HPE brings their A game for enterprise CIOs

This week, HPE made several announcements related to new strategies and service offerings. A few of these are particularly relevant for enterprises and CIOs addressing their ever-changing business and customer dynamics. There are four specific areas that stand out for CIOs.

HPE GreenLake addresses enterprise complexity on multiple levels

There is a lot to unpack with HPE’s GreenLake offerings and it goes beyond new product and service offerings. Let’s just cover a couple of the key data points.

First announced in 2017, GreenLake has come a long way and now represents more than just HPE’s ‘as-a-service’ suite of offerings. GreenLake represents an enterprise platform that moves HPE beyond infrastructure and into software and services across the edge-to-cloud spectrum. Throughout the industry, this is a widening gap that CIOs are looking to fill.

While public cloud is a powerful tool in the enterprise arsenal, it is just one of many tools needed in today’s edge-to-cloud spectrum. According to HPE, almost 70 percent of apps and data still reside on-premises. Enterprises will continue to need on-premises options for compute, storage and network. At the same time, they are looking for cloud-like experiences for their on-prem environments.

Enterprises need hybrid and multi-cloud solutions

HPE announced partnerships with both Google and Microsoft. While partnerships can be interesting, there are two key attributes that make these partnerships incredibly valuable to enterprises.

First, HPE is partnering with multiple public cloud providers. Enterprises typically use multiple providers in a multi-cloud fashion yet multi-cloud partnerships are not common. Second, HPE is integrating their software with Google and Microsoft’s respective solutions. Integration across multiple public cloud providers is also not common yet incredibly valuable for enterprises. The combination of the two differentiates HPE and takes on some of the heavy lifting that enterprises have had to do themselves.

Data is at the center of customer experience and business operations

HPE’s announcement of Ezmeral Unified Analytics is probably the biggest of the announcements and provides integration long sought by enterprises. Data is needed at the center but is located all over the place in silos. The traditional approach of building a traditional data warehouse simply isn’t enough in today’s data-rich world.

Companies like Snowflake and Databricks have taken a different approach to the traditional data warehouse, but Ezmeral Unified Analytics appears to have changed the game. Beyond the technical hurdles of data integration for analytics, performing analytics where data lies rather than moving or mirroring, addresses regulatory, compliance, privacy and political challenges. Add to that HPE CEO Antonio Neri’s comment: “The big data and analytics market, which IDC predicts will reach $110 billion by 2023, is ripe for disruption…”.

In addition, HPE announced their Data Fabric Object Store which creates an underlying data fabric by serving as a broker of data services across public cloud providers and on-prem solutions like GreenLake. This essentially creates an abstraction layer across different provider options and allows data access where it resides.

Data Integrity is More Important Than Ever

HPE announced the acquisition of Zerto, a well-known data protection company. Adding Zerto’s technology to the GreenLake platform is one thing. However, when you consider providing data integrity across the edge-to-cloud continuum, one can see how the value increases exponentially.

Providing data integrity is a somewhat of an art within IT organizations. Few do it well. Most do it with mixed results. Integrating the Zerto technology into the GreenLake platform that spans hybrid and multi-cloud has the potential to significantly increase data integrity while reducing risk.

These four specific areas represent just a quick take from the CIO perspective. While these provide interesting opportunities for enterprises, this is just the start of what enterprises, and CIOs, truly need. Turning the corner for HPE from an infrastructure company to a software and services company will not be trivial. However, it appears HPE is bringing their A game and intend to proceed accordingly.

In addition, here is my quick take on theCUBE: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A1v1VX5-dfQ