 Okay, we're back inside theCUBE with final stretch of the day here in Vegas. Capturing all the news, this is theCUBE. We're here at the HP Gen 8 announcement. Press conference went out earlier. We had a pre-game event, and then now we're at the post-game going deep dive and drilling a drill down. I'm here with my co-host. I'm Dave Vellante of wikibon.org. We've got a great guest, John Grimala of CUBE alum, who's the director of product marketing for the ISS Group. John, welcome back. Thank you very much. Glad to be back. Good to have you. So what's the story of the days of this painful, like, I can't do this anymore, provisioning and server management? Finally, do we see light at the end of the tunnel? Are they over? Yeah, we're really targeting, you know, changing this equation that people have between the costs of servers and the amount of time and people required to go ahead and support them. And if we take a tops-down look at that, you know, in aggregate, companies are spending $157 billion a year on management and operations. We know that for every dollar spent on servers themselves, there are roughly $3 for operations and management. And we want to change that equation so that it can be, you know, sustainable a lot more for people as they try and grow with the data explosion that they're dealing with and the servers require to support them. Yeah, so you guys actually are making an attempt to move that needle, that one to three, the other statistic that's thrown out a lot is a 70% on maintenance, 30% on innovation. Absolutely. You think you can get that to 50-50? Again, these are the exact technologies that help enable that. When we look at, you know, the full life cycle, we've got the setup, we've got the day-to-day operations of things and we've got updates, which are something that takes a lot of time for IT. We're targeting each of those areas with new technologies and really making a big impact. So take us into the world of a server admin. What's his or her day like? And how is it going to change with Gen 8? Yeah, the first and foremost is just the way people set up the systems, it's a lot easier now, they can go ahead and even from when a server gets plugged in initially, it's instantly manageable as soon as power and networking are connected. That's something that hasn't really been out there and available with anybody else. We even are taking an interesting leap forward in that we're adding mobile app capability to access those things as well. So come tomorrow, our ILO capability will have an ILO mobile app that will go live for both Apple and for Android. So a great case where we're adding more capability there. And then finally just improving the overall setup process to do it three times faster with 45% less steps helps that whole front end. So talk about the proactive insight, we've been hearing rave reviews about it. Ultimately there's a lot of software involved, a lot of innovation around the software. Are you guys going full self-service? How does all the data work? I mean, where does the data come from? So it's coming in from the network. Is it aggregated in? Can you just walk us through some of the examples? We actually, let me take a half step back with that. We're starting to not think of things in terms of hardware and software. We're thinking about integrated platforms. It's how the hardware and software work together. There's so much more, even firmware and all that's integrated in the systems, there's a significant amount of that that takes place. And even something like the ILO management engine that we've got, it runs a lot of what a lot of people would call software, but it's integral to the system and how it operates. Again, an important step forward in how we do that and pulling together all of that data so that you can better manage systems and keep them up, manage better uptime is really the direction we want to take things. This all sort of builds on a technology we announced a few years ago called Sea of Sensors where we now know what's going on inside the systems and now instead of just looking at 32 temperature sensors, we're looking at 1600 different system parameters, engineering parameters to really help better manage the system. You know, I find interesting about this announcement, again, this is just in my view, looking from the silicon angle perspective, looking at the whole market. When people go integrated and to end, it's usually a land grab. I want to own everything, right? What you guys are doing is you're looking at a lot of integration software and services all together with hardware, but yet you're multi-vendor and you got to channel deals. So that is really difficult to pull off. So you're creating just more efficiency for the people above you and the stack applications. Our goal is really hitting what customers want and customers tend to be multi-vendor environments. We definitely need to deliver what they want first and foremost, but we do also want to make those big strides of innovation and where we can, we want to tie HP technology together to multiply the benefits for our customers too. So yeah, we want to do both. You guys focus a lot in this announcement on unplanned downtime. A lot of people might think, well, why? I mean, these things are really reliable, you know, five, nine, six, nine, you know. Talk about what's going on there. Why is that such a big problem area with customers given that the hardware today is so reliable? You know, anytime someone has an unplanned downtime it's something that's not desirable. So anything we can do to help keep systems up really helps them and their operations in the businesses they support. And simply by even having tools like smart update that make sure that the systems are up to date with more stable firmware, you know, applied in the right order conveniently to minimize even reboot times, it all helps that system operate more efficiently. And then when we go on the other end of things in terms of just the setup, if a system does go down we want to be able to get access to the information required to get that system online, get it back to our experts in the service and support teams so that they can rack quickly and get those systems back online. So you're saying it's not hardware failures that are the problem, it's human error or it's misconfiguration. It's exactly the combination of all of the above. And there's no question, we even have data that shows that 40% of mission critical failures are due to human error and process errors. So each of these areas is critical to try and manage. And even every time, you know, someone needs to go on in and do those tedious and time consuming tasks over and over and over again, if we can just simply put a tool in there that they can do it, make sure it works right and then replicate it time and time again, it helps to reduce that. When you guys took this to market, obviously two years, $300 million, ton of patents, tons of technologies kind of integrated together. What was your angle on the marketplace? And specifically I'm trying to get the core problem nailed down. You talk to customers all the time, we heard thousands and thousands of interviews. What was the core top three issues that came up with the customers if this one really nails? And some of it goes back to the 70-30 that we talked about earlier. We know looking at it from a tops down in terms of overall spend that a few years back, the power and cooling was that one thing that was grown out of control. And we targeted our generation six and subsequent technologies at getting that back under control. But we knew that that operations and management piece kept growing. And to a certain extent, virtualization helped the consolidation on the hardware side, but the number of virtual servers continued to grow and still needed the same amount of care and feeding. That has aspirated the management problem. Absolutely, and that's really what we wanted to do was look at that, find a way to go ahead and keep those operations costs down for people, which really means that when they purchase an HP server, they're getting a better value that keeps their overall infrastructure costs down. Excellent. All right, well, listen, we're in a tight schedule, John. And so we really appreciate you taking time out of your busy schedule, John Gromala. Thanks for coming inside theCUBE, sharing with us some of the details behind Gen 8. Thank you. And good luck with the launch. Thank you very much. Great to see you again. Okay, we'll be right back with our next guest in one minute.