HPE Discover marked the first major conference for the enterprise IT vendor as an entity separate from HP Inc. It also followed the resent spin off of consulting services to CSC. But HPE executives didn’t spend too much time dwelling on the past, instead focusing on a bevy of infrastructure announcements, cloud strategy, and new product lines based around IoT.
HPE CEO Meg Whitman addressed the recent sell-off of consulting services to CSC at the beginning of her keynote. The transaction should be complete by March 31, 2017, she says. “I think that you know, from our split with HP that we know how to do this with no disruption to customers.”
Drew Houston, CEO of Dropbox, took the stage to share an unusal IT infrastructure story. Dropbox left Amazon Web Services to set up and run its own cloud infrastructure, hiring HPE to provide it. In turn, HPE also became a customer of Dropbox. Why leave AWS? For more scale, Houston said.
BMW and HPE’s IoT division worked together on this intelligent concept car. No, it’s not a driverless car, but it does use connectivity to provide several automated features. For example, the car could communicate with other cars on the roads to learn of upcoming potholes and guide the driver to avoid them. Or it could warn a driver that they’re about to enter a rainy area.
HPE high performance computing customer Ted Colbert, CIO of Boeing, appeared to briefly discuss benefits of the Apollo 8000. He says 1,000 engineers rely on the appliance every day, and Boeing expects data to rise exponentially in the next few years. Every time a 787 aircraft lands, it dumps a half-terabyte of data, he says.
HPE partnered with Paramount Pictures for the upcoming Star Trek Beyond movie, providing consulting on what technology might look like 250 years in the future. Three futuristic gadgets conceived by HPE will be featured in the movie, and HPE also made a new commercial to promote “The Machine” that will feature Star Trek Beyond’s uniforms. HPE didn’t provide any spoilers.
Docker CEO Bon Golub shook hands with Whitman and introduced the firm’s new partnership with HPE. Several HPE servers will now come with Docker embedded. Companies that use Docker’s container technology can develop and deploy applications faster, Golub says, and companies can even “Dockerize” their legacy applications.
A demonstration of HPE Universal IoT Platform as part of a smarty city project shows that city properties could direct cars to empty parking spots. Other aspects of the demo included automated mapping of city maintenance tasks and enhanced awareness of where emergency services were needed or involved.
