Industry keynotes are becoming more about the customer use case and less about the actual technology. Today at HPE Discover 2016 at the Sands Expo and Convention Center in Las Vegas, Meg Whitman, CEO of Hewlett Packard Enterprise Co. (HPE), kept up with this trend. The customer is the story, and by highlighting their successes, more companies are finding it possible to become part of the digital transformation.

Dave Vellante (@dvellante), cohost of theCUBE, from the SiliconANGLE Media team, sat down with David Lewis, senior IT program manager at Microsoft; David Jones, SVP/GM of Information Management and Governance at HPE; and Yogesh Agrawal, VP of Strategy, Solutions and Tech Marketing at HPE Storage, to discuss a customer success story in storage.

One customer journey

Lewis works at the Learning Services at Microsoft, developing content and courses for Microsoft users. He manages the infrastructure team, and he explained that storage is a huge issue. He explained that he had several OEMs and several storage devices. “We eventually moved over to 3PAR [HPE 3PAR StoreServ Storage],” Lewis said. “We were initially hesitant about the transition, but where we are today, it has been really successful.”

Microsoft began with 3PAR and then migrated to HPE StoreOnce for backup and added additional 3PAR solutions. Overall, the company is satisfied with the switch from multiple vendors to one solution for storage and hard drives because it provides simplified management and usability. “It’s really important, because as a manager, I don’t want to pay a lot of money to manage the backups,” stated Lewis.

From liability to asset

Vellante asked Jones about the transformation of data from a liability to an asset.

“It really was all about mitigating risk; typically that’s how organizations think about it … but if you think about it today, the traditional way of hauling it to the traditional warehouse somewhere and then to analyze it, it falls apart, it’s too much,” Jones said.

He noted when a business is always on, it has to make real-time business decisions and manage its data where it is. “That is the big change. It’s evolved from mitigating risk to open up that information and provide it to be part of the analytic footprint of an organization,” he continued.

All-flash strategy

Agrawal responded to Vellante about HPE’s commitment to all flash by outlining the reasons for success. He said that the HPE wanted the product to be innovative, affordable and perform at enterprise-grade levels.

Why HPE?

Lewis told Vellante that with so many models to choose from, HPE’s solutions represented a model that fit his needs. His considerations were price, performance and sustainability. He was also impressed with the data protection.

The solution provides a better way for Microsoft to manage its information, and the responsibilities of the backup administrator are dwindling.

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