At this week’s HP Discover event in Las Vegas, the executive vice president and general manager of HP’s Enterprise Group, Bill Veghte, sat down with SiliconANGLE to discuss the company’s strategy and embracement of open source, his role in implementing that strategy and how HP’s legacy in the movement will be viewed in the coming years.

Like many legacy vendors, some might expect HP’s 75-year history to be a hindrance to its ability to identify and act on new trends in the market. Veghte points out, however, that HP was one of the first companies that actively supported the OpenStack movement, which has taken the infrastructure market by storm over the past several years.

“We laid out a transformation and that transformation is taking hold,” Veghte explained. “You can feel it in the market and in the enthusiasm of the partners and employees.” He goes on to state that the greatness of HP is not only what they do but how they do it, saying, “HP will go the extra mile with a customer to ensure a great outcome.”

The world of IT is shifting toward an application-driven landscape. HP recognizes that this transition will still rely on a well-deployed architecture.

“Without the correct physical infrastructure,” notes Veghte, “you aren’t ready for the future.”

Customers working with HP on their individual transitions know the components they source from HP will be best of breed products. This, Veghte states, is made possible through HP’s partnerships that provide innovative components necessary for a modern architecture. “We can now offer [these products] as integrated solutions.”

HP’s legacy status also delivers peace of mind to their customer base. “Customers want to know we are not only delivering components but that we have the service behind it so they have the fastest time to value with the lowest risk possible.”

Just before the kickoff of this week’s event, HP announced their new suite of high performance computing solutions, HP Apollo. “The Apollo engineering team sat down with the National Research Energy Lab to identify a problem and how to solve it,” stated Veghte. “Apollo is that answer.”

The Apollo 6000 and Apollo 8000 systems, according to HP, were built from the ground up and designed to redefine and transform the data center by delivering improvements in total cost of ownership, performance and density at rack scale. Advancements in high performance computing have previously enabled governments and research facilities the opportunity to tackle issues previously difficult or even impossible to undertake. HP claims their Apollo systems are now bring the potential power of high performance computing to organizations of all sizes.

Service vendors like AWS have laid a large bet on the public cloud, even going so far as to herald the end of the traditional data center as we know it. Veghte and HP recognize the value of public cloud but believe the data center is, while undergoing a transformation, is not going to disappear altogether.

“The cloud is a way of delivering IT and the promise of self-service, to the developer and the end user,” he stated. “As we think about the opportunity, we find our customers don’t just want a public cloud. They want to take those constructs into a private cloud behind the firewall.” The value of public cloud has yet to satisfactorily address proprietary data that must be protected due to regulations and other considerations. “When I go back and talk to customers, I find much data will continue to reside at the company.”

The vast disruption at play in the market today led Veghte to reflect on how he wanted HP and the actions of himself, other leaders within the company and the dedicated workforce to be viewed even just a few years on. “I want people to look back a couple years from now and see that we developed an operating model that helped our customers.”

photo credit: acidpix