HP’s Dietch: Far From a Fad, Cloud Computing Is A “Done Deal”

Cloud computing is here and its here to stay. And organizations large and small better get on board now or risk falling by the wayside, according to HP.

“This is not a fad,” said Steven Dietch in reference to cloud computing, both private and public. “It’s a done deal … SMBs, enterprise companies are going to have to go there.”

Dietch, HP’s Vice President of Marketing for Cloud Solutions and Infrastructure, said helping customers build optimized infrastructures to enable highly scalable and flexible cloud environments in the consumer, SMB and enterprise markets is becoming an increasingly large part of HP’s overall business.

“We’re taking a very comprehensive approach,” Dietch said. “We’re not only building an ecosystem or a marketplace for an entire public cloud infrastructure, we’re at the same time enabling our customers to build their own cloud.”

That means helping service providers build cloud infrastructures that they can rent out to their own customers, as well as selling directly to SMBs and enterprises that want to build their own private clouds. HP’s services division will also help companies manage hybrid public/private cloud environments, he said.

To succeed, HP must deliver an end-to-end cloud offering that includes not just converged infrastructures, but also developer platforms so customers can innovate in the cloud to create business value.

“The people that take advantage of [cloud computing], whether you’re an enterprise or service provider, are not only going to be able to create more financial flexibility but, more importantly, a lot more agility and actually enable a lot more business models that just weren’t possible before.”

Speaking live inside theCube at HP Discover to Wikibon’s Dave Vellante and SiliconANGLE Founder John Furrier, Dietch also defended the pace at which HP has embraced cloud computing itself.

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“We have been criticized for being slow or not present on the cloud,” Dietch said. Not so, he said, noting “we’ve been doing the cloud when it wasn’t called the cloud.”

On security, however, Dietch sounded a cautionary note.

“Is there a silver bullet for security [in the cloud]? Absolutely not,” Dietch said. “I think security will evolve as we go forward and become stronger, more pervasive, and provide a level of protection that probably people can’t envision today. But will you ever get to a point where you’re secure? I don’t think its ever going to happen. You’re just going to have to plan for an attack and then deal with it in a rapid-fire way, sort of a zero-day approach.”