One of HP’s major announcements this week in Frankfurt at HP Discover 2012 was the fortification of its converged cloud service. The Cube hosts John Furrier, from SiliconAngle.com, and Dave Vellante, from Wikibon.org, sat down with Zorawar ‘Biri’ Singh, SVP and GM at HP Converged Cloud, to talk about these innovations and where HP is headed with its converged cloud offerings.

What HP has accomplished with converged cloud is the hybridization of services, pulling together the private cloud, public cloud, and managed hosting all under one integrated system. HP promises to deliver a comprehensive solution in a secure environment, complete with service-level agreements (SLA) to ensure customers receive enterprise-grade cloud service.

Singh described HP’s process for getting enterprise workloads into the cloud and highlighted the three-pronged approach:

1. Cloud System – the private cloud, which is on-premise with the customer
2. HP Public Cloud – whatever public cloud services the customer needs
3. Managed Cloud for Enterprise – ES-led consulting where HP stands up clouds for their customers

In Summer of 2011, Singh explained, HP committed to OpenStack, and by fall, it had successfully demonstrated one of the largest public clouds based on that technology. It entered private beta and then public beta in 2012. Its Compute, Storage, and CDN services have now reached general availability (GA), each of which offers SLA backing. Singh believes that customers need enterprise-grade service quality in order to comfortably move production workloads to the cloud.

He went on to say that HP’s level of dedication to the open source community has allowed them to leverage OpenStack technology to bring public and private cloud implementations together in a hybrid form. Singh believes OpenStack is now ready for prime time, and HP’s investment in it will propel customer adoption of true cloud models.

Vellante asked Singh about using a federated cloud, allowing for the deployment and management of multiple external and internal cloud computing services and if the idea of a federated cloud is on the horizon for HP. Singh replied that HP is already doing it and currently allows its customers to run test applications, scale them, move them into the production environment, and keep them running on the public cloud as they cloudify their on-premise environment.

For more in-depth analysis of HP’s Converged Cloud and more of Singh’s insights, watch the full video right here.