At The Vollrath Company, a kitchen supplies manufacturing company, John Sharp has his hands full as the manager of IT. When he first started work, the IT staff was so busy putting out fires that they rarely had time to do proper maintenance — or think about how they could develop solutions to improve the company. Moving to VCE and related systems has made all the difference, Sharp told theCUBE during EMC World 2015.

“I was brought into Vollrath to think about how we’re going to transform the business and be able to adapt,” he explained. “We grow a lot through acquisition, and our infrastructure was aging. We weren’t able to keep up. And they didn’t want IT to be the slowdown in acquiring any companies. So, one of the things we had to do was we had to move off of a lot of individual server stacks and move toward more of a convergent infrastructure.”

Ensuring data is in ‘good hands’

But any shift was going to raise questions of cost, security, reliability and other enterprise issues. Fortunately, the VCE systems were able to meet all of those needs and more, as well as make Vollrath feel comfortable that the company’s data was in good hands.

“The groundwork to their success was … flexibility,” he said. “When we think about VMware and vCloud orchestrator and some different things, Vblock was a perfect platform to help us start moving toward that and doing it in a way that a traditional manufacturer who likes to ‘hug their box’ and [say] ‘our data’s secure inside … the fortress’; we can do that. But we also had the flexibility because it was VMware that if we need to, we can wall things off, expose only parts that need to be out in front of our customers, and do that from Vblock.”

Overall, the shift has been a good business move, Sharp believes. “I think there’s just a lot of great things coming out of EMC that are just going to help us maintain that solid growth strategy.”

Watch the full interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE and theCUBE’s coverage of EMC World 2015.