Life insurance products, investment software applications and actuarial grids are just a few things that Pacific Life Insurance manages on its network. With so many moving parts, the company is very particular when it comes to partner selection, and HP turned out to be the right fit for this organization.

In a joint interview for theCUBE at HP Discover, Alex Munro, Assistant VP of Enterprise Technologies & Corporate IT for Pacific Life Insurance with Dominic Wilde, VP of Global Product Line Management for HP Networking, talked with show host Dave Vellante about why Pacific Life Insurance chose to work with HP and how the company is benefiting from this partnership.

Overall value

Munro said that Pacific Life Insurance initially had four vendors, which were narrowed down to two. The two finalists were brought in to do extensive work in the lab with their equipment bridged into Pacific Life Insurance’s current networking infrastructure. The company then ran some of its applications to make sure that it was going to have a seamless transition from its current network to one that the company wanted to have.

Based on overall value, Munro said that HP turned out to be the best vendor for the selection criteria that Pacific Life Insurance had. He did not, however, offer any specifics on the criteria.

• Aiding innovation

Wilde said that, although still early, HP is already delivering software-defined applications that are really adding value. For Pacific Life Insurance, working with HP on the network side gave the company an opportunity to leverage a partner relationship and combine some functions into a more effective operating environment for its users and business.

Additionally, Wilde added, “Customers are finding their own ability to innovate within their environments to create solutions themselves.” This is one benefit that Pacific Life Insurance is gaining with its new network.

Munro noted that one of the big advantages of working with HP was the fact that the company was able to design its data center network.  This allows the company to deliver high performance with a very easy-to-manage, holistic experience for not only network engineers, but also IT, application developers and business users.

See the entire segment below.