Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) held its annual Discover conference in Las Vegas last week. It has made a sizable commitment to Internet of Things (IoT) and the Edge—areas central to my writing for the past few years. I am floating a number of ideas looking for feedback as I travel, and I’ll bounce some of those here later.
There is so much I learned last week beyond even what I wrote Monday about the new Edgeline computer. Perhaps the best place to start is with my latest discussion with Lin Nease, Chief Technologist IoT at HPE. This was a continuation of a discussion we began in Madrid last November and resumed at Industry of Things World in San Diego in February.
HPE’s power of compute at the Edge fascinates me. Even though my being in Las Vegas precluded being in Boston for LiveWorx, ThingWorx came up in many conversations at Discover. Nease said that ThingWorx (product and division of PTC) has been a good partner. Back to compute power at the edge Nease mentioned this power combined with TSN—Time Sensitive Networking, a new extension of Ethernet promulgated by IEEE.
Indeed, there is sufficient power in Edgeline that an enterprising developer could, for instance, accomplish the software defined DCS that seems to be the dream of some of the engineers at ExxonMobil and the Open Process Automation folks. Anyone out there have time and money?
Speaking of Edge, evidently the enterprise IT bloggers I hung out with during the event try to avoid the term. CEO Antonio Neri had said, “Edge is everything outside the data center.” In the blogger round table that I posted Monday, blogger Alastair Cooke noted, “Gary, we consider everything you do as edge.” Back to Neri who stated 94% of data is wasted; 75% of data comes from the edge.
Following are some points I gleaned from a session called “Harness the Power of Digital Platforms”:
- HPE is a huge fan of open source & open platforms
- Digital natives build platforms-e.g. Uber, Google, Amazon, etc.
- An internal team built an open API platform to solve a problem in supply chain
- Biggest problem was selling the system internally so that people would actually use the system (never seen that before—said no one anywhere)
- Traditional—>Digital; everything is a frictionless stream of data
- Platform always on, always looking for exceptions — sense/respond
HPE has an OEM Solutions group. Following are some points from a session discussing them:
- OEM Solutions can be Embedded, Integrated, Private Label
- Everything as a Service — Green Lake is the service offering that OEMs can resell the service
- Shift to software defined
- From storage to flash
- Example—Konica Minolta embedded an Edgeline computing device in a printer called workplace hub that makes it easier to set up and install a new remote office
HPE has momentum in IoT and edge devices—and an organization supporting manufacturing.
