Last year, Hewlett-Packard invested a healthy sum in OpenStack R&D and its Helion cloud platform. What some considered not much more than a “science experiment” last year has evolved into a “credible, scalable enterprise-grade cloud platform,” said Tom Norton, VP of OpenStack Cloud Services for Hewlett Packard Enterprise Co. (HPE).

Norton said the platform has gained traction in the Telco, service provider and financial services sectors.

John Furrier and Dave Vellante, cohosts of theCUBE, from the SiliconANGLE Media team, wanted to know what services sector customers ask for.

“They may have an app that they want to host on OpenStack, and they want to move that into production as quickly as possible,” Norton explained. “Accelerating adoption of OpenStack in their environment is the first step. From a services perspective, we have senior resources both in OpenStack and how OpenStack applies to the network.”

Norton said that customers also see OpenStack as a viable option from an workload perspective. “If they are shifting to a cloud-native environment, they want to have a platform for cloud that can dramatically improve the way that they handle cloud-native applications,” he said. “So it’s a shift but it’s not a 100 percent lift and move.”

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