At this year’s HPE Discover event, the future directions of data management and other key technologies are being shown to attendees, with chances for their feedback to affect design choices. Attendees are also learning about what they should focus on to remain competitive.

Greg Scherer, CTO of QLogic Corp., met for an interview with Jeff Frick (@JeffFrick), cohost of theCUBE, from the SiliconANGLE Media team, to share some insights about upcoming tech and discuss where he sees the market heading.

Assessing the field

Scherer was positive in his assessments of the event and the technologies being showcased at it, highlighting a few in particular: “I think we’re starting to see more and more of the reality of the composable solution and Synergy [servers].”

Scherer recognized that, for many companies, the big roadblock is overhauling their internal organization and structuring, but he felt that Synergy platforms managed to address these concerns. “People can’t abolish their investments that they have today in technology, and I think that’s one of the great things about Synergy … that it really does leverage the existing environment of rack-based servers that are very popular and will remain popular even after the full deployment of the Synergy composable platform. But it gives us a great fit between them.”

Scherer also shared that QLogic was in the process of announcing, along with HPE, “our 25-gig ethernet solution. We see it as sort of the new 10-gig … it’s probably not going to take the world by storm overnight, but we see it as a wonderful upgrade path of deploying something that’s 25-gig ready.” Addressing the infrastructure block, he explained that existing 10-gig infrastructure will be usable to upgrade to 25-gig as enterprises become ready.

‘Pendulum swinging back’

“A lot of startups don’t buy their own infrastructure anymore; they start out in the cloud,” Scherer noted. But with this increasing adoption of the cloud for startup needs, many of the larger enterprises that made wide-scale shifts to the cloud are rethinking its suitability.

“In terms of enterprise-based customers,” Scherer said, “we saw this big movement of ‘hey, we’re going to move as much as we possibly can [to the cloud],’ and frankly, many of the applications are moving back now. A lot of it’s because of SLAs and even control issues, in terms of customer lists, sensitive data, ‘what’s my protection in the cloud?’, things like that, that have really caused some bigger issues.”

Scherer saw bright futures for his company’s technologies, its distribution to customers and the HPE Discover event series itself. As he said, “This show is such a powerful show for us. HP is our largest customer … and for us, this is just a terrific environment to both meet with HP execs as well as customers of HP.”

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