HPE, Aruba Flex IoT Muscles at Discover

HPE DISCOVER — Hewlett Packard Enterprise is showing partners and their customers the many business use cases for the Internet of Things.

HPE spent much of the second day of its Discover event emphasizing how the organization is expanding its focus from “core” IT operations like the data center and cloud to what is often called “the intelligent edge.”

HPE’s Meg Whitman

“The edge quite simply is the world outside your data center,” said CEO Meg Whitman. “It’s where you interact with your customers. It’s where you manufacture your products. It’s where your employees sit, and it’s where digital transformation will have the most profound impact on your business, creating new workplace experiences, transforming your operations and creating unique and differentiated customer experiences.”

HPE took members of the media through several demos of its IoT offerings, which range from industrial to smart cities to asset tracking. An HPE predictive maintenance tool monitored a miniature factory and alerted users of potential system failures. Several of the demos were from Aruba, which announced its new 8400 Core Switch series on Monday. Aruba’s health care IoT solution combines Aruba’s AirWave network management and ClearPass access management with capabilities from Niara, a security analytics company HPE is buying this year.

Keerti Melkote, Aruba’s chief technology officer, said organizations are beginning to see clear business outcomes from IoT.

“We’re beginning to see this in the context of customers that [are] public facing… stadiums, hotels, hospitals and on and on,” Melkote said.

HPE announced several IoT-related initiatives. The company partnered with Tata Communications to launch a Low Power Wide Area Network (LPAN) that can help an Indian city become a “smart city.” HPE also partnered with a Texas chemical processing plant to build an IoT-equipped refinery. Pwc announced that it will use HPE’s IoT platform for its Smart Cities Experience Center.{ad}

HPE on Monday announced the 10th generation of its server family and spent much of Tuesday talking up its advantages.

Bob Moore, who leads partner software for HPE, told Channel Partners that the Gen10 sever brings end users economic control.

“Essentially what this does is allows customers to pay for the amount of compute need that they have,” he said. “So as they grow they can pay for additional compute capacity, and conversely, if they were to start declining, they would reduce their consumption.”

Agility and security are the two other main benefits of the servers. Moore says the technology design accounts for the rising number of security threats.

“Security threats have gone up exponentially. We’ve been able to design this new technology, and we started this years ago, so we were able to see what was coming, and we proactively designed in technologies to address that,” he said.

He says HPE has been communicating with partners about the new servers and training them at the conference.

“And we think, with these new Gen10 servers, we’re really providing them a new platform that will allow them to be really competitive and have some additional value that they can offer to their end user customers,” he said.

Whitman used her keynote speech to reassert much of what she said on Monday at the HPE Global Partner Summit. She reiterated the argument that many businesses are backing off from public cloud and moving to a more hybrid environment. She cited Dropbox as an example of a born-in-the-cloud company that succeeded by cutting its dependence on public cloud.

“Migrating to an on-prem, private cloud solution has not only helped Dropbox scale up, but interestingly, it has driven down their costs,” she said. “The company has been able to retain flexibility and accelerate enterprise-level security and scalability and make its costs more predictable and advertise those costs over time.”