Jim Ganthier, VP of Marketing, HP Servers, discussed the company’s server business, their collaboration on converged infrastructure, fabric, cloud, and future innovation trends for HP, with theCUBE co-hosts, John Furrier and Dave Vellante, live at HP Discover 2013 in Las Vegas.

Rounding up the HP Discover announcement, Ganthier mentiond the press release and event for the HP storage team on launching their virtual SAN appliance (VSA), their released on flash based storage, the announcement on entry level servers, the 320 product which is “a single application, extremely compact server for embedded environments,” and what he called the “darling of the show,” microserver. With a strong SMB focus, microservers target the 5.2 million SMB users coming online in the next few years. Microservers are customizable, easy to set up, easy to manage, and easy to use solutions. “The microserver is available today, in any color you like,” he added.

Commenting on convergence and the move to flash, Ganthier said his team “has been working in collaboration with the convergence team” on 3PAR and blade servers, as a result “we can get rid of all that complexity and reduce costs massively.”

Asked how servers, networking, storage, and Moonshot all connect, Ganthier explained that “when you think about Moonshat, we took a fundamentally, radically different approach. We’ll have storage inside Moonshot, 3PAR,” and one management control. “What used to be 4 individual silos will be available as a whole”- storage, servers, networking, power and cooling.

Commenting on customers conversations, storage, servers, networking, power and cooling said “the one thing we’re hearing over and over again – software defined data center.” VSA, Moonshot, help achieve that. “We are looking at software defined networking. People are seeing common proof-points that all our teams are doing” all they can to offer that. The company’s work in cloud, with converged infrastructures, helps deliver “real world products, real world execution.”

In terms of convergence, “we’re thinking about it at a data center level. It’s about looking at things at the data center level and creating them as resource pools,” Ganthier stated.

In the cloud marketplace “we are close to a thousand cloud system customers,” adoption being stimulated by the value proposition, “when you can take a cloud and deploy in a few hours, when you can easily manage it, that’s when the customers adopt it.” Moonshot is enabling a lot of web and hosting providers. “We can help them with their existing public, private, hybrid, and future plastic cloud.”

Detailing the HP.com move to Moonshot, Ganthier said that the website that receives millions of hits per day traditionally ran on legacy infrastructure. The IT team tried smaller apps on Moonshot, and by the launch day, “we were already running 12% of the website on a Moonshot enclosure.” The site has not been 100% moved to moonshot, but it will get there soon and will be able to receive double digit millions of hits. using the power equivalent of a dozen light bulbs, while reducing the amount of complexity.

HP’s new convergence team, Ganthier explained, will ensure that the company’s products have been bundled up as solutions. “We’re going to show that when you have innovation like we do, you can change the economics.” It will be an easy to comprehend, easy to sell proposition.

Commenting on the rumor around IBM exiting the server business, the co-hosts and Ganthier agreed it would be a big mistake. “It’s kinda like I look at the market and I choose not to play.”

“Unlike everybody else, we’re the only teams that have server, storage, networking, all the software and the way to deliver everything put together,” Ganthier said. As far as future HP plans are concerned, he mentioned “dramatic improvements in terms of management, management unified across the data center,” making it easy to deploy and manage. There will also be “a lot more federation of the network and storage components. We always have some secret sauce components that separate us from the pack,” he added.

Dave Vellante pointed out that HP is “taking the labor costs out.” Ganthier said “we’re taking expense, time, and power out of the equation,” that involves maintenance time, electricity bill, not just labor. “It all becomes about the data and the information and what you develop around it to create business value,” Vellante said.

“We want to make sure that others can take some of the innovation that we had laid as foundation and add some more innovation on top,” Ganthier said on the company’s open policy.

Asked if the investment paradigm for IT is changing, if people see IT as a competitive differentiator, Ganthier said some of the customers are “already starting to operate this way. That trend has already commenced, I see that trend accelerating. CIOs are being seen as business partners, IT is being run as a business,” he added.