What to look out for at HPE Discover Barcelona 2024

The Fira exhibition center in Barcelona is once again getting ready to host the European leg of a tech company’s annual conference circuit, with HPE Discover Barcelona taking over the venue for two days next week.

It’s been five months since CEO Antonio Neri took to the stage of the Las Vegas Sphere at the company’s main conference. While there’s generally less razzle dazzle (and fewer announcements) in European conferences than in the US, there will still be some morsels on offer for customers and partners alike.

Here are my top four predictions for what delegates will hear about at HPE Discover Barcelona 2024.

HPE AI strategy

While HPE is still nominally “the edge to cloud to AI company”, it’s been putting a lot more effort into promoting its cloud and AI initiatives than it has edge. This was most visible at HPE Discover 2024 in Las Vegas, when Neri was joined on stage by Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang for the announcement of Nvidia AI Computing by HPE.

I think we can rule out Huang making an appearance again this time, but I would expect Neri to reference the project and perhaps talk about how many customers are using the HPE Private Cloud AI component.

HPE Supercomputing hardware

There may also be some discussion of HPE’s supercomputing products – an area that it’s been talking about a lot in the past year or so. I would expect some mention of its recently launched, AI-focused supercomputing hardware under its Cray brand, but new product announcements at the event seem unlikely.

Specific hardware aside, HPE does like to name-drop some of the big supercomputing projects it’s involved in; at the main conference in June there was even a model of part of Venado on show in the expo hall.

With El Capitan at the Livermore National Laboratory expected to come online before the end of 2024 – which is to say six weeks from the time of writing – we may get an update on that, or at least a reminder that it’s in the works.

HPE cloud services

HPE GreenLake has been at the center of the company’s cloud services proposition. What GreenLake is has evolved over time, but for the past several years has been a cloud-like consumption-based usage model with the hardware being located either on-premises or in a colocation facility. It also incorporates software elements, including security software and analytics, a great deal of which has come via acquisitions.

HPE Private Cloud, which is part of the GreenLake offering, got an update in June with a new virtualization capability (scroll to 19 June 2024 at 20:11 time stamp for full details).

It would make sense for the company to build on this and, realistically, it would be the lightest lift in terms of a product launch.

HPE 2024 acquisitions

Ok, hands up – I got it wrong in June’s predictions. I expected there to be more around HPE’s acquisition of Juniper Networks, which at the time of writing is still pending. I apparently never learn, however, so am once again going to place my bet on the deal getting a mention, not least as it is expected to close either late in 2024 or early in 2025.

I also have my eye on a smaller acquisition, Morpheus Data, which was announced and closed in August. In a statement issued at the time, Brian Gruttadauria, CTO of hybrid cloud at HPE, said: “This acquisition is all about expanding what HPE GreenLake cloud can do to simplify IT complexity.

“This software platform unifies management of multicloud and hybrid IT while empowering DevOps teams with self-service provisioning.”

As Gruttadauria noted, Morpheus Data was already available on HPE GreenLake, so, as with HPE Virtualization, it feels like an announcement on this would be both obvious and a light lift.

I will be at the 2024 edition of HPE Discover Barcelona, which runs from 20-21 November, to find out whether my predictions are on the money. Click here to follow all my coverage, as well as read up on what happened in Las Vegas in June.