 This is theCUBE, this is SiliconANGLE and Wikibon's flagship program, we go out to the events, next track to see them from the noise. I'm John Furrier, the founder of SiliconANGLE, I'm joined by my co-host Dave Vellante, co-founder of Wikibon.org, and we are live here in Barcelona, Spain for exclusive coverage of HP Discover. We're here with Alistair Winner, VP of HP Technology Services, welcome to theCUBE. Thank you, glad to be here. So, one of the things that Dave and I have been talking about all month and year has been the convergence of cloud, mobile and social, big data, really wrapping it all up. We had Robert on from the autonomy group and the biggest challenge right now is not what to do, when to do it. Well, what maybe, but customers need help, right? So, there's a lot of yes, yes, yes, we want to do cloud, we want to do this, a lot of investment. So, my first question is, explain to the folks out there what you guys do, because I want to dig into some of the use cases. So, share the folks, your role, and some of the things that you guys work on with customers. Sure, well, with pleasure. So, I work as part of our technology services business, part of our enterprise group, and I have a specific focus on networking solutions and also our mobility solutions. So, I look after our portfolio and really, we create our point of view. So, it's really, exactly as you say, it's how do we help our customers navigate the world of networking and mobility to deliver business value from their technology investments. So, we had Scott Welleron yesterday morning kicked off the whole event and he's always a great guest. And, you know, we always talk when we see Scott, hey, you know, services are not always talked about, but now, more and more, it's mainstream first conversation. Okay, I want to build and operate, but I got to service this thing. So, a lot of the servicing conversation goes on in the cloud, specifically in a lot of these converged areas around what to do. With OPEX being a big challenge. So, what is the big OPEX challenge that customers have around the services? What are you seeing as the top three pain points and or demand that customers have? So, I think for me, it's clearly returning the value as soon as they can. It's really driving the value quickly and as inefficiently as possible. So, you know, we have a number of solutions which are really focused on driving a true business outcome, driving time to value. Although Scott will have taught you about flexible capacity services being one of the key areas that we're really focused on during the show, during the show this week. He said, what did he say, Dave? Hybrid is a way of life. Yeah. Hybrid is a way of life. Scott was a great soundbite. We actually made the headline of one of our blog posts. But in all seriousness, what does that mean, right? So, obviously, there's a lot of nuances. So, what are the areas you see the most pain point for customers? Is it security? Is it the controls? Is it the web cataloging? Is it the services? What are some of the issues you see? So, I guess specifically in my area of the business, we're focused on the mobility aspect of IT service delivery. And really what we see are IT companies and certainly IT providers inside of organizations really struggling to maximize the value and deliver end user productivity to their employees. So, many IT teams really are under threat from the availability of IT services that you can download on your smartphone. Has the iPad been a big driver? I mean, obviously the consumerization of IT means, okay, give me, I got an iPhone or I got an Android device. They want that in the hands of users. Obviously, we saw Blackberry's market share plummeting over the past two years, the traditional IT enterprise device. I mean, obviously mobility is about putting the apps in the hands of the worker, right? So, we heard that. Yes. And the keynote from Meg Whitman. What are some of the use cases you guys work on? Can you share with us some examples of engagements? Sure, no, absolutely. Well, we really look at the whole spectrum of mobility. Everything from the traditional keyboard, mouse driven solutions that we're all very familiar with all the way through the spectrum to smartphones and tablets. And really, what we're trying to do is essentially virtualize that engagement. So, it's really seamless delivery across whichever device that you use. So, we see a number of use cases in our engagement with customers. Certainly, we have a big focus on connecting people. So, the social aspect that you've described. We have a very strong partnership with Microsoft. And we look at enabling link across the various platforms. That seems to be a really important area for our customers. We also look at things like exchange and actually having a hybrid environment around exchange in Office 365. So, yeah, we really look at connecting people. We look at making those apps available seamlessly across multiple platforms. And also, we look at data. So, things like SharePoint and Dropbox and those types of solutions. I'm really making them available to a user on their own personal device as well as corporate provider devices. So, what's the customer conversation sound like? First of all, who are you talking to when you go in before in the consulting part of your business? Who are you talking to and what are they asking you? What are the challenges they're facing? Is it BYOD? Are they trying to get VDI slash end user computing going? Are they trying to get an app store up? Take us inside the conversation and who are you having that conversation with? Yeah, I mean, it's all of the above. I mean, we're very much focused on helping enterprise IT. So, it's really the traditional IT department inside of an enterprise who have traditionally been the control point of IT. So, they would choose the device, they'd choose the apps, they'd choose the way that the user would connect with the apps. It really is that organization that we're really trying to help embrace what mobility is now. And they're frustrated, right? Because on the one hand, they're all mobile users. So, it's not like they don't get it. But they have to accommodate all this complexity. Absolutely, absolutely. You're absolutely right. So, it's a reality to these guys. And I guess they're going through, I guess a change process of one potentially being in denial to start through, I really want to control this. But actually, what we're encouraging our customers to do is to really embrace it and see it as a huge advantage. And actually it can help drive productivity in their enterprise. So, really we start with that as the premise for our consulting engagements. We have a transformation experience workshop. It's a demonstration here on the floor where we really explore all of those elements. It's BYOD. It's about having an intelligent edge of the network. It's about cloud and the provision of data that then gets presented on a smartphone. There's a whole number of aspects. And what we typically see with an IT team is that they are absolutely working projects in each of these areas. But they maybe don't have a complete strategy. And that's really what we're helping them to do is to build a strategy. And then we can pragmatically help them along that journey using the knowledge. And that strategy is obviously going to vary by the type of company, right? Because... It will. Now, is there a big drive to try to make the mobile experience give access to apps? Is that a big drive? Or is it really sort of new apps that are mobile enabled combination? I mean, it really depends on the customer. I mean, we work with a number of enterprises. And at one extreme, you'd have maybe a car manufacturer, a car designer, who's really looking for a hosted desktop virtualized solution, which is very high intensity, high graphical capability. They want the security and mobility of the data. Through to another extreme, what actually is about having action-based apps on a phone so you can literally approve things rather than having to log on to your laptop. You can just approve things using the smartphone. So it's a whole spectrum. And every customer is different. Every customer has a different level of maturity. And really what we do is we help them to assess themselves and really set them on the right path. And ultimately our aim is to help them with NGS or product. What are you seeing in terms of who owns the device? Is it the company or the employee? Typically. I mean, I know it varies, but how would you break that down? I would say almost entirely an employee will have at least one, if not two personal devices. So even if the enterprise does provide a device, I can guarantee the employee will be bringing at least one, if not one soon. So it's predominant that the employee owns the device. Now, how are organizations handling the security aspects of that? Because if you're going to bring your own device and you're going to put it on my network, it's got to be secure. Yes. So that's obvious, but there's also a data element as well. Who owns the data? Might be your device, but I might own the data. How are organizations, or how do you advise people to sort of pace through that? You know what I'm talking about. If you're going to put your data on my data on your phone and you're going to leave the company, I'm going to have to scrub your phone. Yet that's my phone. It can't be scrubbing my contact. So how do you sort of square that circle? No, absolutely. I mean, it's a real challenge. And I mean, there are a number of technology solutions that we have that really enable policies on those devices. And obviously, dependent on the enterprise, they'll want far more rigorous security. I mean, even in HP, we have our own mobility policy where you have to, before you download the apps and have use of the data, you have to basically acknowledge that the company has the right to essentially wipe the phone. And of course, in- Wipe the phone, not just the app. Correct, wipe the phone. So once you do that, you've gone over to the, you've basically handed over the keys to the kingdom. Yeah, yeah. So I guess that's one extreme and actually that's an HP provided phone, so. Well, but it's an opt-in. It is, it is an opt-in. It is an opt-in. But of course, actually the reality, especially in the enterprise, is very little of the data actually, the real data resides on the smart device. It's all virtualized back in the data center and we're just providing a window which is essentially transportable across multiple platforms. That's the idea. Wow, but that data can be moved through the device to some other device. It can. Can you, I mean, technology today presumably can actually, well, it certainly can know if something's been moved through there and then whether or not you have access to the target device is a whole nother discussion. Yeah, it is. That's interesting. I wonder if we could talk a little bit about networking. Sure. What do you see as the state of networking? How would you describe the state of networking? How is that infrastructure, you're changing and what's HP doing to sort of facilitate that transformation? Sure, well, it's a really exciting area to be in and with HP networking and our partnership there, we're doing a lot of great innovative things with our customers. I mean, when you look at the, I guess the holy trinity of IT with servers and storage and networking has really been the laggard of those three. I mean, you can spin up virtual machines and virtual partitions on the server and the storage, but actually to do any changes on the network, you're talking weeks, months, it really is highly complex, very slow. So the approach that we're taking with HP and is really to simplify that experience, one operating system across all the devices and making it programmable with software, so with software defined networking. So although we're still at the early stages, customers are really starting to understand the value proposition of an SDN network and a lot of the work that we're doing is really helping our customers get ready for that journey. So again, they have a legacy network that they're heavily invested in, both from a technology perspective, they have people that are experts in the legacy. So we need to help build a very pragmatic way to move to an SDN-enabled network. So I look at mobility is almost like the storm's coming. You can't stop it. You got to batten down and just accept it and get ready for it. Are the discussions around networking more prescriptive? In other words, are they part of a larger umbrella transformation around cloud or big data? Can you talk about some of the big drivers there? Well, I think, for me, this whole move to software defined networking is driven by those big mega trends and they all have an impact and they all mean that actually the network needs to be able to respond differently because in every enterprise, at least two, if not all of those elements will exist and actually coexist on the network. So dependent on the time of the month, the financial cycle, a project or initiative that a customer might be running, they need to be able to spin up capacity, be able to adjust the quality of service. And today, the network is just a rigid thing. It doesn't understand what's moving across it. So we're able to provide a level of intelligence and actually make it automated. So based on, again, on some policies, the network can actually adjust and tune itself without an administrator having to do that. Alice, a couple of questions I want to ask on the round mobile, because this comes up all the time. Not everyone tests their app, so like, I know there's some conversations going on here at HP to discover some testing labs and a lot of hands-on stuff around some of the tooling available. But that brings up the question of apps, right? So apps, are they going to be bulletproof? Are they tested? Do they meet the requirements? That brings up BYOD, bring your own device to work. So all that's kind of going on. So I want to get your take on those concepts in context to the recent Amazon announcement around VDI. So you see Amazon dipping their toe in the water, signaling, they got their public cloud, they got their public cloud, they got developers. But you see VDI coming out. VDI's back again, right? So again, it's rearing its head again. But it's relevant now, with virtualization you can do some things at the edge of the network. This brings up internet of things, a lot of coolness at the edge, mobility, whatever you want to call it. What's your take on that? You got a cloud angle with the VDI, with Amazon's approach, which is kind of signaling that, hey, it's really happening in this edge app world. What is going on in that market? I mean, you have the mobile device, okay, we talked about that. But the apps that are running at the workloads, all these things underneath the hood. So that's, we've kind of talked about with the other technology. But talk about the edge, the app. What are customers doing? What are the safeguards you need to take care of? Just give us some color around that and what that dynamic. Sure. I mean, it's quite amusing really, because we've been talking about VDI for many years. It's the year of the VDI, right, again. No, but it's really happening now. It is though, absolutely no. We're through the hype curve and it's a reality. And actually there are, I mean, VDI is just one, one approach. And actually, again, we look at the whole, we look at the whole spectrum from server-based compute, which I guess is actually presenting a very specific app on a very specific client workstation. And I think one of the most exciting things about the show actually, and the announcements we've made is around HDI, so hosted with the Moonshot server and actually having a complete virtual desktop in a Moonshot cartridge. That gives us another unique differentiated experience that we can offer to our customers. I mean, from an app's perspective, again, customers are doing a whole variety of things. What I would say today, the majority of the work that we're doing is actually providing what I call very basic services to enterprise services to customers. So it's about things like Link and UC. It is basic apps like email and Office 365, that type of concept. So that's really where the main focus is at the moment. Alastair, really appreciate you coming on theCUBE. It's awesome. I want to give you the final word. So I want you to put a bumper sticker on the car that's leaving Barcelona of the show, okay? Around the work you guys are doing with customers. What's on the bumper sticker on the car? Summarize the show in a bumper sticker. Wow, that's a real tough question. Thank you. I don't even put you in the spot. You know, life is good, you know, things are rocking. I mean, what's, come on, give me a bumper sticker. So the bumper sticker for me around mobility would be universal access to people, apps and data. That's what we're here to do. Universal access to apps, people and data. Man, that's a great bumper sticker. It's going to take the whole, remember the old bumper sticker today? The old true bumper sticker. Alastair, appreciate it. This is theCUBE, John Furrier with Dave Vellante here live in Barcelona, Spain. Exclusive coverage of HP Discover. We'll be right back with our next guest.