As Hewlett Packard Enterprise Co. furthers its journey to a hybrid computing solutions provider, the legacy tech giant works toward analyzing, monetizing and protecting data during the mass digital transformations taking place across commerce and all verticals.

HPE’s GreenLake edge-to-cloud platform is taking the lead on this effort. As part of the recent “An HPE GreenLake Announcement” event, theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s livestreaming studio, interviewed executives and thought leaders on HPE’s opportunities to grow in cloud-based services and other trends in the digital landscape. (* Disclosure below)

Here are five key revelations:

1. HPE is increasingly seeing itself as a data management company

Edge-to-cloud, for hybrid, is one of the principal ways HPE is reconfiguring to software-as-a-service-type workloads; and it is a growing market, according to analysts at the event. Edge, in particular, is “a massive opportunity,” explained Daniel Newman, principal analyst at Futurum Research, who was interviewed by theCUBE.

Vehicles are just one future example, according to Newman.

“They’re basically [going to be] massive rolling data centers full of chips, compute, networking and storage,” he said.

That shift to edge, along with the connections created by faster and less latent networks such as 5G, is expected to instigate infrastructure spending (as is industry carbon-footprint sustainability efforts from industry; they need AI and ML too). It’s a need for data that’s driving all this, though, and HPE is positioning itself to take advantage.

2. Customers want to analyze shared data across different IT infrastructures

HPE’s purchase of CloudPhysics for its GreenLake platform is aiming to solve an emerging issue: letting both customers and partners view identical datasets from their physical data centers and choose solutions to problems. Simulations for migrations is one of the SaaS features, allowing all involved to get an idea as to cost, for example.

“Partners all of a sudden get this opportunity to be much more strategic to their customers,” said Sandeep Singh, HPE’s vice president of storage marketing, during an interview with theCUBE.

Repairing, upgrading and adapting data centers to hybrid cloud environments is part of the modeling, and HPE believes it will now be possible to replicate exact infrastructures.

3. Edge-to-cloud services enable required digital transformations

Industry and commerce want digital transformation now more than ever, in part due to COVID remote working and commerce. And HPE wants to meet this market demand to connect edge computing to public cloud.

“When you run a multinational global enterprise that has edge, data centers [and] manufacturing facilities, there are just unbelievable requirements on technology,” Newman told theCUBE, referencing servers, storage, networking and databases morphing into cloud services. “We’ve got to connect that public cloud.”

HPE, with its hybrid skills, has a head start, he added.

Industry analyst Dion Hinchcliffe of Constellation Research believes HPE’s Edge-to-Cloud Adoption Framework — announced during the event — is an indicator HPE is taking this area seriously. The framework optimizes the cloud model for organizations.

“A lot of key pieces have fallen into place,” he said in an interview with theCUBE.

Notably, that new framework is structured around business, not technology, explained Alexey Gerasimov, an executive in HPE’s hybrid cloud practice.

“We’re just trying to help them address the outcomes, not necessarily to give them more tech,” he told theCUBE.

The framework covers items such as identifying people requirements and strategy, for example. HPE, in a blog post recently, claimed the framework uses “proven methodologies” and works with “any cloud operating model.”

Protecting data, too, is part of GreenLake’s new SaaS offerings. The Zerto acquisition is part of its edge-to-cloud platform.

“You’re going to see compliance-as-a-service, you’re going to see data protection-as-a-service, and you’re going to see disaster recovery-as-a-service,” said Omer Asad, general manager of data management SaaS, infrastructure and HCI at Nimble Storage, an HPE company, during an interview with theCUBE.

InfoSight App Insights is another acquisition that fits well into this portfolio. It detects application anomalies.

“It’s 100% SaaS, with nothing to install,” Asad said in another interview with theCUBE.

4. We are entering the age of analytics with everything

HPE intends to scale data management across all computing environments to advance next-gen, edge-to-cloud analytics. The idea is to thwart challenges related to analytics, which most conspicuously includes that it can become expensive to pull large amounts of data out of a public cloud — something necessary to perform one’s analytics if all an organization’s data is in public cloud.

“Cost-performance tradeoffs have started to become really important and started to enter the conversation now,” said Vishal Lall, chief operating officer of HPE Aruba, in an interview with theCUBE.

HPE’s hybrid environment, cloud analytics, along with the HPE GreenLake edge-to-cloud platform, optimized for hybrid environments fixes that because it allows companies to keep some of that data on prem or on-site, reducing analytics data retrieval costs, Lall explained.

Unified analytics, described as GreenLake for analytics, ties in the data engineering and data science, Matt Maccaux, global field chief technology officer of Ezmeral software at HPE, told theCUBE.

That new product is essentially a Kubernetes-native object store, specifically for analytics.

“Cloud-based analytical capability, machine-learning data engineering through hybrid analytics,” he said of Ezmeral. Notably, it’s offering on-prem, container-based scaling.

5. HPE’s as-a-service emphasizes on-prem

HPE is bringing the cloud experience to the customer on-prem, according to Keith White, general manager of GreenLake at the announcement event.

“They get to have it automated, self-serve, easy to consume. They pay for what they use. They can have it in their data center, they can have it at the edge, they can have it at the silo, and we can manage it all for them,” he said in an interview with theCUBE.

This reinforces HPE’s 2019 projection that it would be going all SaaS in due course.

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.)

Image: HPE