DreamWorks Animation LLC brings computer-generated feature films to life with the power of Hewlett Packard Enterprises Co. and it’s networking solution, a necessary scaling effort considering a movie like “Shrek” or “Madagascar” can take years of rendering images and up to 80-million hours of compute and petabytes of storage.

DreamWorks Animation and HPE are working to improve speed and agility when it comes to the creative process. Now the partnership is ramping up the technology to grab opportunities as quickly as they come.

“Opportunity costs. In our business, a new opportunity for a creative endeavor comes up all the time. And the key is that you want to be able to explore that as quickly as possible. … But the key is that if it takes you time and effort and money to just explore it, you’ve got an opportunity cost,” said Kate Swanborg (pictured, right), technology communications and strategic alliances at DreamWorks Animation.

Swanborg and Ric Lewis (pictured, left), senior vice president and general manager, Software Defined and Cloud Group, at HPE, stopped by theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s mobile live streaming studio, during the HPE Discover event in Las Vegas, Nevada.

TheCUBE co-hosts John Furrier (@furrier) and Dave Vellante (@dvellante) analyzed the partnership between the two companies with their guests and broke down some of the new HPE technology announced at the event to uncover how it will help DreamWorks accelerate the creation of animated films. (* Disclosure below.)

What drives hybrid IT

HPE is growing business by working with and acquiring channel partners in the hybrid information technology space. In February, HPE added SimpliVity to its portfolio to drive its hyper-converged platform in the market. The company is using these partnerships to take hybrid IT to the next level and, according to Lewis, software is helping to simplify solutions.  

“We have three primary vectors that we’re driving in order to make [hybrid] happen. The first is our hyperconverged appliances. The second is HPE SimpliVity, [which is] composable infrastructure. And the third is our hybrid IT management stack software that we have [been gaining] momentum across hyper-converged,” Lewis said.

DreamWorks has used a hybrid IT environment for years, and Swanborg explained that it is labor-intensive and time-consuming to configure the networking, storage and compute into a real-time environment. The complexity adds time and complexity for the artists to do their job, she added.

“What we’re looking for in the HPE Synergy deployment [HPE’s hybrid IT platform] is to reduce those weeks down to days and those days down to hours. Once we’re able to do that, our engineers can go off and focus on the niche technology solutions that actually matter to the artist. And that’s where we want to get the business benefit,” Swanborg stated.

Talking about the announcement of HPE’s Project New Stack launched at the Discover event, Lewis believes this is the icing on the top of the hybrid IT management stack and the future of software defining cloud. Project New Stack will expand the capabilities of HPE Synergy and all of its hyper-converged solutions.

“We’re going to lean heavy into new stack, because we believe that the innovation that we’re seeing in that space is really finally going to deliver on this promise of cloud,” Swanborg said.

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s independent editorial coverage of HPE Discover US 2017. (* Disclosure: TheCUBE is a paid media partner for HPE Discover US 2017. Neither Hewlett Packard Enterprise Co. nor other sponsors have editorial control on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE