 Okay, we're back live here at HP Discover in Germany. I'm John Furrier with SiliconANGLE.com and my co-host Dave Vellante and I are here with Biri Singh, SVP and general manager of HP Cloud Services and Cloud Systems. No, Converge Cloud and Cloud Services. Converge Cloud and Cloud Services. Welcome to theCUBE. Thank you, thanks for having me, John. Great to have you on. We met in Palo Alto for a short briefing. I know you had run all these executive meetings, but the cloud was emerging. You were behind a lot of the OpenStack and the cloud project and since then you've launched the cloud. Okay, when we met it was months ago and HP's got cloud everywhere. They've had cloud system out there but talk about the cloud offering right now and let's set the table for the cloud. So cloud is a big global term. It's generic, but it's not generic and HP's a little different nuances. So can you lay out what cloud is with HP? Let's talk about HP Converge Cloud, which is really the... So if you look at it from the standpoint of Converge Cloud, what we've done there is actually pulled together private cloud, our public cloud offering and our managed hosted offering and put that together under the banner of HP Converge Cloud. And really what it's dealing with is the idea of hybrid delivery. So we're pulling together a set of solutions under each one of those respective areas that together allow us to offer customers and partners. We think one of the most comprehensive solutions for dealing with not just hybrid delivery but also wrapping it with things like a very secure environment, SLAs. And the whole thesis is what's it going to take to get enterprise production workloads onto the cloud? So is that the buzz that we were seeing this morning about enterprise grade for consumer cloud prices? There was some buzz going around. Was that the Converge Clouds at cloud system? That's part of it. So cloud system is our private cloud offering. HP Public Cloud is our public cloud offering. And then our managed cloud business with enterprise services is essentially our ES led consulting where we essentially stand up clouds for our customers. Got it, okay, got it. So how's the reaction, because you guys went into beta and now they're the product. So we started working on the public cloud about a year and a half ago. We, in the summer of 2011, committed to OpenStack. Put a full weight of HP behind it. It's been fantastic. We're one of the, I think most significant players in OpenStack, but not just in terms of sort of showing up. We've actually demonstrated and executed and stood up one of the largest public clouds, you know, using OpenStack in a fairly tight way. So in the fall of 2011, we went up in private beta. In May, 2000 of this year, we stood up our public beta service and we just went GA with compute. So now we have compute, storage, CDN, both block storage, object storage in general availability within SLA backing it. And really why I want to emphasize that is it's our thesis that ultimately to get enterprises off the sort of dev test and just playing around for shadow IT of using cloud, you really need a true enterprise grade service quality. And then standing behind an SLA is really important. So, you know, in seven months we went from beta to GA. We think it's the early innings of now being able to go after full blown production workloads, not just dev test, but dev test to production. And I think it's important. And if you look at what we've executed on relative to the rest of the industry, where other players took anywhere from 12 to 22 months to put their service into play and some haven't even exited beta yet, we think we've made some progress. So we've been busy, but it's been a good busy. So what? You mentioned your commitment to OpenStack and you sort of said you were really committed to OpenStack. I know a number of people have joined OpenStack, but it's almost, you get the feeling of, okay, hey, we're into, we're open. Yeah. So talk about that a little bit in terms of that commitment. So HP's got a pretty strong tradition in OpenSource because we put a lot of wood behind OpenStack. The way I think about it, in OpenSource communities code speaks, right? And you have to be able to look at what each vendor and each member is doing, not just the large companies, but even some of the smaller and even individual developers. And committers and the idea of committing is important. So we've aspired to make a difference there. We're one of the significant sponsors. We leveraged our understanding of sort of how to do foundation work to get stand up the OpenStack foundation. So I think we've done some decent work around governance, but quite frankly, also leverage what we think is an incredible stack of technology that the community is sort of centered around. And I say community in a broad sense. But I think we've leveraged it. We're one of the only vendors that has stood up a public cloud on OpenStack, but also now have a private cloud implementation and the idea is to bring that together in a hybrid solution. So there's a lot of weight in your shoulders with that commitment that you're making to OpenStack. Is OpenStack ready for prime time? We think it is. It's like any open source project, it's only as good as the ecosystem around it. And if you look at the players, there's some serious players that are sort of geared up. And I think we're going to see a lot of activity just in the last three months. There's been tremendous, tremendous milestones within OpenStack. And we think that's going to continue in 2013. The credibility of OpenStack definitely has turned because at the beginning, we were critical of OpenStack being kind of like, back in my glory days as a youth land manager, remember the whole, everyone was jumping in these standards bodies and it goes nowhere because it's just him marketing ploy or infighting. And then when Citrix dropped out, you saw an interesting shift, like in Nasira and the guys in the SDN area, you got some heavy duty tech guys going in there, looking at it as a playground and some good stuff came out. So the Nasira stuff was interesting. You called it a Hail Mary against Amazon, but it looks like the past got completed. Well, it became a developer environment. It really became kind of a playground to get some stuff out there. And you guys going in that speaks volumes. My question is, is that if you look at what OpenStack is doing right now, it's becoming kind of this third option as a way to kind of get some independence. You got AWS out there. You got Rackspace and all the Rackspace does play in OpenStack. But at AWS, the trend was, we're going to put SSD and AWS. We have Netflix as kind of their showcase customer. And then recently, the signal from NetApp to do storage in there, it's pretty interesting. So given those kind of market signals, HP has their own cloud. You have an amazing announcement from three-par team here at Storage Group. How do you cobble in the greatness and the awesomeness of some of those other products into your cloud? Well, I think at the end of the day, you have the HP storage announcement, which I agree, fantastic. It's catering to a very specific demand in the market for enterprise that we've seen. And I think you're going to see HP always continue to deliver. That's part of the Converge infrastructure portfolio, which we essentially coined three plus years ago. The entire industry's followed it. Similarly, we've taken Converge Cloud in a similar theme and said, we believe there's a certain way cloud technologies will be used and cloud solutions will come to manifest, vis-a-vis hybrid. So our investment in OpenStack is in parallel to follow that. The storage piece follows what we're doing in Converge infrastructure. For HP Cloud, we're using Converge infrastructure to power the cloud, if you will. We're using HP software solutions. We've built our own with OpenStack. We've brought in a healthy dose of the enterprise services piece of it. So I think it's coming together to essentially help customers move from traditional IT models to now incorporating cloud models. I think that's really how it's in. The beautiful cloud was obviously buy as you go, rent versus buying kind of thing, economics were supposedly good, but really it's about on-demand and utility-based like electricity, if you will. How are you seeing the demand? Now that the on-premise has gotten in more advanced with solid state, we see some innovation, like you said, three-part caters to the audience. On-premise has been good. Public cloud, obviously it's public cloud, but the hybrid really has emerged as a nice little gateway between the two. Not a lot of people are throwing their weight into the public cloud because of security and data issues. So this new ground, the hybrid, was the focus. So how do you see those three things playing out? Obviously you're doing all three, right? So you're rolling out all three. Do you have any particular preference? Let's make a point first. Our view on public cloud has been we're building an enterprise-grade public cloud with service quality of an SLA, a secure cloud, the notion of customer service to deal with the very notion of production workloads. The reason you haven't seen enterprises go full DevTest to production is because of what you just mentioned. There has not been two-data robust offering dealing with what enterprise departments are. We think we've delivered the early innings on that. When you combine the notion of cloud system and private cloud, we've been in that market for two plus years. I think we've done a very admirable job there. But pulling this together is the notion of hybrid delivery. Customers have hybrid clouds, right? We don't have a hybrid cloud. HP doesn't have a hybrid cloud. We don't have hybrid delivery. Customers have hybrid environments, hybrid clouds, they expect us to manage for them. So our goal is to really line up public cloud. That's a connection. It's not a hybrid cloud, right? Basically make them interoperable in terms of service quality, in terms of moving workloads across the environments on-premise to your public cloud environment, and third, keeping it open and making sure our customers have choice, because all the other vendors' solutions are largely fairly locked in. They walk you down a path, whether it's virtualization or it's another stack, but they ultimately walk you down a single stack. That's not been our approach. So customers actually federating applications in that hybrid model? Absolutely. I mean, one of our announces today is, you can now go with our HP Cloud Workload Migration Service. You can literally take a Linux or Windows app and with our partner, push button deploy to the cloud. So you're now seeing a real world example of workloads being moving from an on-premise environment to a secure public cloud. Over time, we'll see other clouds get federated, but we need to see other clouds actually adopt the same level of SLA, the same level of sort of requirements. Hypervisor support, all the hypervisor support. How about federating between one of your customers' private clouds, which have the robustness, and your cloud? Do you expect that in the near or mid-term? Yes, I think you'll actually see us being very active there. We just did our workload migration service, which can take any on-premise application, Linux, Windows, through three great partners, AppZero, Clicker, and GigaSpaces, and I've implemented that as a service. We think that's going to be a massive solution for our customers. Yeah, okay, and so, am I correct though, you're not seeing that today? That's sort of a near-term or a mid-term, or are you actually seeing federated apps today? No, we're actually seeing that today. We announced that solution to deal with the demand. But do you have customers actually federating apps in between their private cloud and your public cloud? Yes, we do. Yeah, okay. What's the use case for that? So you can take anything from, take DevTest, you've got an application, you've seen it in production, you now want to scale it. You want to basically move it into a production environment, keep it running on the public cloud while you basically cloudify your on-premise environment, which was a traditional monolithic structure. So while you essentially, you can't afford to have that application go down. So have it run securely in the public cloud while you essentially refactor your on-premise model into a cloud model. Do you agree that's rare in the industry in terms of providers being able to do that and actually having customers doing that? You're really the first, and I've been looking for months. I think you're the first, and I said, yes, we're doing that today. And I've talked to probably 20 cloud service providers in the last two weeks, and that's that very same question. The answer is consistently, we think it's coming. You're the first to have said yes. Why do you think that is? Well, I mean, HP's got some breadth and depth in terms of customers. Like I said, a lot of the folks you've probably spoken to are coming at it from a lens of either, it's a pure private cloud view or it's a pure public cloud view. When you couple the notion that says large enterprises want to adopt all the mobile stuff, all the web 2.0 cloud-enabled social networking apps, they want to take advantage of the bring your own device phenomena, there's a lot of new age web 2.0 distributed mobile apps that are looking to sort of get deployed in what we call new cloud infrastructures. There's also traditional applications that essentially need to get moved on. We've responded to that need. I mean, our pipeline tells us there's a healthy need for that. That's why we're all the solution now. I would love to follow up with you on that and talk to some of your folks about it and learn more. That would be great. I appreciate it. So my final question is we got to wrap up here is marketplace. Since we talked, a lot has changed for you in terms of the scope of your offering and the success. A lot's happening in the marketplace, specifically in the platform as a service and infrastructure as a service business. And then yesterday, VMware, Cloud Foundry, Vfabric, Green Plum, Cetus and Pivotal get popped out of VMware our spring sources in there too. Merits is leading that charge. So you're seeing the maturation of an app environment, right, app developer environment. And you know, my angle on that is obviously two DNAs of VMware. We have the plumbers, the infrastructure guys doing the virtualization side and then you had the developers floundering. Little bit different opportunity. So I can see that. Actually, I think it's a good move for them but I want to get your take on it. Why are they doing it? What's the dynamic? What's changing the platform as a service market? What are some of the key dynamics that are happening? Well, I'll defer to VMware and EMC to comment on why they think they're doing it. My take on it is I think it validates our model in HPE Cloud Services, which was we designed our cloud services to have infrastructure through cloud, not virtualization to cloud, which isn't true cloud. True infrastructure is in a service with an integrated platform stack. So we're building platform as a service. We did it with Cloud Foundry. We've leveraged other models on it. We think what the future of that is people want a secure place to build and run workloads and applications. That's what the CIO wants. Then they in turn want tools that are modern, modern tools with databases, service analytics, all of the sort of different language and frameworks. They want that for their developers, whether it's a startup or an enterprise developer, along with their IT ops model, completely tied in and say, we're not giving you a set of tools and environment, a management environment to manage all of your workloads. So to me, the EMC VMware announcement, I think is great for the industry. I think it actually validates the fact that they probably needed to focus more and from our standpoint, this is what we set out to do two years ago. True Cloud, we love True Cloud. This is a no-cloud-washing zone. Yeah, yeah, this is good. No, I think it's awesome. I totally agree with you. HB Cloud Service is definitely a no-cloud-washing zone. You can soundbite on that last segment. This is, to me, I totally agree with you. To me, what I'm most excited about, what you guys are doing, what that's happening with those guys is, it's good for their business and all the people involved. So, I mean, the spring source guys are jumping ship left and right. You know, they're losing talent. There's all kinds of things going on there, but it's good for DevOps. It validates what I saw as a stall on DevOps. So, DevOps had this great momentum, kind of stalled a little bit, big data sucked the oxygen out of the room with a dupe and a lot of things going on there, but this absolutely, to me, legitimizes DevOps as a bona fide category of market. And I think that is ultimately still early build-out days, but the ability to move workloads seamlessly just at push of a button and it programmatically is the future. So, congratulations. Barry Singh with HP, senior vice president, Converge Cloud and Cloud Services. So, he's now in charge of all that greatness over there. Congratulations. The cloud wars begin, true cloud will be the definition that we will look at. And we love it here at HP Discover, extracting all the signal from the noise. This is SiliconANGLE theCUBE. We'll be right back after this short break. Thank you.