HPE talks up AI’s role in boosting server business

AI presents an opportunity for partners to sell more on-premises hardware, according to HPE CEO Antonio Neri.

Speaking at the company’s annual Partner Growth Summit ahead of the main HPE Discover 2024 conference in Las Vegas, Neri said: 

“When you think about AI is not a monolithic workload, it’s actually a distributed workload, which is obviously very data intensive. That actually opens up the opportunity to bring more infrastructure on premises than ever before.

“The fact that AI is a data first business will drive customers to rethink their data strategy, where they store it, [and] how they maintain it in compliance.”

By offering customers a cloud-first approach that’s also based on-premises (such as that provided by HPE GreenLake), there’s an opportunity to really increase revenues off the back of the trend, he suggested.

“AI has given a triple shot in the arm to the server business,” he added.

It’s not just AI where HPE believes the opportunity lies, though. Leaning on one of the key themes of this year’s conference, sustainability, Neil MacDonald, EVP and GM of compute, HPC and AI at HPE, spoke of the need for companies to modernize their existing infrastructure, saying “there’s a lot of old, dusty server equipment out there that is ripe to refresh”.

MacDonald claimed that these elderly systems are “wasting our customers’ money”, as they’re not very efficient.

“There are over 400,000 [HPE] systems out there of over four years of age,” MacDonald said.

“Legacy systems are consuming about 66% of data center power, but they're only doing about 7% of useful work so there’s a huge opportunity for efficiency gains. One Gen11 can replace 11 Gen8 servers and consume 90% less power.”

He also pointed out that older infrastructure doesn’t have all the security features of HPE’s more recent products. All of these are reasons to encourage customers to upgrade, he said.

ITPro's Jane McCallion will be live on the ground in Las Vegas this week with rolling coverage of HPE Discover 2024. Keep tabs on all the latest news, updates, and announcements in our live blog.