Among the alliances drawing attention at HPE Discover 2016, solutions for storage, containers, networking, infrastructure and customer services are all being covered, and finding ways of tying these together for a unified business is a goal which many attendees would be happy to achieve.

Chris Selland, VP of Business Development for the Big Data Platform of Hewlett Packard Enterprise Co. (HPE), and Ken Kryst, director of Information Management Practice at PwC (PricewaterhouseCoopers), joined host Jeff Frick (@JeffFrick) of theCUBE, from the SiliconANGLE Media team, to talk about the work their companies have done together, plans for the future and how data keeps changing demands on services.

Customer questions

Kryst took an overview of the market early in the interview, saying, “I think that a lot of what we’re seeing with customers out there… all the things that HP is doing with various technologies, the people are partnering with, [is] very impressive,” before moving on to a wider view. “But fundamentally, at the end of the day, a lot of those technologies are producing data, [and] clients and customers are trying to figure out ‘how do I generate value from this? How do I get it into the hand of people that can make decisions?’”

Kryst also examined the continual process of improving services, and how companies can keep up with it:

“What am I seeing out in the industry today? A lot of stuff, particularly around customers, personalization, better service, client experience. We have the whole idea of CX, which is that customer experience end-to-end, don’t just worry about ‘how am I going to retain customers and prevent churn, but also go up the life-cycle and figure out how to attract more customers using data, personalizing my service offerings, improving my digital products, things of that nature?'”

Data unicorns and AI

Another point of focus was in how to address the overwhelming amounts of data being generated by users and standard app routines.

“The concept of the data-scientist being that individual that is like the unicorn and doesn’t exist,” Kryst said. “So what we talk more about now is like pulling together SWAT teams, where you have someone that understands the data, someone that understands the business problem, someone that understands deep analytics.” Once able to “spin teams like that up,” he says, you can “go out and find the answers.”

“I would also say that another thing that’s going to help with regards to the whole data-scientist crunch is machine learning, robotics, things of that nature, artificial intelligence,” Kryst added. “I definitely think that that’s something that people kid about as something that’s far down the future, but I think it’s coming very quickly and something that companies should pay attention to.”

Overflowing rains of data

Selland addressed the revolutionary effect of cloud connections, and the way it’s drawn in users beyond those with the technical knowledge of running through VPN connections. “[The cloud has] allowed a lot of customers to iterate faster, to try new things more quickly, set them up, take them down,” he said.

“It’s gotten business people involved… it’s not always just IT people these days driving the data-lakes, it’s now, you’re starting to see, other C-level execs, the CFO, the CMO, starting to drive some of these initiatives. And cloud-based solutions make those things more accessible, so we’re definitely seeing both quicker iteration and more business involvement.”

On the other side of that, Kryst acknowledged, IoT and similar areas are creating a “data deluge,” which increases the pressure on the people responsible for managing that data.

“Customers, especially business consumers of the data, are getting very much more smarter, much more savvier, so the demands on the folks serving up that data, storing that data and protecting that data are gonna be more and more crucial, but it’s just a great business to be a part of. …We’re proud to be part of it, and proud to be here.”

Watch the full interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE and theCUBE’s coverage of HPE Discover 2016.

Photo by SiliconANGLE