Latest / Technology Now / HPE Discover 2023: The Wrap-up
Transcript
- Michael Bird: Hello, hello, hello. And a very warm welcome to Technology Now, a weekly show from Hewlett Packard Enterprise where we take what's happening in the world around us and explore how it's changing the way organizations are using technology. We're your hosts, Aubrey Lovell and Michael Bird. And you may notice that Aubrey didn't introduce herself this week, and that is because she is out on the floor of HPE Discover 2023 in Las Vegas as our illustrious roving reporter who will be joining us very shortly. So in this episode, we'll be looking at the key announcements from this year's show, including tools to make your hybrid cloud transformation that much easier, expanding partnerships with some of the biggest names in cloud services and something huge, or should I say large in the world of AI. I promise that joke will make sense later. Curious? You should be. So if you're the kind of person who needs to know why what's going on in the world matters to your organization, then this podcast is for you. And if you haven't yet, do make sure you subscribe on your podcast app of choice so you don't miss out. Right, let's get onto it. HPE Discover 2023 hit Las Vegas from the 20th to the 22nd of June. It's HP's annual showcase and it brought together thousands of delegates to explore the cutting edge of AI, cybersecurity, edge to cloud and more. So of course we went along well rather, our roving reporter Aubrey Lovell did and we're going over to her now. Hello Aubrey. Aubrey Lovell: Hello Michael and Viva Las Vegas. I am coming to you live on the show floor and I have to say this is one of the best HPE Discovers I think I've ever attended. There is so much to do and lots to see covering a variety of topics, edge to cloud. But the big thing people are talking about really is Antonio Neri's keynote. HPE has announced some groundbreaking new solutions and services focused around our HPE GreenLake edge-to-cloud platform, hybrid cloud services, Private Cloud portfolio and partner ecosystem. And once that, that Antonio led with was how HPE GreenLake has a 98% customer retention rate, which clearly shows and validates that our strategy is working. And I think the biggest announcement of all is that HPE has entered the AI cloud market through the expansion of its HPE GreenLake portfolio. And this really allows us to offer large language models for any enterprise, whether it's a startup or a Fortune 500 company. So obviously very, very exciting news coming out of HPE Discover. And with that in mind, HPE GreenLake for large language models will allow any large organization to privately train, tune and deploy large scale AI through an on-demand supercomputing cloud service. And this is obviously made possible by HPE strategic investment in Cray and in our partnership with Aleph Alpha, who was also a part of our keynote customer panel. So another cool thing I want to mention is that in the CTO session Fidelma Russo's keynote, she showed how this offering has sustainability built in. And one thing I took away was showing how it can reduce power usage by almost 20% and the heat generated from that offering can actually be recycled and reused. So it's really, really amazing stuff. And as we alluded to previously, we knew that AI was going to be a big topic this year at HPE Discover, and HPE definitely delivered on that promise. I think the takeaway here is that HPE has cemented their place in the age of AI and has really helped to expand AI capabilities, not just for the few, but for all, for everyone in the enterprise space. And so that's really powerful when you think about it. Here's what Antonio had to say. Antonio Neri: HP GreenLake for large language models will enable any enterprise to privately train, tune and deploy large scale AI through an on-demand multi-tenant supercomputing cloud service. HPE GreenLake for LLAM will help you build and privately train all those models from scratch and publish for others to consume. Or you can use pre-trained LLMs to tune and deploy with your own data to your unique use cases. Unlike consumer grade models, your customer data remains yours and HP services experts will be there to help you ensure success. You also don't have to spend the millions and millions and millions of dollars to acquire the supercomputer and infrastructure, the skills unique data center capabilities, which are very, very different to run AI systems on your own. Instead, you can accelerate from proof points of concept to production at scale and focus on optimizing the outcomes for your business. HPE supports three critical components of the AI journey, training, tuning, and inference. In addition to the introduction of HP GreenLake for LLM to privately to train and tune your LLMs. We also have available AI inference compute solutions. The systems has been tuned to target workloads at the edge and in the data center such as computer vision, generative visual AI, and natural language processing. These AI solutions are based on the new HP ProLiant Gen11 servers and integrate a video GPUs, which has been built to integrate advanced acceleration critical for AI performance. HP now provides a full breadth of AI capabilities from what I call edge to exascale. Finally, to HP GreenLake, you have all of this at your fingertips on demand. The unveiling of the AI cloud, the public cloud we are entering is the next step in making accessible the most sustainable supercomputing cloud infrastructure to customers of all sizes by providing them the ability, again to privately train and tune their AI models in a software subscription based offering. Whether you are just experimenting or are ready to scale your AI pipeline and workflows, come to the HPE GreenLake for LLM cloud to embed AI into every aspect of your strategy and deploy that scale across every facet of your enterprise. Aubrey Lovell: Pretty transformational. And speaking of partnership, HPE's partners and ecosystem were on full display. One of those is with our trusted partner, Equinix. Antonio invited Jon Lin, executive vice president and general manager of data center services at Equinix on stage to join him in announcing the pre-provisioned, keyword there, pre-provision HPE GreenLake Private Cloud Enterprise and GreenLake Private Cloud Enterprise Business Edition. Now, the highlight difference between these two offerings is that the HPE GreenLake Private Cloud is fully managed by HPE, whereas the business edition allows the customer or a partner for the customer to manage that environment. Let's take a listen. Antonio Neri: And so today we announced a significant expansion of our partnership with column market Equinix. HP GreenLake for both Private Cloud Enterprise and Private Cloud Business Edition will be pre-provisioned and available on a rolling basis at seven regional locations around the world. By partnering with Equinix, HP enables customers like you to go from quote to production in just days adding capacity and scale on demand. And here to tell us more is a executive vice president, general manager of data center services at Equinix, Jon Lin. So we talk about how customers complete their hybrid cloud journey and obviously colors are a very important part of the data center footprint and to me is an ingredient to make sure the right mix of the cloud is there. So can you elaborate on what customers should consider when they're thinking about this approach? Jon Lin: You think about all of the discussion around cloud and it's so centered around the software portions of everything that's being delivered, but at the end of the day there is a physical component and that's difficult, right? But markets have chosen, multi-cloud is the architecture of choice for infrastructure of the future, and that includes multiple public clouds, it includes SaaS, it includes private cloud infrastructure. And that private cloud is key to providing the experience that developers, that application owners need and use. But they need the same scalability. They want to use the same tooling, but they also need to understand how they can control the performance. They have opinions about how that hardware needs to be run, the importance about understanding the security domain that exists there, what privacy rights, what regulations need to be there along with that predictable cost of ownership. And so customers count on interconnected co-location providers like Equinix to make sure we're distributing that infrastructure from that cloud core all the way to the edge wherever the application needs to live. The partnership that Equinix and HPE have had for years now about helping solve and locate that technology stack adjacent to the clouds has been incredible. But what we've heard loud and clear from our customers is, as you said, it's complex. It can be difficult. So how can we create simplicity of that motion? How can we provide that access to the ecosystems of technology partners that Equinix provides, but do it in a way that's more software enabled, make networking easier, make the logistics easier, make that presence and location easier, and really make that physical infrastructure end up feeling more like just cloud. At the same time, our customers are telling us loud and clear sustainability commitments are there in the market. And figuring out how can I make this private infrastructure I need to grow sustainable is something that every enterprise is staring at. And knowing that their enterprise data center is not going to be able to get them there in terms of their requirements, that's why Equinix is the easy button for all of their sustainability needs. And the partnership that HPE and Equinix have had around identifying science-based targets around sharing the same ethos and goals about being climate neutral and putting that out there as a marker. And then enabling that visibility and transparency for our customers is incredibly important. And of course, making sure that we're reliable. I mean that's table stakes operating those facilities around the world. Antonio Neri: But what I really love about our partnership is the fact we have similar views of the market and similar values, and I think you talked about this, working together to solve some of these biggest challenges. Not just provide standard infrastructure, solve the network and solve the energy, solve the carbon footprint. And I'm really particularly excited that now we're going to have PCE and PCBE pre-provision at the Equinix data centers around the globe. Aubrey Lovell: It's also worth noting that HPE announced new collaborations and advancements in our partnerships with both Amazon Web Services and VMware all geared towards aiding organizations and making their digital and hybrid cloud transformations as easy and cost-effective as possible. So in short, big presence, big partnership on main stage, Michael. And I want to leave on the note of what Fidelma and Antonio have been mentioning multiple times. It's that hybrid cloud is not a destination, it's an experience back to you. Oh, and that sounds so official, by the way. Michael Bird: Brilliant. Thank you Aubrey. And that's all pretty huge and remarks a pretty radical shakeup of the industry. We'll be back with more from the show floor at HP Discover very shortly. Next up, it would usually be down to you, our audience, because this is the segment where we normally open the floor for you to give your recommendations on books which have changed the way that you look at the world, life and business in the last 12 months. Now, if you want to share your recommendations, there's a link in the podcast description, just record a voice note on your phone and send it over. But this week, since we've got a reporter on the ground, I thought I'd ask you Aubrey Lovell, nearly live from Las Vegas. What have you read recently? Aubrey Lovell: Ooh, the pressure is on. So I don't necessarily have a particular book for book club, but being at HPE Discover, I did want to share an experience that I had. I was able to attend the Women in Tech breakfast that we had and it was absolutely wonderful. We had over 250 women there. Great, great time to collaborate to just have a conversation on all the important topics about being a woman in tech. And one thing I really took away was the setup where we each had a team captain at the table and all of us were given a quote that we had to talk about and kind of give our perspective on. And our quote had to deal with storytelling and the importance of essentially making sure that your voice is heard and supporting your community as women in a space like tech. And so we talked about how important storytelling was in terms of it being one of the greatest gifts that you could have or to hone in on, to be able to share your experience, share your perspective with others in order to influence the environment and the future. And so it was a really, really great breakfast. One of the highlights of my stay here at HPE Discover and just definitely wanted to share that with you. Michael Bird: Thanks for that Aubrey, and sorry to put you on the spot. So we've heard a couple of the key points from Antonio at HP Discover 2023. Aubrey, do you have any other major announcements? Aubrey Lovell: So as you know, there was a ton of exciting announcements that you can view on hp.com. HPE has announced a suite of new cloud-based tools for enterprise level organizations built around the cloud. And these include new services such as the large language models for GreenLake AI, an expanded portfolio of cloud-based partners, both of which we've heard about earlier. And a suite of expansions on what GreenLake already offers including new cloud-based shared super compute. So here's Antonio with one more clip. Antonio Neri: Whether you consume it as a CapEx or whether you consume it as a service. For customers who require more customized solutions for vertical use cases or specific workload application to accelerate deployment, we offer what we call now HPE GreenLake Flex Solutions, built on standard cloud infrastructure and software building blocks. This enables more choices in how they are consumed, deployed and managed. However, for speed of deployment and simplicity, our HP GreenLake platform offers standardized SaaS and IS solutions. HP GreenLake SaaS based solution includes things like backup and recovery, which is hybrid ransomware protection, new defined analytics, data fabric software, and now obviously IT operations management services. Obviously we have come a long way, and as I said earlier, no hybrid cloud is complete without the integration of the public cloud. And you have given us very direct feedback. We want a hybrid experience and the public cloud needs to be part of it. And so this new capabilities add to the HP services already available on AWS marketplace and actually builds also on the full life cycle of consulting migration and modernization services for hybrid cloud that HP delivers today. When we first announced HP GreenLake for Private Cloud Enterprise, we delivered a modern cloud experience and the flexibility to deploy and optimize any application. And today we are adding new container support for Red Hat OpenShift and additional hybrid multi-cloud capabilities to self provision workloads in AWS, Google Cloud, Microsoft Azure, and VMware. Now with HPE PCE as we want to call it, you have the ability to deploy fully automated instances from edge to cloud. Michael Bird: Fascinating. Thanks Aubrey. So I have to ask, what has been your highlight? I know you've been hoping to hit up some of the nice restaurants and you've been pretty busy with some of the photos on the group chat, making me feel very jealous. Aubrey Lovell: I think my highlight is being able to be in the same space as all of our customers, all of our partners, and seeing all of our coworkers around the globe that maybe we haven't seen in years. Or maybe even since the last Discover come together and have great conversation and talk about the technology, talk about the advancements that HPE has made just within this last year. And obviously there's a huge buzz going around AI and how HPE is entering that chat essentially and really becoming part of that conversation and giving that accessibility of AI to everyone. And I think that's super important. It's a really, really wonderful journey. And I think this is again, one of the best that I've been to and I hope everyone has had a wonderful time here and got something out of it. Michael Bird: Thanks, Aubrey. Right then, we are getting towards the end of the show, which means it is time for this week in history, which is a look at the monumental events in the world of business and technology which has changed our lives. The clue last week was we are heading to 2005 and well, you are listening to it. Did you get it? It's a little niche because this week in 2005, Apple announced support for podcasting in iTunes 4.9. It was the first major platform to offer the service with Apple's aim being to become the absolute standard and go to platform for what it considered a potential growth industry. I mean, you can't really argue with how it went, can you? Because when Apple introduced podcast support, there were just 3000 listed podcasts. Now there's around 800,000 active podcasts listed on Apple, and it's become an 18 billion industry. Next week's clue. It's 1969, let's make plans to connect. Ooh, what is it? All right, then that brings us to the end of technology now for this week. Next week we'll be resuming normal service with a look at why some organizations are starting to view generative AI with a more critical eye, but why it's still going to change the way we do business. In the meantime, do keep those suggestions for life-changing books coming in, using the link in the podcast description. Until then, thank you so much to our roving reporter, Aubrey Lovell. And to our listeners, thank you so much for joining us. Technology Now is hosted by Aubrey Lovell and myself, Michael Bird. And this episode was produced by Sam Datta-Paulin and Zoe Anderson with production support from Harry Morton, Alicia Kempson, Alison Paisley, Camilla Patel, and Alex Podmore. Technology Now is the lowest street production for Hewlett Packard Enterprise, and we'll see you next week.