What does a big tech CEO have to say about the strategic shifts and innovations defining the future of enterprise technology?
From HPE Discover Las Vegas 2025, join industry analysts Daniel Newman and Patrick Moorhead as they host an exclusive conversation with Antonio Neri, President and CEO at HPE. Discover HPE’s innovation journey and get insights into the strategic advancements unveiled at this landmark event, and the company’s latest developments across AI, Hybrid Cloud, and Networking.
Key takeaways include:
🔹HPE’s Innovation Trajectory: Unpack HPE’s “Road to Discover” strategy, emphasizing the company’s relentless focus on innovation in AI, Hybrid Cloud, and Networking, propelled forward by the impactful announcements made at the event.
🔹The Dawn of Unified Private Cloud: Explore the significant competitive impact of the Unified Private Cloud, powered by Morpheus, heralding a new era for enterprise IT and redefining how businesses leverage private cloud environments.
🔹Agentic AI through NVIDIA Collaboration: Gain insight into the deepened collaboration with NVIDIA, designed to enable agentic AI and highlighting the unique, synergistic benefits this partnership delivers for enterprise customers building advanced AI infrastructure.
🔹Fortifying Zero-Trust Security: Discover HPE Aruba Networking’s introduction of robust new policy capabilities and expanded observability, strategically bolstering HPE’s zero-trust approach and offering enhanced security in complex, multi-vendor environments.
Learn more at HPE.
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Transcript:
Patrick Moorhead: The Six Five is On The Road and we are live here at HPE Discover 2025 in Las Vegas. Daniel, it has been a great show so far. Can you believe it’s the second day? And you know, we have heard a lot about hybrid cloud, AI and networking. Those are the three, three top things that we heard at the keynote and that has permeated the entire event.
Daniel Newman: Yeah, and I mean the event had this amazing atmosphere. We were inside the sphere, which anyone out there that has experienced a number of Vegas keynotes. And I joke with you sometimes on this show like we’re professional event attenders. We go to hundreds of these every year. We sit in these crowds. The sphere is an epic experience for us as analysts to be able to sit there because you actually aren’t staring at a pole in a wall and just slides. You can see the person speaking. And of course it’s better when the content’s strong and to your point. It hit on three things I think you and I have long been passionate about. Network. It’s going to be the driver of AI growth. A lot of people want to talk about just compute, which we’ll get to then. Of course, hybrid cloud, it’s been a big part of the HPE story. Greenlake was in there in a big way, which of course is an underpinning and something you and I have chronicled for years. And then of course at the end, the AI, the Nvidia, the compute, that was the fireworks.
Patrick Moorhead: Yeah. I mean, Nothing beats a 50 foot Antonio Neri. But it is our privilege to bring him in. 16 by nine on the Six Five. Antonio, welcome back to the show.
Antonio Neri: Well, good afternoon, guys.
Daniel Newman: Yeah, I was laughing. 50 foot, you know. Is that how tall it is?
Antonio Neri: No, the bigger. The entire sphere here is like 150ft.
Patrick Moorhead: It is, yeah.
Daniel Newman: But you are, you know. Yeah, it’s about a 1/3.
Antonio Neri: Yeah, I was bigger yesterday.
Daniel Newman: You were looking good, you were shining bright and you know, like I said, because the way that place is set up, I mean, you’ve been around tech a long time. You’ve done events at places like this.
Patrick Moorhead: Well, they did. HPE was the first company to do the big keynote at the Sphere and.
Antonio Neri: The only company did it twice.
Patrick Moorhead: There we go. There we go.
Daniel Newman: You were first of your time. But you’ve also been in venues like this where you did it in the regular stage where you’ve got that sprawling room and you got people in seats and they can’t see you. So they come all the way out here. So I think it was such a nice thing. It’s audible, it’s clear. And what a great way to get your message out, show your technology. But also just something I was going to tell you is some of the video work and I’m sure this was inspired by you, but really the narrative and the storytelling and the stitching, I think that was so great.
Antonio Neri: Well, thank you. Look, it was fun to do it again inside the sphere and it takes a lot of work because it forces you to be ready way, way in advance, not the day before. Way, way in advance of delivering the keynote and from the narrative, obviously aligned to the strategy and the announcements you’re going to make through the production on that screen. The rendering alone takes an enormous amount of work and hours and hours. And you have to go through an iterative process that takes many, many times. And so I’m really proud of what the team has done. As you said, you know, I have to be heavily involved because it’s my story, it’s the story of the company.
Patrick Moorhead: Right.
Antonio Neri: And at the same time, you know, the team had to be ready with all the announcements we made because one of the things I do and I’m very, very maniacal about this is linking the keynote to the show floor. And so if you obviously follow the keynote from. Look, here’s our vision started with networking, going through hybrid cloud and AI. This is exactly how the show floor is structured. You enter the networking, going through the hybrid cloud, all the announcements we made and then end in the AI space. But also we have a new brand. Right. Which we’re very, very proud to showcase.
Patrick Moorhead: Yeah, I like the way you made it, the personal touch you put on. I mean, listen, I’ve seen and I’ve been part of 150 brand refreshes, but I like the way you tied it to the culture, but also to the technology. I thought that was good.
Daniel Newman: Yeah. And, so let’s get to the hard stuff. No, I’m kidding. All the tech stuff here, Antonia. I mean, the Discover is the moment, but the road to Discover.
Antonio Neri: Yes.
Daniel Newman: You’ve been very focused on, you know, having that kind of steady drum beat of innovation. You’ve been focused on hybrid cloud, you’re focused on AI GreenLake in the growth. I think every quarter we are kind of you and I do a little conversation, I do a little cheer, like, because, you know, five years ago. Is it six now? Five, six years ago you said like, we are going all, you’ve done it and it’s a 2 billion plus dollar ARR business. I say sometimes I think it’s underappreciated by the streets. I’ll call that out right now.
Antonio Neri: I think the streets, it is underappreciated.
Daniel Newman: It is underappreciated. You and I agree on that. So, but talk a little bit, kind of how this road and this recent announcements, because now it’s all about AI. It’s about leadership, it’s about helping your enterprises drive to the future. So how do you think that the culmination of all these announcements of this event is really driving HPE’s leadership in space?
Antonio Neri: First of all, it started with conviction and consistency. So look, seven and a half years ago, I was convicted of the market trend we were seeing starting at the edge, where it was the on ramp to drive the digitization of the enterprise. You know, look, this space is a prime example. We had 14, 15,000 people roaming through the floor. You need to give the connectivity. And every engagement we have with each and every one of them is a digital engagement without the connectivity. It can do any of that. In fact, here behind us, you also have visible the noc. And you know, we actually showcase the blueprint of all the access points, points and the telemetry we are collecting at the network level and how we are managing security and so forth. So that was that. And obviously I did it on the back of the Aruba networking acquisition I did in 2015. And I will argue the Aruba has been an incredible success. We took it from $1.4 billion to over $5 billion in eight years. But when you look at the future with cloud and AI, networking becomes the core foundation. And that’s why I’m pursuing the acquisition of Juniper Networks, because that gives the complementarity from the edge to the core to the cloud. And we are very excited to complete that in this fiscal year. Then on the cloud side, we always talk about cloud enabled. And for me, cloud enabled means an experience, not a destination. And we designed Greenlake to your point, more than five years ago with a hybrid by design set of principles, meaning everything we do inside that cloud needs to be cloud native and AI driven. And so every infrastructure we deliver, whether it’s networking at the edge and in the data center, or our servers and our storage and our private cloud, and all the services are now built and delivered through GreenLake. It’s the bridge that takes you into the future. And we now see more than 42,000 customers on the platform. And to your point, we already exceeded the $2.2 billion in annualized revenue run rate, but in terms of contracted value it exceeded already $15 billion. And so that’s revenue that will unwind over time. And then inside that hybrid cloud, obviously we learn opportunities along the way in storage to provide a modern disaggregated architecture for both structured and unstructured data.
And at this event we announced the support of an intelligent protocol, which is the MCP, the model context protocol that makes the storage way more intelligent so we can build AI pipelines faster. Right. And then together with our world class server portfolio, we build that into a private cloud for virtualization and private cloud for AI. And the private cloud for AI obviously is a deep partnership with Nvidia. And then obviously that virtualization is a big opportunity because of what we see in the market. And so behind that wall you see the Morpheus integration with VM essentials to the unified private cloud, the integration with backup recovery partnership with Commvault and VEEAM, and then the unification of the cloud operations as well with Morpheus so we can manage the public cloud instances. And then there is another crown jewel which is OPSRAMP. And that OPSRAMP gives me 20 trillion data points for me to implement Greenlake Intelligence. And that GreenLake Intelligence is the agentic AI approach we announced yesterday. And then in the AI obviously are the AI factors of the future. And so there is the model builder, service providers, the sovereign, the product and the enterprise.
Patrick Moorhead: Gosh, what a payload of announcements that you just rattled off there.
Antonio Neri: That’s what he said. Right. So we started the road to discover. So we announced a new Y 5.7 portfolio, new security features as a part of the SSC framework. Right. We announced in the spring the Generation 12 servers, you know, supporting the latest intel processors, the latest Nvidia processors. Yesterday we announced the latest EPYC processor from AMD. We support direct liquid cooling in the enterprise cloud servers in addition to the leadership cloud servers. And then obviously we announced the X10000, we extended X10000 with MCP. We continue to add more ISVs to the private cloud AI. 28 new ISVs in through the platform. And then the expansion of the AI factory with support of the latest Nvidia GPUs and AI at scale. And then obviously the AI mod pod, the integration of. And there’s more and integration of, you know, we’re not ready to sit back cooling, modular cooling that comes with it.
Patrick Moorhead: Yeah. As we’ve gotten to know each other and I’ve written this in my write ups, what I really have appreciated about your leadership style is you call out an industry trend and you’re right. And you go all in on it.
Antonio Neri: Most of the time.
Patrick Moorhead: Edge to cloud. Right. Was one of them. Everything will be hybrid and everything will be as a service and I really appreciated that. One thing I gave your teams a hard time about on the hybrid part was, well, wait a second, how can you be hybrid if you have no connectivity to the public cloud? And then you go and you acquire Morpheus? Which I was like, okay, it was.
Antonio Neri: Because of you, Pat.
Patrick Moorhead: Oh, yes, there we go.
Daniel Newman: You know, he’s going to do that now. Run with that.
Patrick Moorhead: It’s going to be a super clip. No, but seriously, it’s what enterprises want, it’s what your customers want.
Antonio Neri: Yes.
Patrick Moorhead: Now you upped your game even more with Unified Pro Private Cloud.
Antonio Neri: Yes.
Patrick Moorhead: And I’m going to put you on the spot here. How does this change the competitive environment?
Antonio Neri: Well, look, I always guide myself from customer feedback. Look, customers are looking for an alternative. That’s not the secret. And they also want a modern alternative that gives us openness, but also choice and flexibility.
Patrick Moorhead: Right.
Antonio Neri: With Morpheus, we can support the incumbency and the alternative, which is multiple, but also get them an alternative from our own portfolio, which is obviously the VM essentials, and let them decide how they go through that journey as also they replatform applications to container and bare metal. And that’s the power of the VM Essential together with HPE Morpheus. And then to your point, because of your feedback, the unification of the cloud with the public cloud experience. So by the way, we also offer, as a part of Greenlake, three different deployment models. We offer the always connected.
Patrick Moorhead: That’s right.
Antonio Neri: We offer the single tenant in the public cloud, which is the virtual private cloud. And we offer as well the air gap, which is very important for sovereign reasons, but also very highly regulated environments. So it’s not just the cloud experience, but the optionality of deployment as well.
Daniel Newman: Yeah, we heard Jensen’s definitely leaning in the day we were talking today, we’re talking a little about your partnership with Nvidia here, but I think he definitely doubled down on every country’s going to have a sovereign cloud. And I think I’ve heard you say.
Antonio Neri: And I agree with him.
Patrick Moorhead: Well, we all, when we were in Davos together, we all saw that, that same, same thing. And all the tariffs have escalated that even, even further now. So.
Antonio Neri: But I will show you an interesting stat. I’m not sure you know, but this is an interesting stat. So in the world there are probably more than 12,000 data centers, more than 9,000 are in the United States.
Patrick Moorhead: Right.
Antonio Neri: So the rest of the world has to catch up. Because if you want to own your destiny with AI being so transformative and disruptive, you have to own that closer to where you do work and also maintain sovereignty and as well as your cultural beliefs. So that’s a very important aspect.
Daniel Newman: It’s a good data point.
Patrick Moorhead: Well, it is a great data point. And finally we have the software stacks to pull it off because quite frankly, for the past 15 years and 15 years ago the public cloud started, we were always playing catch up. We thought OpenStack was the solution. It lacked a lot of things. But now your platform and some of the other software platforms, I think we’re here. And it’s not just version 1.0.
Antonio Neri: No, it has matured dramatically. Look, AI is more ready than people think it is, but is as good as the data, the infrastructure you power with.
Patrick Moorhead: True.
Daniel Newman: So let’s talk a little bit about AI in the enterprise because I think everyone is seeing the rapid proliferation, consumption of certain consumer use cases and the LLMs. We’re seeing the hyperscalers going really fast, right? This kind of insatiable capex number. And HPE’s got a really powerful story that it’s done. It’s a private cloud partnership, deeply integrated with Nvidia for what it brings. But the market obviously is going to want to hear your differentiation because there’s a few companies out there that are thinking similarly partnering with Nvidia. Talk a little bit about the kind of the generational improvements that you announced here. The key differentiation, and one other thing too is you’re leaning in on enterprise, because I think the enterprise is adopting it. But it’s such a massive opportunity, Antonio, and it’s not a big part yet of the numbers that we’ve actually seen in terms of revenues and margins in the market.
Antonio Neri: So I think we should decompose AI, and I’m a fan of customer segmentation and then use cases. So on the customer segmentation side, I argue there are three key segments. There are model builders and service providers of any size. So obviously the model builders, we know the names, right? The Grox of the world, the Mistrals, the OpenAI and Gemini, and so forth, the Deep SEQ and so forth. They need an enormous amount of computational power to continue to make this model more accurate, to drive better reasoning. Right? And that’s the name of the game. They are, what they are looking for is time to market with the latest technologies so they can reduce the cost of per token training for sure. Right. And obviously do it in a very sustainable way because the amount of energy is growing very rapidly. So that’s one there. HPE competes very simply because we have a deep partnership with Nvidia on the iFactory. So many others to be fair. But our manufacturing capabilities, including direct liquid cooling and the ability to service this at scale is very unique to us. And that’s because we had a supercomputing heritage where we have been doing direct liquid cooling for 50 years. Right. But it was a leadership class system that was built for a single purpose. Now that’s fungible across this new AI space at scale. Then you go to sovereign, right? It looks a little bit like a supercomputer, but it does a different type of workload. The config may look different, but the reality is there are 15, 20 countries that have the means to go do it. Look, we are building some of the AI clouds in Japan with AISD, in the UK with Bristol University and so forth. In some cases they’re going to deploy a supercomputer for simulation and modeling where they use AI to accelerate the simulation and vectorize the data. In other cases they’re going to configure more AI to develop these models and then open it to the private ecosystem. Sovereign reason.
Patrick Moorhead: Flops and tops.
Antonio Neri: Yeah, flops and tops. And then that obviously has a lot of interest also from a geopolitical perspective. Then you go to enterprise and the enterprise, if you look at our last quarter, one third of our numbers bookings came from enterprise. So what I see is an acceleration because look, there have been two years since the breakthrough was achieved. I think enterprise customers got a little bit more comfortable about a few things. Number one, the understanding of this alien stack is not the same stack that they use in cloud or virtualization. So they had a little bit more time understanding it, including the provenance of where these models come from. Number two is the fact that these models hallucinate less. And so they say, okay, let me see how this model operates with more accuracy. But I think one of the big accelerator has been the agentic AI because with agentic AI becomes more real because you take a workflow in enterprise, you digitize it, you automate and now you apply agentic AI processes to IT admins of sorts, like we do in our Greenlake to do specific tasks and you stitch all of them for an outcome. And I think that’s what is also getting through it. And if you think about some of the partnerships we announced with Accenture, with AI Refinery, which they built with Nvidia or with Deloitte with Zora AI that they built with us on top of the private cloud AI. Those are agentic AI processes, whether it’s finance or procurement, whatever that now enterprises see. And also the fact that there is better clarity on the return on investment. So we see now the momentum upticking and that’s where also there is a lot of opportunities for differentiation in that environment. We really did something unique with Nvidia. We co-engineered. We did not just take a recipe which is not designed for enterprise, but or maybe a very small sliver of enterprise unless you are in quantum hedge funding or something. We took it for what I call the mirror model. If you do ragging, fine tuning or small language training or inferency, we tightly couple their IP and rip for time to value speed of achievement, which they want with AI.
Patrick Moorhead: Exciting stuff. Gosh. As we wrap up here, I can’t believe we haven’t talked about security. So let’s talk about security. You brought new policy capabilities into HPE Aruba networking.
Antonio Neri: Yep.
Patrick Moorhead: And I’m curious, it’s apparent to me how this helps in zero trust. But I’d like you to explain it anyway because it’s so important you hit it a little bit up front. But also how does it extend value to customers in multi vendor environments in networking?
Antonio Neri: Well, you know, interesting enough, Aruba had a multi vendor approach with a clear path in policy management and deployment. And our approach is we trust nothing.
Patrick Moorhead: Best definition of zero trust I’ve ever heard.
Antonio Neri: We trust nothing. And so when you do that then our approach is to at stake every layer of the stack. As you go up the stack, we have to state everything. So on the network inside the policy managed to trust nothing. We can extend it to competitors like Cisco, so we do that as well. But when you go to the infrastructure, Obviously, you know, ILO 7 is a unique capability at the root of the hardware infrastructure that it serves both servers and storage and therefore is also designed to be proof for quantum. Meaning if quantum eventually breaks the encryption. Right. Even when the server is powered off, we actually protect the hardware from attacks. All right. On the networking side, the most important part is to now understand that encryption at the time of the issue of the certificate, not through the lifecycle the first time. And so we are working on that. And then obviously it’s to protect your data. And this is where HP Zerto plays a big role in data protection, which gives you ransomware protection and gives you a cyber bolt capability and if you get encrypted for whatever reason, we actually can restore your environment encryption in a few seconds all the way to the application layer.
Patrick Moorhead: Interesting.
Daniel Newman: So Antonio, one last final opportunity. I’d love you to get a message out to the audience. It’s great to have you here. But as the audience, the people, the crowd and your customers’ partners all sort of disperse after this event. Enough. Kenny Chesney, the after party glow.
Antonio Neri: He’s a great guy by the way.
Daniel Newman: The after party glow and of course in the sphere. But like what is the kind of one or two big thematic takeaways you want them to go back to that you think are going to be most important. You definitely don’t want to miss them as they leave this year’s Discover event.
Antonio Neri: Well, look, I hope they appreciate the fact that our strategy has been a consistent strategy, a curated strategy for today. The bridge is in through the future. I’m very excited once the Juniper transfer transaction closes to give our customers and partners a true alternative that’s modern, secure and AI driven. Because I do believe when we haven’t spent too much time on the actual networking disruption, we’re going to see in the future, including quantum computing as we move to photonics and other, that that’s going to be an important element of the stack. NHP will be another core, but believe it or not, a networking company. Right. And this is the first time HP will own and if you go to HP, every aspect of the stack, from the silicon to the infrastructure to the operating system to the software to security to the services, will become the core fabric. And then GreenLake is there is the off ramp into this new world which is going to be all AI driven, including the infrastructure. Right. And so we use AI for the infrastructure and we use infrastructure for AI. And so HP has all the components to serve any subject of the market. And our strategy is basically founded on innovation and that innovation drives shareholder value over the long term.
Patrick Moorhead: Silicon, I think he said silicon. All excited now.
Daniel Newman: That gets me going. Antonio, thank you so much for joining us here. Hope the rest of your event goes great and look forward to sitting down with you again soon.
Antonio Neri: Thank you. I appreciate you covering the event. Look, it’s always energizing to be with customers on the show floor for sure.
Daniel Newman: And thank you everybody for being part of this Six Five On the Road live from HPE Discover 2025. It’s been a great event. We appreciate you tuning in to all the coverage. Subscribe Check out all of the great conversations that we had and our team around the show floor. And for this episode, for this show, for this live segment, we got to say goodbye for now. Stay with us. More to come.
Author Information
Daniel is the CEO of The Futurum Group. Living his life at the intersection of people and technology, Daniel works with the world’s largest technology brands exploring Digital Transformation and how it is influencing the enterprise.
From the leading edge of AI to global technology policy, Daniel makes the connections between business, people and tech that are required for companies to benefit most from their technology investments. Daniel is a top 5 globally ranked industry analyst and his ideas are regularly cited or shared in television appearances by CNBC, Bloomberg, Wall Street Journal and hundreds of other sites around the world.
A 7x Best-Selling Author including his most recent book “Human/Machine.” Daniel is also a Forbes and MarketWatch (Dow Jones) contributor.
An MBA and Former Graduate Adjunct Faculty, Daniel is an Austin Texas transplant after 40 years in Chicago. His speaking takes him around the world each year as he shares his vision of the role technology will play in our future.
