Eric Hulbert and Brady Wilson, the CEO and CTO of Opus Interactive, discussed how solutions from VMware and HP help their company drive value for clients in a recent interview on SiliconANGLE’s theCube.

Opus Interactive was founded in 1994 as an application development and creative design studio. The firm had shifted its focus to managed hosting, and now offers infrastructure- and IT-as-a-service solutions for enterprises in a wide range of verticals, including retail, finance and healthcare. Hulbert tells theCube host Dave Vellante that prominent brands such as Intel and Microsoft collaborate with the company to handle traffic spikes generated by big budget marketing campaigns, or “throwaway campaigns” as he calls them.

Opus “settled on HP hardware across the board,” according to Wilson, with the exception of certain components of its network infrastructure. The firm’s environment consists of virtualized blade servers and LeftHand storage that together power approximately 1000 VMs with a combined capacity of several hundred terabytes.

Wilson views the software-defined data center as the next phase of enterprise IT. The methodology “makes sense,” he explains: “It comes across as a buzzword initially, but like cloud, you can tell this is the way things are going. A lot of what we do is software-based – we’re managing operating systems, we’re managing VMware as an operating system. So why shouldn’t we manage our network, why shouldn’t we manage our storage in the same way?”

Hulbert highlights than unlike other providers, Opus limits itself to using only VMware. Wilson says that it all boils down to functionality: vSphere offers monitoring, management federation, hybrid cloud support and a wide range of other enterprise features that are not yet available with competing solutions. The firm did have a few customers that used Hyper-V, Hulbert notes, but they all switched to vSphere.