Q&A: HPE reports growth in edge-to-cloud revenue as customers accelerate digital transformations

Hewlett Packard Enterprise Co. recently released its third-quarter earnings, which displayed an annualized revenue run rate headed toward $1 billion, up 33% from the prior-year period, and an intelligent edge revenue of $860 million, up 27%.

So where exactly is the momentum coming from? Services like HPE GreenLake, the company’s edge-to-cloud platform, are hitting a chord with customers.

Vishal Lall (pictured, right), chief operating officer of HPE Aruba, and Keith White (pictured, left), senior vice president and general manager of HPE GreenLake, spoke with Dave Vellante, host of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s livestreaming studio, during the HPE GreenLake Announcement event. They discussed why HPE’s services, such as HPE Greenlake, are doing so well within the digital transformation space, as well as the demands customers are making for acceleration. (* Disclosure below.) The following has been condensed for clarity.

2020 was called the forced march to digital. Customers are rethinking their digital strategies and their transformations. So where are we in terms of transformations? What’s the business angle? 

White: Customers found a lot of holes that they had in their environment because of the pandemic. I think customers are also seeing opportunities to grow pretty aggressively. And so what you’re seeing is … [in the] first phase of digital transformation, public cloud was an interesting scenario. Now they’re being able to be [intentional] … and say, “Where’s the best place for me to run this for the latency required with that data, for the choice that we have from an ISV standpoint … for the on-prem capabilities of what we’re trying to do from a security standpoint, etc.?’

So the nice thing is we’ve seen it move … into truly modernizing data centers, monetizing the data that I have and continuing to transform that environment for their customers, partners, employees and products.

You guys talked about edge a lot. Hybrid is clear in people’s minds: You’ve got an on-prem, you’re connecting to a cloud, maybe across clouds. Is edge an extension of hybrid, or maybe we’ll come back to this new version of cloud? What’s happening at the edge that you see?

Lall: The edge … it’s a continuum, right? So let’s take the example of a retailer. They’re running something in the store, and what are they running? They’re running point-of-service applications, or they’re running IoT devices. And, at some point, they have to connect back into the cloud, right? So we actually have … software-defined band capabilities that connect … the edge devices or edge analytics back into the cloud.

We actually have a small form factor Kubernetes operating system that runs on the edge. So we think of all of that as kind of a distributed environment in which edge is one place where the application runs and where the data resides, but it needs to be connected back. And so we provide the connectivity path; we provide the mechanism by which we run it, and then there’s a security model.

What should we expect in the future? What are the kinds of things that we should evaluate you on?

White: The reality is, we are becoming much deeper partners with our customers, right? They’re looking to us to say, “Help me run my data center, help me improve my data and analytics and help me at the edge so that I can have the most effective scenario.” So what you’re seeing from us is this flip from … hardware provider into deep partnerships with that … open platform.

I’d say the second thing that we’re doing is we’re helping them fuel that digital transformation, because again, they’re looking for that hybrid solution. And so now they’re saying, “Hey, HPE, come and showcase all the experience you have … and help me understand what other customers are doing so that I can implement that faster, better, cheaper, easier, etc.”

Lall: It’s all about solving customer problems for us. Some customer problems are still in the data center. Some customer problems are in the edge. So they’re all fair game for us as we think about … what we are going to be building out.

And the solutions have to have integrated hardware, integrated software stack, integrated services, right? There are partners who sell that, who service that, and all that entire experience from a customer perspective has to be seamless.

Here’s the complete video interview, part of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of the HPE GreenLake Announcement event. (* Disclosure: TheCUBE is a paid media partner for the An HPE GreenLake Announcement event. Neither HPE, the sponsor for theCUBE’s event coverage, nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE