HPE boss ushers in the ‘age of insight’

HPE CEO Antonio Neri has used the firm’s Discover event to outline his vision that we are all entering the “age of insight”, with opportunities rising for those that can help customers to cope with increasing amounts of data.

Neri told journalists in a pre-brief session that data was being generated “at an amazing pace and that pace is unstoppable”, and that the experience of the past 18 months had changed the landscape even further.

“We live in a truly distributed enterprise, digital economy is taking a significant foothold in digital transformation for the enterprise and it is accelerating at a pace we haven’t seen before,” he said.

He added that the changes meant that the world was moving on from the “information era”, where customers were data rich, to the “age of insight”.

“That’s why we as a company are accelerating our vision to become the edge-to-cloud company that eventually accelerates outcomes from that data. We believe now more than ever that customers need an edge-to-cloud architecture,” he said.

The channel will be all too familiar with what that means from a product point of view, with GreenLake being the way HPE meets those changing demands.

Discover has included some updates to GreenLake to add support for Microsoft Azure Stack HCI and Microsoft SQL Server to attract those users looking to implement a cloud-native architecture on-premise. There were also a number of cloud services targeting specific verticals and technologies, including financial services and 5G.

The channel has been the main route to market for Greenlake, with HPE reporting that sales have continued to rise through partners. Neri said that the approach was fundamental to its commitment to providing everything as a service (XaaS).

“It’s about advancing our vision to offer XaaS and edge-to-cloud architecture,” he said. “GreenLake is the North Star of everything in the company.”

He added that it was important to give its channel the chance to differentiate on the platform to add its own value: “For us, [GreenLake] is an open platform that allows our customers to innovate on data, and for our partners – an important component of the ecosystem – to add their own services.”

Discover will also see the debut of GreenLake Lighthouse, which is a cloud-based management system that simplifies the process of triggering additional services.

“It removes a tremendous amount of configuration complexity, and the procurement cycle, patching together compute and storage and all the runtime that you need to put together, will give the customer the fully deployable configuration right up front, with only one simple click,” he said.

Neri also teased the ongoing developments on the security front, with it gathering momentum around a zero-trust approach with Project Aurora.

“We’ve taken [zero-trust] to the next level with a cloud native zero-trust,” he said, adding that the cloud-native technology would test that everything was secure between all the endpoint connections.

When asked about the general shift from its competitors to also trumpet the as-a-service model, Neri said it validated its approach and welcomed the moves.

“It validates what we said a few years ago, about the world being hybrid and the world moving to a consumption model and the edge being the next frontier. Unfortunately, we had to go through an event like the pandemic to see that growth and acceleration,” he said.