The diversity of companies making use of the Hewlett Packard Enterprise Co.’s (HPE’s) business solution sets goes far beyond the regular residents of Silicon Valley, with even manufacturers of goods for blue-collar workers finding ways to put HPE’s tools to use.

Jeff Kyle, director of Product Management, Enterprise Servers, at HPE, and Nina Bailey, IT manager at Mag Instrument, Inc., sat down with Dave Vellante (@dvellante), cohost of theCUBE, from the SiliconANGLE Media team, during HPE Discover 2016 to talk about Mag Instrument’s upgrade of its legacy system, HPE’s support for mission-critical operations and the importance of staying updated.

x86 shift

Early in the interview, Kyle described how HPE’s shift of focus to x86 environments, along with the roll-out of new products, is “allowing customers to move from legacy environments into open standards, but get performance, availability and scalability.”

Bailey agreed, citing how Mag Instrument is still running on a legacy platform but that it it in the process of “migrating to [an x86] platform.” The new platform is a complete suite, she explained. “So, as an organization, we are migrating pieces over” to improve performance, she said.

As the makers of the heavy-duty Mag-Lite flashlight, Mag Instrument’s top priority is supplying product, Bailey said, so the switch-over cannot be allowed to impact production. “Mag is, being a manufacturing company, it’s all about getting product out the door. So that’s where we need the mission-critical availability of our ERP system, as well as our hardware, [and] business analytics is a compelling factor as well,” she said.

The piece-meal approach to migration is allowing the company to inspect the integrity of its databases and other mission-critical elements, but Bailey anticipates that the platform move will eventually serve to improve multiple factors. “Really, it’s getting into business analytics, BI tools, marketing the CRM, the full package that we want to take advantage of,” she added.

Mission-critical “Renaissance”

With this instance of a hardware-manufacturing company making such a successful switch, Kyle felt that it was an example of the “Renaissance” currently being seen for mission-critical services.

“Mission critical … it’s the data. I have to protect what’s going on in the business, and it’s often associated with legacy,” he said. “But there are more and more mission-critical environments, it’s not just the database; it’s the consumer and end-user interaction right now that matters.”

“Mission critical’s end-to-end,” he continued. “Data is assumed to be available, and we know how to do that, but we’ve gotta cover the end-to-end environment of the user and customer experience now.”

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