 Welcome back to HP Discover. We're in Las Vegas for HP's big customer event. All the top executives are here. All the customers are here. A lot of technical folks are here. Just a really, really good show. This is Silicon Angles, the Cube, our flagship program. We go out to the events, extract the silver from the noise. I'm John Furrier, the founder of Silicon Angles. I'm Joe with my co-host. I'm Dave Vellante of wikibon.org. Bethany Mayer is here, a multi-time Cube guest. She's the senior vice president general manager of the networking business for HP. Bethany, welcome back. Thank you. I'm excited to be back. Yeah, thank you again for taking your time. So we heard this morning big honking switches, and you guys are powering this convention center. So you got good props from Donna Telly. So give us the update on the business. Sure. So the business has continued to go very well. We just passed now our 14th consecutive quarter of growth for HP Networking. We continue to take share again this quarter from our competitors. And we, as you might have heard, we're shipping now a whole new lineup of data center products as well. And our SDN offering portfolio continues to get bigger. So we really have some great opportunities coming up. And frankly, lots of good customer discussions here around our products and around what we can do for them. Yeah, the whole SDN thing has really taken off. Early on in the Cube, you've started to talk about that really before the industry really hopped on board, certainly before the NYSERA acquisition. A lot of the discussion in the industry has been kind of geeky about overlays and protocols. We were talking the other day about we're not hearing enough about management. What's HP doing in that space? Well, so there are all the geek-speak stuff that's really fun, and I like it too. We can geek out if you want. We can geek out. I like geeking out. I'm a girl geek. But anyways, so there's that. But also there's really what it does from a benefits perspective for the business, because honestly, the network has been such a stumbling block for businesses trying to do things differently, whether it's acquire a company, whether it's add new applications, whether it's go to the cloud, whether it's have a big data application, whatever those things are, the long pull in every project tent has been the network. How to provision it to map to whatever is new is needed. And of course, that just isn't going to work going forward. And so really what SDN does is it makes the network responsive to the business in the time frame that the business needs it to be. And that's the difference. It also automates a lot of what was, frankly, true, just nuts and bolts and bites, kind of manual entry. That just goes away. And so these are huge changes. And sadly, they're huge changes because the network hasn't been any different for 30 years. But they're huge changes that need to happen anyways and that are happening as a result of SDN. So the conversations are always talking about ports, this, that, the other thing. And networking has always been back and stacked. But one thing that's coming clear, not only in our conversation earlier, but in the industry is the notion of fabric. Right. So here we talked with Broadcom. And people talk about the internet of things. The fabric conversation is really becoming more and more relevant. That kind of speaks to kind of the underlying, you know, geeking out on the SDN. So, you know, that is a top comment. What conversations are you guys having around fabric? And, you know, you guys have laid out your fabric vision. Yes. How does that relate to what's going on in the main trend? You've got cloud, you've got mobile, you've got social. Internet of things. Right. SDN brought on this whole software trend. Right. You guys were first to ship on theCUBE. You mentioned you guys were two years ago. You were the first to ship OpenFlow. So we're going to keep, get the props out there so people can remember. Yeah, that's true. We were here. But what is the fabric conversation that you're having internally at HP and with customers? Well, so again, so I think the fabric, it's interesting because the fabric discussion of old was about boxes. It wasn't even a fabric. It was, OK, how many boxes do you need to put together? And then they call that a fabric, right? When reality, what you're talking about is really, sorry, but that's true. That's always true. OK. So, yeah, so there you go. So we're cut off. But really what you need is you do need this connective tissue that goes between server storage seamlessly and that can deploy applications in a very, very quick, efficient manner, right? And that connective tissue can be anywhere. It can be in a server. It can be in a storage device. It can be software-based. It doesn't have to be a bunch of boxes tacked together. And so I think that that's a paradigm that's changing as a result of, frankly, more intelligent thinking about what is a fabric and then how to deploy that fabric in a logical manner, given the amount of integration you can do in a company like HP. Are the customers savvy about that? I mean, when you go to customer discussions, are they, I mean, they don't say, give me a fabric? Or do they say, give me a fabric? Are they, what are you? Well, they ask you what your fabric is, right? What exactly is your fabric strategy? And the discussion that we have is really around virtualization of the fabric. I mean, our fabric capability is a virtualized fabric, right? So intelligent, resilient framework that really provides fabric for the data center. Fabric for styles of IT. Exactly, right, and got a new suit. It's a good fabric and you make a nice, new suit in your video, that's great. We like sports analogies and you like designers. We just gave you some great sound bites for your next keynote. Right, but it's important to know, it's a different discussion. It's about, it's also about, so our fabric strategy is a software fabric strategy. It is not the port density fabric strategy. We have very strong port density, that's not the issue. Yeah, the value creation for you guys is software. So you can ride the, quote, Moore's Law or whatever the law of IT becomes on performance on hardware. Whether it's a moonshot like thing or something new integrated, but right now the performance of the hardware is getting better, cores, multiple cores. But on the software, you have to then integrate across. So okay, let's take that to the next level. So internet of things is a hot conversation right now. And a real conversation, we were talking about how to connect the edge of the network. Mobile device is the first generation of internet of things, maybe it's Google Glass and Fitbit or other things. So that has to land on a fabric. There's small pieces of data. Are you guys involved in anything with that kind of approach and technology? Yeah, so we have a really, really nice BYOD solution. And by the way, it's SDN enabled. So basically we have a BYOD solution that provides self-service onboarding that provides tracking of devices and fingerprinting of the devices. It provides access control of where people can go in the network. It also, from an SDN perspective, we use our security application, SDN security application, which is Sentinel to basically enable security all the way down to the switch port itself so that if a device comes in with malware on it or it's been to a bad website, instead of it having the traffic having to go through an IPS box sitting somewhere in the network, it actually is blocked right at the switching port. And that is actually a software strategy. So it's a software platform. Much more granularity. And it does what we've been trying to do with security and networking for years, which is dissolve a function like security into the switching plane versus basically taking all these boxes again back to our boxes talk and having all these boxes in the network to try to support that. And virtualize that. It was different than the concept of the compute. Virtualization was all about consolidation and getting more out of this underutilized resource. And networking's different, the ports aren't underutilized. Well, so in a way it is kind of underutilized in the sense that if you have, as a good example, let's talk about link, okay? Link is an application that generally is pretty hard on a network because you've got these people who want to run video simultaneously or they want to share a desktop and it requires a lot of bandwidth. And it also, you know, it's all over the place, right? And so the issue with link is what you do from a networking perspective is you generally have to over provision the network because you don't want to make sure everybody gets a good user experience, right? Right, so with SDN, that all goes away. Because, and as we've done with our SDN controller, we wrote an application with Microsoft Link to basically integrate link into the controller so that the network dynamically brings up a session for two link users who want it in a session, brings up the link in the session, provides it with the priority, quality of service, and all of the issues, all of the things that the session needs to be successful and have a good end user experience. And then when it's done, it dynamically tears it down. So you don't have to over provision the network. You actually don't have to do anything. So you free up those resources. Right. It does it for you. And so that is an application that you can create with SDN that's very different than the way most folks think. But- Does that handle encrypted data too? Yeah, oh yes, it handles encrypted data. But to your point about virtualizing the network and having it be better utilized, you've now better utilized a network without adding more bandwidth to it, right? To solve the problem, that's the idea. Well, to your other point about the labor content involved in configuring networks, now you start to address that challenge. I tell you, and this has been interesting, this whole SDN, you know, paradigm shift, I would say in five years, this discussion about, well, we need to use a CLI, oh my God, we got to go do all the Perl scripts, that's just going to be noise. That is not going to be a discussion we'll be having at all. This is going to change that completely. Because that doesn't scale. Well, SDN is- It just never will. I mean, SDN's been a double edged sword, right? I remember we were kind of dismissing it early on when we were first talking about it a couple of years ago, but it's created awareness to the mindset of shift. So it's going to change and get better dynamic policy enforcement, encryption, et cetera, you mentioned. So I got to ask you about security, because that's one of the pillars of Meg's vision, big data mobile, cloud and security. That's pretty much it. You play in that. So what are you guys doing on security? What's the new, any new information, any new announcements? Well, so we don't have any new announcements, but what I would tell you is that we work very, very closely with the security business unit with our Gillens team. And the idea there is to utilize our controller as a platform for a lot of different security applications, I guess I would call them, to be able to provide those to the network, across the entire thing, across the network. So instead of it being, as I said, a hardware box, like an IPS box, it's going to be more of a software platform. And that's, I don't know that anybody else right now is doing anything like that. I mean, frankly, I know that Cisco is not, because they can't. Well, to our, you mentioned. Broadcom mentioned they're doing multiple cores, they're doing inline, 100 gig, 100 gig E. Right, and of course we use Broadcom in our chipsets, in our switches, but the fact that you can, you know, actually dissolve security into the fabric itself, without a bunch of boxes, that's a different way of doing it. Well, you mentioned art, and he's got one of the best wraps I've ever heard on security, he's got a good vision for it, very practical as well. He talks about how most of the investment in security historically has gone into, you know, keeping the bad guys out, but they get in. His stat was fascinating. He said, on average, when the bad guy gets in, it takes 416 days for the customer to realize that they're in. So he said HP is essentially shifting its focus and helping clients shift the investment to find out when they've gotten in, use the analytics accordingly, really try to understand the anatomy of that hack in a much, much better way. Well, and remember, because a lot of attacks really are low-lying, right? They hang out for a while, and then they pop up when desired, right, by the perpetrator, and so that has to be, again, back to the fabric itself has to be secure. It has to sense these things. It has to be able to sense that there's a DOS attack that's occurring, or that there's malware that's beginning to propagate across the network, and you can't do that by just constantly having sniffers. You've got to have a fabric that is secure in and of itself, and you do have to have wonderful analytics that can compile that information and go, we've seen that pattern before, we know what that means, and then dynamically modify the network configuration to stop it, right? That's the concept. That's the must-have solution. That, to me, is the direction because we were just talking earlier with the customer, they've had malware and it's got an update from McAfee, and it was in there for three months. It's like the fingerprint just didn't connect. It's like, whoa. Yeah, that's exactly what happened. Huge issue, so we're running out of time, Pethy, but I want to ask you one question. We just had Sarguilay on, he's got this pan-HP view with cloud. You were kind of looking up, you have a pan-HP view from the network side, so you have to play in a lot of different worlds within the company security. So what is your landscape? How do you look at the trends of software-defined, fill-in-the-blank, storage, servers, networking? Got moonshot, very disruptive. You've got fabrics on your end. You're kind of a little bit of security. Got multiple, great hardware, good software. You're kind of the mayor of networking in every solution, right? And my name is Mayor. Yeah. Yeah, you got to check in with all these different groups and put all those solutions in there. So what's your view about the world that we're living in right now? So I think it really is all about the application. Whether the application is a business application or whether it's going to the cloud, the network has to have the tools and be responsive to those. And it can't be done in a manual fashion anymore. It's got to stop. And the only way to really enable new applications to happen quickly, enable the cloud to actually allow people to use the cloud and for people to create private clouds is to change the paradigm of that network. And that's really what we're trying to do with our software-defined networking is to make sure that when an application is deployed, when an individual comes on the network, when there's bad things happening, the network dynamically knows itself, it can sense it and modify its behavior to match that requirement. So that's the idea behind it. Whether it's load balancing for the cloud, whether it's security for BYOD, BYOD, or whether it's a link session, whatever it is, got to be able to support that. There's a lot of diversity at the edge of the network. It's almost like access methods from the old days, right? You get different access points. You need to be secure. So that's the world we're living in. That's the way you see it. Wow, and so what's your key milestones for the next 12 months, what's your goals for the group? Well, for the next 12 months, I mean, the first thing is we've got to ship our SDN controller, so that's happening. Just want to make sure that happens. And then I think after that, it's working with partners to create new applications to offer our customers. And we've already met with several partners here at the show to do exactly that. And there's some really creative things that can be done now with our APIs that could be, I mean, there's some things that you're going to see that you would never have thought about using SDN for. I predict that there will be an explosion of these applications. So let's talk about with the OpenStack, because that's been some hot, hotbed SDN. OpenStack HP is really deep in. We support it. You guys have made some good calls with OpenStack. It's now the ecosystem of choice, even though it might be still in its formative years or months of developing. But you guys are there. What's, how does that play into your roadmap? I mean, actually, it's pretty important. Right, so OpenStack is one of the orchestration capabilities that our SDN controller supports. So if you're a cloud provider and you're developing using OpenStack to create your cloud and you want to have the network controlled through the OpenStack platform, you can do that using our product and with its OpenStack APIs. So that's completely available. And that's our focus has been on OpenStack for the cloud, cloud orchestration, and our SDN applications using the APIs for other purposes. So you're talking about, you're comment early about the things that we're going to be doing with APIs that caught my attention. So you're talking about potentially accessing granular services through those APIs, turning the network into an API. Right, I mean, basically, you know, a network that doesn't require human intervention, machine to machine behavior, right? That really has, you see it in other technologies, you see it in storage, why not the network? Why not the network? So that's the goal, that's the goal. And I think you'll see a lot of them. I heard it here in theCUBE. Bethany Mayer, Senior Vice President General Manager of the networking group within HP, talking about fabrics for styles of IT, no more manual policy enforcement, all dynamic, a future of a intelligent edge with security, HP networking is powering it all. And thanks for coming on theCUBE again. Great to have you. This is theCUBE. We'll be back with more interviews after this short break. We're going to have Roger Levy come on, Craig Nunez, George Kedif is coming on. He's heading up to software group. He'll be on at four o'clock. It'll be his first time on theCUBE. So if you're watching, stay on until four through four o'clock and here's those great interviews. We'll be right back after this short break.