Cloud's future is hybrid, according to HPE
Jorge Colotto, VP Communications Service Providers, talks about HPE and the choice of adopting OpenNFV solutions and open technology standards.
During our visit at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, we also stopped at the Hewlett Packard Enterprise stand, the new company born from the recent split of HP in two parts. Regardless HPE being a smaller company than HP, its presence at MWC is massive, a whole lotta 3 stands, of which one is dedicated to NFV (Network Function Virtualization) partners.
We have interviewed Jorge L. Colotto, VP Communications Service Providers Industry, and talked about some of the news of this MWC and its point of view regarding the IT world.
Jorge, what are the points of reference for the new HPE in this world that is ever shifting towards the mobile sphere? In a world that is more and more addressing towards IT, like Telco’s, do you believe that security is sufficiently taken into account?
HPE identified 4 pillars, 4 fundamental areas of transformation. The first one is Hybrid IT which is about the key technologies of this transformation, like SDN and NFV. The second pillar can be identified with the word ‘’protect’’ in order to put an accent on security: security that goes well beyond a single layer of protection, like the one of a firewall or of an antivirus. At least 6 or 7 layers of protection are required and we must work always considering the hypothesis that the attack could also come from the inside and that one or more protection layers could be already compromised.
What are the two remaining pillars?
The third is inherently tied to the themes here discussed: mobility, smart working, the opportunity of working with mobility and with the greatest ease. The fourth is about the extraordinary possibilities of data processing, Big Data and all the related challenges.
Naturally HPE has in servers and storage one of its points of strength, thanks to its historical leadership with the HP brand. One of the future scenarios that is being portrayed by lots of people is the one about a world dominated by cloud, with colossuses like Amazon (AWS) and Microsoft (Azure) owning the vast majority of datacenters, thus having an incredible purchasing power in key server and storage sectors, with obvious disadvantages against brands like HPE. What do you think about these more or less reasonable hypothesis?
HPE strongly believes in cloud, but our vision is not about a single public cloud. Surely many companies will maintain an on-premises part of their infrastructures, so future is definitely hybrid, according to us. A clear example is in front of our eyes here at MWC: Telcos will necessarily keep control on their infrastructures because it’s strategical to them.
HPE is a company that believes in open technology standards and it’s because of that that it supports, for instance, platforms like OpenStack and OpenNFV which offers Communication Service Providers the greater freedom of choice, for an open and interconnected environment.