Two and a half years after Hewlett-Packard CEO Meg Whitman named it as a top priority in her five-year turnaround plan, the cloud remains the former eBay head’s main agenda item. The company recently unified its hybrid computing efforts under the Helion brand in a renewed push for  dominance. Steven Dietch and Kerry Bailey, the top go-to-market executives for HP’s cloud business, dropped by SiliconANGLE’s theCUBE hot on the heels of the change at the company’s Discover conference to fill us in on the roadmap.

Cloud computing is as much a means as it is an end for Whitman, said Dietch. HP is leveraging the model to transform itself from a slow-moving behemoth into a nimbler and more focused organization. The company is ramping up its cloud push as the adoption of managed services nears critical mass in the enterprise, where CIOs are embracing an “if you can’t beat ’em, join ’em” mentality toward the phenomenon they had once fought.

“Enterprise adoption is still in high single-digits, but you’re seeing now that there’s such an imperative around speed and agility and innovation and not only supporting the business, but helping shape it as well, that IT needs to become an internal service provider,” Dietch explained. “CIOs realize that to in order to do that, you’ve got to adopt a hybrid mentality.”

That acknowledgment comes years after infrastructure-as-a-service entered the technology mainstream. Dietch attributed the delay not to sluggishness enterprise IT departments but to market dynamics. He pointed to the fact that cloud services were at first mostly geared toward the needs of developers and startups rather than those of large organizations. But the situation has changed considerably since.

Today, it’s CIOs who are dictating the pace and direction of cloud innovation, he said. Facing unprecedented pressure to deliver value lines-of-business, IT organizations simply have no choice but to jump on the bandwagon. But making the transition from old to new is much easier said than done in the enterprise, Dietch pointed out. Pulling off hybrid computing at large scale requires achieving an optimal balance between private and public wherein each workload runs in the most appropriate plane under a unified security and policy enforcement model that spans the environment.

“Enterprise customers want to have someone that’s got a strong firm on the tiller that can lead them in that direction,” he continued. “It’s just not a fly-by-night or even a non-fly-by-night entity that’s going to understand those requirements and migrate not just existing workloads but also deal with cloud native applications. That’s a complex endeavor for anybody. From HP’s perspective, we got all the assets to help customers do that.”

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Bailey, who joined HP less than a year ago following a lengthy stint in the telecom industry, shares the same view. In fact, he said that the breadth of the company’s portfolio was one of the main drivers behind his decision to sign up with the hardware giant, which he remarked is uniquely positioned to deliver on the IT-as-a-service vision he spent much of his career trying to realize.

“When you think about HP, we have literally every [needed] component,” he said. “We’re committed to open standards – whether it’s Cloud Foundry, OpenStack or Linux – and we have the world’s largest channel, both direct and indirect. When you add that with the fact we have 170,000 people in our services organization, you [realize] … we have all of it.”

The telecommunications industry happens to be a major area of focus for HP in its hybrid cloud push, in part because there is a great deal of overlap between its goals with Helion and the operational objectives of the major carriers. Bailey sees that manifesting in the growing industry adoption of network functions virtualization (NFV), a new service delivery paradigm that shares a common aim with the cloud: enabling greater flexibility to react to new trends.

Carriers have an especially important place in HP’s Helion Network, a newly announced initiative that Deitch said is meant to establish a federated network of cloud services based on OpenStack. “It’s not a project, it’s not a partner program, it’s a core element of HP’s strategy going forward,” he promised. “We’re going to lift everybody’s boat and create a network that delivers enterprise-grade services and accelerates enterprise adoption.”

photo credit: Giovanni ‘jjjohn’ Orlando via photopin cc