For a company that isn’t even a year old, Hewlett Packard Enterprise certainly has a wide range of inspiring customer stories to boast about.
A selection of them including Home Depot, Dreamworks and the New York Genome Center joined HPE CEO Meg Whitman on stage for the first day of HPE Discover in Vegas, where over 10,000 of the company’s customers from across the globe are attending to hear about the latest innovations from the computing giant.
Whitman took to the stage in the opening general session to share the company’s vision, where the theme was digital transformation and how it is empowering the idea economy: “Digital transformation is more than an abstract concept or a nice to have. It is a competitive necessity and it’s not just the future, it is the present – it’s here today”
CSC-HPE spin off company
Whitman also explained the motives behind the recently announced spin-off company, combining CSC and HPE’s Enterprise Services business: “The new company will offer deep, deep industry experience in a variety of sectors including financial services, transportation, consumer products, healthcare and insurance” said Whitman, acknowledging that just a year ago she took the stage to explain why HPE was splitting from HP Inc. “We know how to do this, with no disruption to customers” she said defiantly.
The company also made a variety of new product announcements on the first day:
HPE Helion Cloud Suite
Front and center at the launch was the addition of Helion Cloud Suite, enabling customers to deliver and manage all of their mission-critical apps across the full range of infrastructure environments.
Bringing together a full range of hybrid cloud capabilities into a single, simplified software offering, HPE Helion Cloud Suite includes full-stack automation to enable rapid delivery of IT services and applications, and provides a common simplified, self-service storefront for IT and developers. It also includes a complete development environment supporting DevOps processes for traditional and cloud-native applications.
“No enterprise has a one size fits all approach to cloud—every customer wants solutions that help them drive their business faster and cut costs across their full spectrum of applications,” said Bill Hilf, senior vice president and general manager, HPE Cloud. “Organizations require their own right mix of traditional IT, private, managed and public clouds and the flexibility to support applications spanning different technologies, architectures and delivery models. The HPE Helion portfolio gives customers a simple, powerful set of options, offering the breadth and coverage they need.”
HPE Helion CloudSystem 10
HPE Helion CloudSystem 10 is an engineered hardware and software solution that delivers hosting, automation and orchestration of traditional and cloud-native workloads. This pre-integrated solution, brings together HPE market leading innovations in hardware, storage, networking, software and services into one package.
HPE Stackato 4.0
HPE Helion Stackato 4.0 is an open multi-cloud PaaS solution for building cloud native applications that integrate across traditional and new environments. Designed for customers who are transforming and optimizing their applications for the cloud, HPE Helion Stackato 4.0 provides developers with a container based solution that includes a certified Cloud Foundry service, continuous integration/continuous delivery workflow and extensibility to new and existing application services.
HPE OneView 3.0
Offering software-defined intelligence across HPE’s family of infrastructure solutions, OneView offers customers a route to deploy applications faster and enable IT to quickly take advantage of the latest tools, like Docker, SaltStack and Chef. OneView delivers software-defined intelligence, workload template automation and open integration through a unified API so organizations can provision their infrastructure to improve efficiencies.
“Organizations need tools that enable them to simplify IT operations, respond to business demands at cloud speed and increase productivity, ultimately freeing up IT resources required to deliver new and innovative services to their customers,” said Ric Lewis, senior vice president and general manager, Converged Datacenter Infrastructure at Hewlett Packard Enterprise. “Our mission is to make IT simple for customers. Whether they are managing and maintaining infrastructure, running traditional applications or developing new revenue generating services on cloud native applications, HPE OneView is the infrastructure automation engine built to make that all possible.”
Refreshed Flash Portfolio
As flash expands across the datacenter, HPE announced a full refresh to it’s HPE 3PAR StoreServ flash portfolio including the world’s most capacity-dense all-flash system, persistent storage for containers, unified storage enhancements, and flash-integrated data protection.
“The era of the storage-only vendor is over and has been replaced by the era of the best-integrated IT stack,” said Manish Goel, SVP and GM, Storage, Hewlett Packard Enterprise. “Underpinned by flash and software-defined storage, HPE has the unique infrastructure and software innovation required to power hybrid IT across any form factor and consumption model.”
Docker Integration
Meg Whitman brought Docker CEO Ben Golub onto the stage to explain why every HPE Sever will now ship with full docker integration. HPE will offer pre-configured server platforms ready for Docker Engine and Docker containers. These pre-tested server models, including HPE ProLiant, HPE Apollo and HPE Cloudline, will be delivered ready for container environments, resulting in greater optimization of hardware, improved time-to-application performance and greater portability.
“The default availability of Docker’s technology on every HPE server and HPE’s hyper-converged platform enables enterprises to take advantage of the benefits of containerization while leveraging their investments in existing systems and process,” said Ben Golub, CEO of Docker.
“Having a strategic alliance that starts with Docker Engine but extends to include our commercial end-to-end platform, Docker Datacenter, provides HPE customers with a comprehensive solution that covers all of their requirements over time. Enterprises leveraging this joint solution can achieve immediate efficiencies while focusing on existing applications, which can include a 20X optimization on their infrastructure, while shipping their applications 13X faster.”
Watch the full keynote below
Images: HPE Flickr
