“Digital transformation” is a buzz term lately in the worlds of tech and businesses that utilize tech in their models. Analysts and technologists are promising companies that digitizing has the power to transform their operations and increase profits. So why are businesses otherwise on-board with the change still spending so little of their budgets on it?

John Knightly, VP of Industry, Solution & Alliance Marketing at Hewlett Packard Enterprise Co., spoke to Dave Vellante (@dvellante) and Paul Gillin (@pgillin), c0-hosts of theCUBE*, from the SiliconANGLE Media team, during HPE Discover EU in London about a rut in which many companies find themselves.

“Most of our traditional enterprise customers are dealing with decades of legacy technology that they’ve built up over the years or “technical debt,” as we sometimes like to call it in the industry,” he explained.

Knightly explained that this leaves companies stuck in a pattern where 80 percent of their budgets are spent “keeping the lights on” and only 20 percent goes toward innovation.

He added that HPE’s mission is to give companies a leg up in digitizing by bringing down the cost of legacy systems by delivering simplified “hybrid IT.”

Digital differentiator

Thing is, many other companies are jostling to shepherd companies through the transformation. Many of them are vertically integrated, also, which HPE is not, Knightly said.

To compensate, HPE can offer best-in-breed technology managed through its single-pane-of-glass platforms like HPE OneView. “Basically, that’s an API-driven set of platforms that allow you to plug and play the latest, greatest stack elements, whether it be Chef and Puppet for DevOps, things like that; whether it be Docker for containers,” he said.

Knightly explained that through these platforms, customers can “dramatically modernize and streamline their traditional IT, private clouds, and even their use of public clouds.” In turn, this will allow them to reallocate funds to innovation.

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