Excitement is high at this year’s HPE Discover event in Las Vegas, with the growth and development of the Internet of Things (IoT) and cloud services since last year’s conference having spurred new implementations.

Bobby Patrick, CMO of HPE Cloud at Hewlett Packard Enterprise Co., and Michael Loomis, VP of Technical Sales at Nuage Networks (a Nokia venture), sat down with Dave Vellante (@dvellante) and John Furrier (@furrier), cohosts of theCUBE, from the SiliconANGLE Media team, during the event to talk about some of the recent innovations, how these are being served to customers and the impact of different approaches to the stack have done to move tech along.

Clouds for industry

Patrick gave a wide summation of cloud’s usefulness early in the interview by saying, “Cloud is the catalyst for our partners,” something with which Loomis agreed, as they both went on to give numerous examples of how its use has aided their companies, from improved scalability to more flexible and agile services.

Patrick also laid out the “three prongs” of HPE Cloud’s approach to its sector of the tech world: “Help customers … partner with leading technologies in the public cloud … [and] integrate our solutions with those clouds as well.” He highlighted growth in IoT as an exciting opportunity, but noted, “Security is the #1 concern our customers have.”

Stacking up

Another point of interest was the way that OpenStack technologies have been allowing changes to traditional uses for the stack, with Patrick picking out the “ability to add on top high value processes” as one of the most useful things to develop out of it. “All these pieces are coming together,” he added.

For Loomis, the “problem of scale-out and flexibility in the clouds” was a major issue, though it’s now being addressed through software as an integrated SDN controller. As Loomis explained, his company had approached private cloud years ago, but found that scalability wasn’t developed enough to meet their needs, a problem which was now being solved. However, as he noted, “People are not going to consume that networking technology in and of themselves.”

Future plans

For both Patrick and Loomis, the future and its challenges were something they were looking forward to meeting head on. Picking out one particular issue, Loomis noted, “When you’re talking about … getting away from the [cloud] vendor lock … it means that a lot of products have to come together and work well together.”

For HPE Cloud’s part, Patrick gave some clues to the company’s intended direction by saying, “Our strategy is to partner with public cloud providers. … I think you’ll see more to come on the public cloud partner space.”

Watch the full video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE and theCUBE’s coverage of HPE Discover 2016.

Photo by SiliconANGLE