The global CIO for HP sat down with Dave Vellante and John Furrier on the latest live broadcast of SiliconANGLE’s theCUBE, streaming live from the HP Discover event in Barcelona. Ramon Baez discussed his excitement with regard to the energy of the event and about the direction the company is now headed.

Reflecting on his own nine years at HP, Furrier stated the company boasted the largest intranet in the world. Baez backed that claim up and stated they still maintain that distinction. “We have over 455,000 email boxes, 72,000 servers, 15,000 high performance nodes across the globe.” And this intranet is maintained by only 6 separate data centers, down from a staggering 85 data centers globally. “We did a great job with consolidation.”

The consolidation he references has been driven by HP’s own use of the cloud to drive their business and ramp up their speed. HP Vertica has also been essential on that front. “The beauty of Vertica for us is that it provides information.” Specific to this, HP, responsible for one of every three servers built on the planet, builds in a ‘phone-home’ feature that sends information back to HP on the device’s status.

“Vertica helps us to recognize a problem before the customer may even know they have an issue,” Baez stated. When that information is recognized, HP is able to dispatch engineers into the field to fix any problems, bringing surprise and value to their customers.

Speaking to his role as CIO for the company, Baez stated his primary responsibility is to be an inspirational leader rather than a tech giant. By laying out a clearly mapped strategy and articulating how to bring that strategy to fruition, the army of engineers and developers can move forward. “I’ve learned that speed is key going forward. We are going through this turn around, moving a big ship, changing the mindset and the culture. It’s my job to show people the way.”

One key to embracing a culture of speed and agility is allowing HP employees to take advantage of BYOD. The company has in excess of 150,000 BYOD’s connected on both the Android and iOS devices. Baez claims they have had really no problems on this front.

Another of Baez’s tools he credits with helping the company to adjust its footing as a company that can react and respond faster is their Moonshot server. Paired with their 3PAR storage, Baez claims it is, for them, phenomenal. “It is going to let cloud system operation be put on top of that platform as a service.”

It was clear from the conversation that Baez is genuinely excited about the direction and speed HP is headed. “This was an amazing year for HP. Between Frankfurt and today, we are calling it a tale of two discovers.”

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