 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, Dave Vellante and Jeff Frick. Hi everybody, welcome back to HP Discover. I'm Dave Vellante and this is theCUBE. theCUBE is our live mobile studio. We go out to the events, we extract the signal from the noise. We've done something special for this HP Discover. Check out HP Discover.Social. It brings together all the social media streams, all the video, a lot of content, all access. So please check that out. Sylvia Hooks is here. She's the Senior Director of America's Marketing at HP. And Alex Munro, a CUBE alum, is the Assistant Vice President of Corporate IT and Enterprise Technologies at Pacific Life. Folks, welcome to theCUBE. Thanks so much. It's great to be here. So Sylvia, you're new to theCUBE. Yes, my first time. So welcome. Thank you. So let's start with you. I'm really excited about the transformation, not only in the industry but of HP. We heard Meg talk about HP Enterprise. We heard Dominic talk about Ruby stole the show yesterday. So how do you feel? I feel awesome. So I can really say for all of Aruba that this acquisition is hugely exciting. We've been a little island fighting against big competitors and the idea of being part of a successful big company that can really take us to the next level makes everybody excited. And the people that we've been meeting and the customers that we've been talking to feel the same way. And it's great to get a warm reception. We really feel welcome with open arms. Yeah, so Alex, I wonder, I mean, from your standpoint, HP was very quiet on the acquisition front because it was paying down some debt and cleaning up its balance sheet. And now it's been much more acquisitive. Is that important to you from a customer standpoint? Do you pay attention to those types of things? Regarding the acquisition? Yeah. Yeah, for us it was a surprise, but it was a pleasant surprise. So we had been an Aruba customer for years and it really invested in our wireless infrastructure. And then we had recently become an HP networking customer. So we were in a big transformation of rolling out all our data centers, all our IDF closets, all our campuses on the HP networking. And so the announcement literally happened right at the perfect time for us. And we've leveraging tools, you know, both from Aruba and HP and it's just been a good, good experience. Do you think Pacific Life, I mean, I was talking off camera about all this discussion about the digital economy, Meg talking about the idea economy. It's a real theme now. Everybody looks at Uber and Airbnb in ways as examples of disruption and, but air specific life. You're a very successful company. I mean, I don't know how long you've been around, but it's been a long time. So the imperative to change is not necessarily, you know, right there. But you know, we all are familiar in the tech business with Andy Groves, you know, paranoid, you know, mantra. But is it difficult to get change in a successful company like that that has a lot of entrenched, you know, beliefs? Yeah, I think there's two challenges. One is regulation, compliance, audit security. And you sort of have to jump over those hurdles and make sure when you're enabling employees to be more productive or work from anywhere or, you know, giving them mobile devices and you want them to be productive from home, you know, from the airport or when they're in the building, maybe not at their desk, but in a meeting room. How do you have that seamless work experience that can be productive? But how do you make sure you're still protecting, you know, the company assets and what we do? And to your point, you know, Pacific Life is a very established company. We have a very premium brand. And so we always weigh convenience with at the same time, compliance and audit, you know, and just making sure that we're dotting all the guys and crossing all the T's when we roll out, you know, things like wireless infrastructure. Yeah, as an IT executive, we always have to balance the, I call that, liabilities and assets, you know, data risk and data value. And so, and from your standpoint, Sylvia, if you have to convince every customer that they have to go through a cultural transformation, you know, it'd be a real slog. So how do you deal with that? You just find the sort of leading adopters, the open-minded customer. Well, so it turns out we're not actually usually convincing them, right? They're coming to us. They're dragging you into it. Yeah, right, so the user is, I mean, the generational shift and the technology that's come with us from back when we used to work only in offices to where now, we want to be connected all the time from every place, it puts a burden on IT. And so IT's coming to us saying, my users are demanding this, how do I satisfy it? And there's a lot of ways you can do that to be compliant, you know, how much openness do you offer? Gartner has laid out a methodology where, you know, the more trust you have of a device, the more access you give them. And I know that's what Pacific Life is doing, that they give access for devices that they manage. So you kind of have to look at with each customer, what are they trying to achieve? But we never are in a position of having to convince them because their users are doing that for them. Their users are dragging in all these consumer devices. And then how the customer chooses to adopt that BYOD policy or how they choose to open up their networks depends on how much security concerns they have or how much regulation of the data. So that's interesting. I want to unpack that a little bit. But Alex, let's back up. So last time your arm was a year ago. What's been the big change in the past 12 months within your organization? From a networking and from a wireless perspective, probably the biggest, I'll call it a little bit of a surprise is the adoption of link and real time voice video collaboration. And once people got used to joining a meeting via IP, just clicking on a link and coming in via a web browser but also having voice and video capability, sometimes high depth video, the bar was up significantly from a latency perspective and from a performance perspective. And people wanted this not only in rooms but walking from room to room and getting in the elevator and going between floors. People expected all of a sudden to stay connected into these real time collaborative sessions. And that was something that took us by surprise a little bit and when it works well, it's a great experience when it doesn't, sometimes you hear about it. So we've spent a lot of energy in that area. Just making employees, the other thing I want to bring up with Aruba that we love, we rolled out certificate servers, we rolled out a product called ClearPass they make for authentication and we do provide most of our employees with a company-owned device but it allows us to give them that seamless joining of the network as soon as they enter the building and they can access their data, they can access their file shares, they can access information they need to collaborate without having to go through a multiple hoop process to get onto the wireless network. So it's not a BYOD model at Pacific Life? We have BYOD but more for guest networks. So we have a contractor network, we have a guest network and then we have the company network. Then the nice thing again about Aruba is we can manage all that off of one set of infrastructure but it's different trust policies and it's different level of access based on whether you're on a company device or whether you're on a personal device. And so does employee have a choice to bring his or her personal device in and they just get the less open network? Yeah, you get the less open. So in general, all executives, management, et cetera, or knowledge workers, we give them a device. We just consider part of a tool that that person needs to work. Where you get into gray areas is with hourly employees and lower level employees and there's different reasons why you may not want to give all of those employees a mobile device. The ROI might not be there. The ROI might not be there and you may want them at their desk, answering the phone or doing work. And so for that employee, we actually have something called CafeNet when they go into the lunch cafeteria or the cafe. It's a wide open personal network and then they can talk to their friends, they can go to Facebook, they can see their pets and their kids at home via video. And but they're doing all that on a guest network and it's not part of the company network. Well, a lot of companies, I remember maybe in the last three or four years have just taken away, you know, company sponsored smartphones, for example. It kind of short-sighted, right? I mean, you don't obviously don't take that philosophy. Yeah, there's just economies of scale with essentially managed cell phone contracts and then also just lost devices. You know, we want the ability to be able to wipe the device. Yeah, of course. We want to have control of what's on that device. We need a certain amount of ability to manage that device. So we've made a decision that it's really not worth that savings to have all these different types of devices brought in. What do you see with other customers? Yeah, so it's across the board. I mean, I think some companies have decided, hey, you know what, if our users want to bring their own devices, they can do that, but they're responsible for them. So then you're in a position of, well, your help, this doesn't really support those anymore. So maybe those people aren't quite as productive as they might be. So Pacific Life doesn't want to use that model. They want to support their users, make sure they have the right tools. But, you know, each business is different. And I think the point that you made earlier about our infrastructure will allow those choices and you can even change your mind. So with our controllers and with ClearPass, you can set the policy you want for the scenario. It may be different classes of employees like the hourly employees can BYOD. They just get on the guest network and have internet access. But the more knowledge worker types get the full access and it's a company-owned device. So I think the flexibility of the infrastructure is important in this idea economy because it is so, it changes a lot. The scenarios, every company has multiple scenarios. So you're in a highly regulated business, financial services, insurance, so you kind of control freaks, sort of have to be. So what I'm hearing is that the Aruba technology allows you to sort of dial up, dial down, it gives you that flexibility. Can you just add some color to that? Well, the other thing I want to point out, so the Surface 3 and laptops. So you have a laptop in front of you and when you're on a laptop, you even have another experience. So now I all of a sudden want my Active Directory credentials and I want my authentication into applications. I want to have that desktop experience but now I want to have it in a meeting room and I may also be on a video or a link call or dialed into a bridge all via my laptop. And so there's just again, multiple scenarios. We call it the right tool for the right job but it's really about what is the employee most comfortable using and then how can they be most productive anytime, anywhere. Whether they're at home, whether they're in transit in an airport or whether they're in our buildings or in a conference room. And the big catalyst, of course, is mobile devices. I mean, it was interesting to hear Dom yesterday talk about when they started Aruba, it was Intel Centrino. And I remember when Centrino came out, I was like, nah, you know, it didn't really excite me that much. Intel was pushing the ads out and they go, okay, whatever. But then all of a sudden, you know, the wireless trend with smartphones comes out and a huge tailwind for organizations, technology companies. And a big, most IT practitioners I talked to sort of had a love hate with it. It's like they love it because they get it and they're users but on the other hand they got to deal with all this stuff and then you have a story. You enabled about a thousand users with iPads. Yeah, we decided to provide everybody with director and above with an iPad as a productivity device. And unfortunately we did not do full wireless surveys in advance and we discovered the hard way that a lot of our corner offices and in some of our important meeting rooms did not have adequate coverage. And so we had to sort of do an emergency wireless assessment, I had to bring in a specialist and walk all the buildings, go into every office, actually sit down in chairs, go into every conference room even with multiple people. And some of our conference rooms hold upwards of 200 people and we would have people all of a sudden bringing in 100 iPads. They did a bankers convention and they literally, all of them wanted Wi-Fi access, you know. So we learned, you know, the hard way that we had to build out the network infrastructure with the capacity and the security so that people could have that seamless experience. And so can you describe sort of your network, it's a campus sort of set up? Yeah, so the one benefit that Pacific Life has is we own most of our main buildings. So we aren't afraid to invest a little bit in the infrastructure of that building because we know that we're going to be there for a while. And that does change the game a little bit because we have distributed antenna systems for wireless and then we have extensive Wi-Fi investments in those buildings to make sure that people have the right experience not only in the building they normally work in but we have buildings that are across the street in a campus and we want to have the exact same experience when somebody walks across the street that they have when they're sitting in their own building or in their own office. So you had mentioned approximately a year ago when you were on it, you were relatively new HP networking customer at the time. What was the catalyst to go to HP networking? We had an aging network infrastructure with sort of a legacy, you know, provider that was literally seven, eight, nine years old in certain locations and we just started to experience issues, we had a couple outages and we just decided it was time to upgrade, you know, the entire network infrastructure. And we did a formal RFP, I talked about it in a presentation yesterday and in a panel that I was on but we went out and really did a competitive RFP, narrowed it down to two of the big vendors and everybody knows who the biggest vendor is but HP was the second finalist and when we brought everything in the lab and we did our full side-by-side integration tests and we got on the equipment and did failover testing, we realized that HP met all of our requirements and, you know, at the end of the day we saved a little bit of money and we were an HP server customer, we're also a HP desktop customer. So for us, there was some synergies between server infrastructure and the network and now we're even looking at some of the three parts as well. So you guys have begun to talk about this sort of, you know, the mobile generation, the wireless, you know, first approach. Maybe describe that a little bit. Sure, I mean, I think we've been touching on it so we started off with Centrino kind of experience where you had your laptop, right? And then we moved to this world where you have tablets and smartphones and as generation, and I don't think it has to be an age generation, I would like to imagine myself as part of what we call Gen Mobile, it's more how you behave. We're cool. Right, yeah, we're hip with that. So we're really wanting to use the devices everywhere, be productive all the time. They're not devices that were designed, or I should put it this way, they're consumer devices. So the experience that we're used to having on a laptop that has a little bit more robust antenna and wireless capabilities, our networks, the aging networks were not designed to handle these kind of low power devices. So when you start bringing them all into a big conference room, they don't have great reception. They're not that powerful, right? Yeah, we love them. So the network has to kind of adapt to these new style of devices. So I think the experience that Pacific Life went through is what we've seen in a lot of customers is, help, I have this network that was designed for more stationary users in one place with a big laptop. Now they have all these devices running around. How do we adapt our network, adapt our apps, adapt our IT to really go after this generation that wants to use these devices this way? So we really feel like wireless has become front and center because of user experience concerns. And we're watching our customers and helping our customers really transform and that works for that. So this new, we call it GenMobile, and it's this generation that wants to work from anywhere all the time, switching back and forth between personal and professional life. And Aruba just feels like it's here to stay. Our customers are dragging us in there. So give us a practitioner perspective on that. So that sounds great. I have a buy into it, who wouldn't? But you have this installed infrastructure that you have to deal with. So how do you go from where you've been historically to this sort of GenMobile vision? So we do it with the same networking team, but we have mobile specialists now and we have data center infrastructure specialists. And the two systems are different, there's different technologies and they all sort of join on the back end and they all have to work together on the back end. And so we have architecture groups and we have business user groups. We do business case scenarios. And then we talk about the experience. The big thing for us is user experience and what type of user experience are we trying to deliver? And for me it really says, I want an executive or a person to be able to be on a mobile call, drive into our underground garage, get out of their car, stay on their phone, join into the network as they walk into the building, fire up, go to meeting, access their documents, do all of that while they're on their mobile device. And the average user now has two or three devices. So we have 3,000 employees, we have about 10,000 devices that we manage. So it's not one device, it's not two, it's often three devices that an individual employee will have. So I'm curious as to the sort of justification model because so many things in IT we have to run through, you know, do the ROI and you're flexible. Is this more like, remember when the land, the land's first come out, we need a land. Okay, great, was it more like that or do you have to go through sort of a formal RR? You know, we realized when we ran the numbers, I think last year that we were spending more money on mobile devices than on laptops. So we crossed that barrier. And we sort of managed, I'll call it in bulk, which is we know we're going to spend a certain amount of money every year on about a three year refresh cycle on laptops, maybe four years on desktops, usually about three years. Mobile devices tend to be on a two year cycle for a couple reasons. They're tied to contracts and there's a two year refresh. And they also just tend to wear out and then everybody, of course, wants the newest, greatest thing. So we tell employees, you cannot upgrade for two years. After two years, talk to your manager and you may have to wait till three years, depending on budgeting and how we're doing. But somewhere between two and three years, you will be eligible for a new device. And that's kind of our, you know, we're not draconian about it, but we also try not to have upgrades. Yeah, some structure in policy. There's got to be some guidelines. But I also want to make the point that I think Delman and Corn made this point and is key note that to some extent your old infrastructure is keeping you back from your new infrastructure because there's still all these support investments and software licensing investments. So even if you're not using that desk phone, you're paying for the license and the IPVVX. I personally don't even know the password to my old desk phone that we ripped out. So I think if you can free yourself from the legacy investments that aren't even really getting used, it does free up some money to then invest into the new infrastructure. So the ROI gets a little bit easier when you look at it that way. Well, and the landline's a good example, right? That's easy. I think I even have on my phone message, don't leave a message here, because I don't check it ever. People still leave a message there. All right, Alex, I'll give you the last word again. We love the practitioner perspective. So you've gone through this transformation. Obviously, you know, you got the, had the surprise with the thousand iPads, but other than that, what other advice would you give to your peers around, people looking to sort of move into that mobile generation wireless first? So a couple things, don't ignore the compliance legal HR front. So you do need to pay attention to security. We hire external PEN test vendors and we do wireless surveys. And the one thing we didn't talk about, Aruba has a very nice, two nice products, Airway, which allows you to see the user, the user experience by user and where they are in the building and what access point they're attached to. They also have some really nice detection software that detects rogue access points. So if somebody brings in a links this home router or sets up an unauthorized access point, it can detect it right away and notify you. So you want to really pay attention, depending on what type of business you're in, to those aspects of wireless. Then the second part is, again, the user experience. What are you trying to accomplish from a user experience? And then once you decided that, then you have to assemble a team, a cross-functional team, and say, how are we going to build it? How are we going to support it? And how are we going to manage it? And that's really, it's just like any other big project, but wireless has its own unique challenges and its own unique flavors, but it's here to stay. My kids now, we travel everywhere, even in Europe, and the first question when we check into a hotel, what's a Wi-Fi password? And they just expect it, you know? And so we're in that world and I don't think it's going away. Excellent, hi. Well, the industry's transforming, HP's transforming, at the heart of that transformation, HP's networking group with the acquisition of Aruba, Alex and Sylvia, thanks very much for coming to theCUBE. It's really a pleasure having you. Thank you, David. All right, keep it right there. This is theCUBE, we'll be right back after this short break.