LAS VEGAS — At its HPE Discover conference this week, Ric Lewis, general manager of Hewlett Packard Enterprise's software-defined and cloud group, said the company is working on a project, internally named Project New Stack, that will help IT departments bridge their on-premise, private cloud ecosystems to public clouds.

The move caters to an increasingly more frequent demand from IT departments: they want to optimize the placement of their workloads between private and public clouds.

Project New Stack will give HPE customers the ability to deploy workloads based on economics as well as business requirements. It will also make it easier to tap into under-used resources already on-premises. Project New Stack also will provide analytics across an organization’s entire hybrid IT estate.

“If there’s one commonality our customers have, it’s that they live in a hybrid IT world,” wrote Lewis in a blog post. “They run a mix of workloads on traditional IT, as well as private, managed, and public clouds. That mix is different for every organization, dynamically changing as business needs require.”

At HPE Discover, Lewis said, “We plan to deliver New Stack as an appliance. It shows up as a private cloud that bridges to hybrid cloud. New Stack is an open platform.”

But Project New Stack is only in its nascent phase. HPE hopes to trial it in beta with a select set of customers by this autumn.

HPE isn’t the only organization touting the hybrid cloud. Nokia conducted a cost-benefit analysis comparing the cost of private versus public cloud, coming to the conclusion that most organizations will opt for hybrid cloud.

The OpenStack Foundation has been trying to get out its message that private cloud is cost-effective and needs to be part of a mix with public cloud.

Project New Stack is the newest move by HPE to help its customers transition to hybrid cloud. Lewis also highlighted two other initiatives underway at the company: SimpliVity and Synergy.

In February, HPE closed its acquisition of SimpliVity for $650 million. SimpliVity provides a hyperconverged system that integrates compute, storage, and networking into a preconfigured appliance. HPE said it has more than 2,000 SimpliVity customers using the technology to simplify their virtual machine (VM) environments.

Finally, at HPE Discover, Lewis talked about HPE Synergy, which the company introduced in late 2015. HPE calls Synergy “composable infrastructure” to accelerate application delivery in both traditional and cloud native environments. The composable infrastructure allows an application to grab compute, storage, and networking as necessary to meet its specific needs. Because Synergy is 100 percent programmable, IT can deliver infrastructure as code with developer environments and tools, including Docker, Mesosphere, Ansible, and Chef.

Lewis said that since the beginning of 2017, shortly after Synergy became commercially available, HPE has garnered nearly 400 Synergy customers.