With $4 Billion push, HPE gets serious about Intelligent edge computing technologies

Intelligent Edge technologies and services will drive Hewlett Packard Enterprise's (HPE) $4 billion investment over next four years, announced HPE. The focus of this investment would be to enable interaction among people and things. HPE will focus on research and development around connectivity, security, edge computing, automation. HPE also plans to use machine learning, and artificial intelligence (AI) to make sense out of data spanning from edge to any cloud.

By 2022, Gartner predicted that 75% of enterprise-data will be generated and processed outside centralized data centers or clouds. This means that most of the enterprise data will be generated by edge devices such as oil rigs, medical devices etc. In order to derive insights into data from these edge devices, such data needs to be processed, analyzed instantaneously with minimum latency at their edge locations.

President and chief executive officer, Antonio Neri, HPE said, “Data is the new intellectual property, and companies that can distill intelligence from their data —whether in a smart hospital or an autonomous car—will be the ones to lead. HPE has been at the forefront of developing technologies and services for the Intelligent Edge, and with this investment, we are accelerating our ability to drive this growing category for the future. The next evolution in enterprise technology will be in edge-to-cloud architecture. Enterprises will require millions of distributed clouds that enable real-time insights and personalised experiences exactly where the action is happening.”

The other vendors are also completing for edge computing. Big players like Cisco, Dell EMC, VMware, and Microsoft are already strengthening their cloud and edge offerings. In April 2018, Microsoft announced its $5 billion investment plan for IoT and edge computing technologies.

HPE also said that it is a leader in the fast-growing market for Intelligent Edge technology
In 2015, HPE acquired Aruba Networks. This puts HPE as a leader in Intelligent Edge technology, including wireless LAN, campus switching, security, location-based services, edge computing, and analytics and assurance.

The announcement also said Aruba and HPE are working with customers such as Gatwick Airport to make it a technologically advanced airport, Texmark to make manufacturing efficient and Streamr for data monetisation by storing data from individual cars on the blockchain.

This post is subject to the original announcement.