Hewlett Packard Enterprise Co.’s recent aggressive acquisition strategy has found it purchasing many companies with complementary technologies that can be sold through HPE’s distribution channel. Its interest is focused primarily on acquisitions of companies that can provide software-defined and hyper-converged products, strengthening and extending HPE’s legacy products. An example is the Arista Networks Inc. partnership; by bringing in Arista’s software-driven cloud networking, HPE can move up its growth in the data center.

Alain Andreoli, SVP and GM Data Center Infrastructure Group at HPE, joined Dave Vellante (@dvellante) and Paul Gillin (@pgillin), co-hosts of theCUBE*, from the SiliconANGLE Media team, during HPE Discover EU, held in London. They discussed HPE’s recent acquisition of SGI, as well as the refocus of on HPE’s traditional data center business.

With SGI, moving into supercompute

HPE’s recent acquisition of SGI Corp. gives HPE a boost into high-end, specialized supercomputing markets. “It’s a small acquisition, but in reality, it will have a large impact on how we become more and more an expert in what is specialized and what is mission-critical,” said Andreoli.

Andreoli explained that the supercomputing market used to be a niche market, but now HPE can use its capabilities as a large-scale vendor to take supercomputing mainstream. Part of the strategy is to win secret, federal programs; another part is to be able to play in unique and advanced technologies, and then decide what to take to the mass market.

SGI’s two main product lines — ICE (fifth-generation supercomputing) and UV (a first-generation mission-critical memory system) — will both be carried over into the HPE product line, integrating SGI into the overall continuum of HPE’s product offerings.

A refocus on the data center

Traditionally, HPE has been the leader in data center services; despite the convergence of all things cloud, HPE wants to continue to lead in the data center. To that end, “Over the last year and a half, we have refocused on the data center,” said Andreoli.

He went on to say that HPE wants to give customers the best choice and the right mix for their hybrid IT journey. If a client wants to go on the public cloud for some workloads, they can do that with HPE’s Synergy layer. If they want to be onprem, they will get the same flexibility and cost benefits that they would on cloud, including flex capacity, he added.

Andreoli made the analogy, “Do you want to lease or do you want to buy your house? The choice is yours.”

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE and theCUBE’s coverage of HPE Discover EU. (*Disclosure: HPE and other companies sponsor some HPE Discover EU segments on SiliconANGLE Media’s theCUBE. Neither HPE nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo by SiliconANGLE