Ben Kepes sat in on theCube at HP Discover 2012 for a quick cloud discussion with Wikibon’s Stuart Miniman and SiliconAngle’s Alex Williams. Full video below.

At any given time, the cloud has been either at the forefront of discussion at HP Discover 2012 or an undertone.  The importance however has been consistent, regardless of the topic.  While there is quite a bit built around the infrastructure, it is believed that the real opportunity comes in the actual data.  We are seeing aggregation and HP is using the term data layer that reflects the power of data and indicates that this is the real growth opportunity.  The significance to business will be new value streams, new revenue models, and essentially Big Data has given the cloud “something to do”.  Ben shares a scenario that reflects these initiatives.  In the airline industry, there are a whole world of price pressures and push to find margins.  Initiatives are now underway to encompass the mass of unstructured data in that industry to develop and find a greater value to the consumer, by creating an experience that is more contextual.  That requires computing of this nature and on this scale.  Case after case indicates that the message is feeding into line of business discussions across many industries.  Soon the day will come where most devices we touch will be ip-enabled and with that comes a massive swarm of data.  What is done with this data will prove to be a massive challenge, but is an incredible opportunity.

On the meaning and implications of HP and Microsoft working together, Kepes discusses a shift in mindset for HP away from looking at hardware as a revenue stream, looking more towards services as their revenue stream.  This extends to the organization as a whole, because as Miniman noted, there is a track record of services success in the history of HP, as in the EDS division.

HP cloud is reflected on in the discussion as a realistic reaction to some enterprise concerns.  The need for some type of consistency between the many variations of public and private cloud environments is a serious challenge.  The answer is a form of hybridized platform independence that will fill the gap between public and private environments, a transition that is not as simple as it sounds.  Kepes notes that there are some legacy applications that will never move into the cloud.  This includes mission-critical mainframe applications and the sort.  There is too much inconvenience at this time to rise to that level of effort.  At this time, the cloud is primarily an environment for ‘greenfield’ apps.   This is a reality that forms that gap challenge.

Kepes talks about cloud education and his CloudU series.  The curriculum was designed by Ben and is found on Rackspace’s site.  It is vendor neutral and a fantastic learning source.  Acknowledging the  value of various vendor-specific education programs, Kepes is committed to education in the brave new frontier of cloud technology.  He also mentions some of the ‘hot jobs’ of the future such as DevOps, Data Scientist, and business-focused IT jobs.