HPE Discover 2024: My hot take and observations
By Jyotsna Grover
As an ex-HPE employee, I am all too familiar with HPE Discover, having worked at the company from 2015 – 2018. Last week, I had the opportunity to get back in the thick of it and attend Discover in Las Vegas again, only this time, I was on the other side, attending Discover as a partner. The two-day conference, which was hands down the best Discover ever, left many of us who attended excited and extremely bullish about the future of technology. There were so many elements that made this year’s Discover stand out but to name a few.
- For the very first time, CEO Antonio Neri gave his keynote from the Sphere, which for the record, is an incredible venue. Antonio was accompanied by none other than Jensen Huang, CEO of Nvidia, which is now the most valuable company on the planet – thanks to, no prizes for guessing… the AI revolution.
- HPE announced big news in partnership with Nvidia – NVIDIA AI Computing by HPE – to accelerate the Generative AI Industrial Revolution.
- HPE brought out an impressive roster of customers on the mainstage including BMW, Walgreens, Lockheed Martin, and several other large brands we’re all familiar with to highlight how they’re leveraging HPE Greenlake Hybrid Cloud to meet growing customer needs and demands.
- And, finally, I’d be remiss not to mention that Dead & Company stole the show at the end of the day celebration in an epic performance at the Sphere with visuals that left attendees completely mesmerized.
To add to all of this, if you’ve ever attended HPE Discover, you know that the conference floor is where all the magic happens and this year was no exception. The Hyperscience team not only walked the show floor and did a deep dive into several demos but we also attended several sessions.
As is true for several organizations around the world today, AI and especially GenAI was the #1 topic on the minds of everyone at the conference. From questions about starting one’s AI journey to exploring use cases for inspiration and determining the necessary technology stack and compute power for data-intensive workloads, AI was all the rage.
Here are my three key takeaways from HPE Discover 2024.
1. The new Nvidia AI Computing by HPE is a game changer – HPE’s comprehensive generative AI solutions portfolio co-developed and co-branded by Nvidia includes a breakthrough HPE Private Cloud AI offering, which is designed to provide organizations a complete generative AI compute, storage, and networking portfolio to accelerate AI adoption is bound to be a game-changer for organizations. The two companies are bringing together a solution that is designed to be up and running in just three clicks, which the audience had an opportunity to see live, in action.
2. A company’s data is everything: It was clear from the keynote that data is the lifeblood of each and every business. And this is more true now than ever before because of the rapid growth of GenAI. GenAI, as the name suggests, is all about generating new content and not just labeling data. For the first time, human productivity is being transformed but the most important takeaway is that GenAI is nothing without data, but not just any data, data that is relevant to your organization, data that is curated, transformed, and organized. As I sat and listened to the keynote, what resonated most with me was when Jensen clearly outlined that there are three key components of implementing GenAI within your enterprise:
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- The model stack
- The data stack, and
- The compute stack
While data is critical, getting accurate data is even more critical, but getting accurate data isn’t easy… in fact, it is an incredibly tough problem to solve. According to some studies and surveys, data scientists spend 60% – 80% of their time cleaning and preparing data before they can analyze it – this can run up a company’s costs quickly and frankly, it isn’t the best use of a data scientist’s time. The other piece of the puzzle is that 90% of an organization’s data is unstructured, the majority of which is contained in documents and information assets such as email, trapped in the back office. This is where Hyperscience comes in – our machine learning models can read, extract, annotate, and label all that data with 99.9% accuracy, at 98% automation. The Hyperscience Hypercell for GenAI transforms complex documents into LLM and RAG-ready data, accurately, automatically, and continuously.
3. Finally, making GenAI easy to adopt and roll out is going to be imperative: As the conference continued into day-two, it became clear from the final session of the day with CEO Antonio Neri, Neil MacDonald, EVP and GM Compute, HPC & AI, and Fidelma Russo, EVP & GM, Hybrid Cloud & CTO that the industry needs solutions that can make the adoption of GenAI easy, while keeping in mind all the guardrails to ensure the safe adoption of this technology. GenAI requires systems to be intelligent about your business but what’s available today is largely generic. Vendors offer a bunch of different technologies and expect organizations to piece things together for themselves and become the experts on what to use. What became clear as the collaboration between HPE and Nvidia was unveiled is that these organizations have done all the hard work – they have taken care of the HOW, leaving organizations to worry about the WHY and WHAT they’re doing. We at Hyperscience are taking this a step further and working with companies like HPE to give customers complete flexibility to operate in the infrastructure and AI development platform of their choice, to enable use cases such as prompt engineering, RAG, grounding, and fine tuning on the customers’ proprietary enterprise data.
As the conference drew to a close, one of the questions posed to Antonio was about how HPE has managed to anticipate what’s coming and stay ahead of the curve? Antonio mentioned that HPE has predicted many trends right but didn’t always execute on those trends. He was clear to state that it’s very hard to recover from missing inflection points and if history is a reflection of the future, you need to make sure you don’t make the same mistakes. As GenAI takes off and with all that’s transpiring in regards to your data estate, which side of history do you want to be on?
Take control of your data estate with Hyperscience and begin your journey with Hypercell for GenAI with us today.
P.S. My favorite part of being back at Discover was seeing so many familiar faces and reuniting with old colleagues and friends. Big shoutout to all of you – you know who you are!
