Manish Goel, the SVP and GM of HP Storage, believes the industry is undergoing a colossal shift. In an interview with theCUBE at HP Discover 2015, he talked about how storage has changed.

“Storage used to be simple,” he said. “Do you want SAN? Or do you want NAS? How many tiers of SAN do you want? And today, the kind of questions that the customers are asking is just like multiplied. Object. Hyperconverged. Do I want open source, or do I want to go hybrid? The number of questions have just absolutely multiplied, and making sense of it is hard. And it is impacting the vendor community, it’s a technology set of questions, it’s a delivery model set of questions.”

But in this changing world, HP still has three important things going for it, Goel said.

“The first is just still a very strong engineering and technology culture and roots,” he explained. “I see it in the time that I’ve been here, every conversation starts with, how do we apply technology to a new opportunity or a problem that we are seeing? The second thing I am super impressed about is the leadership … And the third thing, which I think is sort of [a] testament to what HP has been, is the loyalty of our customers.”

The shift to flash memory

One of the biggest shakeups in recent history has been the shift to flash memory, which is fast enough to take the question of performance almost out of the equation. But Goel said he isn’t concerned about the shift.

“Our belief has always been, if you can solve a customer’s problem dramatically better than the current solutions on the market, in the long run you always win,”he said. “And we’ve won that every time we’ve lowered the cost in storage by Nearline … etc., and flash has absolutely the same opportunity.”

But in the end, he said, “winning” in this market comes down to one thing: customer service.

“I’m here at the customer event, and every single customer I’ve met has been an all-HP customer for a really long time, and I’ve asked them only one question: ‘How have we been treating you?’ They said, ‘Really well. I like being an HP customer.’ And once we have that, we feel confident that we can win,” he said.

Watch the full interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE and theCUBE’s coverage of HP Discover Las Vegas 2015.