HPE Leaps Into Operational Technology

HPE DISCOVER MADRID — Calling the edge a new total addressable market (TAM) opportunity for partners, HPE on Tuesday announced new HPE Edgeline Converged Edge System solutions and a dramatic strategic company shift that focuses on the operational technology (OT) market. HPE made the announcement at HPE Discover 2018 Madrid.

Today’s announcement includes: the HPE Edgeline OT Link Platform; HPE Edgeline systems management; HPE Edgeline EL300 Converged Edge System; and HPE Edgeline Field Application Engineering Services.

“What we’re doing is combining OT and IT in the same box,” Tom Bradicich, vice president and general manager, converged servers, edge and IoT systems at HPE, told Channel Futures.

Bradicich called the edge the third TAM — the first being the data center and the second the cloud.

The edge is everywhere other than the data center and cloud — it’s the home, the manufacturing floor, a smart electrical power grid the battlefield, and so on. It can be a smart city or an autonomous smart car.

HPE’s Tom Bradicich

“The edge presents a tremendous opportunity for partners on the supply side but also a tremendous opportunity for the demand side, or customer,” said Bradicich.

With this announcement, HPE is creating new market opportunities for HPE software partners who’ve written for the data center — the idea being that they take that same software and run it at the edge. HPE is also creating a new channel opportunity for the OT industry. OT is an $80 billion business, he said.

According to Gartner, by 2022, as a result of digital business projects, 75 percent of enterprise-generated data will be created and processed outside the traditional, centralized data center or cloud, up from less than 10 percent in 2018.

The new HPE Edgeline Converged Edge System is designed to speed the deployment and simplify the management of edge applications, enabling businesses to act on data generated by machines, assets and sensors from edge to cloud. It’s an open platform that allows businesses to seamlessly integrate applications and OT devices for edge deployments.

Taking a deeper dive into the solution components:

HPE Pointnext can help customers develop their own data acquisition, industrial network and control components for HPE Edgeline OT Link Platform to create custom solutions and competitive advantage. HPE Edgeline OT Link Platform-based solutions can be delivered on-premises with a turnkey deployment service, operated by HPE Pointnext.

The HPE Edgeline EL300 Converged Edge System is now available globally, with list prices starting at $2,532. The HPE Edgeline Integrated System Manager is also now available globally, and a zero-fee software license is included with HPE Edgeline EL300 Converged Edge System.

For partners, this means that HPE for the first time is creating OT products that can sold by HPE’s IT channel.

“They can sell IT and have the option to sell OT products, like control systems,” said Bradicich, pointing out the HPE Edgeline OT Link product. “Now they’re purveyors of not only IT but of OT.”

Partners will have to decide if they want to deliver more value by this convergence of IT and OT by HPE, and take the required steps to expand their business.