As IT industry competition becomes more solutions focused for digitization, Hewlett Packard Enterprise is using its Big Data platform to vie for a piece of the business by becoming a solutions-centric provider to enable the digital transformation to its enterprise customers.

Chris Selland, vice president of HPE’s Business Development and Big Data Platform, joined co-hosts Dave Vellante (@dvellante) and John Furrier (@furrier) of theCUBE, from the SiliconANGLE Media team, in Las Vegas for HPE Discover 2016 to talk about how the company is becoming a data-driven organization.

From platform to solution

Selland considers his team as a platform group. Acknowledging there are platform customers looking for a Big Data platform to solve problems, he goes on to describe the customer who needs solutions as well. “We’re rolling out more and more solutions, whether its security solutions, IT management network solutions or areas like Internet of Things (IoT), of course more business-oriented solutions that are powered and enabled by our Big Data platform. Embedding the platform in the solutions,” explained Selland.

Collaboration and open source

Furrier asks about the changes from old structured data to new data improvements, such as structured streaming data. “What you’re seeing in most organizations of size, what you call the enterprise … there is experimentation and deployment and you’re starting to see some enterprise utilization of next-generation technology and open source projects, whether its Hadoop, Spark or Kafka,” he said.

Discussing the rapid adoption of Apache Kafka, he notes that HPE is doing a lot of work with the open source community and with partners like Confluent, a stream data platform founded by the creators of Apache Kafka, using Kafka as an ingest mechanism. He also said there is a great deal going on with various technologies like Spark structured streaming.

Customer demand

Vellante wanted to know what customers are pushing for now, and Selland responded that you hear more about IoT and edge computing. “It’s moving analytics and moving analysis out towards the edge of the network where all the action is,” he replied. Centralize analytics from the edge and finding methods for its distribution is key to many organizations.

HPE spoke about four areas of transformation for the enterprise: Transforming to a hybrid infrastructure; Protecting the digital enterprise; Enabling workplace productivity; Empowering the data-driven organization. According to Selland, the first area of transforming to a hybrid infrastructure is the key and the other three areas are embedded in that goal.

He talks about using the Big Data platform to build security, predictive analysis, machine learning and A.I. (Artificial Intelligence) into solutions the help customers.

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