HP Enterprise (HPE) Discover 2016 brings together customers, partners, and analysts from around the world to showcase what’s happening on the technology front.
There’s always new technology to see—last year, it was the unveiling of The Machine. This year, the most interesting thing may have been what we didn’t see: hardware. Sure, HPE is still selling plenty of new technology, but the company has clearly shifted its focus to the cloud.
Rolta AdvizeX has been an HPE partner for over 30 years. During that time, we’ve seen enterprise IT needs shift from computation (supercomputers) to consolidation (data centers) to virtualization. Today, the conversation is all about the cloud. Enterprises are energized around the cloud and what it means in terms of scalability, flexibility, and mobility. IT departments are also excited about the ability to focus more on technology that drives business outcomes rather than managing boxes and bug fixes.
But the fact remains that many enterprises are still struggling to get their arms around the cloud. They’re fighting to win back line-of-business units and internal app developers who have “defected” to public cloud providers. They’re pushing against a tide of shadow IT applications that present unique security and compliance risks. And they’re still trying to sort out the new technologies and standards that will protect their cloud investments into the future.
HPE and Rolta AdvizeX have put themselves squarely in the middle of the fight, by helping enterprises create a winning cloud strategy for the future. Ultimately, there is no one-cloud-fits-all solution. It comes down to a variety of factors including security requirements, customer requirements, app developer requirements, business unit requirements, and the architectural requirements dictated by the applications and infrastructure you have in place today.
This is a radical departure from the IT of the past. Even five years ago, a company like HPE could trump out the latest technology with the words “faster, smaller, cheaper” around it and expect companies to buy it based on the ROI gains of a better box. But HPE recognizes that enterprises aren’t looking to technology to help them do the same things better today, but to help them do things they can’t do today. The cloud isn’t about progression; it’s about disruption.
HPE’s Machine captures the spirit of that disruption. It’s a radical re-think of where technology is today: communications running on photonics at the speed of light, massively scalable computing in microdevices, and infrastructures that can be mixed and matched in endless
varieties. The technology is moving outside the box because the business problems are getting bigger, from the cloud to big data. Of course, there will be boxes somewhere to run it all for the time being, but these are increasingly commoditized x86 servers running low-cost Linux software. (It’s worth noting that HPE is the #1 seller of x86 servers.) And in ten years’ time we expect to see all storage move into the cloud.
For technology workers, this really is a time of discovery. If you want to discover what HPE can do for your business, talk to us about our Advizer series of assessment services and our Cloud expertise. ▪