Antonio Neri Takes Center Stage: His 5 Boldest Statements From HPE Discover 2018

Front And Center

Hewlett Packard Enterprise CEO Antonio Neri used his first appearance as CEO at HPE Discover to lay out a compelling vision for HPE as the sole company uniquely positioned to help customers take advantage of the intelligent edge computing revolution.

Neri -- a passionate advocate of disruptive innovation -- said HPE has the people, products, partners and services to help customers transform how they do business by taking advantage of the groundswell of data that remains untapped at the edge.

"Instead of today when 94 percent of the data at the edge is untapped or lost we will help customers use all of it," he said. "This is a new world and this is a necessary indispensable next step. You should think of us as a new company purposely crafted for the future designed to help you win."

Here are the five boldest statements Neri made at HPE Discover 2018.

HPE Is Uniquely Positioned To Drive Intelligent Edge Revolution

The edge is anywhere technology gets put into action. I believe the edge is the next big opportunity for all of us. Today everything computes, everything around us is becoming more intelligent. And intelligence is achieved not only when you connect people and things but when you connect people and things to the data securely. Experiences can be personalized, timely, relevant and enriched by context. It employs artificial intelligence, machine learning and automation to continuously learn, predict and adapt to the changes and needs in real time.

I believe this next revolution requires what we call an edge to cloud architecture, a world with millions of clouds distributed everywhere. That is the future as we see it. HPE is uniquely positioned to drive this next revolution. I believe we are ideally suited for it. Our focus is to enable all our customers and partners to take advantage of this phenomenal opportunity. This is the mission at Hewlett Packard Enterprise.

A $4 Billion Investment To Drive Intelligent Edge Innovation

To show our commitment to this incredible (intelligent edge) future I am excited to tell you that today Hewlett Packard Enterprise is making an announcement to invest $4 billion in the intelligent edge over the next four years.

We will accelerate our investment in R & D to advance and innovate new (intelligent edge) products, services and consumption models across a number of domains including connectivity, security, edge computing, automation, machine learning and AI. It will be an edge that is intelligent and cloud enabled.

With Aruba, we have already been at the forefront of developing new technologies for the intelligent edge to help drive real time insights and personalized experiences. With this investment we are accelerating our ability to innovate even faster. Instead of what happens today when 94 percent of the data at the edge is untapped or lost, we will help customers use all of it. This is a new world and this is a necessary indispensable next step. You should think of us as a new company purposely crafted for the future -designed to help you win.

Edge-Centric, Cloud-Enabled And Data-Driven

The reality is that two years from now we are going to generate twice the amount of data we have generated in the entire human history. That is an incredible opportunity. This is data that actually has the potential value to drive insights and actions across our world, to change our lives and our businesses, to change the world.

Today, the reality is we are throwing away too much of our data because either we don't have the time, the capacity, or the technology to extract and refine every bit of that data and turn it into economic value in the form of insights or actions. That is where the opportunity is.

The question is: what is our vision of the enterprise of the future? We believe the enterprise of the future will be edge centric, cloud enabled and data driven. Those that can act with speed and agility on that continuous stream of insight and knowledge will win. That is why our strategy is to accelerate your enterprise from edge to cloud, helping connect all your data, all your edges, all your clouds everywhere.

The Future: Memory-Driven Computing

We are doing something that is going to radically change the architecture of the future. If you want to do something different it means you need to rearchitect the hardware, software and everything that goes with it.

Everybody agrees we are going to hit the wall. Taking the same thing and adding more software is not going to solve the fundamental problem of power consumption, of scale, to manage big amounts of data. We are on a mission to change that.

That means the hardware is going to look different. The operating systems are going to look different and the applications will have to be designed in a way that actually can take advantage of this vast pool of memory.

Eventually one day you will be able to run an entire enterprise – whatever size you have- which means you won't need databases, you won’t need licenses. You will be able to colocate transactional data with your analytical data so you can run the whole thing in real time. That is why we launched the memory driven compute sandbox so developers and programmers can start getting used to that.

Dell's Lack Of An Edge Strategy And Failure To Innovate

We have the assets to really provide an edge to cloud architecture. Dell doesn't have an edge strategy.They don’t have connectivity. Force10 (Dell's networking offering) -- I don't think does anything.

Obviously they don't have what I call the vertical expertise when it comes down to that wireless aspect of it -- the mobile first , cloud first approach (of HPE Aruba). They don’t have any of that.

Definetely they have a core large business. But so do we in many ways. But ultimately we have a long term vision and innovation which I think is going to change everything.Generally they have not been innovating anything.

The advantage they have is VMware, but that is one way to do things in software defined. We want to be not locking in but (rather) providing an open ecosystem to our partners.

Listen there is a lot of competition out there. The Chinese are competing on price, but ultimately what customers are going to buy is a solution that delivers the value – not just technology- the value that they need and ultimately an experience that comes with it. And it is not just economics.