 live inside theCUBE in New York City for a special CUBE presentation of HP Moonshot, their big announcement changing the landscape of servers, servers and data centers. Here at a major inflection point in the industry, transformation to a new modern era of computing applications, et cetera. I'm John Furrier, the founder of SiliconANGLE.com and I'm joined by my co-host. I'm Dave Vellante of wikibon.org. Doug Foster is here from Purdue University. Doug is the executive director of research computing and enterprise apps at Purdue. Doug, welcome to theCUBE. Thank you very much. So you are a CIO. You've done a number of stints as a CIO. Yes, I have. You're focused on apps, got a particular expertise in SAP apps. And you're here today talking about infrastructure. Yes. It's kind of interesting. Yes. To a CIO and an apps guy, why do you even care about infrastructure? What do you want out of your infrastructure? Well, so I think the important component here is really about this sort of sea change, step change in what's happening with infrastructure. The movement that Moonshot brings for us is pretty substantial. The curve that we've been on with X86, our X86 platform, has not really been moving at the rate we needed to move. The amount of research as a, in a research institution, the amount of research that's coming at us and the need for greater and greater computational capacity, we just can't keep up. Something needs to change. The shift needs to happen. We think that this platform gives us flexibility to aim specific research problems at configured hardware specialized for that problem. So that's what's really interesting for us in this. Yeah, so it's interesting because there's a sort of one school of thoughts. So I presume you use X86 blades today. Yes. And so there's one school of thought that says, well, I can virtualize those blades and I can manage one box and whatever X number of virtual machines. And that would be easier than configuring separate servers for the specific workloads. But you have somewhat of a different angle on that. Yeah, the view for us is that obviously within particular workloads, we're looking for an optimization of support and maintenance and those kinds of things like everybody else is. But the key for us is to optimize individual workloads. We, as a research institution, just happen to have a broader set of those sorts of problems. So when we're sort of customizing these environments against those problems, that for us will significantly reduce the requirement for specific hardware against it. So I guess you could say in the long run, we see that as it will actually simplify our maintenance if we can reduce it significantly enough. We're hearing very big numbers eat 80% reduction in power requirements and those kinds of things. That's a very big deal for us. As an academic and research area, are you interested in the moonshot from some contributing technology or to with HP and a partnership? Or are you more a customer saying, hey, we need the latest and greatest or both? Or what's the relationship? Well, we have a great relationship with HP. It goes back 10 years or more. We currently use their servers in our research clusters. We're probably doing a little bit of both. One piece of this is looking for HP to help us deliver solutions that aim at these specific research problems. Another part of this is we're standing up of what we're calling the HP Discovery Lab at Purdue. We will employ students. Purdue produces a very large number of high quality engineering students. And we're going to employ them in a, co-locate them with some HP resources to work on moonshot. And we'll work on a variety of problems there. Some will be directly related to our research needs. So we think we will be helping each other. HP will bring us some solutions to some problems we have and we think we can help them design solutions for. A lot of, we were just in Boston for a thing with SAP on Friday at the HackReduce Center and where all the entrepreneurs are there. And MIT guy got up there and he's giving this big talk about big data. And then someone asked a question, what about this network configuration? He's like, I just get the best technology. I don't really have to worry about those problems. But academics need, the researchers need the best tech because they are working on some of the hardest problems. Can you talk about some of the things that you guys are doing? Where you're pushing the envelope on the tech side where this fits in, vis-a-vis the old architecture of x86 and or scale up hardware? Yeah, I think there are a number of things that we're, we have a variety of problems being worked on in our research computing environment. We go, we run the gambit, we have very large computational intensive sorts of problems like predicting weather, those kinds of things, predicting earthquakes, those sorts of things. We also suspect that with this first configuration of Moonshot that there's an application for what we term Monte Carlo simulations. They're not as intensive individually but there's millions of them. So we're in lots of spaces. We're starting to even get into some of the humanities with computational science which is intriguing, interesting for us. So lots of different places. Our researchers are continuing to push the limits of what this technology can do. So this I think will be a very welcome addition to their portfolio. Now I'm told you guys are putting forth some kind of discovery lab at the university. Tell us more about what that is. So the discovery lab will be, we've carved out some prime real estate on a campus real estate is of a very high premium. We've carved out some, right in the center of our campus, a research lab basically where HP employees and students will work together to solve some of these problems and look at new uses for the technology, how it might solve some of our research problems but I think more generally HP could bring some more general business problems to the table and ask students to help design solutions to solve those problems. Whatever we could switch gears a little bit and talk about your experience as a CIO. Sure. And we're noticing, we're not the only guys to cover this but we've been covering pretty extensively that the innovation in this industry is obviously coming from consumerization and you see the activity within the web giants and what many people call the hyperscale side as trickling in to the traditional enterprise but there's complexities within the traditional enterprise that make that hard. So can you share with us your take on that trend, innovation generally and then specifically how that consumerization and hyperscale piece will ultimately affect the traditional enterprise? So A, that's a pretty difficult question to answer the how this is going to go from my perspective right now is in a number of different ways. One place that I can see this going is that a lot more organizations are going to start participating in cloud based kind of computing and say we've just gotten to a level of scale and simplification that says I don't need to, I can't do this anymore. I can't be competitive with these large scale organizations. So that's one trend that I see happening. I think a lot more people could start to get on board with do I really need to run infrastructure. The other thing that I think is happening here is because of the kind of sea change that we see in this technology, I think there will be, we can't even predict the ways that people are going to figure out how to use this. There still are great opportunities. It looks like the day, my favorite example is the day I got a smartphone. I wasn't exactly sure why I needed it or what I was gonna do with it. And today you couldn't rip it out of my, yeah right, exactly. So I think this technology feels very similar to me. It feels like we're at the beginning of something and where it could go. That's why we're so excited about the Discovery Lab because we want to help steer some of that and be involved in where this technology goes. You have a very interesting background and one of your roles was to kind of, I call it to translate wallet into geek and geek into wallet. That liaison between IT and business. Absolutely. And we've seen the need for obvious reasons because IT is so complex and business always screws it up when they try to manage the MIT. Is that with cloud and this whole consumerization trend? Is that changing or is IT actually getting more complex? Do you see that shadow IT function which is driving a lot of, for instance, big data initiatives and maybe even some cloud initiatives? The old meme about marketing is gonna have more money to spend than the CIO. Do you see that traditional liaison role as changing or morphing and how so? Absolutely, one of the most important roles in my view in IT today is this role of bridging that gap. A lot of traditional CEOs will not understand the implications of what just happened and they won't know why they care about this. That's the question that I'm used to getting from CEOs is why do I care about this? That translation is critically important if people are going to make the right strategic investments in technology. They have to understand in business terms, in their language, why does this matter to you? And I think the big things here, if I was talking to a CEO, would it be about this 80%, 70% reductions in cost and power consumption and those kinds of things. They're the kinds of things that I think business people can get their heads around. What does that mean from the perspective of how technology is actually deployed in businesses? Again, in my view, a lot of CEOs don't really care. As long as they're out there, as long as they have the apps they need. Is it run, do I get what I need? Is it affordable? Let's talk about that because we were talking about it earlier and I think just on the power and cooling thing alone, this is just a revolution because it's just amazing because a lot of those conversations right now in IT, as a CIO you know, has been around OPEX but we've been over a decade of kind of shrinking and cutting to the bone of IT. And now you have a tsunami of a landscape saying, hey, mobile works, SaaS works. We don't have infrastructure reserves, we don't have cloud. So the delivery is not there yet, it's getting there, but yet you have investments. So now the pressure to invest in IT combined with the space constraints with the option of cloud and mobile for the delivery or consumerization of IT, VDI, whatever it is at the edge, you have the perfect storm for transformation. So given that, what are CIOs talking about right now? Because obviously footprints big because they got to expand so now they have a choice to expand data centers, do they consolidate data centers? I mean, it must be very complicated. Can you share some insight on what that world is like right now in your mind? Yeah, so I think for, I can give you two different answers and they go in two completely different directions because a research university is a very different animal than your standard corporate environment. From the research perspective, the strategic components of what we do are research and our IP. A lot of that we are very uncomfortable with putting out in the cloud. We're very concerned about that IP being exposed, we're concerned about all the bandwidth problems associated with high performance computing over a distance, all of those sorts of things. When you look at the more traditional corporate environment and a lot of what we would call our back office functions, I think it's, the discussion is really starting to boil down to these economics of how do we get the needed services delivered the fastest and cheapest? And one of the components that I've been very interested in is this speed component. And that's another reason why I like the moonshot technology, I like where it's going, because I think a big part of tying up dollars in an organization is related to the time it takes to change, the time it takes to adapt. There's a market opportunity that shows up, but IT is too big, too cumbersome, too slow to make that transformation. So I think the discussions that we've been having are about in these spaces where we are not as concerned about our IP and those sorts of things, how can we get to a very agile, flexible, quickly configurable sort of environment and it all comes back to on the corporate side or on our back office side, it comes down to cost and time. They're the things that we just continue to drive to. So a lot of that cost gets consumed and what Jeff Hammabock or John calls the container, right, we spent all this money on the container, we're not having money left over for software and algorithms and other processes around them. As the cost of the, I'm genericizing the container, it could be storage, it could be servers, whatever, as the cost of that infrastructure comes down, do you see that spend shifting toward those other areas that are gonna drive business value and will that actually get us out of this morass of do more with less, budget cuts, I mean the CIO hell that they're in? Yes, I mean, absolutely. I can tell you from the Purdue perspective, we are committed to driving costs overhead out of the box, as you call it, and driving it into the things that drive our university, research and teaching. In the corporate environments, it's no different. I would suspect in former organizations that I've been part of marketing, being usually a very important component of those organizations, it's driving it out of all the back office sorts of functions and driving it into sort of difference makers in the marketplace, so I think it's critical and I think there's an opportunity here to do more of that. Yeah, and ironically I think that'll actually drive more demand for the infrastructure, but it'll be easier to justify because it's a clear business value. Exactly. So my final question as we wrap up here has been great conversation because you kind of span both worlds, you kind of got the 20 mile stare on both the academic and research as well as corporate, which is completely different animals, both trying to be faster. What is your advice to CIOs on the corporate side? The research side seems to be they have a lot more dough and they can work with more budget, but as the corporate guys have to invest now, the mindset's changed, a modern era is upon us, as you pointed out some of the things you like about Moonshot and other things. What's your advice to CIOs out there and how to execute over the next five years? So I think the first piece here, if you look at any of the key shifts in technology over time, there is a period of, I'll call it confusion, there's a period of, just like I referenced the cell phone or the smartphone discussion, what do I do with this? How does it apply to me? So my advice would be in the short term is to get a real deep understanding of this technology, how it can apply, what kind of problems it can solve in your environment, and I would venture a guess that the people that move the fastest here will be the winners. The people that are going to lag behind not, sort of not believe that they need a smartphone or that they need this technology or that it has an implication for them, I think are going to be left by the side. Excellent, all right Doug, well thanks very much for coming on theCUBE and sharing your perspectives with us like John said, that dual personality perspective and appropriate for this announcement and keep it right there everybody, we'll be right back with our next guest.