Hewlett Packard Enterprise Co. is sharpening its focus on being an edge-to-cloud services provider. In 2019, HPE committed to delivering its entire portfolio as a service by the end of 2022, and GreenLake, HPE’s edge-to-cloud platform for hybrid computing, is currently one of the company’s fastest-growing businesses.

So wherein lies the value of HPE’s cloud-based services in context of the market, and where could HPE be headed next in the future of cloud-based services?

“The performance of HPE has been good, it’s been solid, it’s been in the right place, especially given the circumstances of the pandemic and the impact of on-premises information technology,” said Daniel Newman (pictured), principal analyst and founding partner at Futurum Research. “Twenty-five or so percent of workloads are in the public cloud. That means the rest need services from companies like HPE, so the [total addressable market] is growing. The overall size of the workload, the volumes of data are all growing exponentially, and that’s an opportunity.”

Newman spoke with Dave Vellante, host of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s livestreaming studio, during the HPE GreenLake Announcement event. They discussed HPE’s opportunities to grow in cloud-based services and other trends in the digital landscape. (* Disclosure below.)

HPE’s ‘massive opportunity’ at the edge

With the adoption of the cloud subscription model comes entire business processes around IT investments. Digital change is no longer about servers, storage or networking databases — virtualized services are enabling digital transformations. This is organizationally complex, and HPE is reshaping its business to help enterprises more successfully deploy SaaS-type workloads.

“The involvement and the importance of the role that HPE is playing is huge,” Newman said. “As we’ve seen with some of the bigger players, [this] can be an extremely attractive value proposition.”

With increasing investment in hybrid services comprising storage, compute power and edge-of-network solutions, HPE is positioning itself for customer optionality, according to Newman. As HPE gets deeper into data management, the ecosystem expands to incorporate partners in open source, a necessary component when building an abstraction layer to protect customers from the complexities of cloud-to-edge data management. It all adds up to a substantial market opportunity for HPE.

“The edge is [also] a massive opportunity,” Newman said. “You just look at the amount of data that vehicles are going to be creating … in the coming years. They’re basically massive rolling data centers full of chips, compute networking and storage. This is all going to take significant infrastructure investments at scale, and it’s creating this humongous opportunity at the edge.”

5G’s impact will also bring more data and connects more devices. Such a dynamic network needs intelligent infrastructure, software and services, according to Newman. Sustainability efforts are also going to offer another huge opportunity for growth for companies like HPE. Companies will need to invest in trying to capture, comprehend and manage the data around their carbon footprint and understand how they are going to achieve carbon neutrality. All of these initiatives require artificial intelligence and machine learning capabilities.

Newman expects leading enterprises are going to find a way to extract more value from such data  through applied use of artificial intelligence, machine learning, neural networks and deep learning and other important capabilities. Noting the market trend for homegrown chip partnerships to boost AI initiatives, Newman said this is “going to be an area that on-prem, through hybrid offerings, we’re going to want to see [HPE] compete.”

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

Photo: SiliconANGLE