Usually in January, the President of the United States delivers the annual State of the Union address – a speech mandated by the U.S. Constitution
Other countries have similar addresses, such as the UK’s Speech from the Throne. The purpose of all such speeches is to give an account of past accomplishments and detail future goals.
During HPE Discover Madrid at the end of November 2017, Ric Lewis, Senior Vice President and General Manager of Software-Defined and Cloud Group addressed the audience. As he gave his thoughts on the HPE landscape, I couldn’t help but draw a comparison. The format of the content he presented was strikingly similar to that of a State of the Union address. He presented the accomplishments of the previous months, then followed it with a bold vision for the future.
Judging by the reactions of those in attendance, Lewis presented one of the boldest visions HPE has announced for some time. After a year of talking about making hybrid IT simple, Lewis showed how HPE is delivering on that promise.
Hybrid IT here to stay, but complexity is slowing digital transformation
Addressing a standing room only crowd of close to 500 (with many more conference attendees watching via a live stream), Lewis set the stage. He described the state of business today – a mix of hybrid IT resources that includes on-premises infrastructure, private cloud, and public cloud. Using a hybrid IT strategy, businesses are able to deliver a new variety of services to their customers and can expand the capabilities they need to provide them.
Yet in this new era of hybrid IT deployments, complexity reigns. Different deployment models make it nearly impossible to easily share information or move applications from one model to another. Although speed and agility are vital for today’s digital business, hybrid IT complexity is slowing innovation. More agility, visibility, optimization, and automation are needed.
Simplicity through a multi-cloud management platform
To solve this growing challenge, Lewis presented the world’s first multi-cloud, management solution — HPE OneSphere. This software-as-a service (SaaS) solution is definitely a big move for HPE, a company known for delivering hardware platforms.
“This is a complete game changer for your on-premises and public cloud environment – designed for the way businesses work,” Lewis explained. “Enterprises are now able to build clouds, deploy apps, and gain insights faster and easier than they ever could across a hybrid IT estate.”
Using this new solution, IT can dramatically simplify operations. Visibility and automation are provided for a variety of public clouds, on premises IT, containers, and VMs. Shadow IT activities that were previously unaccounted for are now easily and quickly tracked.
A multi-cloud management solution gives developers the power to access exactly what they need, when they need it — both in the public cloud or on premises. Using the SaaS web portal or through APIs, developers have instant access to a pool of IT resources.
Business executives are also beneficiaries of this new multi-cloud management solution. Real-time, cross-cloud insights enable CIOs and lines of business to increase resource utilization and reduce costs, improving efficiency across the board.
Hybrid cloud users reveal real world experiences
To demonstrate what a multi-cloud management solution can achieve in a real world hybrid IT environment, Lewis introduced two beta customers. Both told compelling stories.
Katreena Mullican, Senior Architect at HudsonAlpha Institute for Biotechnology, explained, “Life in the era of hybrid IT is not quite as simple as it sounds. Our collaboration with researchers worldwide creates a complex and ever-growing hybrid IT environment that needs to be managed.”
A multi-cloud management platform helps HudsonAlpha solve this challenge. “To enable rapid innovation for the researchers, IT doesn’t want to be a bottleneck in the provisioning of resources,” continued Mullican. “We embrace the idea of putting tools in their hands to provision the infrastructure that they need to get the research done.”
Next up was Kate Swanborg, Senior Vice President of Technology and Strategic Alliance, DreamWorks Animation. She began by explaining the computational challenges of making a computer-generated animated film. “By the time we’re done making one of our movies, we’ve crafted half a billion digital files and used 80 million computational hours – for just one movie.” She went on to say that they can have as many as 10 active films in production simultaneously. In addition, they produce innovation-driven short programs and entertainment for location-based theme parks.
“Something like HPE OneSphere enables our creatively by simplifying all of the different fit-for-purpose infrastructures that we need for all of these different creative outlets,” explained Swanborg. DreamWorks has both on-premises and off-premises solutions, which adds a fair amount of complexity. Yet, they must be able to act on ideas quickly. “We need to be able to utilize the right cloud for the right purpose,” continued Swanborg. “We look to HPE OneSphere to simplify that for us – it’s absolutely critical.”
A simpler hybrid IT is here, accelerating digital transformation
Both speakers vividly demonstrated that hybrid IT is a necessity in their organizations, but it also brings complexity that could easily slow innovation. HPE OneSphere solves this problem by transforming the state of hybrid IT from complex to simple.
HPE OneSphere, the industry’s first multi-cloud management SaaS solution, will be available in late January 2018. To learn more about HPE OneSphere, register for the upcoming webinars: HPE OneSphere: Simplify multi-cloud management to build clouds, deploy apps, and gain insights faster.
Chris Purcell drives analyst relations for the Software-Defined and Cloud Group at Hewlett Packard Enterprise. The Software-Defined and Cloud Group organization is responsible for marketing for composable infrastructure, HPE OneView, HPE SimpliVity hyperconverged solutions and HPE OneSphere. HPE has assembled an array of resources that are helping businesses succeed in a hybrid IT world. Learn about HPE’s approach to managing hybrid IT by checking out the HPE website, HPE OneSphere.
To read more articles from Chris Purcell, check out the HPE Converged Data Center Infrastructure blog.
