HP Enterprise is more than an infrastructure company. CEO Meg Whitman drove home that point over and over again during a keynote today, pointing to strategic "digital transformation" relationships with Boeing, Docker, Dropbox, Home Depot, Microsoft and others.
Amid a two-hour keynote at HP Enterprise Discover 2016 today in Las Vegas, Whitman and guests from multiple companies described:
- A new HPE relationship with Docker. All HPE servers will now ship with a Docker engine, helping developers to speed application development, deployments and debugging.
- An expanding relationship with Dropbox, which has migrated some workloads off of Amazon Web Services (AWS). Dropbox now operates a hybrid cloud, running some workloads atop infrastructure purchased from HPE.
- Boeing's CIO described how HPE infrastructure and data tools are helping the aerospace giant to gather and manage data that will lead to even safer airplanes.
- Microsoft's chief information security officer (CISO) described how the company leverages HPE's monitoring tools to enforce corporate security and mitigate threats.
- The Home Depot described how sensor networks and data integration projects now allow all smoother transactions between the company's online store and retail locations. Indeed, 40 percent of Home Depot's online sales are now delivered for in-store customer pickups.
Throughout the keynote, HPE offered anecdotes describing how the company's big data and analytics software increasingly lives on third-party public clouds. A key example involves HPE's machine learning software running on Microsoft Azure.
During recent HPE earnings calls, I've been underwhelmed by the company's software and SaaS businesses, where revenues have generally been dipping. But booth demos, keynotes and other sessions here at the conference paints a stronger picture for HPE's overall business efforts beyond hardware infrastructure.
I'm not ready to say HPE is set to set the cloud or SaaS world on fire. But there are some promising sparks here...
