Antonio Neri’s 10 Most Provocative Statements At HPE Discover 2019

HPE CEO Antonio Neri says HPE’s “open” approach to the cloud is in sharp contrast to competitors who want to “lock” customers into “walled gardens.”

HPE’s Big Everything As A Service Bet

See the latest entry: HPE Discover 2022: CEO Antonio Neri’s 10 Most Provocative Statements

Hewlett Packard Enterprise CEO Antonio Neri said HPE is defining the “next chapter” in the IT industry with its massive pivot to deliver everything as a service by 2022.

“I am committing today to you that in the next three years HPE will be a consumption driven company and everything we deliver to you will be available as a service,” Neri told customers in his HPE Discover keynote address.

The first phase of the sales blitz is a version of GreenLake for the midmarket and a new Network-as-a-Service version of GreenLake from Aruba.

The new midmarket offering will target a sweet spot of $300,000 but can stretch down to $100,000 depending on configurations and customer need.

“HPE GreenLake for the midmarket delivers purpose built solutions such as virtualization and container as a service, storage as a service, database as a service, backup as a service, private cloud as a service and way more- all in your data center,’ Neri told customers.

The new Aruba Network as a Service version of GreenLake, meanwhile, for the first time combines the Aruba Central SaaS model with network hardware including campus core network switches and wireless access points in a monthly pay per use offering.

Here are Neri's 10 most provocative statements from his HPE Discover keynote:

Walled Gardens

The future of the edge and the cloud has to come together. With Aruba and the HPE composable fabric in the data center from the acquisition of Plexxi we are now connecting users and data at the edge to apps and data in the cloud. We know the world is hybrid and the best experience will win. You want choice and flexibility to place your data where it makes the most sense. Our competitors want to lock you into one flavor of the cloud and the cloud stack. They are all what I call walled gardens, each one very unique. Our approach could not be more different. We are open and hybrid. To help you run your right mix of hybrid cloud our strategy is very, very simple: to deliver solutions that are workload optimized, cloud-enabled and consumption delivered.

Everything As A Service

In the near future we believe that everything will be delivered as a service. More and more of you tell me that you don’t want to spend resources managing your infrastructure whether on the edge, in the cloud or in the data center, whether it is cloud native or legacy environments. You just want to focus on your applications data and your business outcomes. You want to be the service provider and broker your enterprise and HPE wants to help you. To deliver that experience I am committing to you that in the next three years HPE will be a consumption driven company and everything we deliver to you will be available as a service. We are defining the next chapter for the IT industry.

HPE GreenLake- A 10 Year Head Start

With HPE GreenLake you will have the choice of pay per use or subscription based and fully managed for you. Whatever is best for your business model. All these approaches free up capital to help you innovate and eliminate over-provisioning while always supporting your workloads with the latest and greatest technology. That is why we have been investing in HPE GreenLake to deliver that experience to you for any workload anywhere.

We are miles ahead of anything else in the industry, delivering a sophisticated set of financial and managed services components wrapped around your solution delivered to you locally. You choose what you want, where you want it and only pay for what you consume. We have I believe a 10 year head start and that has enabled us to build capabilities and unique partnerships that no one else can match. We now deliver HPE GreenLake in 56 countries and lead the industry in consumption-based services on premises. In fact, we have over $2.8 billion under contract today, approximately 600 customers and this is HPE’s fastest-growing business. We are taking our big lead to the next level. Today I am excited to announce the expansion of our HPE GreenLake portfolio for the midmarket and HPE GreenLake for Aruba.

AI Momentum And Making Supercomputing Mainstream

We have been building an HPE AI (artificial intelligence) portfolio over the last few years investing in AI expertise in HPE Pointnext Services to help identify the business case and to design, build and deliver a full AI stack solution for you. With our acquisition of BlueData we invested in the data scientist software so you can put all of your data from all your sources at the fingertips of your data scientists. And we are the world leader in High Performance Computing architecture- the backbone of today’s advanced machine learning and analytics techniques.

We believe that in the near future supercomputing must become mainstream. That is why last month we took another step to cement our leadership position announcing our intent to acquire Cray. This moves our strategy forward to tackle the most data intensive workloads by combining big supercomputing talent and cutting-edge technologies. With HPE AI we have the complete portfolio now: expertise, infrastructure, software, the partner ecosystem and the ability to deliver the full solution to you as a service.

A No Agenda Approach To The Cloud

For us the cloud is not a destination. It is an experience. We believe that the cloud experience should be open and seamless across all your clouds. The best cloud transformation partner is the one who is unbiased, offers choice, and is neutral, without an agenda. You also want a partner that has expertise. Our cloud advisory team at HPE Pointnext Services built on the acquisitions of both Cloud Technology Partners and Red Pixie has completed thousands of successful cloud transformation projects and are premier partners with AWS, Google Cloud and Microsoft Azure to deliver the right mix of hybrid cloud for your enterprise implemented the right way.

Ahead Of The Big Market Shifts

If you look back three years ago the (hybrid) strategy that we laid out not only has been proven to be correct, it is ahead of the market. We were the first to say the world would be hybrid and it is. We were the first with converged infrastructure. Hyperconverged was the next evolution so we acquired one of the leading platforms -- SimpliVity. But we also knew the ultimate future was about composability. We were the first to bring to the market a composable cloud experience with HPE Synergy in your data center. That is now a $1.5 billion business. Then we saw the enormous opportunity at the edge. We placed our bets starting with the acquisition of Aruba and then as they say here in Vegas we doubled down with several acquisitions to grow our edge capabilities. Our strategy and our ability to deliver on it are ahead of the market. That is what makes us the best digital transformation partner for you.

Tackling The Wasted Data Problem

Ultimately everything we do is focused on you and your data: to protect it, to store it and manage it and to unlock its enormous value. According to Gartner today you only get value out of six percent of your data. The other 94 percent of that data is wasted. We must do better because by next year the average person will generate 1.5 gigabytes a day. In the future one autonomous car will create more than 4,000 gigabytes a day. That is more than 2,000 times what an average person will generate. We can not afford to waste any of that data.

Everyone talks about the data problem but we are focused on doing something about it. One way is by helping you put application intelligence into action to solve your business challenges.

HPE GreenLake For Midmarket

We started offering HPE GreenLake through our channel partners last year and today hundreds of partners here in the audience and all our major distributors can sell and deliver it. But you know what: HPE GreenLake is so good that they wanted to sell it beyond the enterprise segment. HPE GreenLake for the midmarket delivers purpose built solutions such as virtualization and container as a service, storage as a service, database as a service, backup as a service, private cloud as a service and way more, all in your data center. And if you don’t have a data center or space in your data center GreenLake is also now available through our co-location partners CyrusOne and Equinix. Now the midmarket can stand up GreenLake and use it in a matter of days.

Bringing Memory Driven Computing To ProLiant

Right when we need infrastructure to keep up, getting faster than ever, Moore’s law (the principle that the speed and capability of computers can be expected to double every two years) is ending. We saw this coming and decided to act on it. Two years ago we showed you The Machine prototype- the biggest single memory computer ever built. We proved memory driven computing works. Then we launched HPE Superdome Flex. Massive shared memory is changing the game in Alzheimer’s research, genomics, cybersecurity and in financial modeling. I stood up on this stage a year ago and said memory driven computing is driving all our road maps. Today I am excited to announce that we are offering memory driven development kits based on the legendary HPE ProLiant platform. I am excited to see what you can do with this amazing technology. I am pleased to announce we are now taking orders on HPE ProLiant with a memory driven architecture.

HPE’s Cloudless Vision

I believe we need to transform the entire approach to how software is built, delivered and consumed. We need to radically simplify and democratize the way developers and users access tools, services and data that powers today's enterprise applications. And it needs to be a solution that is secure, transparent and pervasive -- a new approach that obliterates the distinction between public-ness and private-ness and leverages the full source of the vibrant cloud native computing development community for the benefits of all. In five to ten years from now the world will still be hybrid, but the illusion of interconnection will be replaced by the reality. The result is the agility and simplicity of cloud together with secure interoperability across clouds which is why we call this new vision Cloudless. With Cloudless clouds don’t go away but the walls between them do. This is important to understand. Cloud is an experience. It is not a destination. Partnering with the open source community we want to make that experience open to all. You may be wondering how does Cloudless work? While others are stitching together components we are waving a comprehensive vision where openesss, agility, diversity and transparency are paramount.