Hewlett Packard Enterprise Co. made several big announcements earlier this year, as it shifted toward a cloud operating model.

How has the company evolved since then? And what news did it make during last week’s HPE Discover Barcelona event?

“The event brought all of the energy [from the] loyal fan base of Aruba, and a lot of GreenLake has been built on Aruba Central,” said theCUBE industry analyst Rob Strechay (pictured, left). “They talked about the growth that they’re experiencing and how they’re growing in the actual core networking of the enterprise. On top of that, how they’re making that more efficient and sustainable for folks as well.”

Strechay and co-host Rebecca Knight (right), spoke with industry executives and experts during theCUBE’s coverage of the HPE Discover Barcelona event. They explored how HPE is continuing to leverage its GreenLake platform for converged services and how AI is playing a role in supporting data migration, network security and observability. (* Disclosure below.)

Here are three key insights you may have missed from the event:

1. Security, AI and sustainability are playing key roles.

Among the big questions on Strechay’s mind after the event’s day 1 keynote was around how sustainability might play a more significant role moving forward. It’s been seen in research among the number of inquiries and RFPs going out.

“It could actually be a determining factor if you win the business or not,” Strechay said. “I think we all need to do what we can for the world, and I think this is great to hear.”

Last week’s event was also a chance to focus on security, zero trust, software as a service and cloud access security brokers, and other things built into networks. In addition, there was an opportunity to discuss how to configure things using AI more simply.

“You have to talk about AI, but I think they’ve been using AI inside for quite a while inside the GreenLake platform,” Strechay said. “I expect us to hear not only a lot about gen AI and how they’re enabling that, but [also] their partnerships.”

Here’s theCUBE’s complete video interview with Rob Strechay and Rebecca Knight:

2. AI is disrupting everything, but it’s viewed as a big opportunity.

One doesn’t have to look far to find an industry that is in the process of being reshaped by AI. When it comes to enterprise computing, AI, storage solutions and hybrid cloud are converging and reshaping the landscape. AI may be disrupting everything, but it’s also providing a huge opportunity for modern enterprises, according to Patrick Osborne, senior vice president and general manager of hybrid cloud data storage at HPE.

“We use AI all the time in our products to provide a differentiated product experience,” he said. “If you’re not doing that, you’re going to be disrupted.”

What HPE found was that companies that are doing AI native and that kind of application development, needed a new level of performance and scale. There are a lot of attributes in the storage layer that are foundational “to do all of your data preparation, data analysis and, ultimately, building models and tuning and inference,” according to Osborne.

During the event, HPE announced GreenLake for File Storage, an unstructured data platform delivered through the GreenLake cloud platform. It is intended to showcase the company’s goal of delivering solutions that satisfy the demands of AI-driven enterprises.

While companies eye these dramatic digital transformations, they’ll also be keeping an eye on how to prioritize sustainability. It’s important to emphasize that priority when considering AI, according to Chiara Selvetti, director of sustainable business at Atea Group, an IT service provider. Atea and HPE are collaborating to integrate sustainability into IT solutions.

“The biggest question … is how are you going to use [AI]?” Selvetti said. “If you’re using it to actually drive sustainability, to align your business strategy to your net-zero strategies, and using sustainability to power that … it’s a fairly easy calculation.”

HPE has had other big announcements around AI over the past month, including a supercomputing solution for generative AI. Working closely with Nvidia Corp., the goal for HPE has been to “build a scalable AI supercomputer in a box,” according to Justin Hotard, executive vice president and general manager of the HPC and AI Business Group at Hewlett Packard Labs.

“You can buy one, you can buy four, you can buy eight. We like multiples of four, so we’ll stick to that. But it allows you to really scale easily, and it’s all turnkey. It has all the software you need,” Hotard said. “Comes completely packaged with our services and, of course, is liquid-cooled, which we think is really important because that means you’ve got a much lower [power usage effectiveness] out of the gate.”

Here’s theCUBE’s complete video interview with Patrick Osborne:

3. There’s an effort to continue to enable partnerships.

The HPE Discover Barcelona event also gave industry analysts a chance to dive into the details of various partnerships at play. Among those is the partnership between HPE and Microsoft Corp., which boasts a 30-year relationship.

“I think that the last few years is really what brings us even more together, as we are moving from old cloud to hybrid,” said Valerie Da Fonesca, senior director of worldwide hybrid cloud sales at HPE. “We are really trying to bring that consistent experience operating model across all the different IT estates.”

Advanced Micro Devices Inc. and HPE, meanwhile, have been working together to forge new paths in sustainable computing. From AMD’s perspective, the exciting part is to be able to use advanced design techniques or advanced architecture to produce more sustainable and efficient solutions, according to Matt Foley, director of EMEA field application engineering at AMD.

“System vendors benefit from competitive component markets,” he said. “I saw this in my own history. I was certainly part of platform and system design, or system development. I can say that the systems that were developed when the component markets were competitive are better.”

That’s because it forces everyone to listen to the opposing view, according to Foley. It forces people to ask various questions.

“Do you really need that much space on the board? Do you really need that much power? You sure that’s not the best performance you can do?” Foley said. “Having that conversation on a more equal footing, because the component markets are competitive is a key to building better and better systems, with certainly great system makers like HPE.”

Looking to pursue innovation often moves outside partnerships with the big players too. HPE and the Ryder Cup have also formed a partnership to find innovation and sustainability in golf.

“In partnership with HPE, we were very keen that this wasn’t just about technology for the Ryder Cup — this was an innovation platform,” said Michael Cole, chief technology officer of the PGA European Tour and Ryder Cup Europe.

The partnership brought the use of Wi-Fi 6E, private 5G, sustainability measures and data visualization to the event.

Here’s theCUBE’s complete video interview with Valerie Da Fonesca and Dion Ubert, global hybrid cloud sales director at Microsoft:

To watch more of theCUBE’s coverage of the HPE Discover Barcelona event, here’s our complete event video playlist:

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

Photo: SiliconANGLE