As the marketing of cloud and hybrid storage solutions moves to maturity on the international stage, finding ways of strengthening security and building firm partnerships with established local companies are encountering old problems in modern-day forms.

At the HPE Discover EU conference in London, Duncan Campbell, senior director of worldwide alliances marketing at Hewlett Packard Enterprise Co., joined Dave Vellante (@dvellante) and Paul Gillin (@pgillin), co-hosts of theCUBE*, from the SiliconANGLE Media team, with topics of international standards, edge computing and more under discussion.

IoT’s attraction

From Campbell’s perspective, one of the biggest things driving tech partnerships these days is found in the expanding range of Internet of Things applications, with industrial IoT forming a major segment of that activity. Campbell explained the wide appeal of IoT utilities as being “one of these things where you’re either going to figure out ways to save money or ways to make money.”

But as the DDoS attacks last month made clear, according to Gillin, finding ways of securing these independently networked devices is an essential part of finding the way forward with these apps and services. Campbell described finding ways of improving IoT security as an “exciting” topic for HPE, noting its investment in supporting CTO environments within the company.

“We have some people who go very deep in terms of the reference architecture, very deep in terms of the partners that actually have credibility and experience, both by vertical and by use-case,” he said, adding that studies of both vertical and individual use-cases had shown themselves to be essential in establishing a strong position within new markets.

Partners in power

As the interview continued, Campbell touched on other aspects of HPE’s alliances, including its partnership with GE Digital, something which, he said, “allows us to open doors in terms of some of the different OT opportunities there,” including transport.

Living in an age that gives so much attention to big data is providing additional challenges with international partnerships, and a focus on “the intelligent edge” is one of the ways in which HPE is addressing the physical locations of data centers and their contingent legal issues, such as national data policies.

As Campbell described, regulatory and compliance reasons are a large driver of enterprises choosing to do something on-prem rather than in-cloud, “but what you need then is the type of architecture that HPE has … which is really kind of a hybrid architecture so you actually have a focus on the edge, and then a focus on the core.”

He noted that a variety of partners were needed to establish reliable security practices and standards, “both within the older HPE and the new world,” citing this as an example of the partner ecosystem’s importance to their market strategy.

“When I think about IoT, no one can go alone; it’s really about bringing in the experts,” Campbell stated. “We want to have not just the most, but the best partners as part of the ecosystem.”

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE and theCUBE’s coverage of HPE Discover EU. (*Disclosure: HPE and other companies sponsor some HPE Discover EU segments on SiliconANGLE Media’s theCUBE. Neither HPE nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo by SiliconANGLE