HPE's networking push dominated Discover 2026. Is this the future for the company?

What is HPE? For just over a decade, since its split with what's now HP Inc, the answer has been clear: HPE is an enterprise hardware company specializing in servers and storage.

The additions of Cray and SGI to its portfolio bolstered this position: While they primarily opened the door to HPC and supercomputing for HPE, fundamentally there's a lot of crossover between typical data centers and these behemoths.

Even the name – Hewlett Packard Enterprise – invokes a sense of a company with a long history of making specialist kit for organizations' data centers or server rooms.

At HPE Discover 2026, though, you would be forgiven for thinking HPE's primary competitor wasn't Dell or IBM but Cisco.

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Both of the first day keynotes were chock full of networking. I'm not just talking about announcements, of which there were some, I'm talking about the overall vibe as well. Both CEO Antonio Neri and head of networks, Rami Rahim, spoke about the importance of networking as a foundation for modern enterprise architecture, particularly for AI workloads.

Rahim offered a cautionary tale about the Millennium Tower in San Francisco, a residential high-rise that began sinking into the ground and listing to one side shortly after its completion due to problems with its foundations. His argument: if businesses don't lay solid foundations based on networking technology, then they're setting themselves up for failure. Their agentic AI ambitions, in particular, will become weak and start to wobble.

Such was the emphasis on networking all week, you would be forgiven for thinking that the company had moved away from its traditional business areas. In fact my first question to Antonio Neri when I spoke to him was: "Is HPE a networking company now, then?"

"Yes, it is," came the answer. He expounded on how this plays into HPE's expectation that it will grow into an $11 billion company, adding that "in my mind, together with our competitor, Cisco, [HPE has] the most complete networking portfolio".

"Our competitor Cisco" – what a phrase, and one that would have seemed slightly crazy just a few years ago.

It's not that HPE has had no networking business before this – Aruba Networks has been a core part of what HPE has to offer for years – but I don't think anyone would have openly declared Cisco a competitor in 2015.

Undeniably the Juniper acquisition does strengthen HPE's position in the data center – it can now offer the whole package, from scale up to scale out. Neri was keen to point out the AMD Helios, which should be coming this autumn, uses HPE Juniper Networks for scale up. Possibly more to come on that in July when we get to hear from AMD's CEO Lisa Su at AMD Advancing AI summit, though we shall see.

The question that I've been asking myself throughout the conference and I've voiced already on the 19 June edition of the ITPro Podcast and reaction video, is this: is the focus on networking a perpetual state of affairs, or is HPE just burnishing its latest acquisition?

My expectation is that for the next 6 months minimum Juniper's star will very much be in the ascendence at HPE. After that? Well, maybe the foundations will have settled and networking will have equal importance to the rest of what the company does. HPE Discover Barcelona, the company's European conference that takes place 2-3 December this year, may offer some more insight into the direction of travel.

Until then, you can catch up on all my coverage from Las Vegas here and if you want to know more about the tower and its ongoing issues – including attempts to remediate that made it worse – I recommend this blog, and also the Wikipedia page. It makes for quite a read.