Your car has software, your smart watch has software and your cell phone has software. All of these devices and the data that they use and process are part of the Internet of Things, one of the fastest growth areas in IT, according to Dave Sliter, vice president and general manager for communications and media solutions at Hewlett Packard Enterprise Co.

“From an HPE perspective, IoT’s all about the ‘explosion on the edge,’ going from millions and billions of devices to trillions and quadrillions,” said Sliter. He explained that HPE already has compute and storage on the edge; the interesting part, from a telco point of view, is the connectivity and device management —  auto-discover, provision, fault management — have to all be completely automated.

Sliter and Paul Gudonis, president of Inmarsat Enterprise, joined Dave Vellante (@dvellante) and Paul Gillin (@pgillin), co-hosts of theCUBE, from the SiliconANGLE Media team, during HPE Discover EU, held in London. (*Disclosure below.) They discussed where HPE and Inmarsat reside in the IoT and provided a use case on how IoT helped palms trees in Malaysia to grow and flourish.

The ‘middle ground’ of IoT

Sliter observed that with IoT, HPE is finding that innovation is occurring within a very broad ecosystem of companies. While those companies are very good at making specialized devices and specialized applications in the cloud, they don’t have any interest about anything in-between.

“They come to HPE and say, ‘If you can do the connectivity, device management as a service, and just take care of everything in the middle, we’ll take care of everything on the edge, in the cloud,’” Sliter explained.

How IoT can help grow palm trees

Gudonis said that IoT has been in transportation and logistics for quite some time, but what’s interesting is its uses for agriculture. Agriculture has very complex problems of water and soil management and the larger problem of provisioning enough food for growing populations, which comes down to driving the productivity of food production.

“If we can use water in a smarter manner, without wasting it; if we can actually produce food at lower cost, we can actually start to drive a more sustainable ecosystem for food production,” said Gudonis.

A palm plantation in Malaysia wanted to improve its productivity. To help palms reach their peak growth, they have exacting needs for water consumption and growing environments. To meet those conditions, IoT sensors were placed throughout the plantation, including in the soil, to measure and track the exact amount of water each plant receives. Additionally, sensors tracked humidity, air salinity and other critical data needed to ensure maximum growth.

HPE has taken these lessons learned on controlling irrigation on a palm plantation and is applying them to conserving water on a walnut plantation in California, a state currently dealing with drought issues. It was an initial concept developed by Inmarsat that HPE has exploded, exponentially, into other areas.

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE and theCUBE’s coverage of HPE Discover EU. (*Disclosure: HPE and other companies sponsor some HPE Discover EU segments on SiliconANGLE Media’s theCUBE. Neither HPE nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo by SiliconANGLE