As Hewlett Packard Enterprise Co. gears up for its HPE Discover Virtual Experience, taking place on June 23, the tech industry is dealing with the ups and downs of a global pandemic that affects every industry around the world.

The effects of the coronavirus have even hit HPE leadership directly as Chief Executive Officer Antonio Neri announced on Twitter June 17 that he tested positive for the coronavirus. He said he’s “doing much better” and is “glad to be getting back to normal.”

HPE is holding its annual event after a series of recent company evolutions that included top leadership changes, key acquisitions, a scaled-down portfolio of services, focused efforts on edge computing, a key new open-source project and expanding partnerships with backup-and-recovery providers.

“HPE is a company that’s gone through a lot of change,” said Stu Miniman, principal research contributor at Wikibon and host of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s livestreaming studio. “It’s a different company than the HP we once knew. They’re now focused on enterprise.”

This week’s HPE Discover Virtual Experience — transformed from an in-person event into a free online event amid the COVID-19 pandemic — will feature keynotes by Neri and JC2 Ventures CEO John Chambers, a women-in-tech panel focused on building resilience during complex times and a discussion about how the pandemic has affected the sports industry.

During the event, theCUBE analysts will be speaking with key HPE executives, technologists, and industry experts, including HPE’s Kumar Sreekanti, chief technology officer and head of software; Patrick Osborne, vice president and general manager of hyperconverged infrastructure; Dave Larson, vice president and chief technology officer of the cloudless initiative; Scott Yow, vice president and general manager of hybrid cloud; and Soumyendu Sarkar, distinguished technologist and director of AI at HP Labs. (* Disclosure below.)

Evolving at the edge

Key to HPE’s ongoing evolution is a services portfolio seeking to meet the growing demand for multicloud management and edge computing. To this end, HPE’s made several acquisitions in recent years, broadening its efforts in networking, artificial intelligence, analytics, and backup and recovery. Aruba was one of these strategic acquisitions to build a networking business, incorporating a strong wireless component into HPE’s portfolio to boost penetration into the edge-computing market.

It will take a convergence of these acquired investments to truly service the edge, pulling together security, networking and analytics for the visibility customers need in managing data transactions at scale across end-user devices, according to Miniman.

“Looking at the traditional data-center market, cloud and edge, HPE has positions here for servicing hybrid and multicloud,” he said. “Edge is an area they want to go after with services. Security, networking — pulling all these pieces together … the edge is where it converges. I expect to hear a lot on edge.”

Open source is another area of investment to help support HPE’s efforts, as demonstrated with its most recent acquisition, Scytale.io. The startup is known for the creation of two open-source projects, SPIFFE and SPIRE, both of which have been added to the Cloud Native Computing Foundation’s collection of supported initiatives. It’s a landmark development for HPE, marking the first major open-source project for which it’s primarily responsible. 

Now that HPE embodies a more focused, scaled-down portfolio of services, partners become an even more important aspect of HPE’s ecosystem. Beyond open-source efforts, other opportunities HPE is taking to collaborate include deep partnerships with backup-and-recovery providers Veeam Software Inc. and Cohesity Inc. Hyperconverged infrastructure provider Nutanix called HPE its fastest-growing partner since teaming up in April 2019, while VMware vSAN remains another important partner in the HCI space. 

Pensando Systems Inc. is among the newest and more innovative of HPE’s partners, as the edge computing hardware startup’s flagship Distributed Services Platform is now available as a factory-supported option on HPE’s ProLiant, Apollo and Edgeline Server Platforms.

HPE is both an investor and customer for Pensando, which is developing and marketing its unique distributed computing platform to provide compute solutions wherever data is generated.

“Instead of selling a classic server, HPE now has the ability to provide the security, networking and storage solutions to their customers,” said Prem Jain, chief executive officer of Pensando. “It’s a model that’s unprecedented in the sense that it’s totally distributed. Customers enable whatever service they need there even if they didn’t plan it in the past.”

Livestream of the HPE Discover Virtual Experience

The HPE Discover Virtual Experience is a livestream event, with additional interviews to be broadcast on theCUBE. You can register for free here to access the live event. Plus, you can watch theCUBE interviews here.

How to watch theCUBE interviews

We offer you various ways to watch the live coverage of the HPE Discover Virtual Experience, including theCUBE’s dedicated website and YouTube channel. You can also get all the coverage from this year’s events on SiliconANGLE.

TheCUBE Insights podcast

SiliconANGLE also has podcasts available of archived interview sessions, available on iTunes, Stitcher, and Spotify, which you can enjoy while on the go.

Guests who will be interviewed on theCUBE during the HPE Discover Virtual Experience

Guests who will be interviewed on theCUBE during the HPE Discover Virtual Experience include Neri and other HPE executives: Marissa Freeman, chief brand officer; Pradeep Kumar, senior vice president and general manager for Pointnext; Dr. Eng Goh, SVP and chief technology officer for AI; Kumar Sreekanti, CTO and head of software; Neil MacDonald, SVP and GM for compute; and Jim Jackson, chief marketing officer. 

Plus, we’ll talk with HPE’s John Shultz, chief legal and administrative officer; Dave Husak, CTO of cloudless; Dave Larson, VP and CTO for the Cloudless Service Mesh Initiative; Omer Asad, VP and GM for primary storage and data services; Sorin Cheran, VP and fellow of the Artificial Intelligence Strategy & Solution Group; Arti Garg, head of advanced AI solutions and technologies; Jas Sood, VP of commercial sales; Doreen Voo, marketing and business development leader; Scott Yow, VP and GM for hybrid cloud; Krista Satterthwaite, VP and GM for Synergy and Bladesystems.

We will also be interviewing HPE distinguished technologists Krishnaprasad Shastry and Soumyendu Sarkar, who also serves as director of AI for HP Labs. HPE global heads Justin Hotard, corporate SVP and president for HPE Japan; Chellappan Narayanan, senior director for ecosystems sales for North America; and Arwa Kaddoura, vice president for worldwide sales of HPE GreenLake will also make an appearance on theCUBE.

Other guests joining theCUBE include David Smith, pre-sales field solutions architect for Tech Data; Paresh Kharya, director for AI, deep learning and cloud computing for NVIDIA Corp.; Stephen Laaper, principal at Deloitte; Riccardo Di Blasio, chief revenue officer at Commvault Systems Inc.; Tarkan Maner, chief commercial officer at Nutanix Inc.; Monica Livingston, artificial intelligence sales director for the Americas and EMEA at Intel Corp.; and Alice Taylor,  VP for content innovation and director of StudioLAB at The Walt Disney Studios, to name a few.

(* Disclosure: TheCUBE is a paid media partner for HPE Discover Virtual Experience. Neither HPE, the sponsor for theCUBE’s event coverage, nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Image: SiliconANGLE