HPE CEO Antonio Neri: New AI Public Cloud Service Is Next ‘Breakthrough Innovation’

June 20, 2023, 05:56 PM EDT

Hewlett Packard CEO Antonio Neri Tuesday ushered the company into the AI era with a new AI public cloud as well as deeper hybrid cloud partnerships with with Amazon Web Services.

Hewlett Packard Enterprise CEO Antonio Neri Tuesday ushered the company into the public cloud AI market by introducing HPE GreenLake for Large Language Models (LLMs) during his HPE Discover keynote address.

“We believe HPE GreenLake for LLMs will enable your enterprise to create unique advantages from AI,” said Neri, who declared this year’s HPE Discover, being held this week in Las Vegas, as the “best HPE Discover in the company’s” 80-year history.

“HPE has been at the forefront of every major technology advancement over the last 80 years, and we are very proud that our leadership brings new groundbreaking innovation to our customers and our partners,” said Neri in his sixth keynote address at HPE Discover since becoming CEO of the Spring, Texas-based company. “We declared edge as the next frontier, and we invested market-leading innovation that gives our customers a huge advantage. We delivered on the promise to bring a hybrid cloud experience to all your workloads and data, and we delivered. And today we are delivering the next breakthrough innovation to AI, making it available to all of you to address the biggest business and societal challenges we all face. We do all of this through one unified hybrid cloud experience: HPE GreenLake.”

[Related: HPE Discover 2023: Everything You Need To Know About HPE’s AI Public Cloud Service]

Neri promised that HPE will continue to “reach into the future and imagine” what comes next. “That is what we have always done, and that is exactly why we will continue to do it,” he said. “HPE stands at the forefront of a new era where edge, hybrid cloud and AI will come together to advance the way people live and work. Let’s do it together.”

Reza Zarafshar, president of Advanced Computer Concepts, No. 87 on the 2023 CRN Solution Provider 500, called HPE’s entry into public cloud AI a major “game-changer” for partners.

“If there is one disruptive technology that is going to have an impact on all of our lives it is AI,” he said. “The fact that HPE is coming into this with its leadership position that it has held for 80 years is going to have a magnificent impact on the industry.”

Zarafshar said HPE is sure to bring more innovation to the AI market with its new GreenLake for Large Language Models public cloud. “HPE has the innovation staying power that very few companies have today,” he said.

Advanced Computer Concepts is in the midst of building out the AI solutions customers need, said Zarafshar. “At the end of the day it has to solve customers’ problems,” he said. “It has to bring business value to customers.”

HPE’s Entry Into The Public Cloud AI Market

Neri said the HPE GreenLake for Large Language Models is the first in a series of “industry domain-specific AI applications” that will run on HPE supercomputers and AI software, powered by nearly 100 percent renewable energy.

“HPE GreenLake for Large Language Models will enable any enterprise to privately train, tune and deploy large-scale AI through an on-demand, multi-tenant supercomputing cloud service,” he said.

The HPE public cloud large language offering is a result of a breakthrough partnership with German AI startup Aleph Alpha, which makes the highly regarded Luminous natural language offering.

Neri said Luminous opens the door for HPE to train and deploy large language AI models with customer data in five languages, including English, French, German, Italian and Spanish.

“HPE GreenLake for LLM will help you build and privately train all your AI models from scratch and polish for others to consume, or you can use pre-trained LLM to tune and deploy with your own data to your unique use cases,” he said. “Unlike consumer-grade models, your customer data remains yours, and HPE services experts will be there to help you to ensure success.”

Ultimately the new HPE GreenLake for Large Language Models ensures customers will not have to “spend the millions and millions and millions of dollars to acquire the supercomputer infrastructure, the skills, the unique data center capabilities—which are very, very different—to run AI systems on your own,” said Neri. “Instead, you can accelerate from proofs of concept to production at scale and focus on optimizing the outcomes for your business.”

HPE AI Inference Solutions At The Edge With HPE ProLiant

HPE is also introducing new HPE ProLiant Gen 11 AI inference edge offerings to target workloads at the edge and in the data center, including computer vision, generative visual AI and natural language processing, said Neri. “HPE now provides a full breadth of AI capabilities, from what I call edge to exascale,” he said.

Neri stressed that HPE’s supercomputing leadership, including its prescient acquisition of AI supercomputer leader Cray in 2019, puts HPE in a “league of its own” when it comes to AI capabilities.

“While others are just entering the AI market and announcing investments, HPE has been in the supercomputing and AI market at scale for many years,” he said. “Since 2019 we have already invested $2.6 billion to our own R&D and through strategic acquisitions including Cray, Determined AI and Pachyderm. The unveiling of the AI cloud that we are entering is the next step in making accessible the most sustainable supercomputing cloud infrastructure to customers of all sizes by providing them the ability to privately train and tune their AI models in a software subscription-based offering.”

A Deeper Relationship With Amazon Web Services

HPE is also stepping up its AWS capabilities, introducing new unified services aimed at easing HPE-AWS hybrid cloud deployments with consulting services and app development, modernization, migration and managed services, said Neri.

HPE welcomed AWS Vice President of Technology Dr. Matt Wood to the Discover keynote stage, where he noted that HPE has “dozens” of solutions that utilize AWS services to provide customers a “variety of ways to access and scale” across their hybrid cloud environments.

HPE Tuesday announced several new services on HPE GreenLake and AWS Marketplace, including HPE Nonstop Development Environment, which it said is designed for mission-critical environments, and HPE Fraud Risk Management, which aims to tackle new fraud threats due to 5G technology and IoT platforms, as well as threats relevant for telecommunications service providers.

Among the other HPE GreenLake–AWS partnership areas are the ability to self-manage virtual machines deployed in AWS through HPE GreenLake for Private Cloud Business Edition and container support for Amazon EKS Anywhere for HPE GreenLake for Private Cloud Enterprise.

HPE is also now providing backup capabilities for the Amazon RDS database through the HPE GreenLake for Backup and Recovery.