HPE Discover 2023: All the announcements from the Day Two keynote

Delegates will soon be making their way to the keynote theatre to hear what CEO Antonio Neri has up his sleeve. As noted in our preview, we can expect to hear a lot about HPE GreenLake – described by Neri yesterday as the company's North Star.

It's already getting busy on the show floor, with some of the most prominent stands giving an inkling of the priority messages of the conference. There's also a lunar rover for reasons I'm hoping will become clear later.

With just 10 minutes to go before the keynote kicks off the auditorium is getting pretty full.

Lights down, roll VT, the Day One HPE Discover 2023 keynote is underway!

Neri has taken to the stage and is thanking all attendees both on site and those watching remotely. 

"Today, believe it or not, is my sixth keynote on this stage" says Neri. He reminisces on how much things have changed in that time for better and worse.

Since the acquisition of Aruba, the company has tripled the size of its networking business, Neri says.

Customer retention rate for GreenLake – the core of HPE's business and Neri's flagship project, is 98%

Neri is now talking about the company's Cray acquisition and the power of HPC, as well as AI. There's a "transformational" announcement coming up on this topic during the keynote – but first, a video break.

Time for some Intelligent Edge discussion. More than 50% of data is analysed and acted upon at the edge, says Neri. But 70% of data remains on premises and 'untransformed'.

Later this year you will see why this is the Year of AI at HPE says Neri. But still not yet... first he's talking about the importance of sustainability, particularly when it comes to data centers with initiatives like water cooling and renewable power sources. HPE is now one of only a handful of large companies with a certified net zero strategy for 2024.

We've got a hint of what's coming up. HPE has long called itself the "edge to cloud" company. This has rested on two pillars – edge and  hybrid cloud. But a third element had appeared, ghosted, next to these and that is AI. So a crucial part of the businesses forward strategy, or going to be, so it would seem.

Neri says that HPE was ahead of its time with its dedication to edge computing. It's been bolstered by the acquisition of Aruba Networks and Silverpeak. He's also talking up AIOps, which is deliverred through HPE Aruba Networks.

"We continue to expand our portfolio" says Neri, with Axis being a recent acquisition that adds security to networking and the edge. Another acquisition has brought in private 5G offerings.

All of this is, naturally, available to customers through GreenLake platform. 

Kerrell Hurt, global head of strategy, engagement and platforms at IHG has joined Neri. The company has been using edge services delivered through GreenLake for managing some of its services.

Hurt says the company wants guests to "fall in love" with IHG experiences and the IHG brand. They've been focusing on MLB – not major league baseball but Mobile, Loyalty and Booking.

Now they're going for NFL, which is about networking rather than the National Football Lague.

WiFi is now an essential in hotels. "Some people would rather have WiFi than running water" says Hurt, which raises a ripple of laughter from the audience. I think we all know it's truer than we would like to admit.

"Obviously we've been working with you around the edge with the Aruba portfolio" says Neri. Hurt says the two companies have a long term relationship and they "started dating" several years ago. They have HPE servers, "which are working great, by the way" and have been transitioning to GreenLake from traditional ownership.

All the networking is provided by Aruba. the partnership is "Inspired by IHG, but powered by HPE", says Hurt. It seems it's been a crucial part of IHG's succeess in generating revenue and returning business. And with that, Hurt is off the stage.

We're now onto the hybrid cloud segment. By Q2 2023, GreenLake platform had captured more than $10bn in total contract value since its launch.

Some stats to go with that.

Neri is now thanking partners. You can read more about yesterday's Partner Growth Summit here.

Neri is now talking about its most recent acquisition, OpsRamp. This acquisition only closed in May, but already it's being integrated into GreenLake, but will still remain available as a separate SaaS offering. 

"Ultimately, no hybrid cloud is complete without integration with the public cloud." Earlier this morning, HPE annoucned further partnering with Amazon Web Services (AWS).

Unsurprisingly, AWS believes that all (or almost all) workloads will end up in the public cloud, but there are some hurdles to this. Things like data sovereignty, data location and latency. So AWS has started stretching toward private cloud, such as virtual private cloud and EKS Anywhere, which lets customers run kubernetes clusters on premises.

This parnership inclused AWS EKS for public cloud, elements of EC2, and HPE services available on AWS marketplace.

Announcement: GreenLake for Private Cloud Enterprise (PCE) has been extended to Private Cloud Enterprise Business Edition, which is a more integrated solution, quicker to spin up, easier to deploy.

Also, new integration with Red Hat Open Shift, plus additional Azure features.

Announcement: VMware vCloud is also now available through GreenLake platform. 

VMware CEO Rangarajan Raghuram is on stage talking up this parntership, which makes VMware vCloud Foundation available on demand through GreenLake Platform. Neri says it will be a "winning combination" of VMware and HPE GreenLake's joint market leadership.

Announcement: HPE is partnering with colocation provider Equinix for GreenLake private cloud hosted in Equinix data centers.

Neri is joined by Jon Lin, EVP and GM of data center services at Equinix.

HPE and Equinix have been partners for a while, but the pre-provisioned GreenLake Private Cloud Enterprise and GreenLake Private Cloud Enterprise Business Edition in Equinix data centers is new.

"Pre-provioning makes it so much faster and easier" says Lin. He also talks up the ability of using a colocation provider, such as Equinix, can help customers solve sustainability questions.

This is in seven locations initially, including London and Frankfurt, but there's a hope it will expand beyond that in future. Neri jokes that hopefully they will go from seven to 71 soon.

Ok, finally we are at the AI pillar. It will be the most disruptive technology in human history, says Neri, and 2023 will be a historic year – "an inflection point". It creates "superpowers for your business", he says. It will fuel massive changes.

"We believe AI should be accessible to all" says Neri.

"This is the big announcement: HPE is entering the AI public cloud market".

HPE GreenLake for Large Language Models (LLMs) is the name of the product. The company has partnered with Aleph Alpha to provide some pretrained models in five languages. This is also a big cost saving – GreenLake for LLMs runs on HPC, which would normally cost millions to invest in both from the perspective of hardware and skills.

It uses ProLiant Gen 11, with Nvidia GPUs. And we have a new tagline for the company: "I call this edge to exascale", says Neri.

It will run on the most sustainable colocation facilities, says Neri. Sustainability is a key thread in this event, even if it's not the biggest news.

You can read more about the GreenLake for LLMs announcement here.

Jonas Andrulis, founder and CEO of Aleph Alpha has joined Neri on stage to talk about his company's involvement with GreenLake for LLMs.

"What a time to be alive" says Andrulis. He talks up the potential for generative AI, which is what aleph Alpha specialises in. "This isn't the end. We're in the middle of [a revolution]," he says.

AI is "the best co-worker you've ever had" says Andrulis, adding "AI is not the same as our (human) intelligence, but it's very similar and that's going to change the world."

Andrulis is talking now about the importance of thinking about what the AI revolution and speed of change means for humanity. Technology has advanced over all human history and we've learned to work alongside the machines. But the pace of change now means the question is very urgent and it is unsolved.

He points to the case of the lawyer who used Chat-GPT in a court case, which created a letter referencing fictitious past cases, as an example of how people misunderstand what AI is all about. 

The tech community, and the AI community in particular, is building the future, says Andrulis. We need to think about what we're building because for future generations AI will be ubiquitous. 

This is the fastest technological revolution that has ever happened, and it can allow us to build a world "free of the burden of stupid work" and solve demographic, environmental and other critical problems facing the world today, says Andrulis.

Neri says he hopes this has isparked ideas for delegates. "We believe HPE GreenLake for LLMs will enable enterprises to create unique advantages from AI", he says.

"It's an honor to have you here this week for what I believe is the best HPE Discover in the company's history" he says. "HPE has been at the forefront of every major technology advancement over the last 80 years and we are very proud that our leadership brings new groundbreaking innovations."

"HPE stands at the forefront of a new era where Edge, hybrid cloud and AI will come together to advance the way people live and work. Let's do it together," he says. And with that, the keynote is over. 

Thank you for reading. You can read my analysis of today's biggest announcement, HPE GreenLake for LLMs, here and please do stay with ITPro for further coverage from the event.

It is a beautiful morning here in Las Vegas at the Venetian Expo Center, formerly the Sands Expo. Particularly keen delegates (such as your intrepid reporter) are slowly starting to filter into the building.

This was, of course, yesterday's big news. You can read my analysis of GreenLake for Large Language Models for some additional insight on the announcement.

Delegates are starting to file into the auditorium ahead of the Day Two keynote with CTO Fidelma Russo set to take to the stage in about 10 minutes time. In the meantime we're being treated to some live rock music.

Lights, camera, action! Fidelma Russo is now on the stage to talk to us about "unlocking innovation through HPE GreenLake Platform"

She once again talks up the "inflection point" 2023 marks for HPE, with an emphasis on AI, becoming vendor neutral and HPC.

She's now talking about how the expected surge to public cloud never agtually happened, and hybrid became the go to model. HPE, though, considers that often people went "hybrid by accident" – some data was in a hyperscaler, some with a colo or maybe on premises, but there wasn't an underlying strategy.

HPE is promoting "hybrid by design" – a more planned strategy that is, naturally, underpinned and powered by HPE GreenLake.

She's now talking about edge, which has been a key proposition of HPE for over five years – even prior to Antonio Neri and the birth of GreenLake. "50% of data is now analysed at the edge. I don't think any of us would have predicted this a number of years ago," she says.

She's  talking now to a representative from Henkel – a company you may not have hears of but it's the parent of brands such as Persil and Schwarzkopf. They're rolling our Aruba and Aruba Central and are about halfway through that. About 6 months ago they started working with HPE looking at GreenLake.

He says that the organization has been moving out of managed services but "not out of as a service", which is why GreenLake appealed. The existing experience of Aruba Central also helped sell it to them, and the "single pane of glass" for management that it delivers for their hybrid cloud (they use both hyperscalers and private cloud).

Russo asks what Henkel wants to see from HPE in the future. He says carry on being responsive and that they're happy to be a test bed for new ideas as they have a highly distributed network. And with that, he's off

Now Russo is talking about what is meant by a :hybrid cloud experience.

"Hybrid cloud is not a destination," she says, "it's an experience." This is a segue for talking about HPE GreenLake for Private Cloud Enterprise, launched last year, and HPE GreenLake for Private Cloud Enterprise Business Edition, which was launched yesterday.

GreenLake for Public Cloud Enterprise Business Edition (PCEBE) "Is self managed by you or you can have a partner managers. It provides a unified child experience for virtual machines, either on prem or in the public cloud with a consistent experience and we start with Amazon Web Services, and soon to be expanded to other clients," says Russo.

"For ease of operation, we provide a single fake multi system deployment capability. So you don't have to go click click click 1000s of times. We provide a single click multi site upgrade capability, allowing for fully automated Lifecycle Management."

We now have Denis Vilfort, director of the office of the CTO at HPE, and Katelyn Stone giving a live demo of Aruba Centrral and HPE GreenLake PCEBE

Squeaky bum time as they start spinning up VMs live on both a private cloud and in AWS. Hoping that the network will hold for this, it's always a risk!

Congratulations to them both, it went without a hiccup. They even got a round of applause for their efforts!

Russo is back, touching on the Equinix partnership for Private Cloud Enterprise and Private Cloud Enterprise Business Edition announced yesterday.

We're now talking about GreenLake Platform and how it makes management of the full technology stack. Helping solve complexity, she says, is why the company acquired OpsRamp, which has already been integrated into GreenLake to make it available on a SaaS basis, as announced yesterday.

Russo says she'd like to reiterate how this is transforming the GreenLake offering. It's now "vendor neutral, neutral mode, multi tenant, and multi tier and AI driven", she says.

This is what OpsRamp looks like. You can see, as Vilfort points out, that it's truly vendor neutral as you can see instances from Dell and NetApp in there.

Russo is now talking up the idea of 2023 being "The year of AI" for HPE. She points out that HPE has been working on both HPC and AI for a while, such as through the acquisition of Cray and Pachyderm.

She's talking about HPE for Large Language Models, yesterday's big announcement, and how it opens up supercomputers to everyone on an as a service basis. This overcomes the problem of people wanting access to HPC services but just not having the budget for it.

There's also a sustainability play here. AI is energy intensive, particularly things like large language model training and then running the LLMs after that. Just training can use as much energy as 30 houses. HPE's facilities are being built sustainably, she says, with things like water cooling (in which they are experts) with the waste heat being used to heat greenhouses, for example. 

"GreenLake Cloud Platform is one of the most sustainable platforms on which to run your LLM," she says.

You'd better believe Vilfort is back for a demo of the energy use dashboard.

Russo is back. "You've seen how sustainability is foundational to our business model," she says. 

Russo is wrapping up by reiterating the key message of HPE's strategy: "HPE is the only company which has a single edge to cloud platform, that is vendor neutral, cloud neutral, delivering state of the art cloud services making AI accessible to all."

And that's it, the end of the CTO keynote, but not the end of our coverage. Keep an eye out for more news and analysis of the event in the coming days.