HPE CEO talks up ‘Age of Insight’ at Discover 2021

Antonio Neri, CEO of Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) used the opening keynote of the company’s annual Discover conference to hail what he calls the “Age of Insight”.

According to Neri, the information age was defined by a focus on the volume, velocity and variety of data collection. In the Age of Insight, he said, the focus will instead be on deriving value from all the data businesses create and store.

A key part of this is cloud computing, he said, but rather than public cloud, hyperscalers or exascalers, Neri focused on what would commonly be recognised as private cloud – data held in the customers’ data centre or with a co-location provider.

Specifically, he said this should also be delivered on a consumption-based model rather than dealing with over-provisioning as one might in a standard data centre.

This coincides with the capability HPE offers through GreenLake, its “edge to cloud platform”. This service allows customers to provision capacity on HPE hardware as needed, either from HPE directly or from one of its partners offering GreenLake services – of which there are now 900.

GreenLake took centre stage during the keynote, with Neri highlighting new products and projects coming into this portfolio, including Lighthouse and Aurora.

Neri also took time to rail against cloud lock-in, where organisations can find it difficult to migrate their data from one public cloud provider to another, or back into their own data centre. Organisations, he said, should be able to move their data without being penalised for it – “after all, it’s your data”.

“The past decade was all about the cloud-first mandate,” Neri said. “Looking ahead, the next decade will be focused on using data everywhere across your distributed enterprise – a cloud everywhere mandate.”