One of the downsides of the split of HP into two separate companies was getting the new nomenclature right: it’s Hewlett Packard, not HP, Enterprise. But now that most of the folks in the industry have finally sorted out the branding confusion of two companies with the HP name (HPE’s green rectangle logo notwithstanding) the focus this week has been on what will HPE’s strategy going forward as its first post-split Discover event wrapped up.

One thing that became clear is that step by step, HPE is transforming itself into a solutions-based company, in spite of some pundits’ opinion that it is still trailing players like Cisco and IBM in that department. There are four key transformations that the company is embarking on, which line up with the SMAC (Social, Mobility Analytics and Cloud) IT industry theme: hybrid infrastructure, digital enterprise, workplace productivity, and data-driven organization.

While a lot of the attention has been on the enterprise side of the business, with announcements such as Synergy and the Microsoft Azure partnership in Public Cloud, in addition to many mentions of “Hybrid IT” and “the idea economy”, the new HPE is also seeking to become the carriers’ trusted partner as they embark on their business transformation journeys. The company has created an NFV (Network Function Virtualization) business group headed by Bethany Mayer last year (Mayer later departed the company and that role now belongs to Saar Gillai), to address one of the biggest and most ambitious infrastructure refreshes in the history of the telecom industry.

While much of the networking industry hype has been on Software Defined Networking (SDN) – propelled mainly by large enterprises and cloud providers – the action has been on the service provider-driven concept of NFV. Faced with exponential increases in data traffic, flattish to declining ARPU, and the increased threat posed by OTT players, carriers are looking to significantly lower the cost of delivering anytime/anywhere access to voice, video and data. In addition, they also need to increase their agility in introducing new services and speed at which they can deliver innovation required to support bleeding edge applications.

At HPE Discover, customers such as Vodafone Netherlands, Telenor and Optus discussed how the company is partnering with them in delivering NFV solutions. In addition to needing to achieve a higher service velocity, operators are also challenged with the automation and management of a large volume of proprietary hardware appliances handling various dedicated functions in their networks such as CDN caches, DPI boxes, firewalls, load balancers and SBCs, among others. NFV addresses pain points such as capital investment, power and space associated with deploying new appliances, by leveraging virtualization to consolidate these appliances onto industry-standard high volume servers, switches and storage. Network functions are implemented in software and run on COTS hardware offering carriers the ability to locate the software workloads in various locations, and move the workloads flexibly as needed.

A year after creating the NFV business group, HPE has achieved some impressive milestones in this space, as attested by over 50 completed PoCs (Proofs of Concept) and deployed NFV projects for carrier customers around the world. To date, ETSI (the European Telecommunications Standards Institute, and is an independent standardization organization that helps carriers tackle the complexities of NFV) has approved 15 HPE PoCs. Projects include Telefonica Unica (single NFV datacenter cloud and telecom services), a vIMS deployment, a vCPE solution, an RCS implementation and VNFs (Virtual Network Functions) for partners such as Nokia and NEC delivered on HP’s NFV Platform.

While the NFV tool chain is still maturing, and operationalization issues still linger, these early adopter deployments and PoCs show that the carrier market is ripe for these solutions, and HPE certainly is well positioned in the NFV arena. Other issues needing to be addressed include the interaction between the SDN and NFV controllers, and the post-installation configuration of the VM appliances, which is difficult to automate.

One of the best moments of Discover came via a movie trailer made by HPE’s customer, 20th Century Fox. In that clip, senior HPE executives were placed into famous movies such as Avatar, Die Hard and X-Men, with the audience enthusiastically applauding it. Many HPE customers came on stage to deliver powerful testimonials acknowledging the role that HPE played in their transformation. This demonstrates that HPE is a good partner to work with, and that its management has been successful in switching its discourse from products to outcomes.

Ronald Gruia is the Director for Emerging Telecoms at Frost & Sullivan. He can be reached at rgruia@frost.com

Editors Note:  @theCUBE was on site getting LIVE coverage.  Here is an interview with #HPE Senior Exec who manages the Telco business Saar Gillai

Image source: Hewlett Packard Enterprise, SiliconANGLE edit