What role does automation play in HPE’s comeback? We hear firsthand the requests from cloud customers, on theCUBE at #HPEdiscover.

Every day, more businesses are upgrading their technology. Traditional companies are making the leap to data centers, while data-driven companies are migrating to the Cloud. To ease their growing pains, these businesses turn to partners who can provide knowledge, experience, and infrastructure. The choice of a partner in such matters can be a business-defining decision.

To shed some light on what customers need in this space, John Furrier (@furrier) and Dave Vellante (@dvellante), cohosts of theCUBE, from the SiliconANGLE Media team, visited the HPE Discover 2016 conference in Las Vegas. There, they joined Alastair Winner, VP of Technology Services – Compute at Hewlett Packard Enterprise Co.

What’s important to the customer    

The conversation started with a look at what customers are asking for in a technology partner. “From a technology perspective we are very much focused on the infrastructure itself,” Winner said. Historically, we’ve had a reputation for adding value, he continued, describing how HPE was looking to empower customers around workloads and applications.

Regardless of environment or platform, it’s clear to customers that they have a support partner, he said. There’s a lot to own in IT when a business is running their own environment, so how can that be automated? Winner continued. Customers are also looking at how they can make the workload portable.

Outside the data center

Winner pointed out how, from a developer perspective, HPE is seeing a shift toward containers. “We’re starting to see containers emerge and customers deploying them on bare metal,” he said. “There’s a need for speed. Customers still want all the attributes of mission-critical IT, but the need for speed is everything.”

The discussion moved toward a notable new development at HPE. Winner explained how they’re taking the principles of the data center and bringing them to customers who work outside the data center. Things are really coming to life here, Winner said. People are really getting a sense of what this new company is about.

See the full interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE and theCUBE’s coverage of HPE Discover 2016.

Photo by SiliconANGLE