During the last day of HP Discover 2013, Stu Miniman invited Tim Crawford to theCUBE to talk about the IT world, the trends in the business and his insight, from his privileged position as a Strategic Advisor at HP.

Tim Crawford’s impression is there are no certain paths to success in this business. Making a Vegas analogy, Crawford joked that “leveraging IT today is like rolling the dice.” The future is very hard to picture, despite a great effort from everybody to do so. What he noted though, at this event, was that HP was still relevant in the business.

“HP has some interesting stories to tell. Despite certain gaps in the solutions and in the messaging, this is not an old, tired company as some might have been tempted to think in the past. But they have some work to do.

Convergence + Openness

Miniman brought up the two hot topics of the event: convergence and openness.

Openness means flexibility, reckons Crawford, as it’s been said already, but it also means finding new ways to work more effectively and efficiently, leveraging a multitude of different solutions from different providers, ensuring they work together. That is actually a lot of work. One step further, OpenStack has a ton of potential, it is critical to HP’s strategy, but it may not be the best solution for Enterprises, thinks Tim Crawford. Despite being “open”, open source is NOT free. There are requirements and significant costs associated with managing and getting involved in open source movements. It’s not just the bill, there’s the need for knowledge and staff. Some Enterprises will jump on board, others will wait it out.

But service providers have a completely different perspective. Open Stack provides them with the opportunity to customize and diversify their offering, but it also means they have to scale, to be able to dedicate the kind of resources required.

• Traditional IT is dead

If you compare traditional IT to the modern IT, it’s safe to say that traditional IT is dead, stated Crawford. For a vast majority of Enterprises today, the traditional IT model just doesn’t work as far as moving forward is concerned. The new model, still in his infancy, is here to stay.

• Big Data and Cloud

Where is the intersection between Cloud and Big Data? When he addressed this question, Miniman quoted Vellante: “Big Data gives Cloud something to do.”

Crawford slightly disagrees. He thinks that “Big Data gives IT a future. Cloud is just an enabler to quickly get there.”

See Crawford’s entire segment below.