The final day of HPE Discover ended with a clear message of unification and innovation, primarily focusing on Hewlett Packard Enterprise Co.’s GreenLake cloud platform.

SiliconANGLE Media’s livestreaming studio theCUBE’s industry analysts Dave Vellante (pictured, right) and Rob Strechay (left) presented a comprehensive final analysis of this week’s event, including an assessment of the significance of GreenLake in HPE’s business model. While HPE boasts a strong server and compute business, GreenLake, powered by Aruba Central intellectual property, is currently the crown jewel of the company’s portfolio.

HPE used the event to announce large language models as a service, a major offering under GreenLake.

“HPE is using its supercomputer mojo [from] acquisitions of Cray and SGI to really try to differentiate and move up the stack a little bit with a cloud-based offering,” Vellante said.

During theCUBE’s exclusive coverage of HPE Discover, Vellante and Strechay discussed how HPE aims to differentiate itself with its cloud-based offering and its emphasis on edge-centric, cloud-enabled, data-driven solutions. (* Disclosure below.)

HPE’s shift toward a cloud operating model

HPE is simplifying its messaging and consolidating within GreenLake. The emphasis on services “as a service,” which are readily consumable rather than customizable, signifies a shift toward the cloud operating model. This move is an indication that HPE is adapting to a new era where consumers want an actual application, not just a blueprint, according to Strechay. LLMs as a service is not merely an infrastructure as a service; it’s designed to be a platform as a service, targeting specific use cases and workloads that require high-performance computing.

“They’re very strong in the knitting of infrastructure, the software they got from Cray and from the acquisitions of SGI,” Strechay said. “They’re bringing that know-how of building all of these massive supercomputers that they’ve been building for governments and corporations for years … to bear on this LLM space, which has been really key.”

Sustainability was another significant theme during HPE Discover. HPE Chief Executive Antonio Neri highlighted the company’s efforts in working toward a true science-based net-zero posture. The company’s sustainability commitments, unlike many companies’ “greenwashing” efforts, are science-certified, meaning they’re independently verified by a third-party scientific community.

One of the key moments of the event was when Neri shared the stage with Matt Wood from Amazon Web Services Inc. Wood, representing AWS’ viewpoint, said that in the fullness of time, all workloads will move to the cloud. In response, Neri reaffirmed his belief in the hybrid model, which is the core of HPE’s strategy.

An intriguing development involved Equinix, with both Dell Technologies Inc. and HPE moving to prepopulate GreenLake inside Equinix. This strategy effectively reduces latency and eliminates the need for companies to build their own data centers and infrastructure, according to theCUBE analysts.

On the open-source front, HPE is doing significant business with Microsoft in the hybrid area. The Azure Stack from Microsoft has not been talked about much, but Azure Arc, its hybrid platform, has seen significant traction.

HPE has also been acquiring small software firms to support its cloud operating model, and according to Strechay, “It’s a very determined and specific way … bringing back software that it’s really not trying to do everything and be generic software, but how do they support that cloud operating model.”

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

(* Disclosure: This is an unsponsored editorial segment. However, theCUBE is a paid media partner for HPE Discover. HPE, Intel Corp. and other sponsors of theCUBE’s event coverage have no editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE