As Hewlett-Packard Enterprise Co. prepares to kick off HPE Discover on June 18, it’s been a long and winding road for the company since its inaugural event back in 2011. Back then, the event featured a performance by Paul McCartney of The Beatles fame.

The agenda for this year’s HPE Discover is vastly different than what was on tap for discussion 13 years ago. HPE is now focused on a hybrid strategy that includes edge-to-cloud and networking for artificial intelligence, underlined by the pending closure of its Juniper Networks Inc. acquisition announced several months ago. As Antonio Neri, president and chief executive officer of HPE, told SiliconANGLE in an exclusive interview, “We have been saying that the enterprise of the future will be edge-centric, cloud-enabled and data-driven.”

TheCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s livestreaming studio, will be on the ground in Las Vegas, June 18-20, with coverage of HPE Discover as the company positions itself for the generative AI era. TheCUBE will provide on-site reporting and exclusive interviews with key company executives, industry experts and customers to gain firsthand insight into HPE’s future enterprise plans.

“It feels like post-COVID,” said Dave Vellante, theCUBE Research chief analyst, during an interview with Jason Newton, vice president of global marketing at HPE, in advance of the June conference. “There’s just a new energy around HPE and certainly Discover.” (* Disclosure below.)

Here’s the complete HPE Discover preview interview with Dave Vellante and Jason Newton:

HPE Discover agenda includes tracks on Aruba and AI

The conference will have a different look this year, according to Newton, with a concentrated focus on several key areas of HPE’s business. One change is that a previous event solely for Aruba Networking will now become part of the Discover gathering.

HPE has been actively adding enhancements to Aruba this year, with the release in April of high-capacity Wi-Fi 7 access points, providing IoT connectivity for routing data used in AI training and inferencing. Aruba also received a recent update that integrated custom AI models into its cloud-based networking platform.

The inclusion of the Aruba event in Discover fits with a central theme for the June gathering, which will highlight HPE’s ongoing work in the AI field.

“In addition to that conference within Discover happening, we built a whole program just around AI,” Newton said. “There’s a whole dedicated set of content, speakers, customers available to talk to, demonstration areas, hands-on labs. You’ll see a lot of new innovations around the platform experience, especially tuned toward AI, that we’ll be announcing at Discover this year.”

Check out what’s in store for theCUBE’s coverage of the HPE Discover:

Focus on GreenLake and the hybrid cloud

HPE Discover will also include a separate program track dedicated to the hybrid cloud, the cornerstone of which is HPE GreenLake. Last fall, the company announced the formation of a new Hybrid Cloud business unit, which combined the GreenLake platform with HPE Storage and GreenLake Cloud Services solutions.

HPE has made a number of strategic acquisitions to bolster its AI and analytics capabilities for GreenLake. These included the purchase of Determined AI Inc. in 2021, along with Pachyderm Inc. and OpsRamp Inc. earlier this year.

The company’s hybrid strategy has become clearer as it heads into the June event. It will leverage GreenLake to unify data within the hybrid cloud and drive AI-based workflows.

“Under the covers of the solutions and the HPE GreenLake platform, we’re bringing much more of the AI operations capabilities built-in so that it can be AI driven,” Newton explained. “If you piece apart that [AI] workload, tuning, training, inferencing, and machine learning … and then you look at the workflow like building the data pipeline, feeding the data and the data scientist, it’s a hybrid workload. That ties directly into our strategy.”

Assessing impact of Juniper Networks acquisition

Attendees at HPE Discover this year will be looking for signals around the impact of the company’s acquisition of Juniper Networks. HPE announced its plans in early January to acquire Juniper and its Mist AI capabilities for $14 billion.

The addition of Juniper is significant because it represents HPE’s big bet on the future of hybrid networking. It is the company’s largest acquisition since 2011, prior to the firm’s split into HPE and HP Inc.

Analysts view the integration of Mist AI, which provides enhancements for network security and wireless access, as HPE’s bid to position itself in the rapidly expanding AI and cloud-native markets. The acquisition is unlikely to be finalized by the time HPE Discover is held, but its potential impact will certainly be discussed at the Las Vegas event.

“[By] adding Juniper to our strengths with Aruba, the core of the company now is going to be a networking company, but it does play into AI,” Newton said. “Just like you need different resources for compute and storage optimized for the demands of AI, the networking is going to be the same. You’re also going to see an increase in complexity in all of these environments, and one of the strengths of combining our company with their company is what we can do with AI operations to power and manage that and deliver a whole new experience.”

TheCUBE event livestream

Don’t miss theCUBE’s coverage of HPE Discover from June 18-20. Plus, you can watch theCUBE’s event coverage on-demand after the live event.

How to watch theCUBE interviews

We offer you various ways to watch theCUBE’s coverage of HPE Discover, including theCUBE’s dedicated website and YouTube channel. You can also get all the coverage from this year’s events on SiliconANGLE.

How to watch HPE’s keynote livestream

Don’t miss HPE’s keynote livestream prior to theCUBE’s exclusive coverage. TheCUBE analysts will provide insightful follow-up discussions with keynote presenters, including Chief Executive Officer Antonio Neri.

TheCUBE Insights podcast

SiliconANGLE also has podcasts available of archived interview sessions, available on iTunes, Stitcher and Spotify, which you can enjoy while on the go.

SiliconANGLE also has analyst deep dives in our Breaking Analysis podcast, available on iTunes, Stitcher and Spotify.

Guests

During HPE Discover, theCUBE analysts will talk with industry professionals about developments and innovations supporting gen AI architectures, as well as advancements in edge-to-cloud computing.

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

Image: SiliconANGLE