Antonio Neri: 5 Innovation Advantages To Look For At HPE Discover

HPE President and CEO Antonio Neri tells partners that his company's investments in innovation will help them ‘make more money’ in areas like intelligent storage management.

The ‘Best Ever’ HPE Discover

See the latest entry: HPE Discover 2022: CEO Antonio Neri’s Most Provocative Statements

Hewlett Packard Enterprise President and CEO Antonio Neri says HPE’s Discover conference, which runs June 18-20, promises to be the “best-ever” Discover yet with a focus on innovation that will continue to make partners “relevant” in an intensely competitive market.

HPE continues to invest in innovation, pivoting partners to markets where they can “make more money” in areas like intelligent storage management, said Neri in a conference call with partners on May 31.

“You will be amazed at the innovation we are going to bring to Discover, more innovation in storage in terms of intelligent management platforms, more innovation in terms of edge with edge computing,” Neri said. “But the biggest innovation you are going to hear from us is the pivot to as a service on everything we do.”

Neri thanked partners for their contributions to HPE’s financial performance. Furthermore, he said he is looking forward to meeting with partners at Discover to “talk about how we can solve customer problems with the best innovation on the planet.”

GreenLake Pay-Per-Use Innovation

The biggest innovation at HPE Discover will be to a pivot to the as-a-service model with HPE GreenLake, said Neri. “GreenLake is an unbelievable innovation that we must capitalize on,” he told partners. “My goal over the next three years is to turn everything we do in this company and deliver it as a service. That is a massive opportunity. We believe that business for Hewlett Packard Enterprise can represent 20 percent of the entire company.”

That “massive pivot” to the pay-per-use model with a focus on investing in software innovation and making it “simple to sell and manage” represents a blockbuster opportunity for HPE and its partners, said Neri. “With our workload-optimized solutions, cloud-enabled and consumption- driven, we have a unique opportunity to really provide a true end-to-end experience for our customers,” he said.

Neri said the pay-per-use market already accounts for 40 percent of the total addressable $110 billion market.

HPE GreenLake’s pay-per-use model, which provides a public cloud consumption experience on-premises, had its largest quarter ever with robust 39 percent sales growth in HPE’s second fiscal quarter ended April 30.

HPE’s InfoSight Intelligent Storage Advantage

HPE’s InfoSight artificial intelligence predictive analytics platform is key to HPE’s intelligent storage management strategy, said Neri.

“When we think about storage, we think about not just storing data, but how we turn that data into outcomes and intelligent data platform management,” said Neri. “That capability requires very much AI and machine learning we have developed over a number of years.”

InfoSight has already been been widely embraced by Nimble customers and ProLiant customers. That large installed base is providing HPE with a huge competitive advantage in the race to provide intelligent storage, said Neri. “That is where the differentiation is going to come, it will be very unique for our customers and partners,” he said.

The large installed base of Nimble and now ProLiant customers using InfoSIght gives HPE an unprecedented advantage in a market where machine learning and AI are now table stakes, said Neri.

“Everybody is doing machine learning and AI today,” said Neri. “That is the new standard. The reality is how do you do it in a way that becomes autonomous. That is where InfoSight has really been developed with an ability to self-learn based on understanding what’s out there with the large installed base.”

HPE Composable Cloud

HPE OneView, HPE InfoSight, HPE Plexxi and HPE BlueData are key elements of HPE’s composable cloud innovation advantage, said Neri.

“Composable Cloud platform is a combination of HPE OneView, Plexxi, HPE InfoSight and BlueData,” said Neri. “We bring it all together under a platform that you deliver services on—so you activate what you need. You can go down into the infrastructure so everything gets automated for you in an intelligent way.”

HPE’s software intellectual property from key acquisitions like Plexxi, BlueData and Cray are critical to the intelligent composable cloud platform, said Neri.

“More and more we are adding this IP [intellectual property] including the Cray acquisition, which is important because we have ProLiant, Apollo, 3Par, Nimble, SimpliVity. Now we have more IP at the infrastructure level,” said Neri.

HPE’s acquisition of Plexxi—a provider of software-defined data fabric networking technology—provides HPE with a unique platform to drive a “data-driven” software-defined architecture, said Neri.

Plexxi essentially provides a data breakthrough with the ability to connect application to application, moving data east and west rather than just north to south, said Neri. “That’s a huge advantage in the new architectures that need to be developed in a multi-tenant approach,” he said.

High-Performance Compute Innovation

HPE’s $1.1 billion proposed acquisition of supercomputing powerhouse Cray—which is expected to close in HPE’s first fiscal quarter fiscal 2020—is going to drive innovation in breakthrough enterprise data management capabilities, said Neri.

Neri said the Cray acquisition provides critical intellectual property with software and an “interconnect” fabric that will eventually be made available to partners as part of the HPE portfolio. “That innovation will trickle down into enterprise workloads and in other areas of the portfolio,” he said.

HPE partners, for their part, said they are excited about the Cray deal’s ability to open up new high- performance HPE GreenLake pay-per-use opportunities for them in hot markets like machine learning and artificial intelligence.

Partnership And Customer Choice Innovation

HPE’s steadfast commitment to be a partner-led company with a commitment to “customer choice” is a key innovation advantage, said Neri.

That partnership and openness commitment extends to recent HPE’s blockbuster deals with Nutanix and Google.

Neri said the Nutanix software partnership delivers a “better integrated” private cloud solution that partners will be able to deliver to customers on HPE servers with an “alternative hypervisor” to VMware.

As for HPE Google Cloud, the partnership extends HPE’s composable cloud portfolio into the Google public cloud, said Neri. That deal opens the door for HPE SimpliVity and Nimble to be used in a Google public cloud environment.

Neri reaffirmed HPE’s commitment to SimpliVity as the company’s hyper-converged infrastructure linchpin. “Our hyper-converged platform is SimpliVity and Synergy at scale,” he said. “We validated that with Google Cloud and also we validated HPE Nimble storage and ProLiant for mission-critical workloads with HPE storage as a cloud volume inside the Google cloud. So we have given you the ability to meet customer needs in ways we were not able to do so and the choice for them [customers] to decide what is best for them.”

Neri also reaffirmed HPE partner-led commitment—which has been one of the pillars that he established upon becoming HPE CEO 16 months ago. “This company as a culture is partner-led,” he said. “And we will continue to be partner-led in the future.”