For day 1 of HP Discover 2013, John Furrier and Jeff Frick, theCUBE hosts, were joined by Patricia Wilkey, Director, Enterprise Cloud Service, HP Enterprise Services to talk about what’s trending in the market and solutions.

From an enterprise perspective, the hot topic is security. HP’s customers have been adopting new solutions, but slowly. They have been testing, but primarily in the test-dev environment, and that stage is now over. Clients are beginning to ask about solutions that will allow them to get to market faster, sometimes demanding a live infrastructure and a server environment within a day, versus three months, while keeping their compliance, sovereignty and regulation requirements in check. That’s what HP is trying to achieve everyday: giving customers choice, whether they have a workload or an application that can go to a public cloud, or – in the extreme situations – where that data needs to stay in a very secure, private environment. And then, of course, there’s the middle ground, in the virtual private cloud.

Emerging cloud trends

Because Wilkey is involved in the strategy program, John wanted to talk more about the emerging trends, particularly OpenStack. Wilkey confirmed that OpenStack is an underlying theme of the HP strategy, called the converged cloud. Whether the customers are in the private, public or the virtual module cloud, OpenStack is ensuring that everything is aligned and tied to everyone of HP’s environments. So, whether it’s an API connection or an actual architecture realm, that open platform is giving the customers the flexibility to choose what they need, when they need it. They are not tied down to only one environment. The demand for this service is very high. An Enterprise or a government could take advantage of those tools and create something that goes to more than just one app.

Shadow IT – can it compete?

After discussing large engagements, large cloud-type scopes and the emerging trends, Jeff Frick steered the conversation towards the Shadow IT issue and the quick availability for people to get resources on demand, with just one credit card. He wanted to know how that has impacted the internal IT and their ability to compete, suspecting they need to perform now at a level that simply wasn’t there before.

In Wilkey’s opinion, it all comes back to IT-as-a-Service. While everyone is talking about software as a service, about information and platform, the internal HP customers are really looking for the IT to come as a service model to them. It’s again taking advantage of the resources and getting the applications quicker off the door, helping the end users (who might be using some of this public cloud domains and sharing data that maybe an enterprise or a comapany are not ready to share publicly) to control that. In the Enterprise side, a governance model can be set up, and the workload, the applications, the security, the business process, they can all be aligned to design and take advantage of these different cloud modules.

The whole outsourcing world has changed over the past years. Cloud, mobile and data are changing the conversation. A core application that’s impacting an environment horizontally – even if it’s going to the cloud – is the workflow. Even with the Cloud on and all apps running, the business process is going to be impacted. And then it’s all the apps interacting with each-other.

Looking back, anticipating forward

Wilkey wrapped up the interview looking back at HP’s history, talking about outsourcing, server consolidation, globalization and mobile environments. Mobility drives the customers and is pushing companies to their limits. If an Enterprise does not start to adapt, leveraging that input or that data through the mobility, they are going to be outpaced by competitors.

Wilkey’s forecast for the next 12 months revolves around data and the ways companies can make revenue out of data. Another big issue that is here to stay is security. Security is particularly noteworthy in light of current globalization, protecting the intellectual property of Enterprises and Governments.

Watch the full interview here.