Among its many benefits, cloud computing has created options for businesses that give them the power of choice in where to store, manage and share data. While these options are the key to virtual innovation in the cloud, they can also serve as a hindrance, especially to non-cloud-native companies like traditional media outlets ripe with questions about how to prioritize platforms.

“Customers are having to make decisions about what’s on-premise versus off-premise. … How do we easily facilitate that? The whole message from Hewlett Packard around hybrid [information technology] is, ‘Is compute data where you want; what’s relevant to your organization?’” said Bill Philbin (pictured, left), senior vice president and general manager of storage at Hewlett Packard Enterprise Co.

Hewlett Packard Enterprise Co. is developing tools like Cloud Bank Storage to protect against challenges in cloud data management and recovery for customers like Eugene DePrez (pictured, right), director of systems engineering at Fox Group Inc.

Philbin and DePrez spoke with Dave Vellante (@dvellante) and Peter Burris (@plburris), co-hosts of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s mobile livestreaming studio, during the HPE Discover EU event in Madrid, Spain. They discussed the challenges Fox has faced through digital transformation and how HPE is driving innovation at the company. (* Disclosure below.)

Making processes invisible

HPE takes a customer-first approach by incorporating its partners’ shifting needs and requirements into new releases. “As you move data, they also want to change the way they consume storage … or data center assets. … It’s all about choice … giving them the same experience that they’d see in a web-based property,” Philbin said.

With Fox, HPE’s mission is helping the company make its service delivery experience nearly invisible to customers. “Historically, people would actually buy their own components; they would be responsible for a capital budget tied to a project. … That’s gone. … They don’t want to know about the complexities of what’s behind the mask,” DePrez said. As customer needs shift, Fox looks to HPE for answers on how to best integrate new storage capabilities and compute platforms into infrastructure and hard assets on-premises.

“We have mobile setups that are associated with motion-capture stage. And then that has to be centralized, the transcoding will happen in Fox Media Services, and then distribution from the Fox Media Cloud,” DePrez said.

Each unit must be coordinated so that the data has an even flow from the capturing on stage, to the editing, to the final transcoding for completed media for distribution. “The productions can worry more about what they do, which is creation, and less about what’s underneath it enabling the storage and distribution of that media,” he said.

Because its process must account for multiple delivery points of highly sensitive data, Fox uses HPE’s Cloud Bank Storage services for data protection. “We’re very excited about Cloud Bank. One of the challenges you have with backups is you have to have on-premise and off-premise copies … it’s expensive,” DePrez said.

It’s clear HPE’s tools are providing the environment for Fox to optimize and innovate, and both companies are excited to see where the partnership takes them in the future. “Our obligation is to enable transformation. … The better that we do that, the better partnership we’re going to have and the better way we’re going to move our businesses forward together,” Philbin concluded.

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