John Furrier and Dave Vellante, theCUBE co-hosts, crossed the globe this week to deliver the latest in tech trends from HP Discover in Barcelona, an event much bigger in Europe than it was in Vegas, at least according to Furrier’s observations. Among the first executives to be “cross-examined” during SiliconANGLE’s live broadcast at HP Discover was Xavier Poisson Gouyou Beauchamps, EMEA VP of Cloud Computing with HP.

“What is the HP presence in Europe like?” asked Furrier. “What is the market like for HP?”

“We started with a cloud movement in EMEA about three and a half years ago,” recalled Beauchamps. “We started to build the next step of virtualization for our customers. We spent significant efforts to reduce the costs, increase agility and generate new business streams. The efforts were concentrated around the private cloud strategy we had; we are operating in 8 subregions, we have a really big market, and everywhere the cloud is taking off,” boasted Beauchamps. “The cloud market is taking off in all fields, especially in the telecom industry, but also in finance, insurance, energy and distribution. Most importantly, cloud computing is not only a way of reducing the costs and increasing agility, but it’s also creating new services.”

Furrier agreed: “The cloud is a phenomenon that we are all aware off.” And because a lot of things happening in the US are certainly different than the market in Europe, Furrier wanted to know “what were the challenges in Europe,” besides dealing with countries and their different requirements. “What is the challenge and the opportunity of cloud?” he asked.

The cloud is all about the freedom of choice

“As I used to say to my customers and the press, despite everything you hear, the cloud does not belong to anybody,” stated Xavier. “Cloud is all about the freedom of choice. We have been investing heavily in the developing of our intellectual property. As you said, we have a different market, with different laws and different regulations about data privacy and we need to embrace that. It is a huge opportunity for HP because we have built the compliance strategy of HP offering in cloud about hybrid delivery. It’s about combining workloads in public clouds with those in private clouds.”

Explaining how this works, Beauchamps continued: “If a customer wants to have 4,000 VMs in a ‘test & dev,’ he can built it on-premise, being compliant with the regulations, and work with one of our cloud agile partners, in a public cloud environment. We have developed a compliancy ecosystem of cloud service providers powered by HP who are delivering huge cloud services in their own countries. We consistently help them deliver cloud services on their local market.”

Elaborating about the cloud, Beauchamps stated: “People say cloud is easy. I don’t think it is necessarily so; it is a transformation, it is a journey and you have different segments of market and different size of companies. Small and medium enterprises need to be addressed differently than a large company. That’s the specificity of the market.”

The flexible, hybrid cloud

Furrier then prodded Beauchamps to address the notion of flexibility of the hybrid cloud. “What flexibility features of the hybrid cloud from HP allows a company to go global?” he asked.

“You need to go back to some technology talk about the orchestration layer,” warned Xavier. “I’m talking about the capability to create a unique service catalogue for one customer and to have different delivery modes. What is impressive at HP, is the capability to separate the service catalog from the different delivery modes, and the ability to execute the cloud locally. It’s an extraordinary asset when you take into account the global regulation framework in the EU.”

The compliancy cloud service that HP launched is available worldwide, but it is executed locally, depending on the user’s location. As Furrier summarized, “the service catalogue allows for dynamic orchestration.”

“When we talked with the practitioners in our community we found out the majority are trying to move to that service catalogue,” said Dave Vellante. “But the biggest challenge is aligning those sets of services from IT with the business requirements. How is HP helping customers facilitate that?” asked Vellante.

The CIO has to become a broker

“If you want to be successful in a cloud computing project, you have to invest 20 percent of your budget in management, and the CIO has to become a broker, negotiating with different lines of businesses.”

Talking about the adoption of public cloud, Xavier explained: “You have the traditional cloud service providers; the biggest challenge they will face in EMEA is the different facts and regulations. We need to propose a framework offering a global service catalogue for EU. We need to allow all the cloud service providers to play a role in the EMEA economy. Cloud will reach its real impact when it will allow the software development communities to grow, make money, and then solve the unemployment and the production problems. That’s a big area where we, as a EU cloud team, are investing our time in. We want to create a federation of these cloud services, creating more employment and more production.”