Broadcasting live from the recently concluded OpenStack and Enterprise Forum, the SiliconANGLE team facilitated the broad audience’s access to the event’s top Panels and the key speakers. Panel 3, moderated by Lydia Leong, Research Vice President with Gartner, reunited on stage the heavy weights of tech world: Chris C. Kemp, Founder and Chief Strategy Officer with Nebula, William L. Franklin, Vice President of OpenStack & Technology Enablement, Cloud with Hewlett-Packard Company, and Dave Wright, CEO/Founder of SolidFire.

After discussing with Chris Kemp, Leong addressed William L. Franklin to talk about the importance of interoperability and the APIs.

“I’ve been dealing with OpenStack and other open source products for a really long time,” said Franklin. “There’s still a lot of debate in the community regarding which is best, but I think sooner or later you will see OpenStack becoming very large and very strong, with a massive degree of adoption. If you went one way to support AWS capability, Amazon could go in a total different direction and make it really hard for the community to maintain anything, because we don’t control those APIs. There’s no open way. Every six months we come to those Design Summits and talk about how can we advance stuff. If the APIs are going to change, they are changing because the community makes a decision about them changing,” explained Franklin.

Because the tech environment is changing at such rapid pace, Franklin admits that “in a number of areas HP is taking a wait-and-see position.”

“We’re certainly doing some things in the public cloud, but we don’t want to stifle the debate. I think once the dialogue is finished, we’re going to see multiple vendors moving immediately into that. We are interested in tracking the interoperability of OpenStack.”

Common architecture and set of tools

“How does the OpenStack fit the HP strategy?” asked Leong.

“OpenStack is very crucial for HP’s strategy. HP believes in the hybrid cloud. Public cloud is really crucial for a lot of what people are doing with cloud. HP runs an OpenStack-based public cloud, but we also sell technology – software, hardware, storage, networking to service providers around the world. But we recognize that sometimes for compliance and security reasons – and sometimes for ego reasons – people want their own private cloud. In order to burst move workloads from a private cloud to a managed cloud to a public one and back-and-forth, we wanted a common architecture and a common set of tools we could use across all of this. HP has a very long history in open source, so we looked at different options and chose OpenStack. We were involved with folks at NASA and folks at Rackspace, helping create the foundation. We’re trying to move and more towards where we think hybrid is going,” said Franklin.

As Leong noted, HP didn’t sell an OpenStack distribution, but chose OpenStack as a core of open source products.

Franklin agreed: “What we’re trying to do at HP is deliver cloud solutions to customers. In certain parts of OpenStack we’re fairily core, we have a reasonable number of core contributors to projects, but we’ve also done some projects that we think address both the scale aspects and some of the enterprise aspects. Things like TripleO, heat and bare metal provisioning are big areas that we’ve been making a lot of investments in,” admitted Franklin. “We were co-authors of the security book along with RackSpace and Nebula; the areas where we’re spending a lot of our time in are the big install: the upgrade / update space, the intersection of TripleO, heat, bare metal provisioning and security, as well as the networking space. So, it’s core, but it’s also what we would consider it’s needed by the enterprises to successfully pick the steps up and run with it.”

“The Enterprise is deciding to get OpenStack as software,” noted Leong. “They can choose to get it as a distribution, or embedded in some other product like HP cloud. So why choose HP cloud system enterprise rather than choosing an OpenStack distribution?” she asked.

“Different customers have different requirements and different wants; that was emphasized even by some of the panelists that have been up here. Some are building it on their own, like JC Martin and Rodney Peck, others are looking for a base-level solution. It goes back to the days of Linux and Debian. HP is trying to give the customers choice: some of them are going to build it on their own and some of them are going to consume cloud products either through a managed service or through a public cloud.”

The typical use-case scenario

“I have talked to customers about OpenStack and it really comes down to a set of business choices that they need to make: part of our strategy is trying to use this to build customer solutions. History is a great predicter of the future. In the days of Linux we had thousands and thousands of distributions; in the early days of Unix, in 1981, there were more than 150 Unix licenses, and by 1992 there were less than 20. If we’re not careful, we can wind up in a distribution war with 50 different spins. From HP’s perspective, we’ve tried to focus more on building solutions.”

“What do you think OpenStack needs to do to make it easier for customers to choose it?” asked Leong.

“I believe HP is on the news dial of IT: we’ve gone through the mainframe revolution, the client server revolution and the cloud revolution. Corporations are attempting more and more to outsource managing the VMs machines to someone like HP, thus allowing their in-house talent to focus on where they want to go.”

Lydia Leong concluded Panel 3 by addressing Dave Wright, CEO/Founder of SolidFire, who shared his vision for the open source cloud platform for the very near future. Read more about his input here.