HPE Discover is back once again in fabulous Las Vegas, with the company eager to show off its latest developments, products and strategies.
Six years after the company’s first outing as Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE), following its split from HP Inc in 2015, the business has changed quite significantly – in strategy if not in what it’s actually selling – with HPE GreenLake becoming its central focus for almost everything.
HPE GreenLake, for those not familiar, is the company’s ‘as a service’ offering. It allows organizations to use HPE’s hardware on a consumption-based model; you only pay for what you use and can spin instances up and down as you see fit, much like you would in a public cloud.
The difference is the hardware is located either on-premises or perhaps with a colocation provider, rather than in the data center of a hyperscaler such as AWS, Azure, or Google Cloud.
While it started small in 2017, with just a handful of applications, GreenLake has grown to become the focus of the company’s headline announcements year after year. You would almost be mistaken for forgetting HPE sells enterprise hardware, were it not for the fact that any cloud has to run on some kind of infrastructure.
Show me the AI
What does all this mean for HPE Discover 2023, then? Given CEO Antonio Neri bet the farm on GreenLake in 2021, it’s probably safe to say we’ll hear very little about new hardware launches and a lot about new HPE GreenLake offerings.
HPE’s latest big announcement here came in the form of GreenLake cloud services for high-performance computing (HPC), launched in December 2020. HPE has some serious HPC chops – supercomputing granddaddies Cray and SGI have been HPE brands since 2016 and 2019 respectively – and I would be excited to hear more of what they’re doing in this area.
Of course, the trend currently swamping the tech industry (and everything else) is artificial intelligence (AI), or more specifically generative AI; the DALL-Es, Chat-GPTs, and Bards of this world all rely on top-end hardware.
HPE has already made moves in the AI space, with Ezmeral for ML (machine learning) Ops and GreenLake for ML Ops, as well as swarm learning and a partnership with NVIDIA for enterprise-focused AI. With Dell Technologies partnering with NVIDIA for enterprise AI too, as announced at Dell Technologies World in May, surely it’s time for HPE to make some additional moves in this area if it wants to stay ahead.
Are HPE's acquisitions coming into their own?
It’s always worth keeping an eye on what comes out of acquisitions – for example, 2019’s big hardware announcement, Primera, came out of HPE’s acquisition of Nimble Storage two years prior.
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There haven’t been any acquisitions on the scale of Nimble, Cray or SGI in recent years, but an intriguing one is the recent purchase of OpsRamp. From a GreenLake point of view (because everything is from a GreenLake point of view these days), this acquisition makes total sense given OpsRamp was an IT operations management company.
Boasting automation capabilities and the ability to work across on-premises infrastructure as well as cloud, it’s an easy fit for HPE’s flagship strategy. If there’s no nod to how this will integrate into GreenLake services – even in the abstract – I’ll be very surprised.
With Dell Technologies once again snapping at HPE’s heels in consumption-based computing with Project Apex announcements in May, I hope the company in the green corner has something of interest to counter with next week.
ITPro will be covering HPE Discover 2023 between 20 June and 22 June. Stay up-to-date with the latest news and updates by following our live blogs, and subscribe to our newsletter to catch the latest in-depth stories.
