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What does the future hold for the technology industry? · Technology Now

• AUBREY LOVELL Hello friends 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 Aubrey Lovell, MICHAEL BIRD and Michael Bird, and this week we’re dialling back into HPE Discover Las Vegas 2025 as we are joined by our very own CTO, Fidelma Russo. We’ll be exploring current trends in the industry We’ll be looking at how the industry must adapt to meet the needs of the world And we’ll be finding out Fidelma’s predictions for where we could be going in the next few years. AUBREY LOVELL That’s right, 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. Alright, Michael, lots to get through. Let’s get into it! MICHAEL BIRD So, Aubrey, technology is, without trying to be too dramatic….. everywhere. It underpins society as we know it, and major technology companies, such as HPE, need to be able to accurately read industry trends and react to them. AUBREY LOVELL That’s right, Michael. Now last week, we sent our reporter, Sam, to HPE Discover Las Vegas where she spoke to Antonio Neri, our President and CEO of HPE but he was not the only person we got some time with during the event because… Drumroll… we also we able to talk to Fidelma Russo, Executive Vice President & General Manager, Hybrid Cloud & Chief Technology Officer. MICHAEL BIRD Yes we were lucky to bag some time with Fidelma because as the CTO of a major technology company, she is normally incredibly busy leading the team attempting to solve the biggest challenges in the industry. AUBREY LOVELL Indeed. So let’s take a listen to your conversation from last week at HPE Discover Las Vegas. MICHAEL BIRD So Fidelma, you've been part of HP for almost four years. What are the biggest changes in the tech scene that you've noticed during this time? FIDELMA RUSSO Well, when I started at HPE four years ago, this was all about building a platform for the hybrid cloud, which is unique in the industry. And then here we are four years later, and we're all talking about generative AI, which I would never have imagined four years ago. And so that moment when everything changed really shifted the industry, accelerated everything, and has given us all a great amount of opportunity. MICHAEL BIRD It was sort of like end of 2022, wasn't it? Everything changed. And it wasn't necessarily that the technology was sort of brand new at that point. It sort of felt like it was just the public were aware of it. FIDELMA RUSSO Well, I think what happened was it made it easy for consumers to use it. And so that's just like your phone. The moment that people could use the phone and it was an easy interface, that's when it took off as well, versus having a keyboard on your phone. MICHAEL BIRD So last year when you joined us on Technology Now, you described 2024 as the year of AI. Is that AI trend continuing or do you think 2025 has continued into a new era, so to speak? FIDELMA RUSSO So I think we're in the decade of AI. And last year was a great year. The industry spent a lot of money on building out the big model builders, the big CSPs, a lot of experimentation, a lot of training of models. I think this year we've moved into more of kind of people looking at it and thinking, how does it apply to me in the enterprise? MICHAEL BIRD So AI is sort of starting to have to really deliver. FIDELMA RUSSO It would be the year where people are really looking at, this was really interesting last year and it was imaginative and it was different to, it's got to be a part of my business but now I need to know when it's going to deliver for me because I can't keep spending money and people are interested but I'm not getting anything back. MICHAEL BIRD Yeah, absolutely. So outside of AI, what are the changes should we be keeping an eye out for? FIDELMA RUSSO Outside of AI, y’know, we're in a part of the century where there are a lot of world changes, and they impact the technical sector. And so what we're seeing now is the rise of sovereignty, especially in Europe, where customers and governments are really starting to invest in infrastructure, cloud infrastructure on-prem cloud infrastructure operated by nationals, cloud infrastructure air gapped from the internet. So I think that is one big change that's going on. The other big change that's going on is really as generative AI is rolling out, it's all about where your data is and data gravity. so customers are looking now at their data as a real competitive weapon. They don't want to share; they don't want to train somebody else's model and make it more intelligent. And so that also is driving more of a sovereignty view of your data and keeping your data local. So those two big changes are driving repatriation in certain cases from the cloud or customers looking at their workloads and deciding on putting them in the right place for these kind of two things, which is my data is really important and I need it for generative AI. MICHAEL BIRD So, I mean, is that driving the sort of move to bringing data off, I don't know, hyperscalers or sort cloud providers and trying to bring it in-house into your own data center, but just because those practical reasons of data sovereignty is important to you. FIDELMA RUSSO Yes, I mean we're seeing that across customers as they're looking at their landscape. And now, one of the things that's going on is they're really, it's not all of your data, they're classifying their data. So, a lot more effort now on really understanding what your data is. So that classification, and then in terms of the classification, some will be appropriate to put on the public cloud, some they will want to keep on-prem, and some they really look at as a complete competitive advantage, and in fact, even if you're on-prem, lots and lots of restrictions about who has access to it and what they can use it for. MICHAEL BIRD Yeah, and are there any sort of significant innovations or exciting innovations within the cloud? FIDELMA RUSSO We've been in the world of cloud now for, one could say 10 to 15 years. The pace of innovation hasn't slowed down. instance, and these two worlds of generative AI and cloud are actually beginning to converge. Generative AI, because of its data-hungry nature operates in multiple places. It operates at the edge for those particular use cases, operates in data centers, operates on the public cloud. And that is then driving innovation within the cloud. know, different services, hybrid cloud is, you know, really as we were pioneers of it here at HPE, but now every customer is really looking at how do I implement a hybrid cloud. So that's tremendous innovation being driven by this new workload which is forcing people to reimagine how they do things . MICHAEL BIRD This week at Discover we made quite a few announcements about innovation that you and your team are leading. Can you share more about that and maybe what you're most excited about? FIDELMA RUSSO As we look at innovation here at HPE and within the CTO office and across the company, we're really doing it in the eyes of what are these... true customer needs where we can make a big difference. And so the thing that I'm most excited about this week is the announcement around GreenLake Intelligence and the intelligence built into Aruba Central, because they kind of work together. And it solves a pain point for IT operations staff. Today, IT operations staff, we have a lot of AI ops oriented tools, but they're all very segmented. So you could have one in networking, you can have one in compute, you can have one in storage. But really when you're running a business, there's nobody out there who knows that they're using compute networking and storage, they're using an application. And as the IT organization, you have to deliver that. And when that gets slow or doesn't work, you have to rapidly figure out what's wrong. And what we've done with GreenLake Intelligence is we've built a mesh of agents and they all operate together to look at all of the data from these different parts and come up with a recommendation of what might be wrong and a recommendation of what you should do. And we have the human in the loop because we're still at this era of Gen. AI, we're really just starting. And it's critical for us to, and for customers to choose to have a human in the loop to kind of say, yes, reset the network MICHAEL BIRD And do you see this as sort of a phase one of using AI to sort of manage this sort of infrastructure? You know, do you see a further phase of, as you said, like full automation of like, okay, I'm going to reset the network because I know what the challenge is here. FIDELMA RUSSO you're seeing the emergence of digital twins for the networks. And so you can imagine a world where maybe you want to optimize a circuit and you want to look at the network and you now can experiment on your digital twin and it can say, hey, you've got 15 things that you can optimize and go do it. to me, is this a really exciting time in infrastructure and generative AI over the next decade is really going to change how we do things. AUBREY LOVELL Thanks so much Fidelma. With the way technology underpins so much in our society, it’s really fascinating to find out exactly how the industry is adapting to its role in the world. Really looking forward to learning more later on in the episode. MICHAEL BIRD Alright then. Now it’s time for “Today I learned”, the part of the show where we take a look at something happening in the world that we think you should know about. Aubrey, what have you got for us this week… I hope it’s some long and complicated words. AUBREY LOVELL Oh you know producer harry is going to put in some long and complicated words. Ok this is quite a cool story so I hope you’re ready for it because researchers in Edinburgh in the UK have found that bacteria can turn everyday plastic waste into acetaminophen… MICHAEL BIRD That’s paracetamol for our non-US listeners… AUBREY LOVELL Ahh, perfect. Now the researchers discovered that the common bacterium E. Coli could be used to turn P.E.T. into acetaminophen in a process that produced virtually no carbon emissions. Currently thousands of tons of fossil fuels are used annually to produce the painkiller and with a 2024 report from statista predicting over 35 million metric tons of PET to be produced during that year so being able to recycle even some of that PET into usable painkillers would be a major sustainability moment. The experiment followed a synthetic reaction, called a Lossen rearrangement, with bacteria, where genetically reprogrammedE. coli were used in a fermentation process to convert the industrial PET waste into acetaminophen, at room temperature, in less than 24 hours. The team have announced more development would be needed before the process could become commercial but it does provide another alternative for waste PET other than recycling or landfill. Pretty cool! MICHAEL BIRD Gosh, that is fascinating. Do you know what I also find fascinating, Aubrey, is that we within our countries have a different name for it. So I guess you have brand names, but it's called acetaminophen in the US from my understanding. In the UK. And I guess like maybe in Europe, we call it paracetamol. And I wonder why. AUBREY LOVELL Yep. MICHAEL BIRD If you look, if you type into a search engine, it just has both names. I can't seem to figure out any explanation as to why there are two different names for it. I just find that fascinating. AUBREY LOVELL I'm not sure, but we can add it to the list. We should start making a list of all the differences in terms of like the same thing, but two different words between the US and the UK. It's rather lengthy. I think we keep finding these. MICHAEL BIRD Right then, it’s time to return to my conversation with HPE’s CTO, Fidelma Russo, recorded last week at HPE Discover Las Vegas. MICHAEL BIRD I would love to talk just a little bit about you. As the CTO of HPE, you create the technical strategy for the company, but you also come from a technology background. Do you sort of miss the more hands-on work? FIDELMA RUSSO So it's a great question. I think my team get annoyed with me sometimes when I want to delve deep and maybe do some of their jobs. I do like to know the details because for me that's important in tying things together. But you know I would never let me in a lab anymore or never let me code anymore, I mean I love technology, I love what I do and I'm very grateful for the opportunity that I have. MICHAEL BIRD Do you think you could code now? What programming language do think you could dust off? FIDELMA RUSSO I think actually a good coder should be able to code in multiple languages. Because a lot of it is around how you approach it, how you think about structuring the problem. I think co-pilots are great now on coding, but you still need that basic, how do I approach a problem, what's the problem I'm trying to solve? how do I structure it and am I getting the right answer. So that I think will also facilitate people being able to do things in multiple languages. MICHAEL BIRD Yeah, yeah, fair enough. Okay, so this year marks HPE's 10th birthday in just a few months. Where do you see the world of technology heading in the next 10 years? FIDELMA RUSSO So I think if you looked back four years, and we started this with what happened four years ago, we would never have imagined a world as dominated by conversations around generative AI. there's only a few waves that happen in tech. We had client server, we went to cloud, and then we went to gen AI. And all of those take 15 to 20 years to play out. Generative AI is much faster because, first of all, it's the next evolution in terms of AI and ML. So we're really not at the beginning. We're more at that acceleration and the curve. And so I think over the next 10 years, you're just going to continue to see more more revolutionizing of how we do everything with generative AI. Towards probably the five to 10 year mark, we're going to see more quantum in specific areas where it's kind of a co-processor in certain applications for generative AI, but I really do believe that the next decade belongs to companies who embrace generative AI to build their products and to change how they do their work. MICHAEL BIRD And do think we're going to still see this acceleration of IoT or edge devices? FIDELMA RUSSO And so now with generative AI, where you could do processing at the edge and you can make decisions at the edge, especially in things like factories, retail units, energy plants, we're going to see the explosion, I think, of IoT. but IoT and edge computing combined together. And relatively intelligent devices now who are kind of making decisions, gathering data on the fly to autonomously run a number of these operations. MICHAEL BIRD How do you think cloud computing will change? FIDELMA RUSSO Well, I mean it's already changing. You're starting to see more specialized services. You're starting to see the build out of other providers. know, all of these model trainers, all of these big GPU clouds, they're all clouds. So it's a very specialized cloud and it's not the traditional ones. So you you're going to see the traditional hyperscalers expanding. You're going to see them offering more services and the other thing in tech is these waves don't go away. So they're kind of additive. If we think about it on mainframes, we still have mainframes. There's still a lot of the world's really critical applications running on a mainframe. But we've added, over time, open systems. We've added cloud. And now we're adding Gen.AI. so I think you're just going to start to, there's just going to be more. More. That's very technical. MICHAEL BIRD Good answer. And do you see our organisations becoming more sustainable, less sustainable? Where do you see that’s going to fit in? FIDELMA RUSSO Yeah, well that's a really good question. I mean… we're in an era where we are building chips and systems that are really hot. That's, you know, again a very technical term and that need incredible amounts of energy to power them and I don't think that's sustainable. So I think… that problem I think will be solved in the tech industry because this industry is really good at innovating around problems and everybody cares incredibly about the fact that we need to preserve the planet that we live on. So I think that will change. think the data centers, where are they built, how are they built, how are they being powered, what do they do to the communities that they're nearby, even the lighting. I think that will all be handled over the next decade MICHAEL BIRD So I know we asked you about this last year, but with an extra 12 months of hindsight, what excites you most about the world of where the world of technology is going? FIDELMA RUSSO I mean, I don't know that it's any different than last year. think it's, I didn't actually ever think that we would see a moment again. You know, the cloud moment was a great moment. I think the Gen. AI moment is a great moment. It's just so interesting how it can change everything. It can change your daily life. It can change, how you do your work. And there's tremendous opportunity to innovate. And it's really made a resurgence in the part of the business that I'm in, which is the infrastructure business, which was usually viewed as incredibly boring and there was no more innovation and now we're surrounded by innovation. We also have to think though about what are the guardrails, what's the safety procedures? This is a technology that has the ability to do great good, but the flip side of that is to do great harm. And so as technologists and innovators, we have a responsibility to kind of watch both sides of the coin. It's a great time to be in the industry. AUBREY LOVELL Fidelma, thank you so much taking the time to chat with us during HPE Discover. I think that was really lovely and a positive note to end on. The industry is changing, but those involved are making sure that it changes for the benefit of the world. And there was one last thing, Michael, that you asked Fidelma about, which I think is really interesting because becoming Chief Technology Officer of HPE was not in her original game plan was it… MICHAEL BIRD It was not, Aubrey. One of the questions I asked Fidelma was what she wanted to be when she grew up, and I thought the answer was pretty interesting…. FIDELMA RUSSO When I was younger, what did I want to be? A doctor. MICHAEL BIRD ... How far did you get to be a doctor? FIDELMA RUSSO How far did I get to be a doctor? I couldn't be a doctor, I couldn't afford to be in college for seven years. It the basic truth. So it became, I like math and science and this is, I talked to one of my friend's fathers and he said, you should do engineering and I said, “okay”. That was literally the level of the decision. MICHAEL BIRD And what did you study at university? FIDELMA RUSSO Electrical engineering and then I did computer science. AUBREY LOVELL That's amazing! What an amazing story! MICHAEL BIRD Yeah. Good on her. To go from I can't afford to go to university to study to become a doctor to becoming the CTO of HPE. What an amazing journey. AUBREY LOVELL It really is. And I think it's also a really cool journey of resilience and ambition, right? Like she didn't allow her circumstances to stop her from achieving something great. And we're so lucky to have her, right? I mean, it's, we know that, you the percentage of women in the tech industry is much smaller compared to men. So to have a female CTO, and the impact that she's had on HPE and also just in the industry as well as is pretty amazing. what a great story and we love Fidelma. AUBREY LOVELL Right then, we are getting towards the end of the show which means it’s time for This Week In History. Michael, remind me of last week’s clue? MICHAEL BIRD 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. MICHAEL BIRD This was in fact the announcement of… (drum roll please)… the bipolar junction transistor! These were the earliest working transistors and marked one of the most important inventions in the history of technology – so important that the creators, Bardeen, Brattain and Shockley were awarded the 1956 Nobel Prize for their work. The creation of transistors, as I’m sure anyone listening to this podcast is aware, opened the door to modern day computing. These semiconductor devices were only a fraction of the size of the vacuum tubes they replaced. Even so, they were enormous compared to the ones we use today. The original transistor was 76 by 63 by 46 millimetres (that’s around 3 by 2 and a half by about 1 and three quarter inches). Aubrey do you know how small the smallest transistor is today? AUBREY LOVELL I actually saw something recently about this from Berkeley and I want to say it was like one to two nanometers I don't know MICHAEL BIRD The smallest transistors – which admittedly, aren’t in common use yet are around two nanometers which is, if you can believe it, smaller than the diameter of a strand of human DNA! I kid you not. AUBREY LOVELL I can't even process how you even get to that level of visibility to see something that small, but pretty incredible. MICHAEL BIRD. Very, very good microscopes I assume. Very, very… zooming in quite a lot. Now normally at this point, Aubrey, I’d ask you what our clue for next week is… but not this time – and that’s all I’m going to say about it so if you want to find out why, make sure to tune in next week… AUBREY LOVELL Please do because with that, it brings us to the end of Technology Now for this week. Thank you to our guest, Fidelma, And of course, to our listeners. Thank you so much for joining us. MICHAEL BIRD 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, Allison Giato, Alex Van Duyn, Alissa Mitry 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 HPE. (and) we’ll see you next week. Cheers!