As this year’s HPE Discover event kicked off this week, the new announcements and unveilings by Hewlett Packard Enterprise Co. (HPE) were drawing a lot of  attention, though much of it was devoted to digging further into the possibilities offered by composable infrastructure.

Ric Lewis, SVP and GM of Converged Data Center Infrastructure at HPE, joined Dave Vellante (@dvellante) and John Furrier (@furrier), cohosts of theCUBE, from the SiliconANGLE Media team, to talk about customer reactions to composable infrastructure, the changes it’s having on workloads and a few other new items coming from HPE.

Composing the future

As much as the idea of composable infrastructure itself is a high point of interest for HPE, the company is also finding ways to make its utilities more concrete for interested parties. As Lewis mentioned, HPE is “now launching the platform that’s the first instantiation of this composable infrastructure,” and its deployment is already challenging what vendors think customers want.

“Customers are telling us, ‘No, no, no, no! We want to be able to use our infrastructure for both [on-prem and the cloud], and we want to have that security compliance, all the benefits of having on-prem infrastructure for some of that,’” Lewis explained.

Ease of use and power

“At the core of it, when we say, ‘What is composable, really?’, it’s cloud made easy,” Lewis said. “And what does that really mean? Infrastructure as code. You don’t have to deal with all the infrastructure stuff like firmware updates and how to deploy it against applications, and it flexes automatically to workloads as needed.” Lewis gave an example of the composable infrastructure utilizing fluid resource pools, to which resources return when they’re no longer required for processes.

Along with the changes to meet customer desires, the supply side of infrastructure is getting changes of its own. “I think when you hear that operating model, in our old mindset for traditional apps, it was because of cost-minimization: ‘I want to do X, Y, Z,’” Lewis reminisced. “The power has now shifted to the lines of business themselves, and what they want is agility and speed. And so they don’t want to deal with a bunch of stuff, putting it together and procuring it, and taking a while, so if they have a composable infrastructure, they can immediately apply that to the applications.”

This desire for simplicity is hardly limited to new users, Lewis added. “CIOs want to be relevant to the organization,” he said. “Their pressure isn’t just, ‘Keep the stuff running in the back office and make sure it doesn’t crash.’ … Today it is: ‘How can you generate revenue and profit for the company, how do you enable me to develop apps faster, how do you enable me to be relevant with all of the mobile applications that are going on, how do you still have that be secure and compliant like my traditional infrastructure, but make it so those lines of business can immediately roll out applications, and be relevant to generating income for the business?’”

Simplicity and speed

As the times move on, there’s a switch away from selling infrastructure on old ideas of value. “In this new era, it’s about simplicity and speed, and being able to provide dynamic infrastructure,” said Lewis. “It’s different value, but the customers value it, and they’re really interested in it.”

He also shared some clues about the next steps HPE has in mind to bring composable infrastructure to a wider adoption and implementation share. “The next phase, we call it continuous service delivery,” he said. “What it’s really about is integrating more of that vertical stack so that the customers can just have a cloud/private-cloud solution show up on their premise and not have to worry about any of it.”

Beyond this, Lewis said HPE has a big expansion, deployed infrastructure from cloud portals, and more on their plate for this event and the near future.

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

Photo by SiliconANGLE