 Live from the Sands Convention Center, Las Vegas, Nevada. Extracting the signal from the noise. It's theCUBE, covering HP Discover 2015. Brought to you by HP. And now your hosts, John Furrier and Dave Vellante. Okay, welcome back everyone. We are live in Las Vegas for HP Discover 2015. This is theCUBE, Silicon Angles flagship program. We go out to the events and extract the signal from the noise. I'm John Furrier. Founder of Silicon Angles, Dave Vellante. Founder of Wikibon.com. Our next guest is Johan Deschifler. SVPGM of Worldwide Technology Services. CUBE alum, been on every year. Thanks for coming back again. Great to see you. You're welcome. Great setup here. We've got a nice backdrop here. You look good. Day one. So you look fresh. You haven't had all the zillion customer meetings. Full of energy. Good morning, John. Good morning, Dave. Happy coming back. Great to see you. So you guys are out of the gate with an announcement. A quick update on this application-ready infrastructure announcement you guys had. What's going on with you guys and the services? So remember last time when we were in Barcelona, we announced that we were going to go into the direction of software-defined infrastructure, which clearly puts the control layer on top of the infrastructure layer, and where we look at software-defined infrastructure in an integrated way. Well, today we announced that we go one level deeper. And so we announced a number of services around software-defined compute, software-defined compute in a cloud environment, software-defined around networking, and software-defined around storage. So it's bringing it to the next level. But I think the more important thing of what we announced today is around the four transformation areas. You will hear that that is a team throughout the Discover event. And I truly believe that that is a really important approach, not only for TS Consulting, but also for the Enterprise Group. And for you, Lud Packardt, as a company, because it really looks at what are the customer problems that are happening today, and how can we react to that from a transformation perspective? You know, customers go through this transformation. You know that we have a reputation. We spoke about the experience workshops that we delivered in the past. Remember cloud mobility. Well, today we announced the transformation areas workshops in the four areas that HP is going to bring forward today. The patient teased out the four areas, hybrid infrastructure, which I do love the software-defined infrastructure. I like that slogan. It's really nice. Digital Enterprise, data-driven Enterprise, workplace productivity, kind of the UX experience, all tied together with all the stuff in between with security. It's not easy, so it sounds easy. Share with us from a customer standpoint what are the challenges to make their agile, social business, what we try to do here is to understand what the most important customer opportunities issues that they are facing, and we try to bundle it in those four areas that you just named. And it's really a different approach that we take. It's listening to what the customer business needs are, how can we translate it into top-of-mind priorities for them, and how can we translate that into a number of transformation areas that address those needs. And so we felt like, with the workshops that we have been delivering in the past, that we were in a really strong position to deliver new workshops that really address hybrid infrastructure, security, data-driven Enterprise or organization, and then the most mobile workforce. And these workshops are here at Discover in length, duration. Can you share some color around? Someone's here, on site, what do they do? We deliver them at Discover in a short version. So people can enroll for the workshops. There is a booth available where people can subscribe for the workshops. And we take the customers through the methodology that we are using. And I'm really proud that we can make this very real. Going back to Discover, we delivered 100 websites at Discover. I think it was one of the best experiences we had. Because it really means that when we talk about a certain subject that we can take into the discovery workshops and explain how things are implemented in a real-life situation. This is real-life what happened last year. We had 45 minutes to talk about strategy around store and information management. And rather than me explaining it, we went to the experience workshop and go through it real-life. It was unprepared, we dive into it and the value to the customer was so important that, and I'm not joking, we immediately ordered two and we implemented one for them in Europe and one in the United States. That's called closing the deal on site. That's what it's all about. But no, that's something that's going on. People can get information, certainly we do our share by broadcasting on theCUBE. But in the moment on the ground, immersive expertise, I was really impressed with Barcelona. So the plan here is the same kind of concept, bring the workshops and engage with the customers. But what if someone's watching theCUBE and they didn't make it to discover, what do they do? Is there going to be a follow-up? Is there going to be a road show? What's the plan? So the way it works is so first of all, we have done this before, as I mentioned. And so on a yearly basis we deliver close to 500 workshops and so it's something that is really real. So they can contact me at hp.com and we can take it from there or they can go to their local consulting or account management representative and we will take care of that. And so it's not only because we make the announcement here, we deliver those workshops right away. For example, around security we delivered one of the first workshops about two weeks ago in Middle East so these are the things that are going on in real life for customers. So I've got to ask you, pretend that I'm a customer for a minute and I bump into you in the hallway and you close two deals with me and I'm going to get the order signed with me. I say, I've been working with HP with IT, transforming IT but I've got to think strategically, I think bigger. I've got to bring in big data, I've got a new security model, I've got to reboot, I've got incidents going on, I've got breaches, I've got to change the user experience with all the API based applications. What do I do? I need a strategic framework. Not just don't I want to do IT, I've got to go bigger on strategic, the whole company. How do you engage? What we love to do is to understand where is the customer from the business going, what is happening in that market. And what we find out more and more is that being very agile and being very fast to solve new business problems has become a major priority for IT. So once we have understood where the customer wants to go from a business perspective we try to understand how we can bring that into IT priorities. And then how it fits in the overall IT approach. And as you mentioned in your introduction we cannot see infrastructure including the control layer independent from the application. So we want to understand what is going on at the business level, how that implies the applications and how that has an impact on the overall infrastructure. And as business is going faster and faster, you know the development of application making applications available needs to go faster and faster. But there is a correlation between the applications and the infrastructure that you put in place. And so rather than thinking from a box point of view, we try to think what is going on with the customer at the business point of view and how does it come all together. And by the way when we talk about the four workshops about the four transformation areas we can deliver them in an isolated way but we can also deliver them in an integrated way. And I truly believe that you cannot see things like mobility independent from what is going on in big data. And when you have figured out what you want to do with the data that is available to your company, how you want to make it accessible to your employees and to your customers, you need to have a platform that is going to bring the compute value to deliver that information. And that's where Cloud and Ibit infrastructure and so rather than looking at it in a one by one, what we can do is have it in an integrated way. So Johan one of the biggest things we hear from the practitioners in our community is that they struggle not with just the technology piece but the whole cultural aspects, the business process, that's the transformational issues. Are you seeing the same and how is HP helping customers navigate through that? Well I'm really glad that you bring up that point because this is something that is really a high priority for us. You know that within the consulting practice we also have an education practice. And traditionally our education was really focused about the technology that we delivered. And we believe that with the new style of business and the new style of IT there is a new opportunity for us around education. And the way we look at our education business is really to an answer to that question. Half of our education business is focused on how can we help customers understand the new environment but also half of it is focused on change management and how do we transform the workforce of the customer from where it was in the past to where it needs to be in the future. For example when you talk about mobility when you talk about how to make people work in a different way from different places with different technology as you mentioned it's not only a technology but change. It is mainly a behavioral change. It's a cultural change and so within our EDU education practice we really focus on that aspect. And by the way really big customers are very interested in that. And that's a new way of delivering educational services. I love that example you mentioned about the workload piece not just being a box provider. That's IT old IT. The new style of IT business really is about application centric. The software defined infrastructure gives program ability to use a geek term to handle workload configurations agile if you will. So I got to ask you that's a strategic conversation that's business conversation that's not an IT conversation. Are they tied together? They have to be right so you have to know your workload what drives the business and then you got again. So do you guys provide that service end to end in which vertical? Global Enterprise is there certain verticals? All verticals? I think if there is one thing that we have learned in technology services consulting is that you cannot do everything to everybody everywhere. So we really specialize and what we want to make sure is that we can make customers happy about the ULT Packard Enterprise Group Intellectual Property that they buy. Whether it's around service storage, networking, convert systems. But we want to make sure that we can bring it in the overall picture. And so of course our DNA is around the infrastructure IP but you cannot implement infrastructure without having the control layer on top of it without having the software defined on top of it. And as we move on we try to understand what is going on from an application point of view and from a business point of view. Not that we are going to become the business consultant that's not our priority. We are not going to go into application consulting and the price services dot that. But when it comes to make the link between business, application and then the infrastructure that's where we play. And I truly believe that to do our role in a good way in a meaningful way to the customer we need to understand what is going on in the application space. And we need to know what the impact on the business is going to be. And I can give a real-life example of that. You know we with a large American pharmaceutical company where we were doing a major transformation business around storage and information management. It's better to know which application runs on top of that infrastructure to know how you are going to handle it. In that case you know their electronic their e-commerce was running on that platform. Before you make a change there you better know what happens is system goes down. And you do it in a different way when you know what the business case is. So are we becoming the business consultants on driving new business models in pharmaceutical? Probably not. But do we want to understand the business they are in, understand what is really critical for them, what is going on in their market? We absolutely do. Because the better we understand that, the better we can link it to the work that we are doing and bring value to the customer. You can be a steward, not so much the business consultant. They might know their business model differently. What you're saying is you guys would come in and assist in execution of implementing that. They hire a consultancy pharma they lay it all out. And this works really well for us because when you look at HP also on the hardware side we have a DNA of working with partners. The vast majority of our of our gear is brought to customers through channel partners and that is really strategic to us. And by the way I would like to bring that forward too. Also our consulting services are now being opened to channel partners. And so we have the DNA to work with other companies. We do not go into a company with statements. We know it all from business up to infrastructure up to business. And we want to play a cooperative, a partner led model there. You're saying you will white label your consulting services to channel partners. Is that right? Did I just hear that? You know that we have a major channel event here in Las Vegas in March. It's called the Global Partner Conference. The major announcement we made at the Global Partner Conference is that we open up our consulting portfolio to channel partners. Because we truly believe that not only HP needs to move to new style of business, new style of IT but we are also convinced that channel partners need to go into that direction. And we believe and by the way that's the request we got from senior management is that TS consulting can play an important role in helping the channel partners to move what I would call from traditional to new style of business channel partner for HP. And that was the major announcement that we made at GPC. And by the way the attention we got from the channel partners, the reaction we got from the channel partners was overwhelming. And it was really really great for us to see that when we talk with channel partners that the level of maturity for them to go into consulting was completely different. Channel partners will go very high into consulting, even business consulting in a specific industry vertical, for example healthcare or for example banking. And then we have channel partners who are really close to the product and we can help them independent on where they are to open up our consulting services to open up the transformation area workshops so that they can bring it to their customers. How about the global perspective? I love to get the global perspective from you European, you travel all over the world. We tend to see things through the prism of Silicon Valley right, the Ubers, the Airbnbs the Facebooks, the Googles are there differences across the globe? There's certainly geopolitical differences, but what are you seeing in the terms of this transformation? Well I think it is not so much different in this transformation compared to what we saw in the past you know, and there is no good and bad but dependent on where a country is dependent on where an economy is probably the IT is also in a certain state of maturity. And so you have very mature markets across the Americas you have very mature markets across the EMEA and you have very mature markets across Asia Pacific. And so, but you also have more developing countries emerging countries and so what we see is that in all countries in all regions you have different levels of maturity and so what you are trying to do there is to make sure that for the most mature markets and the most mature countries we offer those more advanced services but we realize that there are also environments, you know, customers that there are also countries where there is still, you know, work to do that we did in other countries two, three, four, five years ago. And so one of the things that we do moving forward is making sure that we have a more segmented, a more focused approach on what is needed in a specific market. And we believe that for example I mean there are countries in Latin America that have a different need compared to the United States there are countries in EMEA in Africa that have a different need compared to for example the northern part of Europe the same is true in Asia Japan has a different need compared to, for example maturing and emerging countries in that region and so we really try to go one step deeper and try to understand what is the maturity, what kind of projects can we deliver but be more customer specific around that. And you have the ability to sort of adjust the skillsets and maturity that you put forth as HP based on that region or is it more sort of it's aligned already because you've got people feet on the street in those regions. So the way we work is that we try to have a globally defined portfolio where we try to follow up what is going on in the market for example SDI for example the transformation areas and then what we do is we engage locally with the customers it's extremely important for us to have our local teams in front of the customers at the country level or at the regional level and then when it comes to delivery we try to find the right mix between having people in front of the customer like solution architects, project managers subject matter experts but then from an efficiency point of view from an economical point of view you need to have the right remote delivery people and so the remote delivery people we manage them from a worldwide perspective but everything that happens close to the customer is managed close to the customer and I think it's our responsibility to make sure that we can make that work for a customer in a seamless way and one of the big advantages we bring is that in an international way and so when large customers engage with us we can bring them virtually the same service across the globe I mean the global economies here in Silicon Valley we see the venture capital investments a lot in India, a lot in Asia a lot of great stuff, it's all flat now the world is flat, congratulations thanks for coming, the four pillars hybrid, data driven workplace, productivity you guys are doing it all you have the workshops here on the ground please enroll for it we have many opportunities the real question is what's your quote of this year how many deals are you going to close how many customers are you going to close as I said we made a hundred last year you know what my expectation is growth, growth, growth I want to beat that and we are ready for it so please come to us join us we'll give you a fist pump and a high five later and a retweet, Johan decides for this SPP technology and services consulting here inside the cube, backstage pass we're live for three days we're here to go to HP Discover.Social that is our open, engaging social media site for all the cube and keynotes go to crowdchat.net HP Discover, the influencers are there all the signals being shared this year thanks for watching, we'll be right back after this short break