How does a company construct the perfect multicloud environment? Should they agonize over which on-premises or public clouds offer the best services or cost efficiency and then toss in all their applications? Actually, they ought to let the apps themselves lead the way, according to Flynn Maloy (pictured, left), vice president of Pointnext marketing at Hewlett Packard Enterprise Co.

“It’s about where do those workloads want to land? Public cloud, private cloud, traditional — those are all tools in your toolbox,” Maloy said.

Over the past year, HPE has built out its Pointnext portfolio of services for aiding enterprises in digital transformation. On top of this, it acquired Cloud Technology Partners Inc., a consulting service for migrating, developing and managing cloud applications and infrastructure. And it just announced GreenLake private cloud infrastructure as a service. Together, these round out what it hopes will be a competitive multicloud position.

Maloy joined John Treadway (pictured, right), senior vice president of strategy and portfolio at CTP in an interview during the HPE Discover EU event Madrid in Spain. They spoke to Dave Vellante (@dvellante) and Peter Burris (@plburris), co-hosts of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s mobile livestreaming studio. (* Disclosure below.)

All infras considered

CTP’s dedicated cloud consulting is the icing on HPE’s multicloud strategy, which favors well-considered choices about where apps should live. “Even as a company that derived most of our revenue from public cloud over the last few years, we’ve never ever been the company that said, ‘Everything should go to the public cloud,'” Treadway said.

CTP may recommend a public cloud provider like Amazon Web Services Inc. or Microsoft Corp.’s Azure as the ideal abode for an app after careful analysis — but not before. That’s because migrating an app always comes at some cost, so operational savings or business value better be on the other side, according to Treadway. Lifting and shifting to cloud actually does not work for well more than half of apps, he added. This comes as a surprise to many.

“They’re expecting a certain performance and operational characteristic of their internal infrastructure, and it’s not there. It’s a different model in the public cloud,” Treadway said.

HPE is app-agnostic and gives a fair shake to all on-prem and cloud infrastructure, Maloy pointed out. For this reason, customers can trust its judgement in concocting the best multicloud mix, he added.

“You need to be a little bit above all of those choices,” Maloy concluded.

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

Photo: SiliconANGLE