How is AI fundamentally reshaping enterprise IT, driving efficiency, and balancing critical factors like cost and flexibility?
At HPE Discover Las Vegas 2025, join David Nicholson and Keith Townsend from The Futurum Group as they host an insightful session with Patrick Osborne, SVP & GM, Cloud Data Infrastructure, HPE Storage at HPE. This discussion reveals the future of enterprise IT, with a focus on AI’s crucial role in simplifying hybrid cloud operations and scaling innovation across rapidly evolving landscapes.
Key takeaways include:
πΉAI’s Transformative Role in IT Operations: A deep dive into how AI, particularly Agentic AI, is fundamentally redefining IT operations, ushering in an unprecedented era of enhanced efficiency and advanced automation.
πΉAccelerating & Scaling AI Innovation: Insights into the rapid acceleration of AI innovation across various industries, coupled with a discussion of the critical challenges in scaling these technologies securely and efficiently within the enterprise.
πΉSimplifying Hybrid IT Management: Explore cutting-edge technologies and strategic approaches designed to streamline and simplify the complexities of managing hybrid IT environments, enabling seamless operations across diverse infrastructures.
πΉNavigating IT Transformation & Financial Models: An examination of the latest trends in IT transformation, providing guidance on how enterprises can strategically stay ahead, alongside new financial models offering the essential flexibility for investments in hybrid cloud and AI technologies.
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Transcript:
Keith Townsend: HPE Discover Las Vegas 2025. I’m your host Keith Townsend, joined with my co-host David Nicholson. And David, this is actually, I’m surprised, your first time meeting Patrick Osborne.
David Nicholson: I know. Strange thing.
Patrick Osborne: Yes, very auspicious.
Keith Townsend: Senior Vice President GM of Cloud and Data Center Infrastructure. HPE, welcome to the show.
Patrick Osborne: Thank you very much. Great show. Glad you guys are here.
David Nicholson: Welcome.
Patrick Osborne: Yeah.
David Nicholson: So you’ve heard of this thing called AI, I assume. Let’s talk about where this finds itself in the world of operations. And you know, specifically because I actually teach in Stabbig’s executive education programs at Wharton, where my students in the AI program, the CTO program, are constantly asking how do I save money and, or make money using AI? And they want to see companies like HPE drinking their own champagne.
Patrick Osborne: Oh yeah.
David Nicholson: It’s one thing they definitely want to hear about. So talk to us about operations and how. What’s your view on AI in the world of operations?
Patrick Osborne: Yeah, so a couple things. So obviously it’s a huge cornerstone of a bunch of the announcements we made this week. Very prevalent. So, you know, in the hybrid cloud division, we’re helping people operationalize AI, right. So we have a number of offerings, private cloud for AI. Right. So we’re taking a lot of the mystery out of deploying infrastructure and service of a number of these AI workloads. And you know, so we can get very quick time to first token time to first inference for folks running all the software, all the runtime environment they need. Obviously we provide a very scalable data plane. It’s all about the data really at the end of the day. And one of the cool things that we announced this week is we started a program called Unleash AI, which is a set of. It’s an ecosystem around the software partners that we have. So we announced almost 30 new partnerships here at Discover. And that’s in service to a lot of customers now are. They’re not so much asking us about the infrastructure, it’s more about helping us with the use cases. Right. Some of them are very horizontal, some of them are very vertical. And so we want to have a very deep and wide ecosystem. And those are all those software partners that are validated on our private cloud for AI offerings. They work with our AI factory for, you know, customers that need scale. And one of the trends we’re seeing is not just in service of PC AI, but a lot of the folks that we work with are very interested in data, data storage. And how do you curate you know, data for, tag it, you know, segment it for, you know, for use in AI use cases. So pretty exciting week.
Keith Townsend: So, Patrick, I’ve talked to a couple of the Unleash AI partners. Kamawazo is one of them.
Patrick Osborne: Yeah, yeah, they’re great.
KeithΒ Townsend: My good friends Luke over there and they, and they’re operating across several different industries. I’ve seen folks like those Kamawaza guys implement across manufacturing, financial services, etc.
Patrick Osborne: All industry movement, weather, data. They’ve got a lot of cool uses.
Keith Townsend: Cases just all over the place. And as customers are looking to scale securely and both efficiently, how is HPE helping in that customer journey?
Patrick Osborne: Yeah, so when it, you know, when it comes to AI, a lot of the success we see with customers in their projects is when you speak in their language. Right. And so partnering with folks like Kamiwaza and other folks in the program, it really helps us to understand what they’re trying to achieve. Could be a horizontal use case that most customers use. In their case, some of them are very industry specific. We come in, we partner with them, we validate their software, we test it for scale, we make sure it works with the rest of the AI pipeline. It’s not just one application. We co-engineer our systems with Nvidia. Right. So you guys are very familiar with the Nvidia Zenith partners and the blueprints they provide. So for us, we’re providing a set of blueprints that are mapped to really relevant use cases for customers. And sometimes they’re very vertical specific. So we take a lot of the mystery out of the upper layers of the stack and then certainly when they want to run AI infrastructure, whether that’s on prem, we provide that to them. It’s very easy to use a cloud connected through GreenLake. So it’s a great story.
David Nicholson: So when we talk about cloud, you know, not a lot of people know this, but Keith wanted to name one of his children hybrid cloud, but Mrs. CTO advisor intervened at the last minute.
KeithΒ Townsend: I have for the life of me, I don’t know why and wouldn’t let him do that.
David Nicholson: But as we’ve watched the development of Hybrid cloud from HPE. Yes, we’ve watched it go from a situation where it’s like, hey, we’ll help you manage everything here and there. Yep, great, you guys perfected that. Now AI gets thrown into the mix. The workloads are becoming more complex. I would argue that we aren’t even 100% clear what the workload that you’re going to need to run is going to be six or 12 months from now. So how do you help people stay on top of modernizing their environments while maintaining a level of flexibility? I guess?
Patrick Osborne: Yeah, absolutely. So, you know, Greenlake started off as, you know, the cloud consumption model, right. So we were very focused on the workloads and the customer’s business outcomes and we would put together a solution and architecture for that. And then, you know, they could consume that on a, you know, unit of measure. Right. A metric or even an SLA or a business outcome. And then we’ve really scaled the Greenlight cloud platform part of it. Right. So we heard Antonio speak earlier this week where, you know, we’ve got over 40,000 customers, we’re managing over 5 million discrete pieces of infrastructure and that brings with it a lot of data. So we collect all the telemetry. And then now with our hybrid cloud, the cloud ops suite, where we’re bringing together all the tools around provisioning observability, it gives us a massive sort of insight into all of the workloads, the services, the application layer and certainly the infrastructure. And now we can introduce things for customers around Agentic AI. Right. And so we demo that a little bit in the sphere, but this is, you know, like the first step in a very long journey to helping customers really kind of just autonomously manage their workloads. You know, for SLA service performance, obviously we have a huge FinOps component. So, you know, at the end of the day, it’s for, it’s for us to help customers sort of like stop working, stop their team working on, you know, sort of very reactive type of, you know, things in their daily job troubleshooting manual tickets and automate that so they can work on the most important projects and we take care of that for them.
Keith Townsend: So, Patrick, the landscape is shifting underneath it. Decision making makers, data center managers, they’re asked to do an incredible amount, whether it’s supporting AI applications or dynamically moving from one VM platform to another one, or modernizing the infrastructure. What trends are you seeing in the industry play out?
Patrick Osborne: So, you know, a couple things are, you know, we talked about it earlier today about, you know, the great VM reset, right. People are seeking some alternate runtime environments, different ways to do application delivery, whether that’s in containers or, you know, different runtime environments, obviously in service of lowering their TCO. So that clock is ticking for customers, especially in the face of wanting to invest their money in other areas. We had a great session in The Hybrid Cloud spotlight session where we had the CIO for the Dallas Cowboys come up and talk about sort of the journey that they’ve been on with Greenlake and the opportunities that they have. So it started out with football. Now they’re talking about a next generation fit fan experience, support of nine World cup soccer games next year.
David Nicholson: Do you know if that was recorded? Because if there were any less than 20 football analogies in that talk, I would be disappointed.
Patrick Osborne: Actually they talked a lot about, I mean, because it’s a, you know, when you think about some of these modern sports teams, they’re branching out significantly beyond like their core sport. Right. They’re in service of. So it’s merchandising, it’s, you know, fan entertainment, using the stadium for others.
Keith Townsend: They become destinations.
Patrick Osborne: Absolutely. And they want to really understand all the data about their customers. So, you know, I think one of the things that the customers are coming to us is like I need to focus on those projects that are going to differentiate me and all the things I can do with AI to, you know, to essentially, at the end of the day, there’s a huge expectation on that’s going to really increase efficiency. Right. And so they’re coming to us saying like, can you manage this for us? Can you help us automate using agentic AI so that we can free up resources on our team? Because if you talk to most of the customers here, they’re not, they’re not getting a lot of headcount right in this area. But what they’re rather doing is transforming those folks to work on sort of upper level things that really differentiate their business and relying on partners like HPE to do the infrastructure management, the telemetry, the observability, making sure they make their SLAs. And that’s going to be on us and we can manage it for them as well.
David Nicholson: So as I said earlier, Hybrid Cloud’s been around for a while.
Patrick Osborne: Yes.
David Nicholson: Hey, everything going along, we love what we do now. AI is part of the mix. Keith and I talk to people every day who tell us that while the opportunity is never greater than ever before, they also feel like the risks are never greater than ever before. And we all know that it’s often not just a question of technology in terms of the success of the operation, it’s also people in process and all of that.
Patrick Osborne: Absolutely.
David Nicholson: But there’s another piece to it and that is the sort of ROI TCO question. And all of a sudden it’s a CFO conversation. So from a flexibility in financing. And the way that you approach this from a how do I invest my dollars perspective, HPE has the scale to do something there. What are you doing?
Patrick Osborne: Yeah, so you know, we’re actually, you know, we’re drinking our own champagne as well. Right. So the folks that we partner with, we’re actually implementing on our own. Right. In service of the things that we do internally. So we’re partnering with Deloitte, for example, to implement ZORA to help our finance teams to become way more efficient. When you think about just some simple things like enterprise knowledge management and how we take all the information that we have within Hewlett Packard Enterprise, I mean, I mean it’s like a 60,000 plus person company with. We create a ton of digital artifacts on a daily basis. And so we’re using AI to tag that, index it, create it, often recreate it when we have new updates and make it searchable with a natural language interface for our partners and our customers. So we’re doing a lot of this stuff on our own and, and then for our customers we provide this very flexible platform with Greenlake so they can start small. Like some of the announcements we made this week, PC AI started very small with a developer’s edition and then we have a path forward for customers to scale up to hundreds, thousands, if not tens of thousands of GPUs on premises.
David Nicholson: As well as off premises.
Patrick Osborne: Yeah. And so for us, we bring the cloud operational and the cloud consumption experience to our customers wherever they choose. Right. So they have data centers that can accommodate the power and cooling for this infrastructure. Great. We also have a set of like incredible partners, the Colo partners that are here this week that we can provide that as well. And you know, a number of customers are going to use some of the workloads that are going to be in the public cloud as well too. So with tools like Morpheus for example, Right. You can stand up workloads and observe them with opsramp, whether they run in aws, Google Azure. Right. So we provide that choice. All of it managed through the same operational interface.
David Nicholson: So we’ve talked about the conversion from CapEx to OpEx in this space. Are you still seeing a mix of that?
Patrick Osborne: Yeah, absolutely. I mean, some. At the end of the day, it’s a customer choice. Right. And it all starts with like, what are you trying to achieve? Right. And what are the workloads? What are the services you’re going to provide? How can we help you? Architect to provide a set of infrastructure and software that’s going to be the lowest TCO or the best ROI for you in that space and then we can help you implement that. And at the end of the day, right, they can choose to. If they have a capex model, great. If they want to move towards more of a flexible model around OPEX where they can burst, we can do change orders to their existing infrastructure because like you said, like, I don’t know what they’re going to be running in six months or 12 months. I see the Dallas Cowboys talked about it like they could do some new business venture next year that I’m not prepared for. And so we have the ability through GreenLake to, you know, really help them scale quickly, scale down, scale up depending on their business needs.
Keith Townsend: Well, Dave, it sounds like Patrick could have joined our conversation with Matt Kimball yesterday on just the hybrid nature of the IT infrastructure. Moving from this cloud first public cloud first attitude to cloud first in support of the business. You’re watching Six Five On the Road. We’re bringing these amazing conversations, such as the one we just had with Patrick, around hybrid cloud transformations from the show floor at HPE Discover Las Vegas 2025. For me, Keith Townsend, my co host Dave Nicholson and our guest Patrick. Thank you for joining.
Author Information
David Nicholson is Chief Research Officer at The Futurum Group, a host and contributor for Six Five Media, and an Instructor and Success Coach at Whartonβs CTO and Digital Transformation academies, out of the University of Pennsylvaniaβs Wharton School of Businessβs Arresty Institute for Executive Education.
David interprets the world of Information Technology from the perspective of a Chief Technology Officer mindset, answering the question, βHow is the latest technology best leveraged in service of an organizationβs mission?β This is the subject of much of his advisory work with clients, as well as his academic focus.
Prior to joining The Futurum Group, David held technical leadership positions at EMC, Oracle, and Dell. He is also the founder of DNA Consulting, providing actionable insights to a wide variety of clients seeking to better understand the intersection of technology and business.
Keith Townsend is a technology management consultant with more than 20 years of related experience in designing, implementing, and managing data center technologies. His areas of expertise include virtualization, networking, and storage solutions for Fortune 500 organizations. He holds a BA in computing and an MS in information technology from DePaul University.
