Hewlett-Packard had approached the task of creating a cohesive brand for its cloud portfolio with the typical methodicalness of a corporate giant. Management had the sales organizations put together a list of some 6,000 candidate phrases and present them to the broader workforce, who narrowed down the choice to a small handful from Helion was ultimately chosen.

That was the easy part. The hard part was coming up with a way to differentiate against the slew of other big-name vendors pushing their own cloud propositions, a task that Bill Hilf, the senior vice president of products and services for HP’s Helion business, told SiliconANGLE his company had succeeded in doing with equal handiness. He appeared on theCUBE at the recently concluded Discover conference to share what it is exactly that sets Helion apart from the pack with hosts Dave Vellante and Jeff Frick.

Hilf, who was in charge of  Microsoft Azure prior to signing up with HP last year, has a unique take on the market. He predicts that the distinction between “public” and “private” will dissipate from the cloud discussion as it becomes more and more ubiquitous, in the same way that the nuances of the “information highway” lost their significance to CIOs once the Internet became a mass phenomenon. The Helion roadmap is fully aligned with that stance.

“From a marketing point of view we call it ‘the fabric of an enterprise’ because we believe that customers will build the cloud that they need and not necessarily the cloud that the vendor is trying to describe. So against that vision, what we built is a cloud portfolio that is very composable,” he explained. Instead of offering a pre-packaged solution, the company provides a set of distinct but complementary components – both products and services – clients can use to put together an environment that best meets their specific requirements.

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Flexibility through modularity, with a touch of open-source

That freedom of choice is  the result of HP’s decision to base Helion not on proprietary but open-source technology, according to Hilf. That, he said, allows customers to combine the velocity of the community with support from an established vendor that  possesses the means to channel that tempo into driving business results.

HP’s “best of both worlds” approach extends across on- as well as off-premise environments, which Hilf believes will stay equally important to one another as adoption of cloud services accelerates.  That stance differs from that of infrastructure-as-a-service kingpin Amazon, which has been arguing for quite some time that very few organizations will maintain their own data centers in the future. But Hilf doesn’t see that happening for the simple reason that putting all of their organizations’ data eggs in one  basket is out of the question for CIOs, regardless of whether that basket happens to be private, public or managed.

“What I believe will happen over time is the public cloud becoming in many ways similar to the web tier in a three-tier architecture, where it’s used for very scalable horizontal applications like a streaming media app, or video-on-demand, or the type of mobile devices where you have to push a notification out to 10,000 devices,” he elaborated.

But while that model is a perfect fit for some workloads, Hilf pointed out it doesn’t reconcile with the reality of the  countless – and just as often as not mission-critical – systems strewn throughout the typical enterprise.  Multi-tenancy not only falls short in  supporting legacy workloads but also modern scale-up platforms such as SAP’s HANA in-memory database, he added, which is simply not built for sharing resources with other applications the way a web service could.

A multidimensional answer to a multidimensional challenge

Instead of trying to force a one-size-fits model on all the different workloads that make up the enterprise IT landscape, Hilf said that HP built Helion to tackle the entire multitude of requirements faced by CIOs today. That includes  security, which has become even more important than it was before the cloud services gold rush as a result of the rapid increase in the amount of corporate data stored outside the four walls of the organization.

That trend has presented a new set of challenges that, just as the case with all the other items on the cloud agenda, each have their own specific solution. That produces a great deal of additional complexity for IT organizations to deal with, a burden that Hilf highlighted Helion eases by enabling a common architecture that provides a single point of control and visibility across on- and off-premise deployments.

But although significant in and of itself, HP claims simplified security is just one of many advantages Helion has to offer. Among other things, the portfolio also includes a development environment based on Cloud Foundry, the open platform-as-a-service stack Pivotal spun off into an independent foundation earlier this year.  HP is a Platinum sponsor of the initiative and claims to provide customers with the full capabilities of the platform, including integration with OpenStack, which Hilf said his company is just as aggressive about monetizing.

image courtesy Hewlett-Packard