The term “hybrid cloud” may bring to mind a single entity, crossbred but whole — the infrastructure equivalent to a liger. Yet the reality of hybrid cloud is closer to a large, diverse zoo, according to William Fellows (pictured, right), founder and vice president of research at The 451 Group LLC.

“When they say ‘hybrid cloud,’ it just means they’re using different clouds to meet different needs at different times,” Fellows said of most enterprises bouncing the term around.

What’s worse is that these clouds tend to have little interoperability among them, Fellows stated.

Both Fellows and Ken Won (pictured, left), director of software defined and cloud group marketing at Hewlett Packard Enterprise Co., spoke to John Furrier (@furrier) and Dave Vellante (@dvellante),  co-hosts of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s mobile live streaming studio, during HPE Discover in Las Vegas, Nevada. (* Disclosure below.)

So far efforts to capture multiple clouds into some integrated picture for information technology, developers and line of business people have been mostly disappointing, Fellows stated. One reason is that different clouds pertain to said personnel who require specific information; they also need to use different services for ever-evolving tasks, he added.

‘Single glass of pain’

“Everybody talks about a single pane of glass — that can easily become a single glass of pain if they don’t allow you to do these things,” Fellows said.

HPE just announced Project New Stack, a hybrid IT management tool aiming to solve the problem by providing both a holistic view of different clouds and special views for various “personas” in an organization, according to Won.

A company could be running several different public clouds, an on-prem clouds, Software as a Service clouds, containers, etc. With Project New Stack, “You have a way to look across all of these different clouds and say, ‘I can see where my spend is; I can see where my capacity is,” Won said.

The different “persona” services can calibrate the tool to the wheelhouses of specific employee types, like developers, he explained. “All they want is access to their development tools — so we give them access to a whole marketplace of tools,” he said.

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s independent editorial coverage of HPE Discover US 2017. (* Disclosure: TheCUBE is a paid media partner for HPE Discover US 2017. Neither Hewlett Packard Enterprise Co. nor other sponsors have editorial control on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE