Hewlett-Packard Enterprise (HPE, as the business arm of HP likes to call itself) used the last week to revise its language for the future. This future is available to the migrated customers who once used MPE PA-RISC systems. It sounds like HPE is ready to admit that staying the traditional infrastructure datacenter course is a path that leads away from the vendor's desires. Wrapping up an hour of high-level presentations, Chief Marketing Officer Susan Blocher said transforming a datacenter is a polarizing path.
"Business transformation is a controversial statement," she said to the London attendees of Discover 2015. "You are either happy about the opportunities transformation provides, or you're scared to death of what transformation means, and how you're going to deliver the agility and speed that your lines of business demand."
The transformation points to what HPE called a hybrid infrastructure, with a combination of "traditional" and "on-premise cloud," Blocher said. The next step is to transition to public cloud, or off-premise cloud. It appears that cloud computing is in three of the four elements of the hybrid transformation. (Click the above graphic for the five-part lineup of HPE server offerings. Dead in the middle is Integrity, still destined for mission-critical although its adoption rate falls with each quarter.)
The conference demanded an Opening Experience, the level of marketing that old hands from the 3000 HP era once dreamed impossible, no matter how badly they needed it. So a pair of backup singers blended vocals behind a symphony rendition of HPE's theme music. A "new class of system to power the next era in hybrid infrastructure" was announced, HPE Synergy. The statement, and the specs and pictures on a website, confirms there is hardware there in that solution, but HPE's aim is to get its customers to consider Synergy as a compute, storage and networking fabric. It wants its customers to give their businesses "a cloud experience in their datacenters."
An SMB Hybrid Cloud "enables workforce productivity," she said. "This is a hot topic for every size customer, whether you're small or large enterprise, but it's particularly important for our small and medium-sized customers, where workforce productivity is essential to your business success."
Blocher said "We are your movers, [the company] that will help you accelerate what can be a daunting but clearly competitive opportunity for you to transform your business, in whatever way you need to, over the next few years." A thicket of video clips compressed the week's talking points into five-minute segments on YouTube. There were detailed charts for the CIO or VP of IT, such as this comparison of IT fabrics (click for details). But tactics of deployment were for another day; this was four days of dreaming up terms for enterprise aspirations.
HPE's chief marketer used the 400 million-user customer base of DropBox as an example of fast-growth needs being met by those movers. DropBox vice president Thomas Hansen (above, with Blocher) testified to HPE's size meeting the company's needs. DropBox uses the HP Apollo hyper-scale object storage portfolio. Hansen said his company's storage is the repository for 35 billion Adobe and Microsoft files.
"Those numbers are just incredible," Blocher said as she wrapped up a 10-minute recap. The four-day meeting that began with a symphony orchestra prelude, complete with backup vocalists, looked pitched to a high-level CIO. Such is the change in industry vendor-to-customer events. Its details emerged in a bevy of high-level presentations rife with terms like composable infrastructure, digital enterprise, and service to The Idea Economy.
Hansen addressed the audience as if they were service providers, telling them that customers want simple, easy solutions that are lightning-fast. Hewlett-Packard has transformed the conference experience to represent a information parade for providers, rather than users.
Hewlett-Packard Enterprise is not only about servers," Blocher said. "It's about bringing you end-to-end solutions and value." She lined up the five presenters who had about seven minutes apiece, while she exhorted the crowd to review the numbers: Selling five servers per minute; claiming 30 percent market share; 40 million units sold; 100,000 partners. "One million customers today," she said.
The Discover YouTube channel used candy like "A glimpse into the future" from Paul Muller, VP of HPE Strategic Marketing, talking about how the year 2030 will see five generations of humans alive at the same time. Technology must help with that future's problems, but in less than three minutes he had few specifics for a customer to act upon.