Steady progress and partner potential at HPE Discover Barcelona 2024

European legs of tech conferences are always a somewhat strange experience. If you’re lucky, as a journalist, there will be a few announcements, but you attend in the full knowledge that the big news already dropped some time before.

For customers and partners, however, it’s a chance to discuss what was announced some six months ago in a local setting and perhaps get some local news as well – and so it was for HPE Discover Barcelona 2024.

The biggest news of the event was the arrival of two new air-gapped products: HPE Alletra Storage MP Disconnected and HPE Private Cloud Enterprise Disconnected.

While it’s very possible the technology was in place and ready to go in June at the main Discover conference, or any time since then, there’s a reason that the company held on until Barcelona to make the announcement: sovereign clouds.

I covered what these actually are in greater depth here, but in short it’s a way of keeping data within a certain jurisdiction in a determined location in a colocation facility or similar.

In CEO Antonio Neri’s keynote, as well as in press briefings when it was raised, Europe’s regulatory framework and strict data-regulation practices were highlighted as a reason for creating it. This is why it’s rolling out in Europe first and – by extension – why it was announced during a European conference.

Fewer announcements can mean more time for reflection and learning, though. There was certainly some of that on offer in the press area when CTO Fidelma Russo spoke about how HPE GreenLake had moved from a financial structure when it started to a “platform” for management and orchestration of services. Having written about HPE since before it split from HP Inc, this brought something of a wry smile to my lips, given how it was discussed back in 2019.

Overall, while it may have been a “steady as she goes” European event, there are a couple of things that I feel are worth keeping a mental bookmark of for the future.

The first is VM Essentials. The idea of HPE making its own virtual machines (VMs) was first floated at Discover 2024 in Las Vegas, but in VME it has a fully-fledged product. Leaving aside whether it’s a competitor to VMware products or merely ‘an alternative’, it will be interesting to see how much interest it receives from customers and whether it will get a nod at Discover Las Vegas 2025.

The second is Juniper Networks. It has been nearly 12 months since HPE announced its intention to buy Juniper and the company’s CEO Rami Rahim joined HPE CEO Antonio Neri on stage for the final third of the latter’s keynote address.

The two talked warmly about the future of the two companies, but there are suggestions that the deal is taking longer than expected to process. According to Bloomberg, which cited “people familiar with the matter”, the two companies may delay closing until after Trump takes office “in the hopes of a more favorable view of the transaction”.

In a press conference, however, Neri said he’s not worried about regulatory probes and is confident the deal will close either before the end of this year or at the beginning of 2025. Of course, with the inauguration taking place in January, those two things aren’t mutually exclusive.

Whatever the case, once the acquisition is completed, there will be a significant amount of integration between the companies happening, not to mention between their channel and direct sales programs and onboarding Juniper customers that have no existing relationship with HPE.