HP's $Billion Journey to the Cloud [VIDEO]

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Saar Gillai, SVP and GM for Converged Cloud at HP, oversees a massive multi-billion business. It’s a business that include both private and public clouds and is heavily invested in the open source OpenStack cloud platform.

In an exclusive video interview with Datamation, Gillai discusses what HP is doing in the cloud and provides some guidance as to when it makes sense for an enterprise to move to a cloud model.

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“HP has an over-arching strategy for cloud that talks about using the same architecture and consumption model for private, public, managed and hybrid clouds,” Gillai said. “We have products across the company both for building clouds and consuming clouds.”

On the private side, HP’s CloudSystem is one of the key offerings and was recently expanded to provide cloud bursting capabilities. HP’s OpenStack Public cloud was also recently expanded to include services for cloud monitoring, load balancing and DNS.

Cloud a $3.9 Billion Business

Cloud computing is a big business already for HP. Gillai said that in 2012, HP did approximately $3.9 billion in cloud business. The current forecast is for cloud revenue to surpass $8 Billion in 2015.

Growth in the cloud is coming from multiple locations. There are some customers that come from competitive displacements and there are those that Gillai described as being on the journey to the cloud.

The cloud isn’t just about virtualization either. Gillai explained that what the cloud provides is greater speed and time to value. The decision to move to cloud should first begin with an understanding of what the enterprise wants to do.

“Virtualization gives you efficiency, but it doesn’t give you speed,” Gillai said.

The speed comes from automation and self-service, which is where the cloud fits in.

Challenges

In terms of challenges for cloud adoption, Gillai sees the mindset at enterprises as being at the top of the list.

Many CIOs that Gillai talks too don’t know where to start when it comes to the cloud. There are also those that haven’t come to the realization that in the world of cloud, IT serves as a broker of services that can be provided.

While there are challenges, cloud is now at the point of wide-scale adoption for some workloads.

“I think that adoption is actually happening way faster than people thought,” Gillai said.

Watch the video interview with Saar Gillai below:

Sean Michael Kerner is a senior editor at Datamation and InternetNews.com. Follow him on Twitter @TechJournalist.