Combining the size of HP's IT internal infrastructure with its own data center technology means the company, which is a beta tester of HP technology, is often "customer zero" and a showcase for its own solutions, Baez said. "We will find the problems before you will. ... If it works in our environment, it will work in yours," he said.

For instance, Baez said HP was the first adopter of the company's Moonshot series of module-based servers, and found a way to increase the utilization of its data centers while decreasing their footprint.

"At the time (Moonshot came out), we thought we were going to move from six data centers to eight... and deploy two new EcoPod (modular data centers)," he said. "Based on that infrastructure, we canceled the two EcoPods and then decided to go from six data centers to four."

The data center consolidation HP went through was huge, said Rich Baldwin, CIO and chief strategy officer of Nth Generation.

"Years ago, HP went from hundreds of data centers to 85," Baldwin told CRN. "Then they went from 85 to six. Now they're talking four data centers. I'm not aware of any other companies who have consolidated like that."

HP has proven itself to be a model of what technology can do, Baldwin said. "I've been working with HP for years," he said. "They're working better than at any time in the past, and getting things done faster than ever."

HP, which used to need two to six weeks to deploy a database and two to four weeks to deploy as server, has dramatically cut that time by using its own HP Helion cloud infrastructure, Baez said.

"We were built for slow," he said. "Today, with Helion, we can deploy a database in just five minutes. We can deploy not just a server but a whole stack in four hours."

HP has also significantly increased security by adding it to applications early in the deployment cycle, and is using its own Vertica big data solution to build data analytics into its technology," he said.

At the same time, HP used its internal technology developments to move from an inward focus to a focus on customers, Baez said. "Once you do that," he said, " you go from optimizing the technology to optimizing the business."