Get the Best of Both Worlds: Public and Private Cloud

Sylvain Gaugry, Commercial Cloud Services Solutions, Hitachi Vantara:

My name is Sylvain Gaugry. I've worked with Hitachi Vantara for quite a long time. I'm working, let's say as a sales, business development guy in the AMEA, selling the entire portfolio of Hitachi Vantara as a service that includes basically all of the solutions we've got in the portfolio. And one of them is Hitachi Enterprise Cloud, which is helping our enterprise customers on their cloud journey. How do they do that? How do they move to the cloud? That's what I'm doing on day-to-day basis.

Jeremy:

It's pretty busy day to day. Then I would say considering how the multicloud conversation is right now, it's certainly one of the hottest topics.

Sylvain:

It is one of them. Definitely. It is exactly that. So most of the time we are talking to enterprise customers, big ones because at Hitachi Vantara, I think we are mostly focused on a high enterprise grade. And they all have a cloud journey where it's private for most of them probably if they want to remain private, probably going to be more public sector I would say. But most of the enterprises, they do have a public cloud journey as well. So how do I bridge with private public multicloud? How do I just cope with that?

Jeremy:

And that is what it is. It's about managing that necessity from major enterprise needs. Right? And so public cloud gets lots of chatter, but private cloud isn't gone and that's something that has to be addressed.

Sylvain:

It's definitely not gone. I think it's probably been back because we saw in the past three, four years, everyone was like: I want to move everything to the cloud.

Jeremy:

All of it?

Speaker:

Yeah, all of it. And probably you just don't know what you're doing and you are just telling that I'm going to move all my workloads to the cloud. No way. You're not going to do that. You still have a legacy that is probably not that easy to move. You still have security constraints. You still have complaince constraints, and you all obviously need some performances in different workloads. So, basically, there is no way you're gonna move everything to the cloud, like public. So, what do I do with that? When I started looking at it, it's basically, yeah, some workloads I can move it to the cloud because the necessity is not being security based, performance based. It's probably more agility based. But on the other end, I'm still leaning toward having some on my premises because of performance, security, constraints, compliance. And also I want to run it myself, not being like a subject to another third-party supplier. So yeah, I think the multicloud question is definitely ongoing.

Jeremy:

And, within that, we talk about regularly the need for agility, for flexibility, for speed and that there has to be balance then in the multicloud way in terms of where to find that. Like you have to be able to know how to achieve it and in which part of the multicloud you would do that. It seems that that's part of the strategy to help our customers understand it so that they are like, it's either all this or all that.

Sylvain:

Yeah. So I would say my team and the guys that work with me on a day-to-day basis, like cloud consultants or cloud architects, that we help the customers to say: Hey, this is definitely an application-based typology. That one is ready for the cloud and that one is definitely not ready for the cloud. So not ready for public land. So it's basically an application-based strategy you're going to move on and say: This is my strategy from an IT perspective, I need to stay [with] that workload internally and I can ship that one to the public cloud because it's okay with me.

Jeremy:

Well that's a, that's a great point in terms of the application modernization and cloud acceleration. Like where is the value there? Where do they w how do we help them find that?

Sylvain:

Again, it's very application based. Is that application potentially ready to move to the cloud, ready to move to a mode two, like kind of containerized application? Or: No, that one is really much more legacy and then … wanting to visualize that … we call it mode one. This is really a classic strategy. We can help the customer to assess his own workloads application. Should he be going there or staying there? So that's what we tried to help and we've got a solution called Hitachi Enterprise Cloud that can help our customers to basically run legacy workloads on mode one, which is going to be called VMware and the mode two, which going to be more cloud-native application modernization, very much more IoT at scale and analytics in real time. And that's going to be more mode two, and we can also help with the Hitachi Enterprise Cloud solution.

Jeremy:

Within that with the Hitachi Enterprise Cloud solution and in the ever-evolving wider portfolio, how do we see those parts of it expanding and playing out? How does that portfolio change?

Sylvain:

I would say that four years ago when we launched the solution, it was really legacy, virtualized where VMware based only. And then a year and a half or a bit more than that, we shipped that solution, to more cloud-native application. We have a partnership that we do have, with an open source, a start-up company based out of the Bay. And that one is really MOTU containerized. So I would say every customer is that is easily building new applications that are very mobile, real-time analytics at scale. They want to shift to containerized applications and we can build their new application on that platform as well. Same story.

Jeremy:

There's the same story. So exactly within that story, what do you think is the clearest value proposition for customers in terms of how they look at what we're doing?

Sylvain:

I would say, with us, they can still find the enterprise-class solutions, products, hardware, software. I would say a good combination on what Hitachi can provide as let's say a plus hundred years manufacturer. So for enterprise cloud products … SLAs definitely is a big point. Performance, and also all the kind of consulting facilities that we can propose, capabilities, proximity as we probably not the biggest IT, provider. I would say in the market we definitely have competition, but I would say we're pretty close to our customer and I think we can provide, yes, closing nest to them.

Jeremy:

So I think there's a responsiveness that others don't have. And within that, I think the SLA thing, I don't want to lose track of that, but there's very specific and in a very high, much higher class of SLA available.

Sylvain:

I would say. So it's really embedded in the solution. So what are we proposing is a full stack basically that the customer is not going to buy, is going to consume. So we still owning the entire stack from an hardware software perspective but also from a professional services implementation integration. But also we do run and we do the manage services on top of that. So basically the customer is really consuming a private cloud platform as he would be consuming public cloud offering.

Jeremy:

It's a pretty valuable, uh, aspect to the conversation there. And I'm always surprised at, and again, we're eight minutes into the conversation and neither of us has brought up Kubernetes. Clearly, one of us, probably me, has let us down. So I just want to get into that environment that we know that that's a big part of how cloud strategy is going forward. How do you see our positioning with Kubernetes?

Sylvain:

I think we can provide that, that mode to cloud-native application platform that we have. I think we have a strong partnership … a platform that basically Kubernetes as a service is going to be also in the portfolio that is actually into rock and roll out to our customers. So DevOps platform, real-time analytics, big data, IoT, everything that you can, you can opt together to make, like kind of cloud-native applications, sustainable and at scale. And we've enterprise-class performance, not just the open source platform … you can buy them from the market

Jeremy:

And that's, and that is it. That's again, the differentiation there in those things. It's to not lose track of what Hitachi can do from a historically proving but also forward thinking.

Sylvain:

Ah, I've got something and I've got a discussion early on today and they say everything is Day 2. What is Day 2? It's basically a Day 0 … just like proof of concept. Day 1., I'm just like putting something into production. The Day 2 is really … I'm doing it at scale. Enterprise class. I'm doing it seriously. That's the way we want to do it. At Hitachi, we do the things seriously with our customers being trusted advisors, and I think we do have solutions that are really pretty to do that.

Jeremy:

All right, well I like that we're operating on Day 2. That's a pretty great place to be. So we've talked about sort of where we are in the landscape and how that all lays out currently, you know, pretty easy. What do you see in the future about the cloud? What do you see going forward?

Sylvain:

That's a big question.

Jeremy:

Yeah, no pressure.

Sylvain:

I would say, like almost every enterprise companies are going to be bridging both worlds: private, public. I think we do have an answer for that. Everyone is talking from age to core to cloud. Okay. You still need to cope. We've some multicloud multisites, internationally, widespread everywhere. So I think we do have an answer for all of that. And we need to be able to do, propose that kind of stuff to our customers.

Jeremy

Absolutely. Great to see that. Understand. Do you think that's sort of the speed, that flexibility, the agility, the productivity gains? Where do you think some of the key aspects for that will be for us, for the customers and where they think their cost savings will come from? That being a big one? Obviously cost is always on top of mind for CTOs and CFOs and everybody else.

Sylvain:

This has been like some kind of pushback from customers. Like they moved everything to the cloud and they just didn't realize it's going to be super expensive. And some month or just years after they say: Oh, hey guys, can you just like provide me an answer or a kind of a financial proposal if I'm shifting that stuff from the publisher back to something on private? And I think we do have an answer financially, unless it's just meaningless. If we are not able to prove something that is cost competitive, there's no chance for us. So, I think we were able, and we've seen that in multiple opportunities to just like propose financial proposal that are competitive to the market, to the competition. But also to the public, but they're also more than just a public land, like a set of workloads.

Jeremy:

There you go. It's Hitachi Enterprise Cloud. That's it. Enterprise class. Over and over again.

Sylvain:

I think so.

Jeremy:

Well, thank you so much for being with us.

Sylvain:

Thank you, Jeremy. Been a pleasure.