I compared it with Dell. I compared it with IBM. HPE scored high on my parameters when we were comparing. Some features were available in HPE that are not available in other vendors.

At that time, we were an HP preferred customer, so we looked at HP, Cisco, and other vendors. But then we decided that the more logical choice would be to integrate the solution into our data center, so we evaluated our preferred vendor options.

In our evaluation, we discovered that Cisco was relatively brand new to the marketplace with their HANA integration. SAP, as a partner with HP, recommended HP to us as a solution.

We found that HP had more integrated support and implementation teams so that we did not have to rely heavily on our own technical teams to learn and implement something new.

We had a very nice relationship leveraging our technical expertise with HP’s SAP expertise, so we chose HP.

We did evaluate other options before choosing HPE ConvergedSystem. However, I was not involved in the decision so I do not know what the deciding factors were.

When we were in the market, we went everywhere. When you're in the market looking for a solution, you don't want to go for the first pick. It was a year-long project to find a provider. We based our decision on cost-effectiveness and on what they told us: that it was going to be easier to manage the essential application, that we were going to have increased performance, we were going to have a reduction in recovery time. Promises and promises.

It's not that they are not true, it's just that they didn't seem to be true at the beginning of the implementation of the cloud. You get all of these problems at the beginning and you ask yourself, "Are we going to be getting this kind of scenario everywhere we go in this implementation?" In the end, everything worked out. I guess it's just part of this business. The transformation is not as simple as see it seems.

Customers have evaluated other large brands similar to HPE, and believe that HPE SimpliVity or HPE Nimble can be the solution.

We compared the HANA solution with Microsoft and Oracle, performed a cost-benefit analysis, and we decided to go with HPE.

Cisco, of whom we are a customer, Flexpod, Netapp, and Nutanix. They promise a lot but they are not yet ready.

We chose HP for the expertise. Over the last four years we had a 99.9% uptime. Hard to leave something that is working so well to go to another vendor.

We wanted a converged solution. We wanted something that came as an appliance, with basically everything configured and Dell didn't have an offering that met our needs. We looked at different vendors and we narrowed it down to HPE. We went with the HPE solution.

We were looking at FlexPod, the NetApp solution; Hitachi had a solution; and EMC's solution. None of those did as well as HP's. Some vendors were too strict. EMC was too strict. You couldn't touch their hardware. "This is how you're going to get it. You can't change anything. Take it or leave it." HPE was a little bit more flexible. "This is our ConvergedSystem. This is how it is, but you can make a couple of modifications if needed to fit your business." That's why we went with them. They were a little bit more flexible.