W.R. Grace and Co. has been manufacturing chemical compounds since 1854. But when Srini Vanga (pictured, right) took over the leadership role for the firm’s IT department four years ago, he did not want to rely on decades-old models to meet the demanding technology needs of his company.

“I made a decision that I no longer wanted to be in the datacenter business,” said Vanga, vice president and head of information technology at W.R. Grace. “Working with our strategic partner AdvizeX and HPE, we moved ahead with GreenLake, which solved my problem. We now have a private, on-premises cloud solution that is elastic, fully scalable and centered on a consumption-based model. That’s very similar to what these hyperscale cloud providers have and I love it.”

Vanga spoke with C.R. Howdyshell (pictured, left), president of Advizex, during the HPE GreenLake Day event, hosted by theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s livestreaming video studio. They discussed reasons why companies seek to offload datacenter operations, demands placed on IT by W.R. Grace’s expanding chemical business, how HPE GreenLake offered flexibility in a hybrid consumption model, and a different approach for custom-built applications. (* Disclosure below.)

Watch the full video conversation below:

Business-critical apps

Vanga’s decision to exit the datacenter business was not something new for Advizex’s Howdyshell. He had been dealing with similar needs for other clients.

“The words ‘getting out of the datacenter business’ is something we’re hearing more and more,” Howdyshell said. “In a hybrid model, there are a lot of decisions to be made on what goes into public cloud, what should remain on-prem. This can be crucial when it comes down to business-critical applications.”

The decision by Vanga and Grace to change the company’s IT approach was driven by the realities of the chemical manufacturing business. W.R. Grace has expanded over the years through mergers and acquisitions, resulting in a need for flexibility.

“We need to be able to provide rapid customization to our customers,” Vanga said. “This means our business needs flexible computing power to process and analyze huge amounts of material properties’ data and come up with products that we can go to market with faster than our competitors.”

The flexibility Vanga sought with HPE’s GreenLake solution allowed his IT department to scale up or down as needed. GreenLake offers built-in buffer capacity to meet spikes in demand.

“When our business comes to us with a requirement for new applications or new data analytics capability that needs computing power, I don’t have to wait two or three months to give them that capability,” Vanga said. “The company depends on me and my team to provide value to our business and helping them make decisions quicker and in real time to adapt to an ever-changing market and business needs. GreenLake is sized with this 20% buffer that we can scale to in minutes.”

Move toward SaaS providers

In addition to not having to manage a full datacenter operation, with an inconvenient timetable for scaling to meet capacity demand, Vanga decided he also did not want to be in the business of developing custom applications.

“We retired most of our custom-built applications in procurement, sales, and HR and replaced them with the SaaS providers, like Ariba, Concur, Salesforce and SuccessFactors, which are all hosted in the cloud,” Vanga explained. “These companies spend billions of dollars in R&D and come up with solutions that are state of the art. That left me with my mission-critical applications, which are SAP and its peripherals.”

W.R. Grace recently took a major step to expand its pharmaceutical portfolio with the acquisition in February of Fine Chemical Services, a division of Albemarle Corp., for $570 million. The move was yet another reminder for Vanga of the importance of flexible models such as GreenLake and his reasons for adopting a hybrid structure for IT.

“You must ask yourself: ‘Do I really want to be in this datacenter business?’” Vanga said. “Ask yourself what your core business is and what your core competencies are. We wanted that inherent flexibility; that’s the reason we went to this model.”

Watch more of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of the HPE GreenLake Day event. (* Disclosure: TheCUBE is a paid media partner for the HPE GreenLake Day event. Neither HPE, the sponsor for theCUBE’s event coverage, nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE