For Hewlett Packard Enterprise Co. Chief Executive Officer Antonio Neri, the HPE Discover gathering in Las Vegas this week was an opportunity for celebration.

After making a commitment in 2019 to deliver HPE’s entire portfolio as-a-service by the end of this year, Neri (pictured) used his Tuesday keynote to declare victory.

“It’s a proud moment, because our team worked really had to deliver on that promise in the face of a lot of challenges,” Neri said. “Everything is an as-a-service experience from the moment you log through the HP GreenLake platform to all of the cloud services we offer. It was a pivotal moment in our journey.”

Neri spoke with theCUBE industry analysts Dave Vellante and Lisa Martin during theCUBE’s exclusive coverage of the HPE Discover event. They discussed GreenLake’s contribution to HPE’s success, the company’s value proposition, the role of silicon in future innovation and recent actions by the federal government. (* Disclosure below.)

Over an exabyte of data

HPE’s conversion to an as-a-service model has been focused on deployment of its GreenLake edge-to-cloud platform. HPE now has 65,000 customers and 120,000 users on GreenLake, according to data supplied by the company this week.

“We now have under GreenLake management over an exabyte of data,” Neri said. “That’s a unique opportunity to improve and learn. What comes next is how we innovate on the platform at the pace that customers are demanding.”

As companies place data at the operational center, the need grows for an architecture that can leverage services and primitives of hyperscale cloud to deliver value. This paradigm is more widely known as the rise of the supercloud, although Neri prefers to think of this as more of an underlying layer in the enterprise.

“I don’t like to call it supercloud. I call it a substrate,” Neri explained. “Customers don’t have the time to build stuff; they just need to innovate. That’s our value proposition. We’re enabling customers to power the next-gen business models that they need.”

Silicon-based solutions

To help customers enable new models, HPE has been partnering with various chip makers to provide silicon-based solutions. These include the Ampere Computing LLC-supported HPE ProLiant RL300 Gen 11 server announced this week and the company’s exascale Frontier supercomputer that was released last month.

“We have a lot of silicon built into our switching portfolio,” Neri said. “When you look at Frontier, that high-performance exascale system, the magic of that is in the silicon we developed. We can process billions and billions of transactions per second.”

The importance of silicon to HPE’s business has been underscored by the company’s interest in funding for the CHIPS For America Act, which would provide $52 billion in subsidies for U.S. chipmakers. Although passed by Congress, the funds have yet to be authorized. Neri signed a letter in December, along with the CEOs of many of the tech industry’s biggest companies, urging an end to the impasse.

“It’s important to customers because they need access to technologies in a more ubiquitous way, and it’s important for the United States,” Neri said. “Supply chain disruption has caused a lot of consternation and disruption across many industries. We need to make sure that the U.S. addresses this problem. Once you fall behind, it takes a long time to catch up.”

Recent actions by the federal government have also led HPE to publicly address a societal issue. When the U.S. Supreme Court issued a ruling on Friday overturning its previous decision protecting a woman’s liberty to decide whether to have an abortion, Neri posted a statement on Twitter about HPE’s values in support of a woman’s right to choose. A company spokesperson indicated that HPE would cover out of state care for its employees, including abortions.

“What happened last week was a sad moment in our history,” Neri told theCUBE.

Here’s the complete video interview, part of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of the HPE Discover event:

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

Photo: SiliconANGLE