HPE Discover 2024: HPE Claims Victory on Partner Program

For years, HPE CEO Antonio Neri has preached that the whole world is going hybrid. He said that remains the case with the emergence of generative artificial intelligence (AI).

“AI requires hybrid cloud by design,” he said. “AI will be an accelerator of hybrid for sure. If you go to fine-tune a model with your proprietary data, a lot of that's going to happen on your own premises or on a colo site where you have a dedicated instance. If you're doing some learning without using your proprietary data, and you want to use public data, you may use the public cloud for that. Once the model is what you want it to be and you want to do inferencing, you can use the same infrastructure or use the public cloud.

“But a lot of the inferencing will happen on end points at the edge," he continued. "It can be your mobile phone … or maybe a factory floor in a dedicated AI server processing data in real-time.”

Neri also said he expects HPE Private Cloud AI to appeal to companies of all sizes. It comes in small, medium, large and extra-large configurations. Small begins with 4-8 Nvidia L40 GPUs, 30TB-248TB of storage and 100Gb Nvidia Ethernet networking, while extra large runs to 12 Nvidia GH 200 NVL2 GPUs, 670TB-1.1 PB of storage, and 800Gb Nvidia networking.

Neri said while pricing has not yet been disclosed, he expects the small configuration to start at less than $100,000.

“The entry point is not millions of dollars,” he said. “It’s a five-figure product. With hyperscalers or other large language training models, you’re probably spending hundreds of millions of dollars. But that's not what we're doing for the enterprise.”

If artificial intelligence is all about the data, then make sure you don’t forget the data scientists.

That was the message from Mark III Systems president Stan Wysocki at HPE Discover.

The IT solutions provider has had success selling AI platforms, systems and software to help customers build AI Centers of Excellence. Wysocki said while technology is important to build successful AI projects – Mark III sells Nvidia systems – the bigger issue is to get IT and data scientists on the same page. And the best way to do that is to lead with the scientists.

“As a legacy infrastructure player, it took us a while to figure out that the [AI] opportunities are not driven through IT,” Wysoki said. “They're driven through the data scientists. Once we figured that out, we learned that we had to invest, enable and engage at the data-science level in order to drive the customer toward an AI Center of Excellence on a stack that we recommend.”

He said data scientists are not the usual application owners.

“I think in this industry, we've all been involved in large rollouts that sometimes struggle because we don't have the buy-in from the users of whatever application we’re talking about,” Wysocki said. “And data scientists take it to a whole new level. IT in most organizations that we engage with are reactive to the needs of the data scientists; they're not proactive. It's really because they don't understand. So we engage at the data-science level and try to become a part of the community through the engagement, enablement and the training that we provide once we understand really in depth what the data scientists are trying to accomplish.

“Data scientists vote with their feet," he added. "They’re developing on AWS, Azure, GCP, some doing it at home on a laptop. You can’t really force them to that Center of Excellence without understanding and giving them something that is at least as good if not better than what they’re doing on their own.”

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The HPE Partner Growth Summit at Discover included the unveiling of the 2024 HPE Partner Awards. HPE’s partner awards take into account financial performance, innovative solutions and meaningful business growth.

“Partnership is part of HPE’s DNA and is a critical part to the success of our business, Simon Ewington, HPE’s VP of worldwide channel and partner ecosystem, wrote in a blog announcing the channel partner award winners. “These awards are just one way that we honor our work together, and we couldn’t be more thankful for their continued partnership and the trust we’ve built to deliver the best solutions and services to our mutual customers.”

HPE Global Channel Winners

HPE Global Ecosystem Winners

While the HPE-Nvidia partnership dominated Discover, HPE did have other vendor partner news. HPE and CrowdStrike forged a strategic partnership around CrowdStrike’s Falcon endpoint protection platform and HPE GreenLake and OpsRamp AIOps.

The partnership aims to unify IT operations and cybersecurity into a single process. Information from Falcon and OpsRamp’s AI-driven observability can provide a service map view of the attack surface across an organization’s infrastructure.

Additional integrations into the HPE GreenLake cloud will allow CrowdStrike to protect AI workloads and large language models (LLMs). That integration will play a role in the new Nvidia AI Computing by HPE portfolio.

“Security is crucial for AI applications and the data they access,” HPE CTO Fidelma Russo said. “Our strategic collaboration with CrowdStrike, combined with our OpsRamp observability, offers complete endpoint security to protect your AI applications running on HPE Private Cloud AI.”

CrowdStrike's George Kurtz

“GenAI promises to transform business operations, and the best AI requires the best AI-powered security,” CrowdStrike CEO George Kurtz said. “Our partnership with HPE combines powerful enterprise computing with the industry’s premier security platform to accelerate secure end-to-end AI and ML adoption.”

It didn’t take long for Deloitte to throw its support behind the Nvidia AI Computing by HPE portfolio either.

As part of the Deloitte IndustryAdvantage program, Deloitte launched a digital twin application built on the Nvidia Omniverse platform and HPE GreenLake that will be delivered as part of Nvidia AI Computing by HPE. The digital twin deploys Deloitte’s rapid use case development methodology and accelerators to help build manufacturing simulations. The application will help incorporate new, previously undiscovered data to simulate outcomes, test the efficiency of new greenfield facility designs, predict potential issues, and develop and test new products or differing chemical make-ups.

Digital twins and generative AI can form powerful combinations. Gen AI can help structure inputs and synthesize outputs for digital twins, and digital twins can facilitate testing for gen AI. Deloitte also pledged to add additional industry-specific use cases for that leverage HPE Private Cloud AI’s full-stack capabilities.

“Amid a marketplace moving at breakneck speed, generative AI can unlock game-changing insights and enormous business value — but its success requires an agile approach that targets business transformation through an industry-specific lens and is rooted in data modernization,” said Jim Rowan, AI market activation leader and principal for Deloitte Consulting. “As leaders seek high-performing enterprise AI and data solutions that tackle their most critical business challenges, our collaboration with HPE and Nvidia marks a natural next step in our commitment to bringing our clients actionable insights backed by the power of HPE technology and Nvidia full-stack accelerated computing.”

Deloitte's Jim Rowan

Deloitte is a longtime partner of HPE and Nvidia. It has worked with HPE on solutions across hybrid cloud, edge computing and industrial internet of things (IoT). Deloitte has also enabled AI solutions powered by Nvidia hardware and software, and was selected as  NVIDIA Partner Network (NPN) Global Consulting Partner of the Year this year.

It didn’t take long for Deloitte to throw its support behind the Nvidia AI Computing by HPE portfolio either.

As part of the Deloitte IndustryAdvantage program, Deloitte launched a digital twin application built on the Nvidia Omniverse platform and HPE GreenLake that will be delivered as part of Nvidia AI Computing by HPE. The digital twin deploys Deloitte’s rapid use case development methodology and accelerators to help build manufacturing simulations. The application will help incorporate new, previously undiscovered data to simulate outcomes, test the efficiency of new greenfield facility designs, predict potential issues, and develop and test new products or differing chemical make-ups.

Digital twins and generative AI can form powerful combinations. Gen AI can help structure inputs and synthesize outputs for digital twins, and digital twins can facilitate testing for gen AI. Deloitte also pledged to add additional industry-specific use cases for that leverage HPE Private Cloud AI’s full-stack capabilities.

“Amid a marketplace moving at breakneck speed, generative AI can unlock game-changing insights and enormous business value — but its success requires an agile approach that targets business transformation through an industry-specific lens and is rooted in data modernization,” said Jim Rowan, AI market activation leader and principal for Deloitte Consulting. “As leaders seek high-performing enterprise AI and data solutions that tackle their most critical business challenges, our collaboration with HPE and Nvidia marks a natural next step in our commitment to bringing our clients actionable insights backed by the power of HPE technology and Nvidia full-stack accelerated computing.”

Deloitte's Jim Rowan

Deloitte is a longtime partner of HPE and Nvidia. It has worked with HPE on solutions across hybrid cloud, edge computing and industrial internet of things (IoT). Deloitte has also enabled AI solutions powered by Nvidia hardware and software, and was selected as  NVIDIA Partner Network (NPN) Global Consulting Partner of the Year this year.