Most companies have abandoned the either/or approach to infrastructure. They now know they’ll operate both on-premises and in the cloud for the foreseeable future. But the model hybrid environment remains out of focus. Is it a suite of public-cloud services stood up on-prem? Or is it perhaps an on-prem appliance with arms extending to cloud? And how on earth is it all managed?

Companies have moved cloud-security anxiety, and now piecing the hybrid puzzle together is the preoccupation, according to Barbara Hallmans (pictured), global director of Microsoft alliance and HPE ecosystem GTM at Hewlett Packard Enterprise Co. “I think today people have lost the fear a little bit, but they still don’t know what to put where,” she said.

What to put where is a simple phrase belying the deep partnerships and sophisticated tech needed to make hybrid a reality.

Hallmans spoke with Stu Miniman (@stu) and Rebecca Knight (@knightrm), co-hosts of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s mobile livestreaming studio, during the Microsoft Ignite event in Orlando, Florida. They discussed HPE’s partnership with Microsoft Corp. and how the companies are shepherding customers to hybrid IT (see the full interview with transcript here). (* Disclosure below.)

Will Arc be a uniter of hybrid factions?

HPE has partnered with Microsoft for 30 years. As legacy companies with on-prem roots, are they more able to “meet customers where they are” than younger companies who like to talk about it? Their latest announcements showcase their efforts to do so.

As an Expert MSP partner for Microsoft Azure Cloud, HPE offers on-prem-to-cloud migration services. It also works closely with Microsoft on the latter’s SQL Server — an enterprise-class diskless database. SQL features prominently in Azure’s just-announced Arc, which takes an ambitious swing at full-scale hybrid cloud management.

The list of technologies — on-prem and cloud — that Azure can squeeze onto its control pane (Azure Fabric Controller) is greedily inclusive: virtual machines, database instances, Hadoop and Kubernetes clusters, etc.  Azure Resource Manager, or ARM, automates the resource lifecycle of many services that run in Azure, like Azure Kubernetes Service. With Arc, Microsoft has announced that ARM support will now extend to resources outside of Azure, like physical servers or VMs on Google Cloud Platform.

“The vision is really that we will be able to manage hybrid environments in a better way,” Hallmans said. 

HPE has announced that all of its hardware will be made available as a service over the next two or three years. 

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of the Microsoft Ignite event. (* Disclosure: Hewlett Packard Enterprise Co. sponsored this segment of theCUBE. Neither HPE nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE