried about can my server handle it? Does it have enough storage to look after those extra users? Does it have the power? Now, I need to buy a new desktop. I need the IT company to come in and image that machine and install the software. We're instead now with the likes of zero clients where it's plug and go, all of those requirements disappear and literally you then have a disposable object that whether it's the employee's laptop, whether it's their tablet, they can access this platform from anywhere. So, it's now using commoditized equipment to access a full-blown desktop from anywhere. Robert, I love these segments where the customer does all the talking. I got a breather on this one. It's fantastic for me. So, Jonathan used the term hyperconverged several times. I mean, we talk about, we quantify server sand, you guys have been a leader there. So, what's your perspective on the marketplace, the trends that are going on there? Yeah, well, I think what Jonathan is doing is he's doing build your own hyperconverged. He has a very specific set that gives him an advantage with his kit and I think that what he's found is that software layer, we help enable him to really have that advantage as he was talking about our own cost. And what we're seeing is that there are other people we have, the city of LA is here with us this week as well. And they have a very different model where they don't have people who can travel two hours in a car in LA traffic to go and service a disk going bad in an array and or deal with a server issue. So they went hyperconverged on our HC250 platform, Store Virtual, because they wanted to get out of the business and have highly redundant storage local and it actually gave them performance boosts to go to boot with that. So very different reasoning why they went hyperconverged but to the way you guys put it, it's all server sand at the end of the day and we kind of look at the way Wikibon puts it together is really what is going to be the key differentiator. I may want to consume it as build my own server sand. I may want to buy it as hyperconverged. I may take that up a level to composable where I include network in there. All of this is leading to that more composable infrastructure. When we kind of look at hyperconverged as being that on ramp to composable infrastructure. I also think that as over time, we're seeing for instance, large bank here in EMEA bought a couple of our systems and they were using it for branch offices and they found that it was so easy. They want to go all flash in those remote offices. But the reason for going all flash wasn't for performance reasons. It was because they didn't want anything spinning in there. They didn't want the serviceability issues with a spinning media. So when you look at how people are utilizing hyperconverged, a lot of it is taking a storage admin out of that role, making them a storage architect, being able to kind of bring people down to that IT generalist. And your deployment options are across the board. You could sell me an appliance. You could sell me just software. Right, we have the software only. We have it integrated into our Helion OpenStack distribution as a VSA in there. You can buy it as a hardware appliance in our 4,000 line. Store virtual 4,000 appliances as well. And Synergy has some VSA DNA in it. It does, it has some VSA DNA in it and it will have four of the JBODs that are in there that can hold up to 40 drives per bay. It will be able to use the VSA over that as well, which is all going to be provisioned by the Synergy Composer. That's part of the OneView family. We're tight on time, but Jonathan, I wanted to come to you and wrap in the segment. I said earlier that you're the kind of company that Amazon can't compete with, right? Because there's a zillion of you guys out there. You're high touch, you got the phone number. You're happy to show up and do whatever needs to be done. Do you look at it that way? Are you just 100% focused on the customer? I mean, do you see these big giant whales like Amazon and Microsoft and Google coming into your space? Or do you feel very comfortable that you can compete with them in perpetuity? There are always a concern. It's something that, you know, when you own a business, you always have to consider. However, the thing that we're seeing through looking at the market is there's a clear segmentation about public cloud and sort of like managed cloud. And that with the large public cloud, it's either very commodity based items like such as email and generic things like that. Or if it's a bit more bespoke, it's only the larger companies that are happy to go to the public cloud where they've got the expertise to deal with it. And we kind of have ourselves the market in the UK whereby it's the companies that don't want to do that. So they're always stepping away from public cloud and looking to people like myself to lend that technical expertise. Well, Jets, thanks very much for coming to theCUBE. Thank you. Rob, always a pleasure. All right, last word, bumper sticker? Yeah. On HPE? Discover? I think it's been great. The energy for HPE, the first one with over 13,000 people here has been unbelievable. I actually think the space has lent itself to give people more breath here and a lot of breathing room around the transformation areas. Excellent. All right, well, thanks again for coming on. I appreciate it. All right, keep right there, everybody. We'll be back from the UK right after this word. This is theCUBE. We're live from London. Right back.