HPE’s CEO discussed how the new announcements around HPE Lighthouse, Project Aurora, Silicon on-Demand and compute as-a-service drives HPE’s vision forward, and also commented on their just announced acquisition of DeterminedAI.

At HPE Discover 2021, HPE CEO Antonio Neri laid out the company’s vision and strategy, as he customarily does at this, HPE’s major customer event of the year. The thrust of that strategy has been essentially the same since 2018, and Neri’s principal task at the event – aside from emphasizing that consistency – is to weave the company’s new announcements into that vision.

“The theme is that the future is edge to cloud, and that the future will be completely data driven,” Neri announced in his opening keynote. “So we are expanding our suite of services to serve these needs of the enterprise market.”

These services are related to what Neri sees as a fundamental transformation in the market and the broader economy.

“Our vision is centred on the Age of Insight,” he stressed. “What we have learned in the last 18 months, as digital transformation for the enterprise accelerated, is that we are exiting the Information Era and entering the Age of Insight. This means that customers need more than ever an edge-to-cloud architecture –  GreenLake.

“The GreenLake Edge to Cloud platform is our advanced vision to offer everything as a service, accelerating differentiation and market leadership,” Neri said. “It is an open system that allows customers to innovate on it. and partners to offer their own services on it.”

Neri introduced HPE GreenLake Lighthouse, a secure platform within GreenLake that adds the capability for customers to add new GreenLake cloud services in just a few clicks in HPE GreenLake Central, so that they can deploy faster.

“With Lighthouse, we are Innovating on the GreenLake platform itself,” Neri said. “Lighthouse is a fully cloud native solution that removes configuration complexity. It is a series of workload-optimized solutions powered by HPE Ezmeral software, through which you can add new services and run multiple cloud services simultaneously.”

Neri also announced Project Aurora, which is still a preview at this event, but will be available by the end of the year.

“Project Aurora is super-important, and is a new way of thinking about security from edge to cloud,” he said. “It is Zero Trust Security for edge to cloud infrastructure, taking Silicon Root of Trust to the next level. Today, it takes 28 days on average to identify a breach. With Project Aurora we will reduce that to seconds.”

Neri said that while Project Aurora is still in preview stage, there will be more to come in the next few months.

“By the end of the year, it will be integrated with both HPE Lighthouse and HPE GreenLake,” he stated.

Neri displayed considerable enthusiasm over Silicon on-Demand, which in partnership with Intel, makes processor cores available as consumption-based offerings, providing a level of granularity no one else in the industry has, which will save customers money.

“Silicon-on-Demand is a first of its kind,” Neri said. “There is nothing to order and install. You just turn it on. This instant-on experience is yet another way we continue to innovate.”

Neri stressed that this is something that none of the public clouds offer today.

“Today, they can offer only virtual or container level,” he said. “Now we take this to silicon level – the core level – the smallest core you can think of. The software and metering capabilities we have to measure this, no one else has in the market.”

Another major announcement is the availability – for the moment to select audiences in the U.S. only – of unified compute operations as a service with the Compute Cloud Console. It leverages HPE’s Aruba Central networking management console, and builds on the Data Services Cloud Console, which HPE announced earlier this year, which provides a similar software-defined solution for data storage.

“Adding Compute to our GreenLake platform will simplify both compute and management,” Neri said. “It is starting with select customer engagements today and will be more broadly available by the end of the year.”

Neri also commented on HPE’s acquisition, announced Monday, of Determined AI, a San Francisco-based startup that uses an open source machine learning program to train AI models faster, at any scale.

“We are very excited about this small acquisition,” Neri said. “DeterminedAI is focused on AI and deep learning. It lets customers deploy ready to run, out of the box modules for AI. We will put these on top of our Kray HPC, with training modules which are ready to be deployed. We are the clear market leader in HPC, and this will accelerate us in the market.”