As cloud deployment, storage and development continue to draw attention from the mainstream, the demand for simplified access solutions is prompting some cloud service providers to join with partners in devising easy entry points for potential customers.

At the HPE Discover EU event in London, Ken Won, director of cloud solutions marketing at Hewlett Packard Enterprise Co., and Mark Jewett, senior director of product Marketing, Cloud Platform, at Microsoft, sat down with Dave Vellante (@dvellante) and Paul Gillin (@pgillin), co-hosts of theCUBE*, from the SiliconANGLE Media team, to talk about their collaboration on the Azure Stack cloud management solutions set.

Simplifying hybrids

As Won explained early in the discussion, the HPE-Microsoft collaboration was intended to address “a huge amount of interest from customers who want to deploy a hybrid-cloud environment,” with particular emphasis on meeting the challenge of creating consistency between the various operational environments.

By allowing customers to use the same application for each side of the hybrid, Won sees Azure Stack as “being able to serve that dual environment” while removing the hassle of needing to write specialized code for each part, something that’s been seen as more complex than what the average customer wants.

“We see [cloud-interested customers] facing both this opportunity and a set of barriers that we need to help them with,” Won said. He also felt that due to the complexity of implementation, “what Amazon and VMware did is a little short of what customers are looking for,” because of the way in which they manage different environments.

Compliance and control

Also under discussion was the issue of data sovereignty and regulations when operating across different countries, particularly when working in a public cloud. In response, Won noted, HPE’s plan is to devise OpenStack environments in as transparent a way as they could. “Creating a platform that is transparent, that is absolutely the vision,” Jewett agreed.

And while legal regulations compliance may have been a major prompt in that direction, it’s leading to benefits on the management side for the end-users as well. Jewett picked out the Microsoft Operations Management Suite, spotlighted in one of the event’s keynotes, as a way of letting users “build that orchestration, that monitoring, that will let you look across your cloud environments,” while also supporting Azure Stack’s capabilities of developing in one environment and smoothly deploying in another.

“The advantage of building consistency … is you get all the innovation. … It’s frankly a tricky act for us to pull off, but we believe in the mission,” Jewett stated.

Watch the complete video interview, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE and theCUBE’s coverage of HPE Discover EU. (*Disclosure: HPE and other companies sponsor some HPE Discover EU segments on SiliconANGLE Media’s theCUBE. Neither HPE nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo by SiliconANGLE