Latest / Technology Now / What's happening at HPE Discover Las Vegas?
Transcript
- MICHAEL BIRD Hi everyone and welcome back to Technology Now, a weekly show from Hewlett Packard Enterprise where we take what's happening in the world and explore how it's changing the way organizations are using technology. We’re your hosts Michael Bird, AUBREY LOVELL and Aubrey Lovell and this week, we are dialling in to HPE Discover Las Vegas to find out what’s going on and we are honoured to be joined by a very special guest this week: HPE President and CEO, Antonio Neri. - We will marking 10 years of HPE and looking at what has changed since the company was born - We’ll be asking what announcements are being made at Discover this year - and we will be looking to the future of what the next decade could hold for both HPE, and the world. MICHAEL BIRD That is correct, so if you’re the kind of person who needs to know *why* what’s going on in the world, matters to your organisation, this podcast is for you. (oh) And if you haven’t yet, subscribe to your podcast app of choice so you don’t miss out. This episode is also being released as a video, as well as an audio episode, so you’ve got the exciting opportunity to see our lovely faces as well as listening to our dulcet tones… lucky you Right Aubrey, let’s get into it! MICHAEL BIRD Well it’s that time of the year again. AUBREY LOVELL It really is, Michael. I can’t believe it’s already upon us. But as you know… HPE Discover really is pretty much the biggest event in our calendar each year. It’s a four-day conference where customers, partners, business leaders, experts and technologists that kind of all come together to share knowledge and discover the exciting trends going on in the tech world and I have to say, coming from the brand team and also the comms team right, it is a huge undertaking to do an event like this and we’re so excited to start it off. MICHAEL BIRD Yeah it is, very very exciting, and we are joined by our reporter on the ground, Sam Jarrell. Sam, hopefully you can hear us. What’s it like out there? SAM JARRELL Hi Aubrey. Hi Michael is so wonderful to be here in Las Vegas, Nevada for HPE Discover 2025. And as you said at the top of the show, I'm delighted to be here with our president and CEO Antonio Neri to walk the show floor before it opens. Let's go Antonio. ANTONIO NERI All right SAM JARRELL And how are you doing today, by the way? ANTONIO NERI I’m doing great, always energized to be at HP Discover and obviously had the opportunity to walk the floor yesterday while it was getting ready and it's an amazing showcase . SAM JARRELL Yeah, it looks beautiful this year and you know it's a special year too because we're celebrating our 10th anniversary as a company. Looking back on like the last decade or so what do you think are some of our biggest successes as a company? ANTONIO NERI Well, look, I'm always proud that we have been consistent on our purpose and our strategy, our purpose to advance where people even work. When you go around this show floor, it's not just about technology, about what technology can do for businesses, society. And second is that the strategy. The strategy has been consistent from day one. I remember when I unveiled that strategy at the first HP Discover in June 2018. And since then, we have brought tremendous amounts of innovation that not only creates your value, but obviously advances the businesses. And today here, after 8 years almost as CEO, but 10 years as a company, you can see the new brand, how we showcase ourself, what we stand for. It's just an amazing, it's an amazing journey. SAM JARRELL It really is. And you know mentioned the first HPE Discover. That was my very first Discover event. It's so overwhelming, I think your first one. What was your very first Discover event? ANTONIO NERI It was a long time ago. I had to believe it was in 2011 when I became the general manager of Pointnex. What is today Pointnex? Now, obviously, HP services. And it was a unique moment in time because obviously I got exposed to everything that the company was doing in one place. obviously at the time we were still HP. But what I believe, you know... has happened since then is to give both companies focus and in our case, you know, really advance our position of the market to increase the relevancy and what we bring here to market. SAM JARRELL Wonderful. And you know, what are some of the highlights over the last 10 years as HPE Discover for you? ANTONIO NERI Well, look, they have been unique moments. In 2018, my first discover as a CEO, I stated that the enterprise of the future will be edge-centric, cloud-enabled, and data-driven. In that context, we made a bet that the edge has paid off. In fact, we just walked through the edge showcase, and it's amazing the progress we have made and the amount of growth we have been driving through that portfolio and obviously excited about what comes next once we close the Juniper Networks acquisition. Then in 2019, we talked about that the world is changing the way they consume IT, and we stated that we're going to offer everything as a service. Clearly, that was a unique moment because today we have a platform called HP GreenLake, which I know we're going to get by. It has more than 42,000 customers on it and more than five million devices and systems under management. And it's growing between 35 and 45 % on a consistent basis. And then obviously we talk about data-driven; I didn't know at the time AI would be exploding the way we see it today, but we are uniquely positioned to capture the AI opportunity across every customer segment, whether it's enterprise-driven or sovereignty to engagements with governments and obviously with hypers were the service providers and the model builders. So overall, will say that consistency allows us to innovate where it really matters for customers and then capture that value in the market in terms of revenue growth and profit growth. SAM JARRELL You mentioned AI and obviously edge and networking. Looking outward, what are some of the really, really big industry trends you're seeing right now? ANTONIO NERI Well, I mean, I think the journey has been pretty much defined. The first breakthrough, which obviously was generative AI, happened a little bit more over than two years ago. And I know for a fact that one of the first models was training on an HP system. But that said, that laid the foundation of what reasoning can do for society and businesses. Today we're living the agentic AI kind of moment in our journey and that's good because enterprises will use a combination of large foundational models and agentic approaches to do tasks in a more automated intelligent way. And then what comes next is physical AI, which obviously is going to advance the industrial revolution. And that obviously is a combination of AI and robotics to do tasks that normally humans won't want to do but at the same time do it in a way that's very cost effective. So those are three combinations together with augmented reality, I think is going to change the way we live and work. SAM JARRELL The physical AI piece, it feels very sci-fi to me. Do you feel like it's in the near future or is it still something very, very far out? ANTONIO NERI No, it's already happening. We see that in manufacturing. I think we're going to walk here close by with our partners, Mercedes-Benz, which basically have built a car only using AI and robotics. No human intervention on building that car. SAM JARRELL Wow! ANTONIO NERI Obviously, there is a fun use case, which is about two little robots playing a soccer game and it remind you how slow you have become, but the point is that you already see it. Sometimes for fun use cases, but I think from an industrial manufacturing perspective, look, even in healthcare and other unique vertical use cases, you will see the application of AI and robotics. SAM JARRELL I love that. And outside of AI, I mean that's the big one right now. I know that edge networking is huge for us and we're trying to get a couple of things settled there. But where do you see us going once we do have those things settled with Juniper and everything else? ANTONIO NERI Well, I do believe that networking is the core foundation of a modern IT architecture. Without the right secure connectivity, you can't connect the vast pool of data that you need to power AI. And AI by itself is the true definition of a hybrid world because data lives everywhere. So that networking data fabric is a core foundation of any modern IT stack. And that's why I'm excited to complete the Juniper transaction because HPE will be at the core of a networking company, which for the first time in the history of the company will have the entire intellectual property from the silicon to the pro-lock infrastructure to the operating system to the software and the services to provide a modern, secure, AI-driven alternative to the market. From there, from that core foundation, we built also a modern, true hybrid by design cloud experience that's what GreenLake has been all about. Here at HP Discover, we're going to talk about advancements in that front. And obviously using AI at the core of that platform too. And then obviously AI at scale. In fact, we're working here. We hear some of the amazing direct liquid cooling that we are. SAM JARRELL This isn't that car you mentioned, it? It is, this is the car. Built entirely by AI. ANTONIO NERI This is the car. This is the car. Yes. Well, by robotics, powered by AI. SAM JARRELL Oh my goodness. Well, you know, there's a lot of exciting things here at Discover this year. I'm curious to know what are you most excited about for Discover 2025? ANTONIO NERI As always, know, engage, connect with people, right? It's a big investment. We value the partners that come with us. In fact, you have a lot of the partners that sponsor HP Discover. But ultimately, it's the pride to show some of the amazing technology and solutions we are bringing to market. There is more than 500 people on the floor that will be engaging with customers, more than 300 use cases and solutions that we can demonstrate. And that's a unique moment in time because the core is to generate pipeline so we can grow revenue and profit. SAM JARRELL and we also have debuted a beautiful new brand this year at Discover 2025. Can you tell me a little bit about that? Why did we rebrand? ANTONIO NERI Well, mean, look, it was a decade ago when we split the company and we felt together with the marketing team, this was a perfect moment in time. Also in preparation to close Juniper to bring a refreshed look, a refreshed identity to who we are. And we have changed a lot as a company through the conversation we have been having. But I think we needed that new identity. And I'm really proud of what the team have done because we maintain some of the key elements, right? The element itself, you know, is now truly embedded inside the logo because people sometimes confuse the element with the logo. The logo was Hewlett Packard Enterprise and the element together. Now the element is part of the HPE and you can see there how elegant and simple is. You know, it simplifies some of the confusion we've seen in the market in the past, but fundamentally, it was about time to bring that new identity and I'm really proud of what the team have done. SAM JARRELL I love it too. think that the old logo is lovely, but bit of a mouthful and I like the emphasis on the E in HPE. ANTONIO NERI Exactly, and that's where the element now is in full integrated. Yeah. SAM JARRELL Yeah. And then in picking up on something I noticed was in your keynote, you know, you mentioned our work with St. Jude Children's Research Hospital. Can you tell me a little bit more about that? ANTONIO NERI The purpose to advance the way people live and work in this case, in this case, live, look, St. Jude has done a remarkable job over the many, decades finding a cure to cancer for kids. they need a lot of technology to do that. And through the technology advancement, they went from 20% saving lives to 80%. And we know there is more to be done. And it's all started with research. And that research needs to be powered by an enormous amount of computational power. And they have eight decades of data that they can use. So we are really proud of enabling them with the right technology to use that data they collected over so many decades to complete the research and move that 80 % closer to 100%. Yes, that’s the mission. SAM JARRELL Wow. You mentioned computational power. just passed by El Capitan. Yes. Yeah. I think we have what… The world's top three fastest supercomputers now? ANTONIO NERI We have the tops, they are six in the top ten, with El Capitan number one, Frontier number two, and Argo number three. All three supercomputers deployed at the Department of Energy in the United States. SAM JARRELL I love that. It feels like we're doing so much across edge networking, AI… ANTONIO NERI By the way… to do that you need a lot of networking capabilities and so at the core that system is a bunch of networking with liquid cooling and compute nodes scale an enormous amount so that we can do parallel computing for simulation and modeling and AI. SAM JARRELL I appreciate that you mentioned that because I don't think people think of the networking piece when they think of supercomputing ANTONIO NERI Well yeah that's right because look when you are bringing together 60, 70, 80 thousand GPUs together you know you want to make sure that the bandwidth to connect every GPU to the other GPU because you have to connect 60,000 to each other otherwise you can't reach the parallel computing aspect of it you need that tremendous bandwidth and our team has developed a unique set of capabilities there including software… which is core. SAM JARRELL And, you know, in thinking more about the keynote and our announcements and things like that, we're making a lot of announcements at this Discover. And, you know, how do we keep ourselves differentiated amongst our competitors that are probably also looking at how they're going to make announcements off of the backs of ours? ANTONIO NERI Well, we have had more announcements coming to HPE Discover than any year before. We call that the Road to Discover. And there we prepare the market for unique announcement in the working hybrid cloud, including storage and AI. At this event, we're going to bring a series of new announcements that complement those that we announced already the last three months. But ultimately it's going to come back to how good we are in telling the story and enabling our sellers and our partners. Because we have an amazing portfolio, which is broad and deep, which is great, but the complexity of that portfolio sometimes gets in the way. And that's why sales enablement and solution architecting is the name of the game, to leverage that amazing innovation that is differentiated, but really applying practicality so that people can do what they need to do. SAM JARRELL Wonderful and Antonio as we start to wrap up everything. I'm curious, know, it's been 10 years of us as HPE. What do you see as our next 10 years? What are you most excited for? ANTONIO NERI I'm very excited for the next decade because I think we have done a remarkable job and worked so hard to put us in this new position. And I think it's up to us to define what comes next. know, we talk about Acelerati, comes next. It's up to us, our people, the 57,000 employees we have in the company to define that. But ultimately we have to do it in a purpose driven and obviously we have to create value for shareholders but I'm proud of the culture that we have because that keeps us grounded with a set of values that makes us unique. SAM JARRELL I agree. It's all about going back to advancing the way people live and work, right? Exactly. Wonderful. Well, Michael, Aubrey, that's all from me and Antonio here on the floor. Thank you for the time, Antonio. Back to you. AUBREY LOVELL Thank you so much, Sam. That was fantastic. And what an exciting looking event. I mean, I may be biased, right? Because we're on the brand team and the comms teams, but really everyone has done such a wonderful job pulling this together and it looks absolutely fabulous. MICHAEL BIRD Yeah, I agree. Sam, thank you so much for bringing that interview to us. That was really, really interesting. And my goodness, how cool does the show floor look? That is pretty awesome. I sort of wish I was there, don't you, Aubrey? AUBREY LOVELL I do. It's going to be one of our best this year. Really, really exciting. And it's also important to take stock of our successes so far as well, especially when we're looking towards the challenges of the future. MICHAEL BIRD Yeah, absolutely Aubrey. I don't know about you, but I'm really looking forward to our 10 year celebrations later in the year. Do you think we'll get cake? I hope so. I hope we'll get cake. AUBREY LOVELL I hope we get cake. I do love a good cake. I'm really starting to feel my age. I'll be honest with you because I remember when we split from HP and I remember our celebration with the HPE cake with the first logo that we had. And to see it again, you know, doing this brand refresh and the new logo, new identity, it's really cool to be here and to see that progression. MICHAEL BIRD Right then, we are getting towards the end of the show which means it’s time for This Week In History. Aubrey, what did you have for us last week? AUBREY LOVELL Ok so last week we said it was 1954 and this glowing material is starting to power up... And Michael, I think we were right! MICHAEL BIRD I think we said it was something to do with nuclear power... I think? AUBREY LOVELL Yep that’s true. So this is the story of the first nuclear power plant to be connected to a national grid. Picture this. It’s June 1954, you’re in Moscow for some reason and a nuclear powerplant in Obninsk, is suddenly powering your home. So fission energy was finally being used to benefit mankind and politicians and scientists from around the globe turned up to visit the world’s first nuclear power plant to behold the wonder of a new energy source. Over the next few decades, nuclear plants would spring up around the world: France, the United Kingdom, the USA and Japan all developed nuclear reactors to provide power to their grids. Now today, around 9% of worldwide electricity production comes from nuclear reactors with nuclear energy making up around a quarter of global low carbon energy production. Nice... MICHAEL BIRD Very interesting. I'm sort of in awe that the first nuclear power plant connected to a grid was bought online in 1954. That seems a very long time ago. Yes, and we're still talking about nuclear power today. There's like the, those like small reactors that they're talking about here in the UK. Obviously nuclear fusion, not obviously, nuclear fusion, which we covered in an episode a few years ago. All very exciting, all very exciting. AUBREY LOVELL It was, definitely. Definitely. And it'll be interesting to see how that progresses over time, especially as we also talk about other technologies too, right? There's so much going on as well with hydrogen and different sources of that type of energy that has the same effect. Okay, so what have you got for a clue this week, Michael? MICHAEL BIRD Ok. So this is a very techy story – and that’s your hint before I tell you the clue. Becase your clue this week is: its 1951 and William Shockley, along with colleagues John Bardeen and Walter Brattain have just announced the creation of a device that will change the world. AUBREY LOVELL These seem very British. Is it from Britain? MICHAEL BIRD I don't know. I mean it's like before the space race isn't it? like a lot of big like big inventions happened around space race time. 50s hmm 50s was like device okay you know it's not space. Well I thought maybe like the microwave microwave or refrigerator I think I think we always think appliances don't we because they're always like the devices that have the most impact on people. AUBREY LOVELL Yeah, I don't really I don't have a strong sense on this one I definitely think more like consumer grade something that someone has in their homes or maybe in their cars Maybe it's part of a car. I don't know, but we'll have to find out next week MICHAEL BIRD hang on, hang on. Very techy. What about like the transistor? some- it'll be something to do with a computer. Transistor, a chip, something like that. Yeah, something like that. AUBREY LOVELL Radio, mm-hmm. It's possible, very possible. Well, we'll have to find out next week. And with that, that brings us to the end of Technology Now for this week. Thank you so much to our guest, Antonio, and our reporter, Sam, amazing job. And of course to our listeners, thank you so much for joining MICHAEL BIRD Yes and, If you’ve enjoyed this episode, please do let us know – rate and review us wherever you listen to episodes and if you want to get in contact with us, send us an email to technology now AT hpe.com Technology Now is hosted by Aubrey Lovell and myself, Michael Bird This episode was produced by Harry Lampert and Izzie Clarke with production support from Alysha Kempson-Taylor, Beckie Bird, Sam Jarrell, Alissa Mitry, Allison Gaito, Spencer Trinwith and Renee Edwards. AUBREY LOVELL Our social editorial team is Rebecca Wissinger, Judy-Anne Goldman and Jacqueline Green and our social media designers are Alejandra Garcia, and Ambar Maldonado. MICHAEL BIRD Technology Now is a Fresh Air Production for Hewlett Packard Enterprise. (and) we’ll see you next week. Cheers!