One downside to innovation’s hectic pace is the challenge for enterprises to choose the right infrastructure partner. Sure, one partner may have the technology needed today, but what if market disruption looms ahead? Will they be there with tools to enable an adaptable enterprise?

Kate Swanborg, head of Technology Communications and Strategic Alliances at DreamWorks Animation LLC, remembers when they had a three- to five-year outlook to adapt to industry advances. “You don’t have that luxury any longer,” she told Dave Vellante (@dvellante) and Paul Gillin (@pgillin), co-hosts of theCUBE*, from the SiliconANGLE Media team.

Swanborg and Susan Blocher, global VP, Data Center Infrastructure Group, at Hewlett Packard Enterprise Co. talked with Vellante and Gillin during the HPE Discover EU event in London.

“What we’re looking at now is a data center that is more future-proofed — that allows us to be scalable but agile as well,” Swanborg said. To that end, she said that DreamWorks chose HPE as its infrastructure partner.

Swanborg explained that making a DreamWorks movie typically requires 80 million hours of computing over two years. “What we use exclusively for that are the ProLiant blade servers in our environment,” she said, adding that HP is at the fore of innovation in that area.

Friends in high-performance computing places

Blocher thinks that staying agile enough to future-proof business for customers requires a wide net for partnering and acquiring. She said that HPE chose to acquire SGI (Silicon Graphics International Corp.) recently, because “they had literally more than a hundred patents in areas that we think are going to dramatically extend and expand our high performance computing capabilities.”

“The cognitive data center” is a term HPE has coined to describe the future-proof infrastructure it wants to offer customers, Blocher stated. This, she said, includes multi-cloud capabilities, deep learning and artificial intelligence.

“The third area is really around enabling our customers to really focus on where they want to go from the business outcome and having the data center dynamically aggregate itself through that composable infrastructure story,” Blocher added.

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE and theCUBE’s coverage of HPE Discover EU. (*Disclosure: HPE and other companies sponsor some HPE Discover EU segments on SiliconANGLE Media’s theCUBE. Neither HPE nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo by SiliconANGLE