The following is an excerpt from Saar Gillai’s recent appearance on theCube during last week’s OpenStack Summit in Portland, Oregon.  Gillai is the Senior Vice President and General Manager of HP Converge Cloud.

Converged cloud is all about having one common architecture that provides customers with consistency and choice, across all deployment models, whether it’s private, public, or managed. If you think about cloud work, cloud is about having that flexible, seamless deployment across models and so forth. The way we put that together is we take all different products of HP, we ensure that they are designed with common architecture, and we package them together as a solution that provides customers with that experience. From a customer perspective, they don’t need to know or care which business it comes from. They get a converged cloud solution that gives them flexibility.

In the next year we are going to be providing more and more pieces that are going to have this really common architecture and common experience for customers.

 HP’s presence in OpenStack

In 2011, we started working on OpenStack. We were looking at: what is going to be our next generation cloud architecture? And we looked at different systems out there in the industry and eventually, we chose OpenStack. Not only did we choose OpenStack, but we went full force behind it. We worked with Rackspace and partners to make it so that it’s not just one vendor and we actually put up a public cloud with it.

Then in 2012, we worked with Rackspace and partners to create the OpenStack Foundation.

What’s current in the cloud?

Obviously today in cloud the systems that are most prevalent are systems of engagement, so the applications are designed with the cloud in mind. The key thing to understand is it’s a journey. It’s about looking at a business and look at where there is more value. Cloud is all about speed. At the end of the day, it’s about how fast do I get a result? That’s what matters. Where can I get the most time to value and that’s where I would apply cloud and over time you’ll apply it to other places (eg: public and private). It’s important to have a holistic approach across all models.

Watch the entire interview here.