HPE made several major announcements in their opening keynote, but the one that clearly excited CEO Antonio Neri the most was entering the Artificial Intelligence public cloud market.

LAS VEGAS – In the opening keynote of the main HPE Discover event here, Antonio Neri, HPE’s President and CEO, laid out where HPE is at in their development of their GreenLake platform, hybrid cloud services and strategic partnerships. While on one level, the new announcements give customers considerably more choice in how they can consume these offerings through HPE, on the other, the theme of the development of AI and how it will reshape what the company is doing, was also forefront.

“Our focus is on the edge, hybrid cloud and AI – all of which are connected,” Neri said in his keynote. “This is my sixth keynote, and over that time we have progressed from vision, to strategy, to innovation to business outcomes. In 2019, we were the first to commit to everything as-a-service, and followed that up with GreenLake.”

GreenLake remains the core of the HPE hybrid experience, with Neri noting that its run rate was up 38% year-over-year.

Neri also emphasized the importance to GreenLake of their just-closed OpsRamp acquisition. The OpsRamp acquisition is now available as a SaaS offering on the HPE GreenLake platform, and provides customers with AI-driven operations for multi-vendor, multi-cloud IT environments.

“OpsRamp has over 2500 integrations supported out of the box, and is the easiest way to manage all your cloud resources from a single experience,” he said. “We have already begun to integrate it into our GreenLake and services portfolios. It will also remain as a separate SaaS offering. It is highly strategic for us because it’s how we run our entire portfolio.”

“OpsRamp and our new sustainability dashboard are the two key services we have built into the GreenLake platfom,” said Latha Vishnubhotla, Chief Platform Officer at HPE. “OpsRamp is for multi-vendor cloud establishments. This goes across multi-cloud and the full stack – not just networking, storage, compute and hardware. The complete stack in a big vendor now has advanced hybrid cloud leadership with HPE GreenLake platform innovation, and new cloud services.”

HPE also announced enhancements to the HPE GreenLake private cloud portfolio. An existing offering first introduced last year, HPE GreenLake for Private Cloud Enterprise,has been improved to address multi-cloud use cases with upcoming support to deploy Red Hat OpenShift.

“We are adding new new container support for Red Hat OpenShift as part of Private Cloud Enterprise,” Neri said. HPE Private Cloud Enterprise is offered as an HPE managed service.

“Many of you have asked for a converged solution to deploy solutions across the  private cloud, so we are introducing  HPE GreenLake for Private Cloud Business Edition,” Neri added. “It extends our portfolio and lets you spin up VMs across hybrid clouds on demand.”

“HPE GreenLake for Private Cloud Business Edition, unlike Private Cloud Enterprise, which is HPE managed, is customer-managed,” Vishnubhotla said. “It starts with VMware and will expand.”

The markets for the two offerings are also different.

“GreenLake for Private Cloud Enterprise can scale from edge location to big private cloud locations, but its target market is really larger enterprises,” Vishnubhotla indicated. “Private Cloud Business Edition, on the other hand, is aimed for at midmarket and commercial customers.”

HPE and colo provider Equinix also announced an expansion of their partnership to pre-provision HPE GreenLake for Private Cloud Enterprise and HPE GreenLake for Private Cloud Business Edition at Equinix data centers around the world, with seven in Silicon Valley, D.C., Toronto, Frankfurt, London, Singapore and Sydney available at the start.

“This significant expansion with Equinix will enable customers like you to go from quote to production in just days,” Neri told the keynote audience.

John Lin, EVP and GM, Data Center Services at Equinix, joined Neri on stage for the announcement.

“We have had a partnership for years, but we heard loud and clear from customers that they wanted more simplicity, and to make networking and logistics easier,” Lin said. “We are the easy button for all their sustainability needs. Cloud discussions are focused on software  but in the end there is a physical component. Customers count on us to deliver that infrastructure all the way from the cloud core to the edge.”

Lin also indicated that as Equinix is in over 50 countries, they are currently identifying customer demand for more locations beyond the original seven.

Dr Matt Wood, VP of Technology at AWS, also joined Neri on stage to announce an expansion of the HPE-AWS relationship. It now makes support for Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service [Amazon EKS] Anywhere generally available on HPE GreenLake for Private Cloud Enterprise. It also expands HPE GreenLake for Backup and Recovery to support Amazon Relational Database Services [Amazon RDS] and Amazon EKS Anywhere.

“This is an exciting new collaboration which also expands these products’ use of the AWS marketplace,” Wood said. “HPE Fraud Risk Management will also now be available as a SaaS offering on the AWS Marketplace.”

Another expanded partnership, between HPE and VMware, was also announced onstage.

“We are announcing the expansion of HPE GreenLake for VMware Cloud Foundation,” said Raghu Ragharan, VMware’s CEO. Pre-configured and tested HPE cloud modules, optimized for VMware Cloud Foundation, will now be available.

Finally, Neri turned to what he clearly telegraphed he considered to be the most important announcement of the lot.

“AI will be the most disruptive technology of our lifetime, and we are making one of the boldest bets in the history of our company,” he said. “The most trusted AI training tools must be acceptable to all to own, so we are entering the AI public cloud market.”

The first application available will be HPE GreenLake for Large Language Models, which will let any enterprise privately train, tune and deploy large-scale AI through an on-demand, multi-tenant supercomputing cloud service. This is the first in a series of industry and domain-specific AI applications with future support planned for future support planned for climate modeling, healthcare and life sciences, financial services, manufacturing, and transportation. These will support what Neri termed the three critical components of AI –  training tuning and inference –to provide a full breadth of AI capabilities.

“We have been in the climate space and life sciences space for a long time with HPE and Cray,” Neri indicated. “We have now made it available as a cloud offering, as well as easier to consume. Supercomputing has been available to only some privileged people, and the issue is how do you make it more broadly accessible. We have to make it simpler to consume. Simplicity is the name of the game.”

HPE GreenLake for Large Language Models will be delivered in partnership with HPE’s first partner  in this area, Aleph Alpha, a German AI startup.

“We chose them because their mission to provide generic AI and the way they went about it to privately train the model was perfectly aligned to our vision and our values,” Neri said. “In the future we will bring in other partners, who will be way more particularized for specific verticals.”

HPE GreenLake for Large Language Models will be available in North America in the second half of this year and in Europe in 2024.