In a wide-ranging keynote at Discover 2023, Antonio Neri, president & CEO of HPE, set out the company’s vision for the role that AI will play in delivering tremendous benefits and accelerated development for customers and a wealth of new opportunities for partners.
At its recent HPE Discover 2023 event, president and CEO of HPE, Antonio Neri, used his keynote address to get across the message loud and clear that AI has a key role to play in the company’s future. To kick off though, he emphasised how positive he is feeling. ‘I have always believed in the resilience of our global community and despite the hardships of the last few years, I maintain my optimism and confidence in the bright future ahead.’
HPE has indeed come a long way in these areas under Neri’s six-year tenure. It was the first to commit to ‘everything as a service’ and followed that up with the launch of HPE GreenLake and in doing so, created a completely new category. That bold stratagem is now paying off richly with HPE GreenLake growing at double digit rates and maintaining a 98% customer retention rate.
All coming together
HPE has acquired and integrated 19 companies and invested more than $5.5 billion in its portfolio. Aruba is one of the most notable success stories here but, of course, the one that has now become the real driving force for HPE and all its partners is HPE GreenLake – and Neri explained how all of this was now coming together within the company’s long-term vision.
AI will now play a leading role in unlocking the power of data
‘Through our HPE GreenLake edge to cloud platform, we are delivering one unified cloud-native experience for the entire portfolio. The elements of our strategy are the edge, hybrid cloud and AI, and each of those are connected…edges must be connected to the hybrid cloud to unify data silos and deliver an agile cloud computing experience.’
But while data is exploding, businesses are still not making enough use of it – and AI will now play a leading role in unlocking the power of data, said Neri. ‘I believe the true power of AI is in its ability to turn questions into discovery, insights into action, and our unlimited imagination into reality. We have now [with AI] the ability to harness the power of all our data with systems that mimic the human brain, to adapt and learn autonomously at massive scale.’
AI innovations
Over the next year, we are going to see many innovations from HPE that harness the power of AI natural language and large language processing models to deliver significant benefits for customers and Neri believes it is a real game-changer and not only in terms of the technology benefits it will bring.
Not only can AI help you make better and faster decisions, it helps you predict trends to create new business opportunities
‘AI will be the most disruptive technology of our time and 2023 will be remembered as the Inflexion point. AI has the potential to help solve huge societal challenges, ranging from climate change to energy transition to cures for disease. Combined with automation, AI can drive new levels of productivity and cost savings.
‘Not only can AI help you make better and faster decisions, it helps you predict trends to create new business opportunities. In simple terms, AI creates superpowers for your business. Those who embed AI into their strategy will leave behind those who do not.’
A bold bet
Underlining this point, Neri announced that HPE is making what he described as ‘one the boldest bets in the history of our company’ and announcing a set of industry- and domain-specific AI applications that will run on HPE supercomputer platforms – and powered by nearly 100% renewable energy.
The drive in the IT industry to becoming more sustainable has become even more crucial
The increased power that it will take to drive AI means that the drive in the IT industry to becoming more sustainable has become even more crucial, he emphasised and that in turn will fuel increased use of HPE GreenLake and hybrid infrastructures. HPE plans to lead the way in taking ‘the next step in making accessible the most sustainable supercomputing cloud infrastructure to customers of all sizes’ by giving them the ability again to train and tune AI technology using a subscription model.
Sustainable workloads
Sustainable AI workloads will be available on HPE GreenLake in the second half of this year in the US and will arrive in Europe next year, he promised; these offerings will be super energy-efficient, running on the most sustainable colocation facilities.
The network and security markets are converging
Another area he touched on through the speech, was security. He emphasised that high levels of security would be built-into all of HPE technologies from the data centre to the edge. In fact, he sees security becoming an integral part of networking in the near future.
‘The network and security markets are converging, and the SASE framework is the future for hybrid cloud. I believe the best customer experience will be when network and security are delivered together in one common platform.’ HPE has acquired a number of security specialists in recent times and is integrating these technologies into its solutions to enable a secure, seamless experience across the entire infrastructure.
Bringing opportunities to life
It was an inspiring talk, said Andrew Stuart, HPE business unit director, UK, at TD SYNNEX. ‘It was historic in the sense that Antonio Neri set out HPE’s commitment to lead the way with AI and the future looks really exciting. As a trusted advisor to our partners, our job now is to make all of that relevant and real for our partners. We are always working on our plans to bring the benefits of the cloud-enabled AI offerings that HPE will be bringing forward.
The future looks really exciting
‘We’ll be ramping up our activity and knowledge and making full use of our technical and professional services resources, our close partnership with HPE, and our unique market intelligence, to bring the opportunities to life. ‘
The TD SYNNEX HPE team have a growing community of partners with a focus on AI as part of their HPE Accelerate Program, and are already planning a series of presentations, workshops and engagement opportunities for later this year. If you’d like to find out more, please click below to make contact.
