Hewlett Packard Enterprise Co. (HPE) used HPE Discover Las Vegas last week to unveil a new strategy defined by solution selling, hybrid cloud and the Internet of things (IoT).

The strategy was succinctly defined an interview on theCUBE with Antonio Neri, executive vice president and general manager of HPE’s Enterprise Group (see embedded video below). Neri laid out a strategy centered around several major components, including Helion, hyper-converged systems, edge computing, Moonshot, mission critical computing, software-defined data centers, Aruba, and the new Stackato developer program.

The vision is to lead the burgeoning markets for on-premise cloud and IoT edge computing, while strengthening HPE’s position in high-performance and mission-critical computing. While the company has major competition in all these areas, the strategy is more aggressive and multi-faceted than those that the former Hewlett-Packard Co. outlined while it struggled with its debt load before the cleaving into two businesses last year. As SiliconAngle Media Co-CEO and Wikibon Co-Founder David Vellante (@DVellante) said on theCUBE, HPE has stopped focusing on speeds and feeds and has become a solution supplier.

Regaining enterprise storage lead

HPE is already regaining its leadership in some areas, such as a storage. International Data Corp.’s most recent quarterly market report lists HPE as the leading enterprise storage company, supplanting EMC, with Dell, Inc. third. While ECM/Dell will reclaim first place once the merger is completed, HPE is making rapid progress.

One driver behind this success is the 3PAR all-flash array. It support flash, spinning disk and tape natively, in a single architecture. This gives HPE a huge advantage in a fast-evolving market, Vellante said. In an interview on theCUBE, Vish Mulchand, HPE senior director of product management and marketing, said the company was ahead of the market in moving to flash and intends to continue to press its advantage (see video below).

HPE’s composable infrastructure, announced at Discover 2015, is also proving popular with customers. A have-your-cake-and-eat-it-too approach to converged systems, it lets customers choose from a Chinese menu of server, storage and networking options to build a custom converged system.

Private cloud

HPE is also focusing on private cloud and on building relationships and connectivity with multiple public cloud service providers. It hopes this strategy will put it in a strong position in an IT market in which large enterprises need to integrate multiple infrastructure-as-a-service and software-as-a-service platforms with internal IT.

Industry-watchers are divided over whether the next decade will see IT workloads migrate to public cloud services on a large scale or whether a significant residual set will remain in private data centers. In either case, that migration will take decades. Meanwhile corporate IT will need to move nearly everything on premise to private cloud to meet the changing expectations of business users. HPE faces significant competition in this market. However, its strong focus on private cloud, backed up by its solid, open source-based Helion technology and the alliances it is building with cloud service providers such as Microsoft and AWS, gives it significant market differentiation. In an interview on theCUBE, HP Helion Vice President of Products and Services Omri Gazitt and Helion SVP of Engineering Mark Interrante laid out seven drivers that they said will improve IT agility and efficiency, including self-service provisioning, IT automation, containers and consumption-based pricing (see video below).

The edge

HPE’s big new gamble is Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) edge computing. One of the major IIoT challenges is managing the huge amounts of data generated at remote industrial sites. Fully instrumented wind farms, mining operations, ocean drilling rigs, for example, will produce multiple terabytes of data each day, which is too much to send live to a cloud service or private data center. The public Internet can’t handle that kind of volume, and many remote sites lack high-speed data connections. Instead, streaming data will be analyzed in real time with only significant data – such as evidence of a developing mechanical problem – sent to a central site. These sites may never be moved to public cloud, making the edge an attractive market for HPE.

HPE’s answer is its new line of ruggedized Edgeline hyper-converged systems designed to support local streaming analysis and, if desired, massive data storage. The Edgeline EL1000 and EL4000, the first two units in thine line, include Aruba wireless networking to manage connections to large populations of sensors, and an optional generator to provide power where needed.

But the real differentiation may come from HPE’s new IoT alliances, announced during the conference, with IoT pioneer General Electric Co. and sensor system manufacturer National Instruments Corp. GE is considered a pioneer in IoT, and the alliance give it an advantage before it sells a single unit.

Vellante wrote on the CrowdChat that “Edge to core and everything in between married with GE Predix software is a great combo.” He said that the alliance is a natural choice for GE, which would not want to partner with IBM because the two companies were too competitive in other areas.

For more, watch theCUBE interview with Dr. Tom Bradicich (@TomBradicichPhD), HPE vice president and general manager of IoT Systems, and National Instruments Executive VP Eric Starkloff (@EStarkloff) discuss the new Edgeline systems and the strategy behind them below.

Moonshot refresh

Moonshot, HPE’s massively-parallel server architecture, has been refreshed, with a switch to the latest Intel Xeon processors. Bradicich said on theCUBE that this has increased compute power while simultaneously cutting power requirements and heat generation. HPE also shrank the chassis size and added “lights out” automated management. Bradicich said this is creating new market momentum for the unique technology. To prove that he brought along Jason Willis, McKesson Corp.’s Citrix Systems, Inc., architect, to talk about how the healthcare software company is using the new Moonshot to modernize its internal IT.

The Machine

Not everything was good news. The biggest disappointment was The Machine, or rather the lack of it. A futuristic new Star Trek-themed ad that presented HPE’s next-generation hardware architecture in retrospects as as so advanced that it become a part of “every advance since then” ran on theCUBE between interviews. At the start of the second day general session, HPE CEO Meg Whitman devoted 15 minutes to praising The Machine, but without providing any details. Instead, she promised that we would see it later this year.”

This raises several questions: When will we see it? Exactly what will we see? Will all three of the advanced technologies – for compute, network and storage – actually be in it, or are some not working? How will it compare with IBM’s quantum computers? What will it cost? The answers will have to wait until HPE starts providing more precise information.

Conclusions

HPE Discover was a triumph overall, but big holes still exist in the strategy particularly in software, Wikibon’s Vellante pointed out. In particular, HPE needs to build up its analytics to round out its IIoT service and it needs a challenge to IBM’s cognitive computing. These can be acquired. HPE executives on theCUBE declined to speculate about possible new acquisitions, but with its strong balance sheet and cash flow, HPE is in position to place some new bets.

HPE and its predecessor HP have been successful in the past by identifying and focusing on under-served areas inside new markets. That is what it is doing with Helion. In that vein, one area HPE might want to look at is self-service analytics serving the new class of citizen data scientists who buy their software directly and then expect IT to support them. Companies like Alteryx, Inc., or its competitors might be good targets.

HPE is still a work in progress, but it’s got a strategy and a distinctive product portfolio with which to compete.

Highlights of coverage on theCUBE

Interviews with HPE executives including Executive VP and CTO Martin Fink (@MartinFinkCTO), Software EVP and General Manager Robert Youngjohns (@RYoungjohns) and Executive VP and General Manager Antonio Neri, probed HPE’s broader strategy.

HPE users including DreamWorks Animation SKG Inc.Technology and Alliances Head Kate Swanborg, who provided a fascinating window into the technological challenges of producing feature-length feature animations in the digital age, also appeared. And executives from HPE partners including Microsoft Senior IT Program Manager David Lewis and Principal Program Manager David Smith and National Instruments Executive VP Eric Starkloff (@EStarkloff), were also on, discussing those alliances. All the interviews are available publicly for replay here. For a quick guide to the areas covered in each of the interviews that can help you decide which to watch, go to the #HPEDiscover Crowdchat.