Dave Vellante, theCUBE host, interviewed Roger Levy, GM HP Cloud Services, on day two of HP Discover 2013, touching on hot topics such as OpenStack and enterprise cloud trends.

OpenStack is a huge piece of the hybrid cloud solution. Over two years ago, HP looked at this promising but unproven technology, made a major commitment to it, along with a major investment – not only in the financial sense, but also in the strategic sense – working on making OpenStack a very successful community.

A key observation on OpenStack was that early on in its history, there was a fair amount vendor-driven activity. The vendors got together and they were among the first to move it forward. It’s interesting and very pleasing that nowadays we see more and more of the Enterprise customers getting actively engaged in driving OpenStack development. That is a major point of inflection in the development of the OpenStack project. People are tired of closed, proprietary solutions that offer limited choices. People are pressed on the economics of things, they don’t get the portability and the mobility required by end-users… and then they see OpenStack.

Ecosystems will always win

OpenStack’s striking contrast to the older solutions is what appeals to people, making them embrace it in such large numbers. Because of that, OpenStack is the fastest-growing open source project in history.

Vellante agrees with this statement, noting that “ecosystems will always win.”

The secret behind the current success of HP is the “Dream Team”, boasts Levy. HP has a set of folks who have been in this business for quite a long time, bringing in experience in both large companies and start-ups. Behind the scenes there are a lot of discussions powered by a lot of opinions. Describing the reality, Levy dares to say “it is great.” The debates are great, and at the end of the day, there is tremendous progress. No false modesty when he stated he was “proud to be part of such a team.”

Among the newest things announced at this event, there was the Virtual Private Networking capability on the public cloud, based on STM. That was carried out in conjunction with two other teams, HP Networking and HP Labs, in a great, collaborative team effort. Other interesting releases across all converged cloud were announced as well. For the public cloud HP announced a series of additional enterprise great enhancements. Basically, HP supersized their compute instances, boasting 120 GB and 16 CPUs, and introduced VPN on the cloud.

The most interesting feedback at this event, that happens to resonate with Levy’s personal beliefs, is the statement that “HP is the Enterprise cloud.”

Watch the full interview here.