The digital revolution is reaching its zenith. Cloud computing adoption has become mainstream: The RightScale “2019 State of the Cloud” report shows 94% of enterprises now use cloud. And, as predicted by Wikibon Inc. in 2018, multicloud has emerged as far and away the most popular enterprise cloud strategy. According to RightScale, 84% of cloud-enabled companies have a multicloud strategy, and 58% of those are hybrid cloud.

Multicloud data storage is a practical choice, reducing costs and increasing security. But it is not without problems. The complexity of managing data in a dispersed multicloud environment is causing headaches from the C-suite to the systems admin staff.

Somewhat ironically, the solution to this problem is also its root: data. As the intelligence era dawns, artificial intelligence is poised to provide insights that can solve business issues and drive operational and strategic decisions. The technology is out there. Yet, very few businesses have adopted it. Only 37% of companies surveyed for the “2019 Gartner CIO Survey” were currently using AI or were in the process of adopting the technology.

“Every boardroom wants to leverage AI [and] machine learning just like cloud, but the challenge that customers are finding is there’s a big gap between concept and making it real,” said Sandeep Singh, vice president of storage marketing at Hewlett Packard Enterprise Co.

Asking the question: “How do we bring greater intelligence to how we move, manage and administer data within the enterprise?” Peter Burris (@plburris), host of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s livestreaming studio, and chief research officer and general manager of Wikibon, SiliconANGLE’s research arm, hosted a digital community event at theCUBE’s studio in Palo Alto, California.

During the event, Burris spoke with Singh and, in a separate interview, David Floyer (@dfloyer), Wikibon’s resident chief technical officer and expert in IT strategy, economic value justification, systems architecture, performance, clustering, and systems software. The event also included a ‘Chalk Talk’ tutorial on the intelligence data platform by HPE blogger and storage evangelist Calvin Zito and a live CrowdChat discussion with storage experts and the digital community (see the full interview with transcript here). (* Disclosure below.)

AI simplifies the complexity

Businesses want to gain value from data but are restricted by inconsistent availability and speed from their existing infrastructure, according to Singh. “People don’t want ‘sometimes fast,’ they want ‘always fast,’” Singh stated. “It’s about infrastructure that just runs seamlessly. It’s always on; it’s always fast.”

If data infrastructure ran seamlessly, companies would be free to focus on getting value from the data by introducing AI and machine learning processes, Singh explained. The insights would then allow businesses to make strategic and operational decisions to maximize efficiency and beat out the competition. This is the promise of business intelligence, where data is always fast, automated, available on-demand, and optimized for value by AI and ML.

Traditional intelligence is based in the human mind, and business intelligence is no different. Gaining the product and services is only one side of the equation. The other side is changing the mindset of how the business operates.

One change is taking a services approach with how to deal with data. “It starts with you want to be able to deal with data wherever it’s going to be,” Wikibon’s Floyer said. “Rather than think about each individual piece, think about services which are going to be applied to that data and can be applied not only to the data in one place but across all of that data.”

Data reduction techniques, such as compression and deduplication to eliminate duplicate data, are important, according to Floyer. Security is another. “It’s no longer good enough to say, this bit’s been encrypted, and then this bit’s encrypted; it’s got to be an end to end from one location to another location seamlessly provided,” he stated. “The weakest link determines the protection of the overall data.”

“It’s very clear that for enterprises to get more control over their data, their data assets, and how they create value out of data, they have to take a services mentality,” Burris said.

But gathering a random collection of services is not enough. “We have to think about how we’re going to organize those services into a platform that is pertinent and relevant to how business operates in a digital sense,” he stated.

CrowdChat participant and director of storage channel sales North America Sal Maita also commented: “When you get locked into a platform that doesn’t give you the ability to create a hybrid IT environment and isn’t data aware, you can get left behind.”

An intelligent era needs an intelligent platform

Enter HPE: “HPE’s strategy is to deliver an intelligent data platform,” Singh said.

As well as AI and ML to provide insights that can be leveraged for innovation and empowered business decisions, the HPE intelligent platform is built on-cloud, offering rapid response, on-demand capability, and flexible deployment of any application or tool on any infrastructure, Singh explained. It also offers the as-a-service experience, giving the customer complete control over the cloud environment.

HPE has been bringing its experience in complex services to hybrid, expanding its portfolio with the goal of taming the IT monster, and simplifying the complexity of multicloud strategies. The purchase of big-data analytics and machine-learning focused BlueData Software Inc. is indicative of this shift in focus.

“What we’re able to deliver with HPE BlueData is literally a catalog self-service experience where you can select and seamlessly build a pipeline, literally in a matter of minutes. And it’s just all completely hosted seamlessly — so making AI and ML essentially available for the mainstream through that,” Singh stated.

Key products in HPE’s intelligent data platform include InfoSight AI-driven predictive analytics AI, 3PAR StoreServ all-flash data storage, Nimble predictive flash storage, and GreenLake on-demand, pay-as-you-go infrastructure service.

A new addition is the company’s intelligent storage solution HPE Primera, which is “redefining mission-critical storage to deliver reliability and agility,” according to Singh. Intelligence allows the platform to not only store data, but to manage it as well. The ultimate coordinator, Primera removes roadblocks from the data management process, predicting what data will be needed when and where, and making sure it shows up on time and on location.

“Intelligence is key to data management. In the intelligence era, it’s important to have an intelligent data strategy,” Singh concluded.

Watch the complete video interview below. (* Disclosure: Hewlett Packard Enterprise Co. sponsored this segment of theCUBE. Neither HPE nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo by Dragos Gontariu on Unsplash