Animated films are incredibly data-intensive, Wike said, with just a single movie requiring 500 million files (every character and action shot requires a different file) and 110,000 transactions per second.

HP's managed print services offerings mean that the IT staff at DreamWorks doesn't have to waste its time going around and fixing printers, Wike said. He also praised the printers for offering a pull-out keyboard, their compatibility with OnBase by Hyland's enterprise content management suite, and for encrypting the printer drives, which Wike said is particularly valuable following the 2014 Sony hack.

DreamWorks animation has a $100 million production and distribution budget and releases two films each year, Wike said. The studio is currently discussing films that will come out in 2019 or 2020.

"It's like an assembly line," Wike said. "Every six months, we start another film, and it takes about five years to complete."

In the coming years, Wike said DreamWorks will take its HP ecosystem to the next level by moving some workloads into the cloud.

The company hopes to lighten its on-premise storage burden by moving some data-intensive files to the cloud and using state-of-the-art databases to identify where a particular file can be found.

Like many studios, Wike said DreamWorks is currently in the process of implementing object storage to facilitate greater functionality in the cloud.