Hewlett-Packard may not be as far along the hybrid computing journey as some other major data center vendors, but the company is quickly closing the gap, recently unifying its once largely fragmented cloud portfolio under the Helion brand in an important first step towards delivering a cohesive value proposition. Bobby Patrick, the driving force behind the effort, stopped by theCUBE at the hardware giant’s recently concluded Discover summit in Las Vegas to share the insider scoop on the HP roadmap with with hosts Dave Vellante and Jeff Frick.

Born out of a $1 billion initiative launched this May in response to similarly grandiose investments  by IBM and Cisco, Helion aims to fuse HP’s pre-existing collection of field-hardened cloud technologies into an integrated stack spanning both on- and off-premise environments, according to Patrick. The offering is underpinned by OpenStack, which he said the company had recognized as a long-term strategic priority early on. That is reflected by the fact that it presently ranks among the top ten most active corporate sponsors of the cloud operating system, not only in terms of resources allocated to the project but with regard to net code contribution as well.

Since he joined company as the chief marketing officer for its cloud division three months ago, a lot of progress has been made on extending that focus beyond the open-source community into the enterprise, Patrick detailed. As part of the Helion launch, HP pulled the curtain back on a homegrown OpenStack distribution complete with professional support and consultancy services, two essential components for CIOs embarking on new projects.  The vendor is essentially trying to combine the best of two worlds: the freedom and velocity afforded by the open-source model with the reliability of proprietary offerings.

“We got thousands of the world’s best developers working around the clock on our core cloud future, OpenStack, contributing to that. And then we’re taking that and bringing it to market, providing that 24-hour support, testing and hardening it, doing the things we can do to make enterprises comfortable. We could never deliver that kind of innovation on our own,” Patrick highlighted.

HP claims that the pricing for Helion OpenStack, $1,400 per server per year with volume discounts, is highly competitive considering what’s included in the package. The platform allows for a broad range of private cloud workloads, according to Patrick, while the value-added services that come on the side allow organizations to tailor their deployments to effectively meet the requirements of those applications.

See the entire segment below.

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