>> Voiceover: Live from Las Vegas, it's The Cube covering HPE Discover 2017. Brought to you by Hewlett-Packard Enterprise. >> Welcome back everyone. This is The Cube's day two coverage of HPE Discover 2017. We're here live in Las Vegas. I'm John Furrier, the co-founder of SiliconAngle Media. My other co-founder Dave Vellante, head of research at Wikibon.com. And our next guests are Kevin Wan, Director of Software Defined and Cloud Group Marketing at HPE, and William Fellows, co-founder and VP of Research at 451 Research, well-known research firm with Wikibon, and some of the other research firms out there, covering the cloud. Guys welcome to The Cube. >> Thanks for having us, it's exciting day today. >> So the first thing I want to get into here is, we were just talking before we went on live, about multicloud and kind of having a great debate, it's great, it's a great debate because it really is a hard definition to knock down. And Wikibon has done some research, you've got some new research, I want to get into that. Dave done some, I think, called, True Private Cloud, that shows not a decline in on-prem and server deployment, there's actually an increase. Hybrid cloud is increasing. You guys got some new research. What is the state of enterprises with respect to moving to cloud, vis-a-vis hybrid. 'Coz certainly there's movement there. What's going on? >> So, users want to make decisions about where to place applications, and workloads, and source services based upon policy, based upon latency, based upon geography, and so on. And as the worlds of cloud and hosting, and co-location and managed services, as they converged those options are growing exponentially. And, you know, what HP has been doing is to bring into view tools which allow organizations to select those best environments to meet their hybrid IT needs. And what we've seen in 451 Research is that between now and the next couple of years, there's going to be an increased momentum to put those workloads and applications into different kinds of cloud environments. In other words, when you talk to an organization, they say, "Well, we've got a bit of SaaS here. "We're using a bit of public cloud here. "We're using some other hosting services. "We're doing things on-premise." Already they're using multiple cloud services. So when we asked our global commentator network of about 60,000 folks for whom enterprise IT is their day job, which we call voice of the enterprise, they've told us that between now and in two years' time, existing 40% of workloads in those cloud environments is going to become 60%. In other words, the majority of workloads in two years' time are going to be running in some kind of cloud environment. Now, the mix of those is going to be different depending on different organizations. But we found a variance of less than about 10% across different vertical markets, which suggests there's an interesting benchmark, if you like, a right mix coming into view in terms of the balance of when you would use public cloud services, when you would use hosted private, and when you would use on-premise services. >> Ken I want to get your thoughts on this because that's a great point he's bringing up. The cloud business model is not necessarily, I have to move it to public. You can do cloud-like on-premise. That's where the True Private Cloud comes in. To your point, there is a massive shift to cloud-like, and there's a trend towards the same software on-prem as in the cloud. So, as these things get laid out, you're seeing that path. So just because you're still on-prem doesn't make you not cloud, right? >> That's right, that's exactly right. So what we're seeing is, as William was saying, is that there's an interest in figuring out where is the best place for workload to go? Based on its performance needs, it's security, compliance, cost needs. And often we find that sometimes traditional IT leaving a traditional IT environment is the best thing to do. Sometimes it's best to put it into a private cloud, sometimes it's best to put it into a public cloud. So we're seeing a lot of customers with multiple clouds, on average, somewhere between five and eight clouds today. And the challenge they're starting to have now is, "My God, I've got five to eight clouds. "How do I manage all these?" >> "How'd that happen?" Clouds brawl. >> Yeah, and so, but there's very little interoperability between them. And so you have different stacks of management for each of these clouds. And there's a fair amount of resource required to manage all these different clouds. So I think what the next thing you'll start seeing are tools that allow you to migrate resources, or look at clouds more holistically, and to analyze the entire cloud environment, all the multiple clouds, and to be able to use policy, and then analyze where is the best location automatically, and to be able to pull cost data out, performance data out, across the whole cloud environment. >> And this is what we've, at 451 research has been calling best execution venue for about 10 years now. So the idea is that for every class of IT-related business need, there's an environment which best balances performance, and cost, and other things. And IT should be able to deploy to that environment automatically. And get the benefits associated with having things in the right resources and the right services they need. >> That's right. Our view is that people need to figure out their right mix. Every company will use a different amount of SaaS, private cloud, public cloud, based on their company strategy. An online bank will have different requirements than a brick-and-mortar bank, as an example. Even though they're in the same industry. Because their business models are different, their mix will be different. So we work with each company to figure out what their right mix should be, where do they need that portability. One of the exciting things that we're doing today at Discover is talking about Microsoft Azure Stack. We've worked with Microsoft to bring out this new offering that provides full compatibility between what's running on-premise and what's running in a public cloud. So Azure Stack uses the ability to run Azure-consistent services right out of your data center with its fully API compatible. So that means, as a developer, I can write an application and deploy it into either a public cloud or a private cloud, with no change to the code at all. >> So the extensibility is the key message here. You don't have to adopt Azure Stack from the Azure cloud. You can actually mirror that on-prem in a cloud-like way that's still on-prem. And you can call that private cloud. I mean you can call it private cloud but then that's what it is. >> Right, right. >> But that's obviously going to resonate with developers, this whole notion of infrastructures as codes. So one of the things that CEOs complain about is we spent way too much money on non-differentiated infrastructure management. And so to the extent that you're putting in these clouds, private cloud, whatever, hybrid clouds, that substantially mimic public cloud, William, what does your research show in terms of how organizations are shifting their spending on labor? If that premise is true that CEOs don't want to spend it on, you know, provisioning LANs, but they do wanted initiate digital transformation initiatives. Are you seeing any evidence that this notion of cloud is helping on-prem, is helping them shift their spending on labor? >> So what I would say is that cloud provides the basis and the platform for broader digital transformation agendas. And cloud brings with it some really important changes in the operating model which affect staffing and how you do these things. So, for example, moving from a process development which is waterfall or top down to, agile, from moving from a situation where resources are allocated from one where they are consumption based. So from installing new things in different Silos to where things are updated on a continuous basis. So those things have a dramatic effect on the way you organized internally in order to support that, which indeed then set you up for doing these things that would create a digital platform. So linking technology, information assets, customer experience, marketing, and so on. And I think Devoxx is at the heart of that because it provides the automation, the process change, 'coz remember what we're talking about here is moving from, you know, a world in which, you've talked about, the Silo, to one in which is collaborative, to one in which is multidirectional, and to one which is based on sharing. And I think all of those things have an impact on how you staff for those. I think there's been enough research to understand that not everyone is going to make it necessarily in this transformation. But I think our research indicates that at least 2/3 of the folks in silent organization bind to the things that they will need to be doing in order to support this digital transformation. >> We've certainly seen, the many customers that I've talked to, look at this and see this huge opportunity for essentially automating a lot of functions, you know, the LANS, the networks, installing the application, the databases, and all that. And through this automation, all these people who used to do this now are available to be re-skilled, to do higher level, more value-differentiating sorts of work. All these IT departments are struggling because they want to bring, focus more of their effort on new services but they're so much work to just maintaining the existing services. They don't have the time. So one of the things the cloud does is reduce the mundane day-to-day time and take those resources and move them on a more differentiated value-creating types of services so that they can advance their businesses. >> Ken, interesting point, I mean, yes they were talking about IT, information technology, those two words, I mean, they're not going away, they're only getting stronger. And it's interesting that some of the narrative in the media is the decline of servers, decline of storage shipments. Now I get that, those boxes may or may not be sold in the same volumes as it was before. But the growth shifting somewhere else. And that's the issue. I want to get your thoughts on that. Because it's not the decline in the IT. It is growing if you look at the private cloud and your report suggests that there's a massive growth. So your point about shifting to the value stack is interesting. So what are you seeing with the customers? What specifically are they doing in that shift with IT resources? Is it app development? Is it more operational automation? What are some of the things that you're observing? >> We're seeing through this digital transformation, a desire to automate a lot of the common functions that they use to automate, so that they can speed up services, speed up VMs in minutes rather than days, being able to provide PaaS services to their developers. So the developers, instead of getting a VM from the IT department, then having to load in the database, the middleware, all these development tools, that he should go into his environment and request an environment, the environment automatically comes up. So now the developer doesn't have to spend time figuring out what version of database, what version of middleware, all that. The environment's up and running and he can just focus on writing code, which is ultimately what we want to do, is to help our customers get the developers doing more of what they do best, which is writing code and less of this infrastructure management kind. >> Yes they automate a way and they move to higher value-- >> Well I guess at the top of the pile there, you know, the old adage used to be that, you know, for CIOs cloud meant, you know, career is over. >> John: Not anymore (laughs). >> But what that really should apply, it means, you know, becoming the chief innovation officer, and returning to innovating for the business rather than just keeping the lights on right? >> That's right. It gives the IT folks an opportunity to think about how can you apply this new technology to the business challenges that the line of business are having. So that they can bring together those thoughts. It's very often the line of business guys don't know enough about the technology. And the technology guys don't know enough about the line of business. You've got to have somebody who knows both sides who could see how you can apply new technology to accelerate the business. >> So that underscores that the organizational roles are changing. Lest, like you say, doing this provisioning, server provisioning, more strategic initiatives. There's an area in the market place that everybody sort of talking about as jump-all, which is this multicloud, intercloud management. Nobody really dominates that. Hewlett-Packard Enterprise, obviously, has a good position there. So first question is, what are you seeing in terms of the changing role of the IT department, the gestalt of that? And what does that mean in terms of opportunities for Hewlett-Packard Enterprise? Maybe William you could take the first? >> So what I would say is the IT department is increasingly becoming a broker of services, both those that are created internally and those that are procured from outside. And so what they need is a way to be able to to provision those, to be able to manage, to build a meter and charts, for those who implement security, and governance, and so on. So what we're seeing is the rise of sets of cloud management technologies and real large, you know, we talked about, a cloud management platform that enables users to find, access, and use, you know, a range of different kind of services. And this is what HP is going to be providing with, you know, the New Stack. And the New Stack is effectively a cloud management platform. >> Absolutely >> Right Ken? >> So talked about the opportunity that you see from Hewlett-Packard Enterprise's perspective. >> So what we see is exactly that the challenge that you laid out, is that there's a lot of different clouds out there but there's still a lot of manual work to have to configure and manage them individually. And so one of the things that we announced at the show is something what we call Project New Stack. So this is a vision for how we're going to enable our customers to manage a multicloud environment. So imagine if someone is using AWS, Azure, Google, VMware, OpenStack, >> Containers, Kubernetes. >> and you have a way to look across all of these different clouds and say I can see where my spend is. I can see where my capacity is. And I can do that not only as a whole but from my finance department, they can see their part as well. The HR department can see their resource usage. So now we have a way to look across the entire computing environment, the cloud environment. And understand cost utilization performance at a more holistic level, rather than at an individual level. So we look at this from three different personas. You have to think about this. And we've talked about people and organizations. So one of these personas is the IT guy, right? He has to worry about operation. So we give him a portal where he can set this environment up, where we can make connectivity into all these services on the public cloud and private cloud. We have a different persona where if it was a developer. So that developer doesn't care about the infrastructure, they don't care, all they want is access to their development tools. So we give him access to a whole market place, to different tools, whether that's Chef, Puppet, all these answerable, all these tools that they can use to do their dev ops work. And then there's the line of business. This line of business, again, he doesn't care about the network, or the storage. What he cares about is how much money am I spending? Are my services meeting the performance requirements? So we see the shift to these three very clear personas that need to interact with this environment what we call Project New Stack, and to look at how we enable this multicloud environment. >> So Project New Stack supports this notion of an IT operations management center that allows to have full visibility and control over all my clouds, my SaaS, my on-prem, my public clouds, protecting that data, securing that data. How far away are we from that nirvana? >> And not to be locked in right? Because I think one of the things that characterizes Project New Stack versus other approaches, is that it allows organizations to access and use different kinds of servers. 'Coz the danger with these things is that, you know, everyone talks about, you know, a single pane of glass, that they can easily become a single glass of pane if they don't allow you to do these things. >> That's a good point, I mean-- >> That's correct. And one of the challenges we see from the developer world is developers like to use the tools they like to use, you know, they don't like to be told what to do. So it's very important that there's ability for the developers to bring in the latest and greatest tool that their buddy, you know, that they work with just heard about, to bring in 'coz it's going to make their job a lot easier. So this Project New Stack has strong integrations to third party products and the ability to bring in new developers. >> This is a challenge and opportunity. We should follow up on this. But I want to get your final thoughts on this, both of you. Because this is an interesting challenge, but an opportunity. Too many tools, same hammer, five different versions of a hammer you have. Now multicloud which has kind of been by accident, on purpose, people just got to Amazon over here, they wake up and they go, "Oh my God, I'm in multiple clouds." That doesn't mean multiclouds in the sense of seamless workloads moving around and best resource. So in a way there's an existing kind of legacy set up here. So your thoughts on how customers can manage this. Is that accurate? Do you agree or-- >> So, you raise a good point. So there's a small percentage of folks who are using multiple clouds to fulfill a single business process. However, the majority, when they say hybrid cloud, it just means they're using different clouds to meet different needs at different times. >> Workloads, on Azure, I've got some Office 365, I've got some analytics on Redshift-- >> Exactly, but we haven't seen is organization's moving workloads and applications between clouds based upon minute by minute or penny by penny changes in price. However, the world of HP and other folks envisage is one where you will be able to, because of the needs of a particular application or a geography or latency, you will be able to move data between these things. >> Or cost as you said. >> Exactly. >> So build a stack for your company basically. So you're essentially giving a composability fabric, and go to a company and saying, "Hey, there's no general purpose products anymore, "here's a New Stack approach where you can kind of," I won't say cobble together, but you know, stitched together what they need. >> Put together your right environment, and in fact it's not just going to be about moving application across different clouds based on container technology, it's certainly one of the things that we'll be doing, but even beyond that, it's the ability to run different micro services on different clouds so your actual service is actually running on multiple clouds, all managed together by a single environment. And the operator can look and say, "Oh looks like this service needs a little more resource, "so let me automatically provide that more resource." So we're scaling up, your application continues to meet its needs. That's where this is really getting interesting. >> Because micro services aren't always so micro. (laughs) >> You know latency and data are really important factors in this multicloud. I want to continue this conversation. >> But also if you leave the hyper-scalers to one side, every other organization is becoming a broker of cloud services to some extent. In other words, what I mean is, they're offering access to, not only their own services but to third party services as well, because if they don't, the customers are going to go elsewhere. So they need the mechanism to be able to manage that. >> That's right, that's exactly right. >> It's a great opportunity for HP to take that whole market and increase that TAM of that cloud service provider if you will, I mean-- >> Huge opportunity. >> anyone in the SaaS business is essentially a cloud provider. So you call them a cloud service provider I guess. Guys thanks so much. William great to meet you and have your commentary here on The Cube, appreciate it. Ken thanks so much for the New Stack conversation and hybrid IT. This is The Cube. Day two coverage of three days. I'm John Furrier for Dave Vellante. Stay with us for more coverage after this short break. (soft upbeat music)