Cloud developments have created both opportunities and challenges for businesses new to virtualization. While many cloud conversations focus on enterprise issues around building and maintaining infrastructure, companies of every size struggle with prioritizing workloads and managing multicloud environments. In an effort to address these challenges, Hewlett Packard Enterprise Co. is working with partners like LayerX Ltd to offer HPE Synergy Composable Infrastructure as a combined storage, compute and network solution for customers in a range of industries to create more agile, cost-effective data centers.

“The way customers are consuming [information technology] is changing. … We’re going to help customers in the hybrid IT space consume IT differently, … manage across multicloud environments, … [and] bring artificial intelligence and machine learning to the data center,” said Susan Blocher (pictured, right), global vice president of marketing, Data Center Infrastructure Group, at Hewlett Packard Enterprise Co.

Blocher and Bruce Trevarthen (pictured, left), founder and chief executive officer of LayerX Ltd, 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 work both HPE and LayerX are doing in automating cloud processes to allow customers to focus on the strategic aspects of their businesses. (* Disclosure below.)

Bringing the benefits of cloud on-site

To deliver on the tagline of “Making hybrid IT simple,” HPE and LayerX first work primarily to make the concept of cloud computing more digestible for customers.

“We talk … about what workloads the customer is consuming and where they belong. We’re invariably seeing more and more workloads that really shouldn’t go centralized in a data center; they should be on-site,” Trevarthen said.

Keeping workloads on-site does limit businesses in their ability to leverage the benefits of centralized IT, which is why LayerX optimizes for hybrid workloads that keep customer protected in the event of disaster. “You can have those workloads on-site, but all your files and all their capability are still mirrored in the cloud environment,” Trevarthen stated.

Hybrid information technology has been top of mind for many businesses over the past year, and HPE has helped to enable these workload migrations in partnership with LayerX through the company’s vGRID suite of cloud management services.

“We work very closely with HPE with their edge line and their Original Equipment Manufacturer team globally to deliver HPE hardware on the customer side or on-premise. We put our own software on that; link it back into the core vGRID environment,” Trevarthen said. This allows customers the option of keeping on-site workloads, which they can secure through the public cloud for disaster recovery with LayerX.

Among their many priorities, LayerX customers are by and large looking to keep costs low. The company is able to maintain cost-efficiency with HPE’s automated management platform, Synergy. “Synergy gives us … the ability to change our mind, to be programmatic or autonomous with the deployment of resources for a customer need,” Trevarthen said. The platform’s agility saves time and money for customers and enables them to go to market faster.

For HPE, LayerX exemplifies the company’s mission to make hybrid IT simple. Looking ahead, the company is working to develop the autonomy of data centers to further simplify cloud management for customers.

“We are bringing … real-time analytics for the data to our customers at the edge and in the cloud, as well as applying that same artificial intelligence to the telemetry of the data center and using that to make the data center more efficient,” Blocher 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