When the dust settled following a flurry of announcements from the HPE Discover EU conference in Spain last November, customers and analysts were left with a clearer understanding over how Hewlett Packard Enterprise Co. was going to answer questions about its future direction. The conversation begins and ends with data, specifically the applications needed to manage information wherever it may reside and the software and service offerings to meet customer expectations in a hybrid information technology world.

“Regardless of where my data sits, I need to manage it, I need to secure it, I need to process it, I need to translate it into insight. That’s really what our strategy is all about,” said Jim Jackson (pictured, left), senior vice president of Enterprise Group marketing at HPE.

Jackson stopped by the set of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s mobile livestreaming studio, and spoke with co-hosts Dave Vellante (@dvellante) and Peter Burris (@plburris) during the HPE Discover EU event. He was joined by Jason Newton (pictured, right), vice president of global marketing and messaging at HPE. They discussed a focus on software and services and the key role that consumption models are playing in HPE’s overall strategy. (* Disclosure below.)

Multicloud and AI tools for enterprise customers

Various announcements released during the conference and earlier in the year painted a picture of HPE as being much more driven by its software and services offerings. Recently introduced OneSphere employs software as a service portal for multicloud management. Nimble’s InfoSight analytics tool will now be extended across HPE’s 3PAR storage platform. The company teamed up with VMware Inc. in August to offer HPE Synergy as a composable infrastructure solution using a software-defined platform.

Pointnext, HPE’s comprehensive services portfolio, highlights a consumption model focus. HPE executives have singled out Pointnext as a major factor in partner interest for go-to-market strategies.

“Every one of our partners is saying, ‘I want to take your IT expertise and that consumption-based model and wrap it around a total solution,’” Newton said. “That’s what is white hot right now.”

In December, HPE and Rackspace Inc. announced a partnership to provide OpenStack Private Cloud under a pay-per-use model. The news offered further evidence that HPE is responding to consumption models that are driving enterprise business.

“This is giving our customers the flexibility to now spin-up very quickly private cloud environments with a lot of the public cloud capabilities,” Jackson said. “We believe that innovation is a team sport, and we’re leaning in really hard.”

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of the HPE Discover EU event. (* Disclosure: TheCUBE is a paid media partner for the HPE Discover EU event. Neither Hewlett Packard Enterprise Co., the event sponsor, nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE