At the end of day two, with wall-to-wall coverage of the HPE Big Data Conference in Boston, MA, Dave Vellante (@dvellante) and Paul Gillin (@pgillin), cohosts of theCUBE, from the SiliconANGLE Media team, closed the event discussing how Hewlett Packard Enterprise Co. (HPE) will define the company in the future.

Low key about hardware

Vellante began by saying that the event was low key. There was a great deal of discussion about HPE’s Vertica 8 (HPE’s SQL database analytics portfolio) and the open-source community ethos around HPE Haven OnDemand (a platform of more than 60 advanced machine learning APIs and services), as well as swirling rumors about private equity.

“We’ve heard nothing about HPE hardware during this conference. This was about software; it was about analytics, about database; it was almost like HPE was an addendum,” Gillin remarked.

Duking it out with Dell

Vellante pointed out that this underscores the challenge and the opportunity. “I’ve always felt HP has to do HPE; it’s got to have a larger contribution in software. That’s going to be a fundamental part of its strategy. I’m not sure it is. I’m not sure that Meg’s [Meg Whitman, CEO of HPE] goal is to be relevant in the software business anymore. … It seems like HPE is comfortable being an arms dealer to the cloud and duking it out with Dell as the alternative to public cloud,” he stated.

Referring to Vertica as a diamond in the rough, Gillin noted that the customers love the product and the compelling fact that it is complementary to Hadoop as a dedicated analytics engine. “I question why HPE would want to double down on the hardware business when it’s clear that software is where the growth is going to be,” he maintained.

Vellante is interested in seeing where HPE is taking its software business, saying that there needs to be clarity.

Addressing the rumors

Throughout the conference, many people were talking about HPE going private. Are the rumors true or can HPE put them to bed? Vellante believes they are exploring strategic options. Gillin felt that the company needs to address the rumors about taking the company private for internal peace of mind.

According to Vellante, the trend in private equity is to see the undervalued tech companies as an opportunity for the long term. He warned that there needs to be an investment and building the company up is “going to be invest, reposition, sell off some assets, refocus and maybe float it again.”

At the end of the conference, Vellante and Gillin concluded that HPE needs to talk more about being a software company.

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE and theCUBE’s coverage of the HPE Big Data Conference.

Photo by SiliconANGLE