HPE CEO Antonio Neri’s 10 Boldest Statements From Best Of Breed 2021

Neri talks about the growing importance of data, integrated platforms, and opportunities for partners in 5G, connectivity, and the HPE GreenLake edge-to-cloud platform.

Opportunities For Partners Abound

Hewlett Packard Enterprise President and CEO Antonio Neri has in the past few years been on a mission to transform his company’s technology away from a focus on traditional on-premises infrastructure to using its edge-to-cloud platform for providing as-a-service and subscription capabilities rivaling those of the hyperscaler cloud providers.

The centerpiece of that transformation, HPE GreenLake, was center stage during the Best of Breed 2021 conference, hosted by CRN parent The Channel Company. Neri, in response to questions from Robert Faletra, executive chairman of The Channel Company, and Steven Burke, News Editor, CRN, said there are tremendous opportunities for channel partners to adopt GreenLake. But he also cited other equally important opportunities for partners in 5G and in finding new ways to monetize data.

Here’s what Neri had to say to an audience of solution providers.

On Why Data Is A Company’s ‘Most Precious Asset’

The pandemic has changed a lot of things but in many ways has accelerated what we already knew. That the world would be way more distributed. That the cloud is an experience. And that ultimately data is the most precious asset you have today. In fact, I predict that data one day will be recorded in the balance sheets of your company because it’s going to have tremendous value. And in many ways it is one of those assets like equipment and buildings and other things you have in your company. But to me that’s where the value comes from a business perspective: to extract every possible insight from that data.

On Why GreenLake Is The Future Of HPE

As we think about what the customer challenges are, and always we think about what are the biggest problems we can solve for our customers, what we realized through the digital transformation we all live in—which is now no longer a priority but a strategic imperative—is that they need to approach data modernization first. And they need an edge-to-cloud architecture to do so because data lives everywhere. And more and more it lives at the edge. And that’s why in 2018 I said that the edge is the new frontier.

And ultimately what we saw through the pandemic is, obviously everybody went into preservation mode. Cash is king, and to be able to consume IT and stay ahead required quite a different business model. But the year before, I said that we will offer everything as a service in our company. And so that’s why GreenLake is the future of HPE. And I think it’s the future for our partners too because it‘s a platform that we continue to build where you can consume all the services that you need. We focus on three different metrics: secure connectivity, cloud and data. Those are the three things we’re building in the platform. And then we are on a journey to get that more and more robust as we go along the way. ...The whole experience on hpe.com is about consuming whatever services you need in those three domains. ... This is the future of the company. And where you sell compute and storage today, you will be able to sell it through the cloud no differently than any other service you consume.

On Why Partners’ Use Of GreenLake Will Grow Quickly

[HPE is completing transitions to GreenLake] particularly on the process side and pricing side to make them frictionless. And we have some growing pains, which we are addressing through automation. And this is why, in March next year, you’re going to see a whole different experience. On the one hand, you’re going to have more standardized offerings in which pre-packaging is important. And on the other hand, you’re going to have [complete] information about the quote-to-cash [program] with a simple pricing mechanism that ultimately you can afford. [Standardized offerings] will create more opportunities because we are extending the portfolio through standardization in many other areas. So today, the partners who sell Aruba sell for the most part subscriptions to Wi-Fi or to a LAN port. We are completing integration which extends through the wide- area network side through to SD-WAN. This year we’re going to complete the integration of 5G into the same platform. ...

The second part of that is obviously compute and storage. Those are mostly Infrastructure as a Service, whether it’s virtualization or containerization, but more and more what you’ll see is optimized solutions. In the labs, we are introducing VDI [virtual desktop infrastructure]. We have the unification of the data analytics side. And then data services: backup and recovery, data protection services, ransomware.

On Taking Ownership Of Partners’ Customer Experience

[Note: Neri here is responding to a solution provider who said his company has had success with GreenLake despite a challenging customer experience and was wondering how HPE might improve this.]

I think that a lot of what we have sold until fairly recently was custom solutions, which are great. But ultimately standardization is the key here. And at the same time, getting all the capabilities built into the platform in all the tools you use is what we have been focusing on. At the beginning of Q3 I said that for the next foreseeable future, maybe in the next six quarters, I’m going to personally lead that effort because I understand the model, I understand the system. So I'm personally leading a group of 30 people under my direct control and reporting to me that ultimately are working [on] all aspects of the experience. With Greenlake.HPE.com, you will be amazed at the UX [user experience] we’re going to bring in March. [The] common cloud services and the common cloud platform where all these cloud services get introduced, the site reliability engineering, which is the back end to introduce these services in a cloud operating model, and the IT side, which is basically all the front-end tools plus the ERP system and the supply chain, will deliver a true consumption model and also a software as a subscription model. We want a great experience. And all that we will get done by March.

On HPE GreenLake Being An Open Platform

[With GreenLake] you can add your own services. And the difference for us is that GreenLake is an open platform. So we deal with partners. In fact, for some four or five partners, we will also introduce in March a series of marketplaces that will be added to HPE GreenLake. So our approach is open and inclusive, which is different from some of the other approaches. We want you to expose your services to HPE GreenLake. And the other way around, where the customer just wanted HPE but you are the partner of choice, then all the benefits of telemetry and billing and everything that needs to be done gets passed through to you because ultimately you use that data and those analytics.

The Difference Between GreenLake And Dell Apex

I think the difference between GreenLake and Apex is the premise that we want an open ecosystem. So partners in our case can work with Red Hat or the VMware stack. But we also have our own solution. Dell Apex is only one thing. In fact, the entire experience that you see in the early version of [Apex] is VMware. It’s not Dell. And so, what they’re doing is trying to build around the VMware control plane—all the analytics and the metering and so forth. But they are focused on one thing and one thing only, which is simplicity. They’re not having the sophistication of a broad portfolio [like we have] from edge to cloud. They don’t offer right now pretty much all storage-oriented solutions and containerization and virtualization components for free because of the VMware platform. When we think about edge to cloud, we think about everything that customers need that are connected to the cloud and the data, not just one thing. And we want to open the APIs. By the way, in March you will see four large partners being integrated into the GreenLake platform through APIs.

On Why As A Service Isn’t Easy

When you go to an as-a-service model, it‘s not easy. It’s one thing to specify your license model and another thing to provide a true consumption model. And you need to build up all the capabilities, even the guts of the platform. Metering and billing is not easy, nor is the whole life-cycle-oriented approach. But remember, we are shifting from a transactional kind of experience to a lifetime cycle experience. And you know, we want partners to put the customers in what we’re calling an ’infinity loop,’ and keep them in the infinity loop. So they never leave the loop. Learn. Try. Buy. And consume. And go back to the loop, right? And the key here is that with partners, we need to subscribe as many customers as possible to the GreenLake platform, and then you start selling what are the most relevant services to them on the platform. And then you add your own services on the platform. ... It’s different than just shifting the model to consumption. It’s that true customer life-cycle value that we’re bringing to the unification of that platform from the edge to the cloud. And the most important thing, if you think about it, is definitely the data monetization approach.

On Why Getting Insight Faster Is So Important

If you think about MLOps [machine learning operations] or AI for a moment, customers don’t have the expertise to deploy these at scale. In many cases, they don’t even know what they’re looking for. But what we’re seeing now is, based on protocols and use cases, they need to basically get to their insights faster, whether it is on manufacturing floors or whether it is in transportation. In the use case with [Sweden-based autonomous driving software developer] Zenseact, it’s quite interesting. They need processing at the edge, which is the car driving 50, 60, 80 miles an hour. That’s a cloud with a lot of AI capabilities built on machine learning built in the car. And then they need the back end to process all that data so they can learn on an ongoing basis and actually feed more services to the cars as they go along the way. It is a self-sustaining system that’s based on petabytes and petabytes of data, but the latency and the need to process that data is quite interesting.

Technologies like blockchain will be utilized to provide monetization. So one of the things we’re going think about in the future is blockchain because as you connect multiple customers to the platform you can transact to the platform. A good example is [Germany-based] Continental. Continental is known for providing systems to car manufacturers so they can actually provide systems in the dashboard. If [two cars] are driving the same road, with a blockchain transaction the car in front can say to the car behind it, ‘Hey, ahead of me is black ice, and therefore you have to be careful.’ In autonomous driving, that data is essential. And so you can transact with that data and charge for it. But you’re not sharing the data. You’re sharing the insight, which is a different way to think about it. Most people get concerned about data sovereignty issues. But [in this case] they’re not sharing the data. They’re sharing what they learned from the data but they keep the data.

On The Explosion Of Aruba Opportunities

Customers are telling me they want one experience. It doesn’t matter if they have a SIM card with an antenna or if they have a LAN port or a WAN port, I want to manage all those interactions with my connectivity layer the same way with the same security protocols and standards and policy management. That’s why the Aruba platform is growing so rapidly. In fact, I’ve never seen the demand that we see today. ... We are managing almost 2 billion messages per minute. That’s cloud scale, right? And now what we add is the metering and the billing for the consumption model because they already sell subscriptions on Aruba software. And then we extend the cloud platform for the rest of the business.

But Aruba has also expanded to the edge of the data center. [Also] you will see a radical change on the architecture itself because it’s one thing to have a switch with a bunch of ports and another thing to change the architecture to tie the platform together with smart technologies and smart NICs, what we call distributed service cards with security embedded in the card. And that becomes an enabler for us to deploy HPE Lighthouse [hardware and software platform for GreenLake] through the network down into the service that you provide, whatever that service may be.

On The 5G Wave

There are multiple opportunities, a lot of them being in the smart city and the IoT space. But the fact of the matter now is that 5G and Wi-Fi will coexist. Listen, 5G is still four times more expensive on per-Gigabit basis compared to Wi-Fi. And obviously there is a massive Capex investment that telcos have to put in place all the way to the edge. And we see that opportunity ourselves because we actually provide a lot of virtualization in the core network for 5G, including six virtual functions, [and] we can extend that all the way to the campus and branch because of the Wi-Fi integration. But partners should not be [focused on] that. They should be selling the outcome of it. And that’s why if you sign up for GreenLake, which will include Aruba, you will get 5G with it. You don’t have to be an uber-technologist to do all these things. That’s our approach. But there are use cases where you need persistent connectivity where there’s a remote 5G network and other cases where you can do offloads from 5G to Wi-Fi, which is significantly cheaper. In either case, It’s all automated and has become part of the platform where one can serve connectivity, not just 5G, Wi-Fi, or whatever. The subscription model is the key.