HP South Pacific servers and converged systems general manager Raj Thakur.
Hewlett Packard Enterprise will be directing its focus on creating solutions in the hybrid Cloud and the Internet of Things (IoT) space, according to its South-Pacific servers and converged systems general manager, Raj Thakur.
Thakur said the company recently outlined its strategic direction at its recent Hewlett Packard Enterprise Discover 2015 Conference in London and it includes a focus on its HPE Synergy and HPE Edgeline IoT systems.
“Our strategy is based around what we see is our four transformation areas – having a hybrid infrastructure model, empowering the data driven enterprise, mobility, and around protecting the enterprise,” he told ARN.
According to Thakur, HPE Synergy supports its hybrid infrastructure plan. HPE Synergy is a suite of solutions that bridges across traditional IT and the new world where customers are developing mobile applications like DevOps, and deploying things to the Cloud quickly.
The software defined infrastructure is also fully automated.
“From a channel perspective, this will be geared towards large enterprises or mid-market customers that are typically sitting between what to run themselves and what to put on the Cloud. We have a lot of channel partners that operate within that space and they can offer it as a next generation solution for the datacentre or offer it as a managed service themselves.”
The solution will be available from June next year and Hewlett Packard Enterprise has already started enabling channel partners in terms of technical and sales training to take it to market.
The other trend Hewlett Packard Enterprise intends to heavily focus on is the IoT. Thakur said its Edgeline IoT systems portfolio aims to allow ease of access, management, and the collection of data from outside the datacentre.
“Our strategy moving forward is to develop and deploy more of these systems using our Moonshot technology given that this compute needs to be in rugged, multi-purpose small packages that can process information and get inside the edge,” he said.
“We will also start putting in smarts where we can get real-time analytics from the edge rather than waiting for all this data to be unnecessarily sent into the datacentre and be processed. We will enable the channel on this.”
The company has also launched a formal IoT business unit and established three IoT discovery labs for customers and partners. The Asia-Pacific and Japan lab is based in Singapore, while the other two are located in Houston and France.
“IoT is a partner play and an ecosystem has to be built around it. That’s where these labs come in place.”
Thakur mentioned the company is also in talks with key disties in penetrating this space.
“We will be using distribution a lot more as we move into these new areas. Given the complexity of the solutions and multiple partners that it will require to deliver and deploy it in the marketplace, it makes sense to work with a new style of distribution partners that are geared up to do it in the new world,” he said.
In addition, the company has also forged a formal alliance with Intel around the IoT and both companies will be jointly engineering an ecosystem and developing solutions for the marketplace.
Hewlett Packard Enterprise has also strengthened its partnership with Microsoft around the hybrid infrastructure and the public Cloud.
“Essentially, Microsoft Azure will be our preferred public Cloud partner moving forward. We will also be providing on-premise Azure capability, which our partners will be able to resell into the marketplace,” he added.
Both companies will also be working together on engineering, go-to-market, and services perspective to integrate new compute platforms with Azure.
While Hewlett Packard Enterprise builds out its hybrid infrastructure strategy, Thakur said it is also aware of businesses using Cloud from other providers in the marketplace. To help customers get control of their IT environment, it has launched its HPE Helion Managed Cloud Broker solution.
