HPE CEO Neri: 'GreenLake is our North Star'

Addressing the media and in his keynote speech for HPE Discover, HPE CEO Antonio Neri outlines a data-driven, as-a-service future

The CEO of Hewlett Packard Enterprise Antonio Neri says GreenLake is the "North Star of everything within the company" and claims its differentiation in the market has been "accelerated" following a batch of new announcements.

HPE has revealed a number of additions and innovations to its as-a-service offering GreenLake, including the launch of workload management tool Lighthouse, Project Aurora to provide edge-to-cloud security and the launch of its Compute Cloud Console to offer "unified compute operations as-a-service".

Speaking to the media ahead of the start of Discover, Neri said HPE is looking to advance its vision "to offer everything as-a-service through an edge-to-cloud architecture" and spoke of "a truly distributed enterprise digital economy" which is accelerating "at a pace we haven't seen before".

This was echoed in his keynote speech for HPE Discover, while he also outlined a future driven by data in what he called "the age of insight".

"Data is the new currency that powers the digital economy. It is now our most valuable asset, and I predict that data will one day show up as an asset in your balance sheet," he told the conference.

"In the age of insight, data is acted upon close to the moment of creation to drive action and understanding. As we level the playing field, more people have the opportunity to dream, invent and participate in the data driven digital economy.

"It is our mandate to ensure that digital transformation not only improves businesses but that it improves society as a whole to drive a more inclusive and sustainable world."

Neri said GreenLake was growing "at an outstanding rate of 41 per cent in Q2" and claimed it serves more than 1,200 customers "already on the platform" while being available to more than 900 partners.

HPE was among the first vendors to launch as-a-service, with several of its competitors also announcing their own as-a-service offerings recently including Dell's APEX and Lenovo's device-as-a-service.

On his call with the media, Neri said he "welcomed their entrance" into the space which he believes "validates" what the company said about "the world being hybrid" a few years ago.

He also said that the long-term goal was for GreenLake to become better known in the marketplace than HPE, adding that he was "good" if people confused GreenLake with HPE.

"I think we have years of differentiation here that's hard to really close unless you invest quite significantly in software, or inorganically with finances to integrate as quickly as possible," he said.

"In the end, this is all about the experience and this is where I feel we have a unique value proposition.

"For us, GreenLake is an open platform which allows our customers to innovate on it and for our partners, which obviously is an important component of ecosystem, to add their own services."

HPE has also announced an arrangement with Microsoft which will see it support Microsoft Azure Stack HCI and Microsoft SQL Server through GreenLake.

The vendor has a host of other partnerships, including with the likes of Nutanix and Veeam, but responding to a question from CRN about whether he sees HPE as more of a partner than a competitor to other big tech companies in the future, Neri said he believes there will be elements of both.

"I think no matter if you're competing with them, they see in us an opportunity for them to continue to grow the business in an integrative way on premises, whereas on their own they can't," he added.

"On our side, we're able to give customers the choice that they want and yet we maintain control of that experience through GreenLake.

"We compete and we partner, that's the way of life today. I partner with a few that actually see the world from the same lenses and where Hewlett Packard Enterprise can bring their own value because their value resonates with customers.

"We are not a reseller of their solutions. We tend to focus on those partnerships where we can co-innovate and co-engineer solutions. I'm not interested in reselling anything ourselves."