Add Hewlett Packard Enterprise Co. (HPE) to the growing list of companies attempting to exploit fissures in the Broadcom-VMware merger to win over their customers grappling with changes in product, pricing and licensing. On Tuesday, HPE made a kernel-based virtual machine push as part of an ambitious AI play on Tuesday.
“We plan to catapult the enterprise of today to new heights,” Hewlett Packard Enterprise Co. Antonio Neri said in the first keynote speech delivered at the futuristic Sphere in Las Vegas.
According to HPE, more than 70% of enterprises are pivoting to hybrid-cloud technology to accelerate internal innovation while enhancing operational efficiency and agility. Its argument is that hybrid cloud lets customers modernize their legacy IT environments while accelerating the adoption of AI and cloud-native technologies.
Daniel Newman, CEO of The Futurum Group, said the move underscores the need of companies to have the ability to scale AI on-premises. “HPE has spent more than half a decade very intentionally developing a platform that is hybrid by design, considering the most important factors for customers moving to the cloud with the reality that many workloads benefit from being on premises,” Newman said.
HPE’s batch of product news at its Discover conference, including its Private AI Partnership with NVIDIA Corp., reflects HPE’s long-held strategy. “I see it as an important move, as HPE stands to be a facilitator of real, immediate and measurable value for companies seeking to move from AI hype to AI results,” he added.
HPE Stresses the Importance of Virtualization
This week, HPE executives stressed that virtualization is an important piece of a broader strategy to deliver an integrated hybrid cloud solution to customers.
“With the introduction of virtualization, we now offer the full complement of runtime capabilities spanning from virtualization containers and bare metal as well as third party support,” Hang Tan, chief operating officer of HPE’s Hybrid Cloud business unit, said in a briefing Monday. “We also, in fact, now with this introduction, are the first and only vendor that provides a full suite of hybrid cloud capabilities across the entire hybrid cloud stack.”
Companies recognize the need to take a so-called “hybrid by design” approach to deliver a unified, platform-based cloud operating model, according to HPE.
HPE is dangling GreenLake, its open-standards and multi-cloud solution, as the technological catalyst that serves 34,000 customers representing $15 billion in lifetime total contract value.
HPE said it is expanding its “hybrid cloud offerings with HPE virtualization capability for HPE Private Cloud. The combination of our full-stack hybrid cloud capabilities and our open, hybrid cloud ecosystem makes HPE GreenLake cloud the future-proof hybrid cloud destination for enterprises.”
“HPE understands that IT modernization needs to go beyond virtualization,” the company said. “HPE Private Cloud enables both virtualized workloads as well as cloud-native and AI workloads, with support for virtual machines, containers and bare metal.”
The new KVM hypervisor virtualization capability, which does not intend to use the per-core pricing model VMware adopted after its acquisition by Broadcom, will be available in beta this summer and released as part of HPE Private Cloud Business Edition in the second half of 2024.
“There are many companies trying to steal VMware’s virtualization lunch money: The cloud players with their public cloud offerings, Nutanix, Red Hat, and now HPE,” says Patrick Moorhead, CEO and chief analyst at Moor Insights & Strategy. He added that HPE works with VMWare collaboratively.
