HPE IoT Is Betting That Cloud Computing Will Continue to Require IT Assistance

Cloud computing, which stores data, software, and even business functions on the internet, has taken over technology. However, Tarek Robbiati, Hewlett Packard Enterprise Co.’s chief financial officer, believes that companies will continue to require IT services firms.

HPE has been aggressively transitioning away from hardware and toward a services model. How has this affected the company?

It is a fundamental shift in business model. Customers do not want to be in charge of their IT infrastructure. And our service solutions are there to help them establish a transparent relationship with the infrastructure. They don’t care where the infrastructure is; all they care about is the outcome the infrastructure can provide.

Will businesses, however, use the cloud to avoid IT and outsourcing providers?

There is still a belief that the entire world will migrate to the public cloud, but we believe that the world will be hybrid. The explosion of data at the cloud’s “edge” [on computer systems near the data source] necessitates a much more distributed infrastructure. Every 18 months, the amount of data produced by the world doubles, with the edge producing 80% of that data. You can’t imagine bringing that much data all the way to the public cloud. It needs to be processed, analyzed, and made sense of locally, so that is the overall goal.

Exactly where does HPE fit in, then?

In a nutshell, HPE is an edge-to-cloud company. The edge is where businesses generate data and things happen: Each time a customer transacts with a retail chain, a massive flow of information relating to that transaction occurs. We provide connectivity to record that interaction and can process the data from the edge to the cloud.

Are your customers buying your strategy?

We’ve had fantastic results with GreenLake [HPE’s edge-to-cloud platform]. GreenLake as a service has grown by more than 100% year over year for three quarters in a row. And there will be no easing up on that demand.

What is the most significant shift in thinking there?

The entire IT industry must find a new equilibrium with supply chains that are designed for speed, resiliency, and cost, rather than just efficiency and cost.

What was one of the most important lessons you took away from the pandemic?

The pandemic taught us that the businesses that performed best during that time period were those that had digitized their business models.