Hewlett Packard Enterprise Co. (HPE) will host HPE Discover 2015 Europe in London this week, and theCUBE will be there with Wikibon Co-founder and Chief Analyst David Vellante and SiliconANGLE Co-founder and CEO John Furrier, probing for answers to the questions swirling around the new business.

Coming just a month after the separation of Hewlett-Packard Co. into two companies, this is a particularly significant edition of HPE Discover. HPE customers who cannot attend in person can watch the live stream on theCUBE and pose questions for Dave and John to ask HPE executives, customers, and partners on the accompanying CrowdChat. And there are many questions to be answered, among them:

• With the divestiture complete, what is HPE’s strategy going forward? This is the biggest question, and HP CEO Meg Whitman and her team need to outline it and reassure customers. We can expect that the general sessions, which will be broadcast live on theCUBE, will focus on presenting the HPE strategy in detail.
• What is the impact of the slow collapse of IT hardware pricing on HPE? Wikibon analysts have documented the steady decrease in hardware margins under pressure from Open Source and public cloud business services. Traditional IT infrastructure has become a no-growth market and may be seeing net shrinkage as increasing numbers of compute loads move from private data centers to public cloud infrastructure. How is HP coping with this steady erosion of its traditional markets?
• Is HPE able to compete successfully with Asian white box manufacturers in the cloud hyper-scale computing market? This is the growth market for IT hardware. It has been dominated by Taiwanese and other Asian white-box hardware manufacturers. However, at Dellworld 2015, Dell, Inc., executives on theCUBE said they are selling servers to Microsoft Azure, proving that U.S. manufacturers can compete in the hyperscale market. If HPE can succeed there, it can start growing sales volumes of its core hardware.
• What is happening with Helion? With the recent announcement that HPE was abandoning its attempt to compete in the public cloud, Helion became an on-premise only cloud solution. As hybrid cloud increases in popularity with large enterprises and government agencies, will Helion become HP’s main offering for hybrid architectures? Specifically, will it be HP’s on-premise cloud for its new agreement with Microsoft, Inc., announced last week, or will HP be running Microsoft’s on-premise cloud tools on top of HPE hardware?
• What about Eucalyptus and AWS? A year ago HP bought Eucalyptus Systems Inc, a startup focused specifically on developing an on-premise cloud solution for hybrid clouds using AWS. Subsequently HP announced that Eucalyptus had been integrated into Helion.  All this implied that HP might be positioned to make a partnership deal with AWS, but no announcement was ever made. Is HP selling Helion to AWS customers? What does the new Microsoft cloud agreement mean for the possibility of an HP-AWS hybrid cloud agreement?
• What is the status of Moonshot? HPE has had great hopes for its innovative hardware architecture, but it takes time for companies to adopt something as radical as Moonshot. Customers should expect news of growth in Moonshot sales as well as updates to the hardware and middleware.

One thing is clear: HPE Discover Europe 2015 will be a particularly significant milestone in providing guidance for where HPE, freed of the PC business, is going.

Image courtesy Hewlett Packard Enterprise