The digital transformation era demands efficiency, agility and adaptability. As businesses navigate an increasingly complex IT landscape, hybrid cloud strategies have become indispensable.

Following its acquisition of OpsRamp, Hewlett Packard Enterprises Co. has fostered a unique kinship aiming to propagate the hybrid cloud operating model.

“What we saw, as hybrid cloud became more pervasive, was that it created a lot of problems when customers went to the public cloud in what we call a ‘hybrid by accident’ way … now, you have created a lot of different operational silos,” said Hang Tan (pictured, right), chief operating officer of hybrid cloud at HPE. “You had operational silos for your traditional infrastructure, for your private cloud, as well as for all the public cloud deployments you have. The next big problem we’re going after is how we simplify hybrid multicloud operations in a cloud-native way, in a unified way that truly brings the next generation of AI and automation to bear.”

Tan and Varma Kunaparaju (left), senior vice president and general manager of cloud platform and OpsRamp at HPE, spoke with theCUBE’s Savannah Peterson for the “Cloud AI Journey” series, during an exclusive broadcast on theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s livestreaming studio. They discussed HPE’s hybrid cloud operating model, the significance of observability and the promising future shaped by AI and automation. (* Disclosure below.)

HPE’s hybrid cloud operating model collapses existing operational silos

HPE’s current mission is to simplify hybrid multicloud operations through AI-driven automation and a unified platform that integrates seamlessly across different environments. By offering a truly multicloud, multi-vendor solution, HPE ensures customers avoid vendor lock-in while benefiting from streamlined, intelligent infrastructure management.

“It started out in the beginning just focused on consumption, matching the business needs of the customer with our offerings so that they can pay for what they consume,” Tan said. “That was the first step in our journey. Then it became about bringing the cloud experience on-prem, and that was a big win for our customers with HPE GreenLake.”

HPE emphasizes interoperability by committing to customer choice and flexibility as is crucial in a rapidly evolving technological landscape, where businesses require seamless integration across various cloud platforms and service providers. Operational silos introduce risks such as inconsistent workflows, trapped costs and governance issues. HPE’s vision is to establish a hybrid cloud operating model, enabling businesses to stand up and run entire hybrid cloud infrastructures cohesively, Tan added.

“I think it creates a lot of trapped costs and resources, alongside business continuity risk and governance risk,” he said. “That’s why having a unified consistent operating model, as we would like to call it, is important. We have this term called a hybrid cloud operating model, which means you have a consistent way to deploy, monitor, observe, orchestrate, protect and also optimize your end-to-end hybrid cloud estate in a unified way.”

The OpsRamp acquisition kicks things up a gear

HPE’s acquisition of OpsRamp marks a pivotal step in strengthening its hybrid cloud strategy. Unlike many acquisitions that see innovative startups absorbed and diluted within corporate structures, HPE has fully embraced OpsRamp’s independent growth and technological advancements.

“The enterprise is no longer a single estate of one workload running in the cloud and one workload running in private, but people forget that the consumption of those workloads is coming from branches and edge locations that also is part of the overall infrastructure,” Kunaparaju said. “The vision behind OpsRamp is to create a single integrated operations framework for enterprise IT to deliver the mission-critical business services that business units look for in a unified framework. That’s the vision behind the company, and we always believed in not creating those silos.”

By integrating its observability solutions into HPE GreenLake, OpsRamp has enhanced its full-stack monitoring capabilities, AI-driven automation and network observability — with the subsequent Aruba partnership serving for enhanced network visibility. These advancements ensure enterprises can optimize their hybrid cloud operations with minimal disruption and maximum efficiency, Kunaparaju added.

Looking ahead, HPE and OpsRamp are working toward an autonomous data center powered by AI. With advancements in generative AI, intelligent agents and automation, the vision is to create a self-managing, self-optimizing infrastructure, according to Tan.

“The other piece is monitoring AI workloads, monitoring AI agents and making sure companies can meet compliance and privacy requirements,” he said. “That is also a very interesting observability problem to solve because AI is such a massive workload and such a distributed workload that it requires you to have the capabilities to monitor everything, your networking, your compute, your storage, even the wide-area network, edge locations and data movements. That’s a massive observability challenge that people will face, and we think OpsRamp is perfectly positioned to go after that.”

The conversation is set to continue at HPE Discover.

Here’s the complete video interview, part of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE Research’s coverage of the “Cloud AI Journey” series: 

(* Disclosure: TheCUBE is a paid media partner for the “Cloud AI Journey” event. Neither Hewlett Packard Enterprise Co., the sponsor of theCUBE’s event coverage, nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE