Live from Las Vegas, Nevada, it's the Cube at IBM Edge 2014. Brought to you by IBM. Now here are your hosts, John Furrier and Dave Vellante. Okay, welcome back everyone here in Las Vegas live at IBM Edge 2014. This is the Cube, our flagship program. We go out to the events and extract the signal from the noise. I'm John Furrier, the founder's looking angle. Joe Mykos, Dave Vellante, co-founder wigibond.org. Our next guest is Carl Deshine, who is the co-president of PCD Solutions, winner of the Pureflex Winning Edge Award. Also, we found out a Montreal Canadians fan, which as Bruins fans, you watch us. You know, Dave and I love the Boston Bruins, love all Boston sports except, yeah, although I like to range a little bit, seeing some of them growing up. Welcome to the Cube. Thank you. Good resist. Bruins and Bruins, that's kind of an interesting thing. I love the Montreal's away uniforms. I mean, they're now their home use. The dark uniforms are by far, Dave, the best hockey uniforms out there. Anyway, welcome to the Cube, thank you. So you're the winner of the Winning Edge. Tell us about the award. The award, it's because of the investment that we did, the success that we did to convert a lot of customers to that new kind of computing approach, the integrated systems approach. So that's for Canada. So what was the driver there? Why, it's not easy for a customer necessarily to say, okay, I used to buy my storage, my compute, my networking separately, and now I'm just going to buy them in one block. It's hard, right? Because they have organizations not set up that way. So how were you able to be so successful? I agree with your point, because within our company it will always say, pure flex is not something that is bought, it's something that has to be sell. So we need to understand the value of the integrated computing, and then tear that apart and put that all together and say, okay, I was going to improve the efficiency for a customer, and that's what we did. Like the first, what we did first, we bought our own pure flex, gave that to the engineer, and they looked at it, teared it apart, and put that back together, did a great report for my sellers to see if there's any possible pitfalls. So this built a lot of confidence my seller and they were able to bring the story on the market and start driving good conversation with customers. Carl, what are the customers, give us some examples. What are they doing with pure flex? What kind of applications are they running, and how are they changing their infrastructure? There's many ways, you can run, most of them runs VMware, so it goes very well with VMware. Some of them even have different type of load. They have UNIX load, AIX load, VMware load, Bermuda Linux, and all in the same frame, same box, same management tool. So that's one of the key. So typically what we'd like, the way we present it to a customer, we're trying to spend much less time on selecting the pieces and looking at more at the end result. It's kind of, let's say a puzzle, instead of looking at a thousand pieces puzzle, your focus is more on selecting the image on the box of the puzzle, so what you aim for, and then you turn that thousand puzzle to a bigger hundred pieces puzzle, and it's much more easier. So what kind of results do customers see? Can you share it with us? What they do when things faster, what they're cutting costs, are they saving labor and reshifting people to other tasks? I wonder if you could talk about the outcomes. As I said, because we spend much less time on selecting the pieces, more time is spent on the real added value, like okay, it takes much less time to do the implementation, so you go faster to put the implementation at the hardware in place, and then you can focus on the software, which is where the real value is, not like the infrastructure. So that's what, so there was some time savings, labor savings, and those people, sounds like they weren't fired, sounds like they were redeployed. Yeah, that wouldn't be a big, that wouldn't go over well. So they're redeployed toward the application. Yes, and they can start the application much faster, and it's kind of, and this is a good step for a cloud, the private cloud or hybrid cloud, or what I would say more, the beneficial things that you expect from a cloud, so it's efficiency, agility, like you can grow faster also, depending on you. So is that the big drive of people essentially trying to duplicate the public cloud within their own private infrastructure? At first when we sold it, no, but you see that's a very good foundation to do it. So now customers looking more and more of doing it has a private cloud. So to deliver good value to their customer. As a channel partner, when you're looking at something like Pure Flex, are you sometimes tempted to try to add in different components and say, oh well, maybe we can use this storage or maybe we could use this networking or are you pretty disciplined about it? I mean, as always, you know, if a customer says, well, I would buy it if, you know, what do you do in those situations? You know, that's the strain of Pure Flex because all of the pieces were very comfortable and brings a lot of value. So instead of spending our time on the pieces line, that's a, oh, I'd rather do it with this storage, let's say. Yeah. We bring back the conversation and then we, instead, we invest our time in best practices and patterns so that we can replicate on an, or the customer can replicate when they do a new deployment. So the time it's spent over there. And for storage, let's say, with Pure Flex because of the V7000 and store lines, if they want to use their existing, they just do it in the organization. So this is great. So that's actually quite unique in the industry. I think in fairness, I guess, Hitachi can do that as well, but IBM is unique in that regard. Now, so I have to ask you, so how are you, or are you at all affected by the Lenovo acquisition? Like parts of Pure Flex, the networking piece, I think goes over, right? And obviously any x86 goes over. So as a partner, what do you think about that? Do you have any concerns? How is IBM communicating to you? Okay. There's a couple of questions. Yeah, there's a lot of questions. And there's a timeframe. So if we go back, I think it's kind of January, end of January, when they announced that, it kind of put a bit of fear into our customers. Like the one that they were just making a decision on doing it, so it slowed down for us, it slowed down our business for a couple of months. Then we're a good reseller, but our main advantage we don't work for IBM, we work for the customer. So what we did, we did our homework to see how comfortable are we with that transition. So, so far so good. It lagged a bit for us, like it put a bit of fud, but now it's back on track. The only question marks still that for us who was a bit more of a pain is the power note, that it's not the power eight won't be available till at least a year. So that's the only cloud, the bad cloud for us. Okay, but there's only so much you can do about that, right, you can't control that. Now, are you also reselling storage or just? Yes, we do, yeah. Maybe talk about that a little bit. What's happening in the storage market? How's that changing? You're hearing about software defined, you're hearing about Flash. You know, a new portfolio from IBM, how does that affect your business? That's, they have a very good line of products now. So typically what we do, we take the technology, we're very good technologists, but at the same times, our added value is more the business. So we take that and say, we try to see what the path technology, if we can take that and bring value to the customer. And there's like, with the new announcement on the V7000, there's the new performance, this is so great, so we got, customer can use that. So Carl, I want to ask you about the customers. What is the critical top three things that they are working on right now? As they transform the IT, there's a lot of innovation strategies that include Flash, Cloud. What are the top three that you see across the customer base, where the most attention and investment are allocated to? We saw a lot of the movement out of the VDI, customer looking, implementing, desktop virtualization, that's a big topic. Typically when we go see a customer, we don't talk about Flash, we don't talk about technology for a sake. Solutions. Solutions, yeah. And VDI would be one. When we see a lot of movement on, sometimes customer doesn't call it Cloud, but they say, okay, we want to be more agile, we want to be more flexible, we want to reduce costs. So to us, equal private Cloud. So that's, to us, to private Cloud, it's more a journey than a project. So we are bringing a lot of our customer to that journey. How about application development? Is that hot right now? And how is that changing? I guess, but we don't do that. So it wouldn't be fair. But your customers are, they're moving fast around that? Yes, and you know what, it comes to my point on the Pureflex, so less time spent on implementing hardware. Even though we sell hardware, this isn't the main thing. Like hardware, it's only the first set. The real value is on the application. So they can have more time to better develop their. Do you focus on any particular application area? Microsoft, Oracle, SAP, VMware? We do a lot of SAP. We do a VMware big time. We do a lot of SAP. SAP, Ana, it's a big thing for us. We have a couple of customers who implemented that. That's pretty good. Do you have expertise there? Specific expertise? Do you get paid a higher margin because you have that expertise, or is that just something you do to drive business? I would say we got more project because of that. So you win more business? Yes. Final question I want to ask you is, what is the biggest surprise that you've had with Pureflex this year? That really shook you up and said, wow, a big surprise with Pureflex. Besides winning the award for the winning edge. That would be the biggest one. The other big surprise was we won against Buster. So that top, the brooms, so that top everything. But I mean infrastructure right now is hot. You can see OpenStack, the cloud. You mentioned private cloud. Has there been any big highlights and surprises you've had? I see more and the customer more looking into integrated systems more and more. That's a new way of doing the IT, a lot or a piece of the IT. So Pureflex, no, it just keep on going the way it was supposed to be. So no surprise, no surprise, it's good too. Yeah, so it's working well. It's working very well. Well, surprise or relief or satisfaction. There was no pitfalls or no pink paint. Well, Dave, as you know, infrastructure's a service or something that's on our mind. Carl, thanks for joining us inside the Cube. Really appreciate it. Go Canadians, well actually Rangers got up two games in the none. No, we'd like to see the games win to make it a series, you know? We don't want to make it that easy for them. They took out the goalie. I mean that's pretty, he slipped and lost his edge. Three series in a row. So same way. He's got to get his blade sharpened. This is the Cube. We're shopping our blade here talking to customers here at IBM Edge live in Las Vegas. We'll be right back here for this short break.


I'm really enjoying the performance today. I thought straight from the kick-off I thought we were progressive. We got on the ball earlier than we did last time out. I thought our tempo of our passing was better and that allowed us to change the points of attack on numerous occasions. Newport are a good team and they play in a certain way. They get a lot of people around the ball and they try and restrict your areas in which you can penetrate. We talked before the game about looking for the switches to play because if you do it quickly enough you can get out on the other side and we did that time and time again. We played a good team today who are challenging for those playoff places and really restricted them to one click or chance right at their death and I think that shows how well we're playing at them all. That progressive play you talked about is that us seeing your ideas coming across more and more as we approach the end of the season. It's about focusing and building on what we can do. I think so. I think people enjoyed the performance today. I think they saw a team that's came back there on what we're trying to do. There's certain elements of our play that we need to improve on. I think that's a given for any group of players but improvement only comes from repetition of work and every week we have where if we're building on the base that way we talk about the old fundamentals, those never go away. So it's about just continuing the same vein. I've said many many times that this group wants to get better and they listen and they're coachable and I think everybody's seeing that there's improvement in each and every one of them. When we talk about teams coming here and not looking forward to playing as you mentioned a side like Newport challenging for promotion and trying to take the sting out of us, trying to slow the game down. Is that complement us as well? Absolutely, all those elements should give us confidence. Clearly they felt they were under the coach. They're absolutely delighted with the point they've taken from us and clearly we're more than happy with that because if they were honest as a group they probably felt that they got away with one there. But it's up to us to put these teams away when we're in good shape and we're in the ascendancy, that's when we've got to take our chances and make sure that we finish games off. We haven't quite got that element right yet, but that will come. I guess in terms of squad finally being able to welcome Elliot Watt and Alex Gilead back starting burst and being able to bring the likes of Dion Parer and Charles Verne and quality like that off the bench must be pleasing for you. Yeah, it shows we have got good players in the group and we've got a little bit of strength and depth that we can utilise at the right moments. I thought Charles and Dion came on to a really good effect, did exactly what I wanted from them in terms of making an impact and giving the opposition a different problem because that's what you wanted your substitutions to do.


Hi everybody, we're back, this is Dave Vellante and with Stu Miniman, and this is theCUBE. We're live at theCUBE, and we're talking cloud. Steve is a CUBE alum, he's VP of Cloud Solutions, and welcome back. Thank you very much. Good to see you. Glad to be back.  You know, I grew up in Boston and had season tickets all throughout the 80s. So I'm a little older than you are, I don't know if you remember those days. I remember, well, you know, I was the bird magic era with Kareem and everything when it was an epic event. Did you read the book? I did read the book. Yeah, it was good, wasn't it? Yeah, it was a very good book, yeah. So I mean, it isn't the same today. It really isn't, those two changed basketball. It was just an epic event where you would race home from school. I was there when Henderson stole the ball, was there when Jack was saying, at Boston Gardens saying so what? But in the end, I have to hats off to the Lakers. They got the best of the Celtics, and the Celtics were a great franchise back then. Yeah, well, the tights turned a little this year. Yeah, so, well, Lakers, you know, right there with the Celtics, so the greatest team, greatest franchise in history. How many have they won? They've won 12? 12, or yeah, or something up there. And the Celtics are 13, so. Yeah, hey, mate, they might hang another banner in the garden. I thought the Celtics were going to win, what was it, 0-8? Yeah. And Ron Artest. Ron Artest. The guy didn't do anything the whole series. I thought he came alive, you must have been stoked. I don't know, you know, it's been two bad years now. I'm getting, you know, they've got a retool. You know, Kobe's not exactly a young chicken anymore at 33, 34, he's been in the league. He's been in the league 16 years. I know, he's a pretty amazing player. The thing is, you know, a lot of people don't like him, but he's got to give him a lot of credit. But I think his LA is such an attractive spot and you can get talent. Yeah, they've got to build it. I mean, he just can't do it himself as much as he wants to. 49 points a night just is going to do it. So anyway, let's go back to something else. We can talk about this while we're here.  Yeah, so yeah, it's more fun talking sports, isn't it? All right, so Cloud, so tell us what's going on at Discover with your whole Cloud play. Yeah, so, you know, in April, we announced HP's Cloud strategy, Converge Cloud, which is the industry's first hybrid approach and portfolio based on a common architecture. So, common architecture across private Cloud, managed Cloud, public Cloud, and let's not forget, traditional IT. A lot of people don't like to talk about traditional IT, but you know what, as long as you're not that old, we're not at all, but as long as we're on this planet, traditional IT is still going to be important. So where's the white space in Cloud? Where's the innovation that you're looking for, that you need to develop out either in R&D or through acquisitions? Well, you know, the interesting part of what we're doing is, when we looked at the strategy and we look at the architecture, HP has a tremendous portfolio, both breath and depth. If you look at the layers of the cake to build the architecture, and we've brought in HP, interestingly enough, we've brought in all of HP together, and if you heard MAG or you heard Donatello, you heard Betky, all the other executive committee members, there's three big bets at HP right now. Cloud, security, information optimization. When we looked at Cloud and we stepped back as an executive team, we said, my God, you know, we've really got some tremendous assets starting at the converged infrastructure layer, server storage and networking, management and security, tremendous number of assets, both from internally developed as well as acquisitions. Above that, information, autonomy, vertical, so unstructured, structured data, data, come on, that is the Cloud at the end of the day, how you use information, and then above that, how do you expose the experience to users? We're actually feeling pretty good about the assets, the intellectual property and the partners we're working with right now. Our job right now, I believe that customers believe the strategy is right based on the feedback we're getting. We have to execute now, that's our job. So what are customers doing with data in the Cloud? Are they there yet, are they starting to do data as a server, so they starting to monetize their data? They monetize the data, but you know, I was talking to somebody before, what's happening right now is that I think, it's the democratization of information and data. So if you look at big data in the Cloud, or data analytics in the Cloud, previously that was the field of the accessible to who? Fortune 500 companies that had to spend a gazillion dollars to gain access to heavy intensive number crunching and looking at structured unstructured data. What's happening now? You can actually access that type of capability in the credit and it goes down to, you can be a small medium business and gain the same capabilities as a large enterprise customer today. That is fundamentally a game changer for a lot of people and what you're going to see, I think, fundamentally is an explosion in innovation you've never seen before because the little guy has the capabilities of the big guy now. That has never existed before. Yeah, so now are you based in L.A. now or are you up? No, I'm up in the Bay Area. Okay, so you're in the heart of Silicon Valley, you see all this innovation going out, particularly around big data, you see amazing things happening in big data. So what excites you? What are you seeing that's interesting? Well, I think it's not so much, we've acquired autonomy and vertica and so forth and just what's going on out there is just the depth and the breadth of services that are being built on top of it, on top of big data, the harnessing of what you're going to do with it. And you like to look at it in two spheres of influence. One is what are you doing to protect yourself? So whether it be e-discovery, archiving, that type of round data, but more importantly, what are you doing to drive top-line growth? Revenue optimization, click-stream analysis, and the technology exists now to bring those two avenues to life almost in an integrated fashion, both from a structured, rows and columns and the nice need everybody delivers, but now all of this unstructured data and actually bringing it together to handle both of those dimensions, I'm excited about the whole thing. And actually bringing it to life both as an on-premise, but also exposing it as a cloud service. Steve, when we look at cloud, one of the things people had trouble with it, I think, is cloud to process. It's really not, it's changing the way I do think some, but it's not something tangible. And big data, a lot of people don't understand really the use cases. When we kind of looked at the big data space, the number one application that people use is custom. So we've been trying to collect some of the use cases and real customer interesting stories. I was wondering if you have any good anecdotes for us. For cloud in general? For cloud in general or, you know. Yeah, yeah, I mean, the predominant use case today for customers in a very, very large percentage of customers is DevTest. And interesting, so still, still, still, big, small, DevTest number one use case. Now the interesting part is, and you need to look at this, the cloud look, sports analogy. We love them. Not going to be a student body left. People are not, just like anything else in this industry, they are not going student body left. It is going to be a slow burn. People are going to take a pragmatic, strategic approach to what they want to do if they're smart.  But what this journey is going to be from the traditional IT to hybrid delivery, the best of all worlds and the converge cloud that we call it, it's going to be a journey. And that journey isn't necessarily going to be linear. And let me give you a good use case. So what we see developing more and more is, customers say, look, I need to have a much more efficient way to develop applications. I'm going to spin up an environment in the public cloud. Elastic, cost effective, I can do it quick and then I can just tear it down whenever. But you know what, I have regulatory performance, latency, whatever reasons, develop public, deploy private. And then interestingly enough, even with those security and privacy issues, they're going to go when they find themselves constrained in the private cloud, they're going to burst back to the public cloud for excess capacity. So somebody asked a question that's paying attention and says, well, Steve, you just said there were security and privacy issues, but what you do is because the application is somewhat composite, it's in chunks, you leave your sensitive data, your databases, your backend servers in the private cloud and you utilize the public cloud then for web servers and other things that need excess capacity on an ad hoc basis. That one is real interesting for a lot of customers today. Actually, the predominant use case we're seeing right now. Yeah, our surveys show that, whereas a year ago, that was not the predominant use case. It was like, eh, hybrid cloud, I'm not really sure now, it's just spiking through the roof. We fundamentally believe every customer will go to a hybrid model. How fast? We can guess. Yeah, in some form, you know. Right. Like you said, it's not student body left, but it's going to be a mix. Yeah, yeah. All right, cool. So what else is hot? Security. Security's big, you know, cloud or not cloud. You know, the interesting part is that security is becoming, it's becoming lesser of a concern. I mean, it's up here as a concern, but actually what we've seen over the last six, nine, 12 months is it used to be, you know, 80, 90% of CIOs would express security as a number one issue. The numbers are coming down. It's still up there, but it's coming down. The reason being is that some of these companies in the public cloud will spend an enormous amount of money and resources far beyond what most companies could spend to create a secure environment. Will it ever be, nothing's ever totally secure? But interestingly enough, there's so many resources being thrown at it that the comfort level is getting better. You know, I'm glad you said that. So we just did a survey in Wikibon and we said, what's your number one IT problem? Budget constraints came up number one. Data growth was number two. Data protection slash disaster recovery, business continuity was number three. Security was actually the middle of the pack and security was always top, right? Always, always, always. So to your point, I think people are becoming more comfortable with it. They realize that the benefits of cloud outweigh the risks, you know. You know what's bubbling to the top is there's a worry about complexity as you move to a hybrid environment because you can't leave your existing environment behind. So how do you manage the environment when it's on premise, off premise? And maintain the right level of service level agreements with your user base? That's a concern. So you could brute force it and just have homogeneity on your public and your private. Could. Not the greatest solution for all customers, right? But that's how you see some people trying to solve the problem. Some people doing it, but still the complexity of managing a single view and having that across. And the other one is there's, the cloud is, as you said Stuart, is less about the technology. Actually the technology is at the bottom of the ring. It's people and processes. So the lessons we've learned over the last year is the people that ignore the people and processes and rush forward usually have a big problem they have to back up. But a lot of times, and correct me if you think this is wrong, but a lot of times the technology influences the people and processes. So for example, a lot of customers use VMware for their private cloud. But a lot of the service providers don't want to use VMware. No. They want to use an alternative. They might want to use an open source system or whatever it is. And the processes that they're building up are different than what might be used in the private cloud. So you're absolutely right. The process is the key, the people in process. And there's diversity there. So that to me is the big challenge of the hybrid cloud. Well, it's interesting. So the traditional IT world is basically a hard wired silo, traditional IT. So you have infrastructure applications and information all hard wired. And it was done for a purpose. Because it was built for performance and security in silos, per application. It was never built to be agile, cost effective. What you're seeing evolve now, and this is really what struck a nerve with our customers and the why we've developed the strategy we did over the last 12 months, is that the evolving model for hybrid delivery where people want to exploit the different private managed public traditional is replicating the silo. Because each one of those models has different architectures, different management, different security, different development. So the reason why we developed the Converge Cloud was to create a common architecture, common management, common security, and the portability of the service across the properties. So we've taken that with our own intellectual property and we're exploiting OpenStack as the means to open that up from an open, from a, from a standpoint. You guys are committed to OpenStack. It's not just a marketing ploy. We didn't know it first, right? Because, hey, open source, rah, rah, rah, rah. And, well, let me ask you, is OpenStack ready for prime time? We believe so. We're utilizing it right now in our public cloud as an underlying set of foundational elements. And then as we evolve over the next 6, 12, 18 months with our architectural evolution and product adoption of the new technologies, OpenStack will be a foundational element in the entire converged infrastructure as a service layer. It'll provide the openness and the portability across multiple heterogeneous clouds.  And you're not locked in? Yeah, so take an example of not locked in. Let me just test that premise. So, okay, cool, I'm cool with OpenStack, but I hate their object store. I don't hate Swift, but let's say I do. And I want to plug in, I don't know, Nervonix or something like that, whatever it is. I can do that in your, you'll help me do that. Well, OpenStack has the plug-in technology. So we're using it more as a framework and a set of open APIs than basically being wedded to any of the generic capabilities. So HP's going to bring its intellectual property and we're going to provide plugins so you get the advantages of the openness of OpenStack, but also the differentiated intellectual property that HP brings as long as our partners as well. Where do you sit in the organization? Are you in the enterprise group? I run, I'm responsible, I'm the VP of worldwide cloud for the enterprise group. Okay, so under Donatelli's organization. All right, great. So you're part of a product and support services group, not the professional services group. We have one element of that. We have the technology services, essentially the professional services coupled to the products. So as we go out and help customers build clouds, whether it be private or public, we'll bring the enterprise group products and our technology services to deploy that. Then on the other side of the house, you have enterprise services, which is delivers consumable cloud services as a service from HP. All right, Steve Deitch, amazing as always. I just love the conversations we have with you. I love the energy and the vision. More Lakers. It's a, well, you know, we'll see. You know, I mean, it's been an interesting run.  You know, it's 2-2, we're going to gain tonight. It's got all the best to them. So yeah, good luck. Thank you very much, guys. Thanks, great to see you. All right, keep it right there. We'll be back with more sports talk. This is theCUBE, we're live from HP Discover. The Cube is this conceptual box, if you will, and we bring people inside of the Cube and then we share ideas. The Cube is a comfortable place. It's a place where people feel happy and are happy to share their knowledge with the world and we're happy to be ambassadors of that knowledge transfer.


Ukrainian troops were seen on the road towards Chasevjahr on June 9, close to the devastated city of Bakhmut. Troops riding on the top of armored vehicles raised their arms as they passed by damaged buildings and anti-tank spikes laid across fields. Almost all the residents of Chasevjahr had left after months of intense shelling.  Ukraine has reported gains around Bakhmut, which Russia captured in May after nearly a year of the deadliest ground combat in Europe since World War II. Serhi Cherevity, spokesperson for Ukraine's East Military Command, said Ukrainian forces had advanced 1.2 kilometers near Bakhmut over the past 24 hours.