Hewlett Packard Enterprise Co. was one of the first to steer the edge computing and hybrid cloud bandwagon years ago.

Now, the discourse has shifted to the unification of data within hybrid cloud to account for the different data personas and inherent technologies, such as artificial intelligence.

“You can’t do hybrid without edge connectivity securely — you would have an incomplete hybrid cloud or a cloud by accident,” said Jason Newton (pictured), vice president of integrated marketing, events and messaging at HPE. “Once you have those two elements, you can now start to unify the experience, but most importantly, unify the data and start to bring the right resources to the data.”

Newton recently spoke with theCUBE industry analysts Dave Vellante and Rob Strechay at HPE Discover, during an exclusive broadcast on theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s livestreaming studio. They discussed some unfolding hybrid cloud trends from the end-user perspective and HPE itself. (* Disclosure below.)

Selling outcomes rather than products

HPE’s ideology is implementing features that tackle specific cloud problems being faced by the majority of users, two of which are in the areas of observability and AIOps. Subsequently, the company hopes to become indispensable to organizations through problems solved rather than merely selling products, according to Newton.

“Now I’m selling the opportunity or I’m selling the problem we solve — I’m not selling the thing anymore,” he explained. “And it’s a much more strategic conversation that leads in a lot more directions, where if you come in with a product, it’s usually a yes or no.”

There have also been strategic acquisitions from HPE in a bid to bolster its AI and analytics capabilities; two such examples are the machine learning pipeline automation tool Pachyderm and Determined.ai Inc., which is an open-source platform for training deep learning models.

“We did Pachyderm, we did Determined AI, and now we have OpsRamp,” Newton said. “With HPE GreenLake, [we’re able to] have not only edge conversations and traditional private cloud conversations, but now we’re starting to talk about analytics workflows. We’re starting to take a look at workflows across the entire environment.”

But more than just acquiring technologies, there’s also the absorption of new talent to accompany it — which is just as important, Newton added.

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

(* Disclosure: Hewlett Packard Enterprise Co. and Intel Corp. sponsored this segment of theCUBE. Neither HPE and Intel nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE