 Okay, we're back live inside theCUBE, SiliconANGLE.TV Productions exclusive broadcast of HP Discover 2012 in Las Vegas, Nevada. John Furrier, the founder of SiliconANGLE.com, and I'm joined by my co-host. I'm Dave Vellante of Wikibon.org, and we're here with Antonio Neary, who's the Senior Vice President and General Manager of HP's Technology Services Division. Antonio, welcome back to theCUBE. Thank you, thank you. It's a pleasure to be here. We last saw you in L.A., it must have been around February, I think, and we were talking about it. We were here when we launched the G&A products. Right, right, that's right. And we were talking about a new class of services and things are evolving. We're here at Discover, big event for you guys, obviously. Absolutely, it's very exciting, and technology services is at the core of everything we're doing here. This week we just announced a new set of services in the consulting space to help our customers to transition to Hadoop with workshops, discovery services. So if customers are in that transition, we already have consulting services to help them. We also introduced new services as part of the information management with the big data consulting services, which is great because customers want to understand what big data means, and they have to make that journey to be able to get out insights from big data. And then yesterday we actually announced two new set of services, one around cloud consulting services, to help them plan, design, and implement cloud infrastructure in their environments. And then finally, as a part of the support transformation, we introduced the new data center care services, which is basically the shorter path to the converged cloud. So as you can see, technology services is in the fabric of everything we do. Well you know we love services. You know we think the services where the rubber meets the road, so where customers really get the value. We just did a survey just this month for the Wikibon practitioner community. We asked them, which initiatives in 2012 are you going to look to outside help? And look at the things you just did, cloud strategy, cloud deployment, big data strategy, cloud management, so the ones that you just talked about. Now of course big data deployment, a dupe initiative is way down. They're still trying to figure out what to do with big data, aren't they? Exactly, well I mean if you were here listening to all the announcements and what the strategies of HP is around information management, with the capabilities in Vertica for structural analytics, and then autonomy for unstructured data. And if you bundle that with our consulting services, we have a unique set of capabilities that we can help customers understand what big data is all about, and have to take advantage of the big data to drive business outcomes. So marketing in this business always leads product. Absolutely. And then services, you know, services actually you can develop very quickly. You can respond very quickly to these trends, can't you? Absolutely. But you're seeing a spate of trends coming like I've never seen before in this industry. What do you make of all that? Well I mean, if you think about it, like what's going on, I mean this is a very exciting time in the industry, right? I mean, obviously a lot of customers still in the traditional IT environment, and many of those customers are going through the consolidation and virtualization of that environment. And so technology services has all the capabilities customers need to be able to go through that specific journey. Now many customers are a little bit ahead and they're trying to move now into the cloud, the private cloud. And so we have what we call cloud rapid workshops. So we can help them understand and assess what are the gaps they have, whether it is infrastructure or whether it is applications to be able to move to the private cloud. And then from the support perspective with data center care is a unique offering because we can basically take an environment-centric approach on the data center to be able to manage and operate that with them and for them so that they can spend more time in the innovation, not just operating the data center. And so with our combined set of capabilities between consulting and support, we can meet most of the customer needs. But at the end we drive innovation with our customers. And that's why one of the things I'm very proud about T.S. is that we take a very customer-centric culture which allows us to not just listen but innovate with our customers and we go forward. There's been a lot of talk this week about the Converge cloud. And one of the other things we found in our services last year, nobody was doing hybrid cloud. That was not the predominant strategy. And today, a year later, it's really through the roof. It's the predominant strategy. Are you seeing that? And how is that affecting the service delivery? Well, I mean, think about, first of all, I think HP has the best cloud strategy in the market because it's heterogeneous, okay? It's open and it gives you the choice, all right? And we work with a partner ecosystem. So from the services perspective, think about our customer may start with a private cloud or may start actually with a public cloud to do some proof of concepts so they can test specific workloads and specific application, then they bring it back into a private cloud environment for security purposes. But they may need some bursting into a managed cloud or even back into a private cloud. From the services perspective, what that means, the customers need a single point of contact to be able to manage the entire stack from infrastructure to SLAs through third-party components of that in that open stack. So, yeah, trust is a big equation in all this because we totally see the same thing in our view from theCUBE and SiliconANGLE and Wikibon that the single point of contact, because it's a complex set of solutions. So trust is key. How are you guys communicating that trust? Because a lot of vendors just say, oh, trust is trust, you know, and they market trust. But you guys have to perform. Can you give some examples of when your clients come to you and say that was, which trust is a big part of it? Well, first of all, I mean, you have to earn the trust. And the way we earn trust is through consistent execution. We have, in technology services, more than 4,000 clients that rely on us to manage their mission critical environments. And that to me is a very significant vote of confidence that we can help them, you know, deliver specific business outcomes. So we actually provide mission critical services for clients that they're either manufacturing or they are in distribution. What verticals are really on fire right now in terms of both hot and also troubled? In the sense where they need help. Yeah, I think, you know, first of all, healthcare is one of them. Healthcare is an interesting aspect that we obviously partner with our enterprise services group. If you think about distribution, manufacturing, those are other aspects, even oil, right? Oil and transportation. Very big vertical markets that we play very well because we have a unique set of range of capabilities that we can. We talked about earlier on the queue, we were talking about speed of business. And you know, with the themes here, big data. And it's great that you're doing the consulting because there's a lot of demand for that, and you know, trust and get a roadmap for what to do with big data. But you know, speed of data is about real time and those types of things. IT is slow. Yeah. And so there's a real emphasis on just speeding up, turning up the dial with IT services in particular, to make them faster than cloud, you talk about burst and great example, retail might benefit from that and so on and so forth, that seasonality. Two questions, how do you get, how much time do you need to work with a customer to get that engagement going to when you first engage with a customer? And two, what are you guys doing to speed up the IT business? Right. So I mean, most of our consulting engagements are 90 to 180 days, you know, from beginning to end. You know, what we tend to do, we don't like huge projects that last for years. What we like to do, what we recommend our clients, let's start small in particular areas, and let's do it from beginning to end in a short period of time, so you can get some bullet proof, create credibility with your own customer base. And value. And value quickly. Okay, so that's what we do. Versus we're going to milk this account, outsource, run the whole thing. I'm not interested in that at all because at the end I'm here to help my customers deliver value to their end users. And so I'd rather, from the consulting perspective, start smaller, pick an area, get it done, and move to the next. The other thing I talked, you know, I mentioned about data center care. The reason why I'm excited is because it takes an enormous amount of burden out of our clients, operate and optimize that data center performance so they can spend more time in innovation. And that's a way to accelerate IT value from their perspective. I was talking with the HP Labs guy earlier. Who was it? It was Colin Bash. He's taking over for Chandra Khan over there at Labs and talking about the data center of the future. Really it's an operating system. It's the holistic approach, as they say, which is actually a really smart direction and I think very relevant. We're big data instrumenting everything and what is your consulting service mix of things, projects like that? Are you getting involved in a lot more of those kinds of projects with data centers where there's a real engineering of that? Can you talk about, because that was kind of HP Labs, but let's get to the reality. What's going on? So in technology services consulting, we have several line of businesses. One of them is the data center transformation. Then we have networking and storage consulting services as well as cloud services. But in the data center transformation services, we basically provide several aspects. One is virtualization expertise. The other one is what we call critical facilities, which is both design and implementation, meaning that our organization, if the client requires to do so, we can actually build the data center for them. So not only we plan it, we design it, but also we build it for you. Now we talk about energy, power calling, carbon emission and so forth. We have very unique set of tools in IP that we use all the time. And in fact, we have many, many projects around the globe, particularly in the Asia side, China, that they are using our capabilities to design the data center of the future. And, you know, and they give- Because they need it over there, it's obviously in India and in Africa, other areas too, right? Right, but they are kind of leapfrogging to the data center of the future. So, exactly. And so, you know- And they can. They can. It's part of the structure built up, right? But just to give a perspective, we have at a certain point in time, 40 projects in the data center design and implementation space going on. And for us, it's important because basically we give them, you know, the help they need so they can, the investment can last for a long time. We'd like to get some of those use cases and share them with our community because that's a real hot topic here. We'd like to have your marketing person just send that over to us. We'd like to get, because there's a real conversation around that modernization. And that's been talked about, with the power and cooling pressure. And there's no more space. I mean- Absolutely. And by the way, big data is more storage. So- I think you guys should do a piece on this because I can have one of my worldwide directors to come and talk to you about that. He's the director of critical facilities and he's designing that. And so we'd like to make sure- Yeah, that's a really, it's important for society, more importantly. It's a huge cost problem. Absolutely. And when it's cost and if the functionality is not there, I mean, more and more people going to be loading apps, DevOps is a hot trend. So these are really important. So I think that's cool. Okay, now my next question is big data. You mentioned Hadoop. Hadoop. Cloudera's trained a lot of people on Hadoop because they were pioneers in Hadoop. But there's a real demand for unstructured data. What are you guys' latest efforts there? Explain more about the services you're doing around. Hadoop in particular, and then scaling up to the more of the meat and potatoes as they say, OLTP-like services. So Hadoop's good for batching near real time, but not really good on the scale side. Right. Now, well, right now, what we have just introduced this week was the Hadoop Workshop Discovery Services because many customers still in the planning phase. And so we can help them understand what it will take to them to implement Hadoop in their environment. From the big data and structural perspective, and I hope you saw this with the inclusion of autonomy in storage, we're now creating IP with autonomy in the consulting space so that we come in, we don't only just provide unstructured big data in a consulting, but very unique targeted type of consulting service so we can move quickly to the implementation of solutions like autonomy. So using your own technology to move faster. Right. Because sometimes it's a matter of just finding what you need to do, right? Exactly. And so, and the point I want to leave the audience here is that we actually co-innovate from the services perspective. So they're going to co-innovate the services perspective between services and our business units. And obviously, now being part of the converging infrastructure space, we innovate with ISS products, BCS products. Yeah, you need perspective and IP access to products. That's the key differentiation. The customers have one vendor to work with and they can take care of everything. So Antonio, we're talking about all these changes that are going on in the customer base. What are your customers doing in terms of, and one of the asking you in terms of help as far as re-skilling, becoming whether it's cloud architects, maybe data scientists, are they pushing you to do that? Well, I mean, it's not just them pushing us. For me, it's a basic component of our strategy. So one of the things we do is, in a constant approach, we go and train our people. And obviously, a person who used to support a server now has to know more, has to know storage, has to know networking. And so when we're going through the transformation of people both on the phone and on the field, to be able to support more integrated environment. However, one of the things we are making significant investments is the support automation. We talked about before with the launch of Gen 8, how we approach that. And my organization actually drives the end-to-end backbone of support automation across the entire CI space. So each of the business units, like storage network and so forth, they don't develop that on their own. We actually provide the requirements to be able to create a unique differentiated experience because at the end of the day, we architect end-to-end experiences. And that's what it's all about. Delivering a unique differentiated experience. And Tony O'Neary, we love the services angle, big time executive, great perspectives, really cogent strategy. First of all, congratulations on all the great work that you guys are doing. Thank you. Customers I know really appreciate it. We talked to a lot of HP customers. They love the service that they get. They consistently score very, very high marks there. And we really appreciate you taking time out to come on theCUBE. It's always a pleasure to be here. And Tony O'Neary, thank you. Thank you very much. Okay, we'll be right back here at HP Discover for SiliconANGLE.tv and Wikibon's exclusive coverage of HP Discover 2012 with more great guests right at the short break.