Hewlett-Packard  upgraded the status of its converged cloud business to a full-fledged unit, according to AllThingsD.   The newly announced group will be headed by Saar Gallai, the current senior vice president and general manager of converged cloud.

Gillai joined HP in 2010 as the CTO of its networking business after the company’s acquisition of 3Com, where he served as SVP of worldwide products and solutions for over a year.  Four months ago he was bumped up to his current position, and this latest announcement places Gallai even higher on the corporate ladder.

The executive shared his vision for HP in theCube at HP Discover 2012, a biannual conference that the company held in Frankfurt last year (see full interview below).  Gillai provided an insider’s perspective on his company’s converged cloud strategy and went into great detail about the subject.

In the interview Gillai stressed the importance of usability and reliability from the enterprise of view. He said that Hewlett-Packard’s portfolio includes all the necessary components to assemble an integrated virtualized solution, and that is exactly what his unit is doing.

The manufacturer’s converged cloud offerings draw from a common architecture that Gillai thinks very highly of: he touted it as a simpler and more effective alternative to putting together different products that are not guaranteed to perform optimally when deployed together.

The HP executive also brought up the topic of agility.  In spite of the restrictions typically associated with unified infrastructure, Gillai said that his company’s solutions support all major hypervisors, as well as a large number of use cases. Gillai boasts that the architecture is fully compatible with the public cloud, and can be leveraged for anything, from internal development projects to hosting data for consumers.