For the HP Discover event in Barcelona, John Furrier and Dave Vellante, theCUBE co-hosts, broadcast wall-to-wall coverage of today’s hot topics, getting the angles on infrastructure, software, services, HP’s overall strategy, server and connectivity, storage and networking.

For this segment, Vellante sat down with Greg Scherer, VP of Server and Storage Strategy with Broadcom, and Jerome Riboulon, HP Server Business Development Manager, asking for input on what’s happening in the European and EMEA Region with HP services.

“We’ve recently made big announcements across the networking and the I/O side, leveraging some of the unique Broadcom capabilities. Broadcom became the standard adaptor for the chipset technology that we have across the board,” revealed Riboulon.

“Certainly good news for Broadcom,” agreed Vellante, who asked Scherer to elaborate on the importance of the Ivy Bridge.

“Ivy Bridge is just the next sequential launch from the Intel perspective, but it does provide the tremendous amount of more compute capabilities. The trend, in terms of virtual servers, enables a whole new avenue: you have a whole lot more cores, the speed of the overall systems is a lot greater and, in addition to that, there’s the flexibility capability of HP,” replied Scherer.

Vellante couldn’t hide his curiosity regarding the two entities’ collaboration, especially with the differences in the technical lingo from the service providers and the needs expressed by the customers.

“We are long time partners, we’ve been working together not only working for product qualification standpoint, but the entire life cycle of the products, from engineering to supply, production and deployment, trying to work together in order to deliver high quality products, with the highest level of integration while, at the same time, providing flexibility and choice for our customers, not locking them down in any specific architecture. We do leverage Broadcom specific features, like storage offload, like the Converged Network Adapter (CNA), like the 10GBASE-T and we ad HP innovation on top so we can drive benefits to our customers. Everything is based on industry’s standards and we a bringing a lot of intelligence a lot closer to where the applications run, making sure the servers become more self-sufficient, and that is something that we are doing together,” explained Riboulon.

“What was the development cycle like?” asked Vellante. “In your world, a lot of time you have to decode what the customer really wants,” he told Scherer.

“Once upon a time Broadcom’s focus was working with internal development teams, exclusively at HP, and it’s been a terrific relationship, but we’d found out from time to time that we’ve missed things,” admitted Scherer. “Jerome and his team is getting direct feedback from the customers. We’ve been really fortunate to have such a great working relationship with them because some of the EMEA needs are different than North America needs.”

Vellante was also interested in those differences mentioned by Scherer, and asked his guests to elaborate on those needs.

“In Europe we have very fragmented type of markets, different countries with different types of requirements. For example Spain is very small and medium businesses oriented, far less corporations, and that requires a lot of simplification. It’s country-specific requirements, impacted by the big trends like cloud, mobility, security, Big Data,” observed Riboulon.

What Scherer wanted to add was that “HP has a great technology and has this view of staying ahead but, in addition to staying ahead of the market, it’s giving away the technology so there isn’t a vendor lock-in.”