Wikibon’s Chief Analyst Dave Vellante sat down with VP of Marketing, Cloud Evangelist, HP Cloud Services Margaret Dawson to talk about HP’s current cloud solution and how it impacts the current outlook for enterprise. Right now, theCube is at HP Discover Barcelona 2013 separating the signal from the noise and speaking with a multitude of executives about big data and cloud.

Dawson began speaking about how cost may be a factor in using cloud infrastructure, but really what’s driving adoption is agility and the plasticity of using cloud services (SaaS and others) in order to replace legacy IT with something nimble and scalable. However, while a lot of private cloud is taking over a lot of traditional IT and it virtualizes most of it well, it cannot shift everything. As a result, HP has been taking a stance on cloud that’s hybridized between providing the infrastructure for private clouds, but at the same time still supports side structures.

The marketing motto of HP’s cloud strategy summarizes as “a hybrid-cloud strategy that cloud enterprises rely on.”

Shadow IT and the automate-everything revolution

Shadow IT may become a big thing in 2014, but it’s going to become a bigger question of balance. Dawson points out there’s a lot of talk about how the virtualized parts of a company will get more money than the CIOs, but fundamentally while IT may want to automate everything departments still must maintain governance of their data and network.

“If no other reason than people are losing control of their data, people are putting data everywhere. If something happens to that corporate data that’s going to fall on the CIO. The CEO isn’t going to go to the marketing department, ‘We just had a data breach,’ no, that’s going to go to the IT Department.”

To make this example solid, Dawson mentions compliance as the reason why the CIO’s role is to maintain the governance model so that the company is not hanging in the breeze. As a result, IT Departments and DevOps teams working with HP will still find themselves in the driver’s seat with whatever solution they have implemented.

The tenets of HP’s cloud portfolio

When asked about HP’s cloud strategy, Dawson tells Vellante that HP has a three-pronged approach to their cloud strategy: Open, Enterprise Grade, and Hybrid.

HP intends to remain open and that means a commitment to OpenStack, interoperability, and keeping an open ecosystem/architecture, HP wants to drive APIs to a more open yet standards-based structure. Right now, complex and proprietary APIs are casuing a lot of frustration for small and medium businesses who keep finding themselves stuck between rapidly changing, complex APIs for different tools that refuse to hook up well.

“What we’re doing with OpenStack is saying, ‘We will make this enterprise grade,’ we will harden OpenStack for enterprise customers,” says Dawson. HP has an enterprise commitment to OpenStack. Everything HP does in cloud is something that an enterprise can lean on.

Hybrid as discussed earlier is part of HP trying to take the market into the enterprise grade level by making sure that the cloud from HP can adapt to customer needs.

The DevOps Angle

The cloud has become a huge position for every industry in 2013—especially in the enterprise—to help allow scale to take over and remain agile when new functions are needed on existing products. Applications are no longer boxed up, stamped onto gold CD, and shipped; now they ship instantly. As a result, the cloud providing a way to continuously provide applications to customers has become the must-have for every industry.

HP’s public and private cloud offering will be taken by DevOps teams to mold to their own needs and building around OpenStack will make HP very tempting. Due to the stacks highly interposable components by hooking into OpenStack and HP’s cloud DevOps teams will find themselves able to select from more tools and pull them together with less hassle.

From Dawson’s talk, it sounds like HP intends to approach IT Teams with a hybrid cloud solution and ask them what they need and how they need it and provide as much of an out-of-the-box customized solution as possible. This means that going with HP will allow a DevOps team to build their own experience and still have the support of an industry leader such as HP.