For attendees of the HPE Discover 2015 event in London, networking is of high importance, whether it’s the business, social, or online form. While it’s relatively rare for all of those forms to come together at once, Hewlett Packard Enterprise Co.’s (HPE) conference is just the type of place where that can happen.

Paul Miller, VP of marketing for Converged Systems at HPE, and Patrick Moorhead, founder, president and principal analyst of Moor Insights & Strategy, met with John Furrier and Dave Vellante, cohosts of theCUBE, from the SiliconANGLE Media team, to address the implications and potential of HPE’s recently announced “composable” Synergy infrastructure, which unites networking, storage and computing.

High hopes and potential

The discussion started off on a high note, as Miller pointed out that so far, “the feedback has been phenomenal.” Exploring some of the reasons why there was such positive feedback at this early stage, Miller stated that “[customers] want to understand how they can deliver at cloud speed, how they can actually work and take their traditional apps, their new apps [and] their DevOps environments on one platform and marry them all together and really get that acceleration and simplicity to the business.” By managing servers and storage and fabric with a unified interface, Synergy offers easy access to these optimized frameworks.

Moorhead provided another perspective on customer expectations, outlining what modern users wanted infrastructure tech to be able to do for them. “Whether it’s simplicity in terms of even deploying apps or going all the way to composability, people are on a different journey and a different level, but what they’re trying to do is get technology out of the way, to serve the business.”

API constraints and flexibility

Miller was upfront about the realism of HPE’s expectations for the Synergy infrastructure, acknowledging that they expect a transitional period of a few years while people come to understand its full power. Key to getting this widespread adoption is a targeting of the management layer. “It’s all about getting that management plane, and then that simple API, not layers of APIs and management, that customers as well as vendors and partners can tie into in a simple way,” he said.

Moorhead noted that while writing apps for a single API could lead to an appearance of being “locked-in” to its framework, the coherence from such practices could outweigh that apparent downside. Looking at legacy applications, with companies using apps that they may no longer have the skill-sets to upgrade, Moorhead anticipated a widespread move toward self-service and cloud models.

Watch the full interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE and theCUBE’s coverage of HPE Discover 2015 — London. And join in on the conversation by CrowdChatting live with theCUBE hosts during the event.

Photo by SiliconANGLE