Perhaps the two most common sentiments you hear in IT right now are that customers want choice and that customers want turnkey. And yet those two seem to be at odds with each other. In order to understand the right balance for your business, you need to look at your staff, your resources and your goals.

Patrick Osborne, senior director of Product Management and Marketing of the HP Storage Division at Hewlett Packard Enterprise Co. (HPE), tried to explain what kinds of customers should opt in or out of nerd-knobs. He told John Furrier (@furrier) and John Troyer (@jtroyer), host and guest host of theCUBE, from the SiliconANGLE Media team, smaller customers or remote offices without a lot of IT staff may want to steer away from knobs. “You want to make it as simple as possible; you don’t want to break context out of the UI [user interface] that you use the most; you want to be able to do all those tasks there,” he said.

Alternatively, “When you need scale and you need to be able to tune things for specific workloads, then you want knobs. And to be able to provide both those form factors is kind of unique for StoreVirtual [HPE’s storage virtualization software],” which works in tandem with VMware’s vSphere (a cloud computing virtualization platform), he said.

Passing the buck

Osborne spoke about customers’ increasing desire for vertically integrated solutions and what that means for people on the vendor side.

“I need to manage an order of magnitude more infrastructure per FTE [full-time equivalent] than I was doing three years ago,” he said. He added that the cloud has changed expectations about time-to-value; developers expect an environment to be up and running in hours if not instantaneously, he said.

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE and theCUBE’s coverage of VMworld 2016.

Photo by SiliconANGLE