Videos

Mark: Back in January of this year, I had the opportunity to address the HPE Storage Sales kickoff in Orlando. At that event, I spoke to Andrew Manners. Andrew is the Vice President of Storage in North America. Now here we are six months later at HPE Discover. I thought it was a great opportunity to talk to Andrew about what's going on in the market, specific HPE progress and, generally, how his job and his team is doing today. Here are his comments.

Andrew: I think what we're seeing at Discover is the produce of a lot of years of big investment into R&D. So, you know, with the Primera launch, it's the redefining of Tier 0 storage, more intelligent, higher performance, application aware, a lot of capabilities that we just haven't seen in the marketplace before.

So that's an enormous launch for us, and then we also added to that with our dHCI, desegregated hyperconverged, product. So this is something people have been asking for for a long time, and it's how do we better connect our server parts of the portfolio with our storage parts of the portfolio. So we're basically taking DL380 Nimble technology, some secret sauce, and turning it into a hyperconverged infrastructure that allows you then to independently scale compute and storage, which isn't available in the market today.

There was a lot of emphasis around the the GreenLake consumption based model, and I think this helps our storage customers tremendously. It helps all of our HPE customers, but we're also announcing customization for Aruba environments to take wireless as a service, network as a service. In January, we were having our sales kickoffs, and we had sort of 650 people in the room, and it was really a recharge point for the business, to really paint out the potential we had and what the requirements were from an execution perspective to get us into the window of success.

Week after week, month after month since that meeting, we've just seen momentum coming back more and more into the business, the swagger coming back, success in the business. We're now starting to see market share improvement. We're on a ramp that we can realistically sit here today and say we can be the leader in the storage industry.

The market grew at 5.4% and we grew at 30%, so we were sort of 6x the market. Discover is a Hewlett-Packard Enterprise-wide event. I think for anyone who spent the last three days at Discover, they would've seen a headline story around storage. And we just have not seen that for a number of years. There's been a lot of other product developments, a lot of other acquisitions, but to see that the core foundation of Discover this year is the advances we're making in storage is a fabulous scene setter for our customers.