 Okay, we're back here live at HP Discover. This is theCUBE, our flagship program and throughout the events. I'm John Furrier, join my co-host Dave Vellante and we have a special guest, newly promoted CUBE alumni. CUBE alumni's get promoted. That's what we've been noticing, Dave. It helps a lot. It helps a lot. It helps a lot. Welcome to theCUBE. Thank you. So, SVP, General Manager, Converged Systems. That's correct, yeah. So, tell us about the new role and new opportunity. So, it's only about six weeks ago. We announced a new business unit reporting into what Dave Donatelli. We had gone and consolidated the industry standard server business and the business continuing server business into one HP server organization. And in the process of doing that, made the decision to put a really significant focus on the next wave of converged infrastructure, which is about really tightly integrated purpose-built systems, include server storage, networking, and various software assets we've got to build a whole new product line. So, we spun out a new business unit called Converged Systems, and I'm running that. So, the trend we've been hearing in the industry is, you know, break down the silos. I think Dave wrote a blog post on his Wikibon about that two years ago. And so, this is a new division. So, Donatelli set this division up, right? Yes, he did. So, this is basically like all servers. Well, it's got the server division is still building the servers. The pieces that I have are really going to bring together servers, storage, networking, and we've also got a very significant software development organization because the management software that's required to do this requires really a ground-up, a new approach to how you do cross-domain management. And so, we're really fortunate that we have a strong VP of engineering, a fellow named Phillip Tamer, who I worked with for years over at EMC, and he's now part of our organization, and he owns building that. And that's where a lot of the IP is going to be. It's a management environment that's really seamless across server, storage, networking, to bring those pieces together and kind of just build a whole new product line around. So, Mark Potter gave a talk yesterday and Dave and I did the cube at the Moonshot launch and he said, we're going to think differently about servers. What does that mean? Because what you're basically, what I'm hearing you say is that we're going to look at it differently and not be product-centric in terms of like all these different product lines. You kind of got a new attack vector. What is that new way? And what's your view on the market? And what vector are you taking? Well, I think there are two things. I think what Mark was talking about was a lot around Moonshot. Moonshot is a revolutionary new server technology. But it's very much about how you can drive more in specific workloads. And the more you look at where the customers are today, they are thinking about IT in terms of what their workloads are and how they optimize those most effectively. And an awful lot of this transition to Moonshot, to give you 89% better lower power and a lot of other benefits is really understanding how you can use that technology around certain workloads. And the same thing is true on the side that I'm responsible for, which is this converged systems business. Four years ago, Dave Donatelli started to talk about converged infrastructure. And the last four years has really been about how do you build those technologies into servers and into the storage. And we did that with the three-part product line that we brought out. We built a lot of converged infrastructure technology into it. But now these customers are coming back and saying, okay, we heard you. We've listened to HP. We've listened to other people too about converged infrastructure for the last four-something years. But now we want to buy these things fully converged. More and more customers are saying, I'm trying to deal with these new workloads. I have too many things coming at me to be in the system integration business myself anymore. I want to buy the whole thing configured so I can get it, install it in a matter of weeks and it's going to help me with some of these new problems. Like, what am I going to do about big data? What am I going to do about SAP HANA? What am I going to do about all this virtualization stuff that I need to kind of manage in the overall growth of that? And of course the big one is the transition to cloud. More and more these customers are saying, now I understand why I need private cloud technology in my data center, but I want somebody to deliver that all to me in a way that I don't have to figure this out myself. So your charter is to accelerate adoption of anything converged within the HP portfolio. Is that right? So for example that? Not anything, there's particular areas. It's these hard problems, like quote unquote big data. So we're looking at Vertica and saying how can we build and merge systems around Vertica to help customers adopt that more rapidly? Both for our benefit, the channel's benefit, but especially for these customers is say, look, I understand the value. When we engage with Vertica, we win about 90% of the time, but we've got to make it easier for customers to be able to adopt the technology and that's what these converged systems are going to be. So what's in there, is that mini baby, Jenny, microserver, is that part of your portfolio? Yeah, so that is going to be a part of it. The good thing is we have a tremendous number of assets that we can work with and that moonshot product line as that rolls out and as the roadmap kind of makes itself known. There's a lot of stuff that we can work with to do more with Vertica, to do more with many of these other... So you're in parts of like a super integrator and it sounds like you're developing potentially some of your own IP based on market requirements related to converged infrastructure. I think where the IP comes in is there's a lot of IP that's now baked into the components. Our IP is in two places. One, that management technology. So we have frankly a large group of engineers that they're the people that built Matrix. They're now building the next generation of management built on Matrix. And that's the glue that holds all these things together. Because you've got to, at the end of the day, what we need to provide to customers is not just a seamless management experience across those server stores and networking domains, but a heck of a lot smarter and the ability to federate that manage so you can handle cloud scale kinds of applications. The overall scale of some of these Hadoop implementations or some of these SAP HANA implementations, it's big and that bigness kind of breaks the traditional management paradigm for a lot of customers. So that's the two places that our IP is going to go is things that are built into the platforms and then how we bring them together with a seamless experience. So I talked to John about Mexquino yesterday. You gave her very high marks, John. You know, the stock's up, right? Everybody's happy about that. But you guys aren't high-fiving that because you know there's a lot of work to do. And I've said, Tom, in many respects, if you look around HP and on many, many divisions, many parts of the company have to shrink before they can grow and it just seems to me you're really challenged within Enterprise Group is you got a lot of pieces that are shrinking, a lot of pieces that are growing and you got to throw gasoline on the fire on the pieces that are growing. It seems like that's your role here. Is that fair? Well that is and you know, to be quite frank with you, that was our role in the storage business too. So three years ago we went into a scenario where we had lost market share, we had an older product line and customers were confused about what we were doing and for good reason. And we've kind of completely turned that on its head and I think what we did then is very similar to what Meg has done for the whole company which is to try to set expectations to say, look, you don't throw a switch and make these things happen overnight. She has said from the beginning, this is going to be a four or five year transition. And you might recall that when I sat in the cube three years ago and we started to talk about what are we doing with three parts, we said this is going to be a transition because we had to grow that while we're basically winding down the things that we're not going to invest in anymore and customers don't want anymore. And so until those lines cross, it's not entirely clear to the market analysts and where the growth has come from. But if you look at what we did with three parts, especially with this 7,000 product that we brought out the end of last year, we are now in a position where we've got that thing simple, it's priced to market, customers understand it, it's new technology and it's growing at an extraordinary rate. I mean, you may remember because the numbers were public, with three part, the business we bought it, including product and services and everything was about 190 million. And now we're in a well-being. John and Kelly said a billion dollar run rate now on three parts. So if we can do that again in some of these other problems like big data and HANA and Verica. So I got to ask. That's my mission. Okay, so I got to ask you, because HP always has, the cloud system was involved and John and Kelly and all these little pockets of offerings. You're at GM, you have to deliver. And HP, GM is a big deal. So you're going to be under the gun to produce value in terms of revenue. What are you attacking? What market specifically are you going after? Also, you have to go into the product groups with GTA Potter and across different companies and put that together. What beachhead are you going after? Where are you going to land and expand on? Well, you know, we're picking those market opportunities based on what the customers tell us they want to do. You know, there's a lot of different things you could do. You could focus on security appliances and you could focus on video surveillance, video appliances, there's a lot of things that people are interested in doing, but we're going after pretty much the list that I said. We're going to focus on private cloud, take that thousand customers today that are using cloud system, make it a lot easier and a lot simpler for a lot more people to buy more cloud systems. The second one is virtual infrastructure. You know, the rate of adoption of, you know, VMware, Hyper-V technologies like KVM is still accelerating. So there's a lot of opportunity there and a lot of demand from customers and channel partners for products in that space that are just simple, well-integrated and easy to work with. And the third one is, you know, the buzzwords, big data, but they're underneath that. There's a couple of different major use cases. SAP HANA is one. You got, we've got, you know, 40,000, 47,000 SAP customers that are all trying to figure out how can I get over to HANA? And so we're going to build a solution around that. We've got some of that today and we have a lot more coming. We're going to do a lot with Vertica and I think that there's a lot we're going to be able to do with it. And so those are the big areas that we're focused on right now. And what's the expansion plan internally in terms of headcount, sales force? You're going to handle the go-to markets, that means you've got to build out a sales force. Existing sales force, what are you thinking there? Well, you know, I think that there's two parts of it. So if we do make it simpler, we do make it easier to understand, easier to work with, a lot more people ought to be able to sell it. So what I would like to do is I want to work through the specialists we have today, the CI team, we have folks that know an awful lot about cloud, but really we want to be able to get all of the HP Enterprise Group sales people to be able to be effective with this. And probably the second part of it, perhaps more important, is the channel. You know, the channel partners that we have today have been with HP in an awfully long time. They've been very, very successful with our server business. A lot of them have adopted a free part and they're coming back to us and saying, you know, what can you do next? Give me something else. Give me something else to sell. So we're going to be very focused on doing that and leveraging their expertise. We had AppNet on yesterday. They were very clear that, hey, you know, we've seen this movie before in client server and they see the services opportunity on top of it pretty compelling. So in terms of a channel partner, I mean, it's profitable. Yeah, I think, you know, the major distributors like AppNet and Aero and certainly Tech Data and a few others, they've been asking us for, you know, new product lines that can help them do more. And again, those exact areas, virtual infrastructure, HANA, they want us. And I've had a lot of those meetings here over the last couple of days and they want solutions that they can move a lot of and they can make their businesses more effective and get more influence with their customers. So that's going to be key to it. Tom, what about this, you know, open source, big groundswell right now, open source software. And John and I have been talking a lot on SiliconANGLE, we can bond about this notion of infrastructure, not as a box but as a platform that you can enable, you know, things like big data analytics using utilizing Vertica, you know, providing a platform for ISVs to actually come in and exploit it and add value, you know, beyond what you guys can even do. Has that something that sort of entered the discussion at HP at this point? Well, yes, it has, you know, I think in a couple of key ways. So you said a couple of things I would just point out. One is that, you know, open source is clearly, you know, a model that gives everybody a lot of leverage. You know, we've made a big commitment to it. In particular, we've made a big commitment to open stack and we're one of the top technology partners that's working with open stack. So one of the things that we just did here at this event is we announced something called CloudOS. And CloudOS is not a product, it's effectively an open stack distribution, kind of an open stack kernel that, you know, we can use in a variety of ways. And we've adopted that into cloud system now. So our private cloud, our cloud system offering, the one that we've got a thousand customers out there that I'm not responsible for, it is compatible with open stack. And what you'll see going forward is more and more leverage of that. And it gives us better, you know, velocity in terms of the more we can leverage there, the better. And it gives the customers a whole set of alternatives that have a different set of economics than buying from the traditional software vendors. So that's huge. I think the second part of it is that we are using that leverage to focus our attention on how do we do next generation management? How do we bring a lot of value to customers that the open source community maybe doesn't do quite so well? So the marriage of our IP and our partnership with the open source community, especially around open stack, is a pretty powerful trend for us. Yeah, I mean, the management today is siloed. It's a metadata locked up in the box. You guys are doing some cool stuff with Flash. You can see bubbling that up into that environment, making a shared resource and allowing policy to be more dynamic than it is today. That's exactly right. I think that's, you know, Matrix. If you look at what Matrix has done and Matrix is the core management engine in cloud system, it was really one of the first products that attempted to do that. And, you know, again, I've been around a lot of management software efforts that, you know, had big plans and didn't deliver. But we got a thousand customers using that right now. So it's got some significant stick time out in the field. And what you will see, and I won't, you know, tell the whole story now, because I don't want to do the product launch here yet on theCUBE, but before too long, you will see some things coming out of our group that will take that experience to an entirely new level and OpenStack is a key component of that. Well, we've certainly been digging in. We've heard some rumors. We won't report until we've got full confirmation. But we're hearing code words and some cool stuff. But this comes down into the data center of the future. So one of the things I want to ask you is that to me, this is a mandate. Making you the SVP GM is Donna Telly's mandate. Look, it conversions is happening. And it might not look like what it was two years ago. You've had that view from storage. The data center has lower footprint, higher density, higher performance. Now you got managed cloud. So Amazon has certainly played the public cloud play. You guys are a value cloud. So as you go to the market with the channel and your resources, you got HP at your disposal from the resource. How are you going to cobble together that value cloud? What's your vision on that? Well, I have a critical partner, a peer of mine. His name's Sar Goli. And I don't know if you've had me. He's coming on later for that. Okay, so Sar is a personal friend and he's also a great partner. And he's responsible for a converged cloud at HP, right? And that includes the work that I'm doing with cloud system. It also includes the HP cloud. It includes a lot of this work around OpenStack. So he's got a pretty big job. And if we can bring together those resources where we all do our part in a way that's, that is seamless in terms of the presentation of the customer. There's an awful lot we can do that, frankly, I don't know anybody else that can do what we're trying to accomplish there. I think the other part of it is, it isn't just about HP's own cloud. We have a partner network out there, both in channel partners, but also in service providers. You'll recall that with 3PAR, we did a great job working with those service providers. They were our first and best customers for 3PAR. Well, off of that experience, we built something called Cloud Agile. Cloud Agile is a program where we work with even competitive cloud service providers to what we do internally. And they use our technology, we arm them, and they do unique things, and we go partner with them in the field. We do phone marketing, we do co-selling, we help them get more business on their cloud. I have the 3PAR red herring on my desk in my back in the office in Bobbell. That's right. And I go to it every now and then, it's all about utility computing. That was the parlance of the day back then. Yeah, it was, that's right. Tom, I kind of like the execution cadence that HP has around Discover. You got your June Discover in the US, and you've got something either in November, December timeframe in Europe. And it seems like you guys put pressure on yourself to make innovations for those events. So, I know you're new, and you'll only be in, let's say, six months, but thinking ahead, six months, maybe even a year ahead, what are the things that observers should be looking for in terms of milestones and progress that you're making in your group? Well, you know, you hit it on the head. So, that timeframe, Discover in December, we want to have a big, big bang there. So, we're six weeks into this. We'll be six months into it at that point. You can expect us to have a very strong presence at Discover in December, and a lot of great stuff to talk about. So, basically, the description I just gave you, a lot of that we want to have come true in that timeframe. The other thing to watch is that we'll start to see pieces of this management vision come out over that timeframe and through the next year. So, that's probably the thing I'm most excited about is starting to be able to go out and tell that story and get some feedback. Well, it is exciting. In fact, here at this event, we have an NDA lab, and if customers want to sign an NDA, they can get a sneak peek at some of what we're doing in that area, which is really pretty exciting. Yeah, some visibility on that. I mean, it is exciting because people watch them, they look at the hyperscale guys, and they kind of salivate it. The levels of automation they can achieve, but they're looking for people, technology companies, like HP, to come in and actually solve those problems because they don't have PhDs running around, and you guys are, I think, filling that gap. And the other thing we're hearing a lot is some of the hyperscale guys are saying, all right, this scale out thing, you can only take it so far. It's getting really expensive. You know, they're spending a billion dollars a year on CapEx and Wall Street to squeeze in them a little bit. And so, there's things we can learn from hyperscale, things that enterprise customers are looking to adopt, they don't have the resources, that's what they look to you. Yeah, hyperscale is real, but again, it does come down to management, technology, and federated management technology in particular. Some things we do have now in the market are things like we have a cluster management utility for Hadoop. And it's designed to do that, to manage a cluster of thousands and thousands of nodes. And that's a piece part that will be fundamental to a lot of this conversion for structure that we're doing and the conversion management that I'm talking about. So yeah, it does come down to real IP innovation. You've got to have people doing hardcore engineering on some of these difficult problems and HB is a company that's got a legacy of doing that kind of innovation and it's fun to be a part of, to be honest with you. My final question, I know we've got time's crunch here, so I want to get one final question. Just quickly summarize Sars role and your role just for the folks out there, just we're going to separate this. He's got Converge Cloud, you have Cloud System. What does that mean? Well, what it really means is, so we're building the Cloud System, the EG Enterprise Group Cloud System, server storage, networking, matrix software, the software wrapper around that. That has to work with our HP Cloud. It has to work with the tools and software that we're building in HP software like Cloud Services Automation and many of the capabilities that they have. And so on one level, he's got a governance role. So let's make this all work together. On the other hand, he's got a set of brilliant architects, including himself. So he's leading an open-stack effort. He's leading the open-stack effort. And so he's a partner and frankly, a supplier. So that Cloud OS open-stack role, we use that and so we work with him to make sure that he's building things that we can use and vice versa. He's a customer. He's a customer supplier, he's kind of bi-directional. So the thing is, when you're in a company of this size, you need people like that can think about the architecture globally. So folks like me can go do our job and execute stuff. So you're basically going to take Donatelli's toolbox, storage networking and servers and make it Cloud. That's correct. And then give that to Tsar for him to sell productizing over he renders Cloud. Yeah, make it part of the whole HP Cloud effort. Ideally, you want to have one face to the outside world and we're all working together and Tsar's a really key partner. Awesome. But don't tell him I said something about him. Keep the pressure on. We'll make some stuff up. No, we won't. Congratulations, Tom. Really, Dave and I were both last night super excited for you personally because you're a high-class individual, high integrity, great executive. And hey, we've been following your career. You've done some great work and now that. You guys have been great friends in and out of the Cube and I really look forward to your future success and anything we can do to help. We appreciate your support. Good luck and we'll be following you. You know, need anything? Cube time, let us know. Great mission. This is what it's all about. Software-led infrastructure. We heard it yesterday with storage, the three-part, the success, the profitability is leading the way in this transformation. Tom Joyce here, Senior Vice President, General Manager of Cloud Systems Group now, really taking on a new role, changing the game, congratulations. We'll be right back with our next guest here inside the Cube after this short break.