Saar Gillai, Senior Vice President and General Manager for HP Converged Cloud, stopped by theCube during the annual OpenStack Summit to discuss HP’s new developments with cloud and OpenStack with hosts John Furrier and Jeff Frick.

Gillai opened the discussion by highlighting Converged Cloud’s product vision. Converged Cloud is about having one common architecture that provides customers with choice and consistency across all deployment models, whether its private, public or managed. We take all the different products we have at HP, ensure that they have a common architecture, a common user experience, and we package them together as a flexible solution for the customer, Gillai explained.

As for OpenStack, HP has been very involved in the open source project. In 2011, Gillai explained, the company was on the look out for the next generation cloud architecture, and  we chose OpenStack. We went full force with it, and, working with partners like Rackspace, set up a public cloud and then created the OpenStack Foundation.

John Furrier asked Gillai, as a veteran OpenStack supporter, how he sees OpenStack  evolving as a community. With OpenStack right now, we see people playing, but they’re not deploying, Gillai commented, and to get them deploying, it needs to be easier to use, there needs to be a lot of provided tooling for it. There’s a lot of work to be done around it—figuring out how it will talk to applications, and building ecosystems around it—which does provide a golden opportunity for developers, Furrier pointed out. Stability in OpenStack’s frequent upgrades will also be important to the project’s future, since integration is essential, Gillai added.