 Okay, so Dave, what do you think about that? Yeah, so Scott Weller, you basically are in charge of the support line of business. That's right. John and I were talking at the top of the show here, just how cloud and virtualization is really changing, a converged infrastructure, changing IT infrastructure. And we want to know how is support changing and adapting to those trends? And is it happening fast enough? Yeah, so that's a great question. You know, as we've worked with customers and partners and scanned the market over the last few years, it's very clear that IT is changing. You know, IT is packaged very differently today with converged infrastructure. It's procured and sourced and consumed very differently today. And then when you add on top of that, the fact that CIOs have so many different sourcing options, depending on the choices they make, the IT can be even more complex, more difficult to manage and govern than ever before. So it was very clear to us that the support services and the support experience needed to change. And that's why today we're launching our new Always On Support portfolio and services. Scott, HP, obviously, is known for their service. I worked at HP for nine years, back in the late 80s, early 90s. And it was great. HP was number one in customer satisfaction across the board and all their metrics. Continue that tradition throughout the years and as a monster organization, they've acquired EDS and continues to be an amazing powerhouse and services across the board. So there's an old way, HP has an old way. So when you, before we get into the kind of new configuration of your portfolio, take us through kind of what happened. I mean, you step back, you say, okay, why the change and what happened? I mean, what was it like? So we look at this two ways. One is in the product itself or the system itself. There's, you know, it's a product is not just the hardware any longer. It's really a stack of hardware and third party and proprietary software elements. And that whole stack together is what creates the platform that runs our customer's applications. And that's what they care about. They care about the apps, not the platform. Then in addition, if you think about when issues occur, how hard it is for our customers to really navigate through all of that and figure out is it the OS, is it the hardware, firmware, interoperability issues and so on. So the conclusion we came to is we need to comprehend that whole stack. It can't be a gear or hardware mentality. It has to be a platform mentality. And so that's why even in our most basic and foundational services, we take the call regardless of where the issue arises, regardless of whether we've actually sold the software licenses. We will take that call and do remediation on that system. Single point of contact. Correct. Single throat to choke as they like to say. So what's changing? And so multi vendor was something that happened with client server pretty aggressively. Not at this scale, but talk about that configuration of multi vendor support. Now you have much different touch points, different sourcing options, different user behavior, customer behavior. Can you talk about some of those dynamics? Absolutely, so you know what's interesting is in systems today, those are multi vendor in a system or discrete system. In the environments, they're very much more complex as you said around the sourcing options. You can have hybrid bursting. You can have software as a service being played in. You can have people building out traditional IT as well as private clouds, wanting to leverage all of this at the same time. What's really behind this is a desire for business agility. CIOs want agility, they want choice, they want ROI. And we intend to enable all that. We've got the new service you'll hear about later data center care. That's really about creating that new experience in the data center by enabling all of those elements and taking a lot of the complexity and risk out of the equation for the CIO. So I want to push down that agility a little bit because there's a tension going on. You've got the cloud guys, the cloud service providers, the Amazons of the world moving like crazy. You've got business adopting cloud faster than IT. You guys service IT. Talk about that tension and are you able to react fast enough and what processes have you put in to be able to speed up the way in which you can provide support so that your IT organizations can keep up with the business? Yeah, that's the huge challenge. So what we've done, and again I'll reference data center care that's part of the launch, what we do is we enable that agility by creating building blocks of IT and assembling them using playbooks. And the playbooks are very prescriptive about what services you bring into the deal, how you talk to the customer and engage with them, how you price the deal and so on. And it's by enabling all of these different custom building blocks in real time that allows our customers to do really interesting things, stand up new business models, digital repositories, location-based services, app stores, all these things, these new business models are what are deriving all of this demand and the tension that you talk about. Scott, we've been hearing from HP and we've been seeing it out in the marketplace around obviously automation, software innovation. So as hardware vendors like HP are out there, we constantly hear the theme software is the competitive advantage of seeing things like flash and being a big part of the storage side. And so automation's good. If you can automate things that eliminates some of the break-fix and problems around keeping the uptime and reliability going. We're also hearing at Strata and Big Data in particular, as well as other areas, huge personnel challenges around, finding challenge, right? So can you talk about the balance between obviously, automation is clear, there's benefits to automation, which you guys are leading in, we talked about that Gen 8, so no need to kind of go into the nuts and bolts there, but that creates essentially more opportunity for labor deployment. So, and hiring people's challenge. So how do you guys talk about that? Because doing multi-vendor is hard, right? You have to find qualified people. Right. And it's just, what's your views on that and what do HP stand there? Right, so I think there's a myth that automation somehow removes all of the people from the equation. The fact is that we're- Great headlines, that's for sure. Yeah, it does, but the fact is, is that these new services require higher skills, more people in some cases. Sure, automation takes some of the more tedious work out of the equation, but in fact, if you have to remediate a stack, a platform versus just the gear, that takes a lot of skills that you don't necessarily have in a traditional services organization. So we are really building out, making huge investments. And in fact, as we look at all of our investments and added up over the last two years that get us to today, $100 million plus. So huge investments, people, processes, tools, technology. What kind of personnel out there, as you guys expand this new world, this obviously new job descriptions, we're seeing data scientists, all kinds of different roles. Energy plays a big part of that. What do you guys see as the key hiring trend for HP and in the marketplace? What's the key opportunity for folks who are looking to either redeploy their skillset and or be in the right spot, be in the right thermal that takes them into a new career level? Right, so I can only really talk about my business. So what I'm guiding is that we need people who are interested in learning not to be narrow but broader. So it's a bit broader than traditionally because again, you have to have those skills to figure out in the moment where the issues are coming from, whether you're in the call center, whether you're in the field or so on. We also need to do a lot of work with sales. A traditional selling force for the traditional portfolios really were more monolithic also. So we need people who are much more consultative and so on to sell some of these offers and really work and engage with customers in the way we need them to. Can we talk about the channel a little bit and how the channel is changing and what role support plays there? So there's a couple things going on. You've got the reseller channel and system integrator channel that are used to selling a lot of hardware and some software and they're looking at the cloud and a lot of them are saying, oh, what do I do? And so they're creating cloud services or maybe doing some security services and consulting and then you've got cloud service providers which are becoming a channel in and of themselves. So what's the whole channel strategy for your organization? So it's a very dynamic play for us. So the channel is immensely important to HP and that's true for our hardware and our services. We've just recently launched a new channel program called Service One and it's a very interesting, exciting program for our partners because it allows them to earn more money working with us selling and delivering our branded services. What's interesting is that anytime you innovate, whether they innovate or we do, there are opportunities for collision, right? And so what we've done is we've looked for ways that we can climb the value stack and avoid these collisions with them. So some of the services that you'll hear about today, proactive care, for example, data center care are things that really you can only do with the global reach, the kind of deep skills, the ecosystem of global partnerships with back-to-back service agreements. These are kind of things that most partners can't do on their own. So they're really seeing us get out of their way more, pay them better for high performance and it's actually very exciting for them. So you mentioned your HP branded services. Can a channel partner use its own brand? They're always, it's always the prerogative of our partners to do their own thing, if you will. And that's fine with us. Our preference, of course, is that if we've got an overlapping service that they would be preferential to ours, but absolutely there's no restrictions on that. And to qualify for service one, you've got to go through presumably some kind of training and certifications. Absolutely. That's a huge piece of it. And at the end of the day, the economics typically works out so that these overlaps don't occur. Scott, in your business, what would you say, because obviously this is a massive shift for HP. We think it's in a good way because it aligns with our services angle positioning. But you guys don't just do this. It's not like, hey, let's just make a change. HP's the big aircraft carrier, it moves slowly. So you talked to a lot of customers. What is the number, top three things that you guys saw from your customer base, both channel and IT around the needs of this new portfolio of solids? Right, right. So again, it's about being that single point of contact for these complex issues that arise in a system that's basically a multi-vendor system. That's one. Customers are looking for us to help them innovate and be agile so they can spend more time on innovation and so on. So again, helping them realize more value from their investment sooner, the sort of the time to value story, helping them optimize their environments. Again, what we're intending to do is specifically around data center care is to help our customers operate and evolve. So being there when they say, you know what, I've got to stand up an app store. How do I do it? You know, how do I have my IT configuration enabled, that sort of thing? We want to be there in that moment for them to help them be an agile business. Do you find that the CIOs are constantly being pulled into more top-line conversations? Absolutely, yes. Yes, it's, you know, our vision for CIOs is in the end they become service brokers, right? That doesn't happen unless you have a stable environment. You don't have agility unless you can count on your environment running and that's part of what we do. Talk about what that means a little bit. A CIO is a service broker. Explain what you mean. So in the end, you know, the business is demanding different kind of capabilities. The CIO will use all of its different sourcing options to come up with the answer. You know, and that answer will evolve sometimes week to week. This week I might pull, you know, software as a service. Next week I might want to deploy that as an app inside my firewall. So there are all these different options and again, making that dynamic, having those relationships that we can bring to the CIO and enable them to assemble this in real time is really the secret sauce. Yes, a lot of, actually a lot of IT practitioners, as you know, don't like the term cloud. They like to use the term IT as a service. Right, right. And so, and or manage cloud. So like the private public cloud is an issue, right? So, you know, private cloud means on premise, basically, or you know, but then you have public cloud, which means security disasters. So this hybrid model is not so much a, we're seeing that the hybrid's not so much a product, but it's more of a delivery. It is. It is. So manage cloud is kind of an open definition at this point. What's your view of that? Well, so, you know, I have a lot of customer discussions around this and cloud is an interesting term for some of them. They prefer to say dynamic resource provisioning and a lot of other terms. But listen, I think that the fact is, is that there's great interest in the economic proposition and understanding of the security issues and so on, but people are moving forward aggressively to deploy these things and really learn what it all means. Again, we intend to be right in the middle of all that with our expertise, with our capabilities. And that's our plan. Let's talk about the CAO guy. I love talking about CAOs because, you know, they are the key service broker. I would agree with you there. What are you finding in terms of actual services that they need? Do you see them transforming their role from training and they're looking at more training? Is it training that they need? Is it more business planning that they need? What kinds of things does the CAO want for themselves? I don't mean like for their organization. The person, the CAO. What's the day in the life of the CAO these days? So what we see happening in the more leading edge is that their role is becoming more about governance. Governance, even more than management. And so it's how do you govern all of these relationships that you end up with when you have all these sourcing options? That's really a big issue for them. And so ensuring that the right processes are in place, the right decision rights are in place, and so on, all of that is really key. And really, you know, the management of the IT is becoming a less of a preoccupation. We talked with Pat Gelsing who was at Intel and now is at EMC and we asked him the question about culture and since it's more of an HP cultural question, every company has a DNA, right? Intel's Moore's Law and everything has the cadence around Moore's Law. What's HP's support DNA that you'd say we are really good at this? Every company has that one thing that's just kick ass with them, it's like really, really strong talent. What's HP's number one thing that you'd say? I've been in the company now six years and my observation of the technology services business is that we are really excellent at operating. You know, once we have a process in place, once we have a customer engagement defined and arrangement defined, we are very, very good at operating that environment. And what we've been building on the last couple of years is to do the evolve piece. And that comes in part from our consulting organization that works with my team and so on, but that's really, that's really excellent. So evolve to operations. So get the pathway, if you will, to kind of play off the theme here. Exactly, exactly right. Okay, we're here live in Irvine, California. We're here with Scott Weller, who is the VP of HP's Technology Services Group, the support line of business. And we're here talking about services, services transformation. My last question is one of, I want to go back to those organizational roles. You're seeing this merging in certain organizations of application development and infrastructure professionals. A lot of cross training going on. Have you seen that a lot in your customer base yet or are we at just the really nascent stages of that? I would say it's nascent at this point. I mean, I do see it, but it's still, these are still very much silos in most organizations. But I mean, in the end, it makes sense because one of the obvious options for most CIOs is take my application and turn it into a software as a service, right? And so that's why you're starting to see this intermingling of the domains and expertise. All right, Scott. Well, thank you very much for coming on theCUBE. HP has been great. It's our big sponsor today. And one of the things we asked HP is, can we hear from some of the people, because your business is a lot about the people and the relationships, can we hear from some of the people, some of the experts that are actually in the field making this happen? So we've got a number of technology services, professionals, and videos from these folks. And we're going to hear from David Cannon on this break and we'll be right back from Irvine, California, Silicon Angles, continuous coverage, live.