Last month, Antonio Neri, chief executive officer of Hewlett Packard Enterprise Co., stated his belief that “50% of employees will never come back to an office.”

If Neri is correct, then his company and many others will be preparing for a much different world where enterprises will depend on productive remote work environments. That will not only involve HPE, but its business partners as well.

“When we all ended up in this pandemic in March, we were very nervous because everyone had to operate remotely,” said Rajesh Srinivasan (pictured, right), head of global cloud business at Tata Consultancy Services Ltd. “Now we’re talking about millions of workers going to work from home. I see this as an opportunity where the TCS cloud solution will help them achieve this, and it’s a great opportunity not only for TCS but HPE.”

Srinivasan spoke with Lisa Martin, host of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s livestreaming studio, during the HPE Discover Virtual Experience event. He was joined by Chellappan Narayanan (pictured, left), senior director of ecosystems sales, North America, at HPE, and they discussed efforts to support work-from-home productivity, collaboration on as-a-service solutions, creating flexible architectures for joint clients, and a broader view of digitization in the enterprise. (* Disclosure below.)

Over 30 years of collaboration

From HPE’s standpoint, it was an opportunity to collaborate with TCS on a set of solutions that drew on the two firms’ joint efforts spanning more than 30 years.

“Many customers were looking for solutions like virtual desktop infrastructure,” Narayanan said. “They wanted their employees to be productive while they’re at home. We’ve seen a lot of engagement with the TCS architecture team and also the solutions team to address requirements of the market jointly.”

In addition to collaboration between the two companies on remote work, TCS and HPE have also combined forces to make the in-memory database — SAP HANA — available as-a-service in the cloud. The cost and complexity of SAP HANA can be a barrier for adoption by smaller enterprises, so HANA-as-a-service enables data-driven analytics and applications in an affordable model for a number of TCS and HPE clients.

“The customer has complete flexibility to scale up or down, like a true cloud model,” Srinivasan explained. “The architecture is flexible so that a customer’s business needs can be met through architectural changes. With HPE and TCS coming together, we were able to give a cost advantage to the customer.”

Joint lab to create solutions

Along with HANA-as-a-service, HPE and TCS work together on a wide range of industry solutions. These include an Aruba-based Digital Workspace Solution for employee mobility, a Core Banking Solution for financial services customers, and offerings to modernize legacy storage.

“When we work with TCS, we create a joint architecture, addressing the customers by industry vertical,” Narayanan said. “What suits one vertical may not suit well for a different vertical. Both of us have a joint lab where our technologists and TCS technologists come together to work on joint solutions.”

The current global crisis has expanded the enterprise view of digital solutions through nearly every business model. While remote work represents a current focus, HPE and TCS have an eye on the opportunities beyond.

“The opportunity goes beyond the work-from-home solution,” Srinivasan said. “It is all about digitization; it is all about digitizing the whole business process.”

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of the HPE Discover Virtual Experience event. (* Disclosure: TheCUBE is a paid media partner for the HPE Discover Virtual Experience. Neither Hewlett Packard Enterprise Co., the sponsor for theCUBE’s event coverage, nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE