As HPE evolves its core business around the data center, converged infrastructure and the Internet of Things, the IT stalwart delivers more solutions than product pitches at this year’s annual HPE Discover event. Broadcasting live from the conference, we pick attendees’ brains regarding their thoughts and expectations for HPE’s new direction and performance.

Ray Wang, Principal Analyst at Constellation Research, met briefly with host Dave Vellante (@dvellante) of theCUBE, from the SiliconANGLE Media team, to talk about these very things.

Industrial and digital

One of the first topics brought up was the business alliance of General Electric (GE) with HP Enterprise, something which Wang described as “huge.” In his assessment, with “GE being the digital and industrial, [and] HP jumping into the SmartBit,” there was enormous potential for development, not only of their products, but of IoT at large.

“If you think about what’s happening with IoT,” he said, “we’ve gone from sensors to stacks to platforms, and we’re about to get into networks. And as we make that transition, I need security, I need to make sure all these devices, at computational power, have the network speed.”

Transformation and recovery

Moving on to address how HPE can improve itself internally, and for HPE to be a digital transformation factory, Wang said, “You’ve got to bring together the pieces around business models, what’s happening with Insight and Insight streams, and the ability to actually take all this stuff and make it easy for people to use. People want to be able to consume this on-demand, and be able to put the parts together. Right now, it’s a mess … and I think HP’s trying to industrialize that.”

In reference to HPE’s software side of business, Wang said “I think they’re starting to do the focus around the analytics piece, [and] that’s core, getting the Big Data around it. And then the rest of it’s really on partners and ecosystems, and you’re seeing them do that right now.”

Looking to other factors and possibilities in HPE’s near future, Wang laid out what he saw as the essential focus: “HPE’s partnership strategy, that’s going to be the key to actually bringing the ecosystem back, to getting back into the global 2000s accounts, and then going to the verticals that they’ve been strong in.”

Watch the full interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE and theCUBE’s coverage of HPE Discover 2016.

Photo by SiliconANGLE