As a cloud services provider, The Sourcing Company was looking for a hybrid platform that would deliver flexibility, agility and lower costs for its clients, which include a number of law firms. The company became an early customer of Microsoft Azure Stack when it was announced nearly three years ago and has embraced the automation and standardization features the platform provides.

“For the first time, it’s possible to get control of cloud,” said Ronald Verweij (pictured, right), managing partner at The Sourcing Company, who described the benefits of letting customers share that control. “The company can decide whether to go into the cloud or stay inside Azure Stack. So they have control of their data, they can keep control of their data, and on top of that it’s our hardware.”

Verweij stopped by the set of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s mobile livestreaming studio, and spoke with co-hosts Dave Vellante (@dvellante) and Peter Burris (@plburris) during the HPE Discover EU event in Madrid, Spain. He was joined by McLeod Glass (pictured, left), vice president and general manager of SimpliVity at Hewlett Packard Enterprise Co. They discussed the benefits offered by Azure Stack, the integration of HPE’s technology, and how law firms take advantage of the cloud platform’s workplace solutions. (* Disclosure below.)

Benefits of flexible pricing model

A hybrid cloud platform, Azure Stack lets enterprise customers deliver Azure services from the data center. A key benefit offered by this model is pricing flexibility, where pay-per-use is the standard. “In our legacy environment, if a machine is on for two minutes, we have to pay for it for a month,” Verweij explained. “In the Azure Stack environment, we pay for the minutes.”

Microsoft’s platform is based on an all-in-one hardware and software solution using HPE’s ProLiant servers running Azure Stack. HPE’s solution allows customers to scale Azure Stack by node and in different memory or networking configurations.

“One of the things that separates our solution from some of the others is our expandability,” Glass said. “We’ve worked hard with Microsoft to pull together what we believe is a very compelling solution with Azure Stack.”

The Sourcing Company offers a complete workplace package for the legal sector called Magistra. Through Azure Stack, the company can provide resources for key tasks in a law firm, such as software functionality (Office 365), document management and accounting for time billed.

“We put a lot of time into finding out what they need, what keeps them awake at night, and we translate that into software,” Verweij said. “It’s fast, and that’s what they like.”

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

Photo: SiliconANGLE