With HPE Container Platform, enterprise-wide containerization is a reality

I’ve said it before, but it bears repeating:

The cloud is not a destination. It’s an experience and operating model.

And the cloud experience can offer considerable benefits to organizations, such as speed, ease of provisioning, scalability and pay-per-use. But the vast majority of existing non-cloud-native apps have been left behind. They were written over the past decades and often are the core applications and data which run the business.

This can leave even the most mature IT organizations trapped by complex operational models across both modern cloud-native and legacy application environments, making it difficult to securely, consistently and holistically manage them. Customers I speak with are struggling to achieve their digital transformation goals across their on-premises and cloud estate.

I’m certain this conundrum is one of the reasons, according to a McKinsey study, that only 30 percent of enterprise digital transformations have succeeded. And that’s simply unacceptable. For digital transformations to achieve their purpose – and accelerate the rollout of new applications, customer experiences and business models – IT must continue to move spending away from maintenance and aggressively toward innovation.

With today’s news, we’re a major step closer to delivering the cloud experience to all apps and data. We’re unveiling HPE Container Platform, the industry’s first enterprise-grade Kubernetes-based platform. Importantly, it’s designed for containerization of both cloud-native and non-cloud-native applications. And it is now a foundational component of our hybrid cloud solution stack.

Everyone’s talking containers today, so what’s different about HPE’s approach? Containerization is on the rise, with Gartner projecting 75 percent of global businesses will run containerized applications in production by 2022. These firms see the value in leveraging containers’ ability and portability to more rapidly deploy application environments anywhere – on any infrastructure or public cloud, and at the edge. Containers are a key building block for cloud-native applications.

But the issue remains: How to bring the cloud experience and operating model to monolithic non-cloud-native applications? That’s where HPE Container Platform comes in.

This unique platform deploys application containers on bare-metal, virtual machines or cloud instances – providing the ability to reduce complexity and costs with bare-metal containerization, while ensuring enterprise-grade security and performance.

Only HPE can offer this state-of-the-art solution, as it’s been developed by leveraging capabilities from two of our recent acquisitions – BlueData’s container-based software platform, and MapR’s distributed file system for persistent data with containers.

And by weaving in Kubernetes, the leading open source container orchestration engine, you have a turnkey offering that enables the containerization of both cloud-native, microservices-architected applications and monolithic non-cloud-native applications.

We are confident that this solution is exactly what the market needs to continue driving digital transformation. HPE Container Platform is the latest – and perhaps most dramatic – way in which HPE offers open and flexible compute, storage, networking and software solutions that can help enterprises accelerate container deployment and operations. By doing so, they will advance their transition from infrastructure management and ownership to consumption-based IT solutions. That means lower costs yet still maintaining control … and harnessing more resources to focus on business-driving innovation.

More proof that the cloud is not a destination, but instead an experience that runs seamlessly throughout your organization.