Hewlett Packard Enterprise 2020 Predictions: Hybrid Cloud, as-a-Service, and Artificial Intelligence will change the future of IT

Now that we’ve entered 2020, it’s time to shed light on what the upcoming decade means for our customers, for the technology landscape, and for HPE. In the past decade we’ve seen trends like APIs, big data, containers, IoT, SaaS, software-defined, (and an alphabet soup of everything between) swiftly transform from buzzword to reality, and from nice-to-haves to need-to-haves for every enterprise serious about digital transformation—another concept which even just a few years ago, was still unfamiliar to many. So what trends can we expect to see in our fast-evolving industry in 2020 and beyond?

One thing’s for sure: we will increasingly see a paradigm shift to as-a-Service

Despite the promise of the cloud to speed delivery of new applications, the vast majority of today’s apps and data remain in the data center and are growing at the edge. As a result, businesses have been struggling with their digital transformation efforts as they are dealing with a siloed, inconsistent experience across their hybrid estate and lack control and visibility into the costs and risks across their enterprise.

2020 will see an increasing demand for a consistent cloud experience across on-premises and public cloud with simple, point-and-click access to services and rich insights about cost, compliance and performance across the entire hybrid landscape. Customers will be opting for this experience to direct and drive their digital transformation initiatives, all delivered as-a-Service.

While SaaS is nothing new, core hardware technologies such as compute, networking, and storage are powering the next era of innovation – and will be increasingly consumed as-a-Service as customers demand flexibility, simplicity and freedom.

87 percent of IT decision makers have already started to or have fully implemented these solutions as-a-Service in their organizations, and the majority (88%) agree that it’s paramount to gaining a competitive edge.¹ Unleashing the potential of as-a-Service will mean more enterprises can make hybrid IT a reality, and accelerate digital transformation. It will mean broader market use for powerful emerging technologies like edge computing, high-performance computing (HPC) and artificial intelligence (AI) to fuel discovery and insights in ways that have never been made possible before.

Channel partners are showing that the consumption model is something that they are embracing. HPE GreenLake sales through the channel were up 326% in our FY19 and show no signs of slowing. We will definitely see more of the channel opting for as-a-Service models as we move into the next year. Now, let’s dive into what the future holds for critical technologies that can be offered as-a-Service, and where we see tremendous opportunity in increasing outcomes.

We’ve asked business heads leading our core technology groups to chime in on how they foresee the industry changing in the next decade, and here’s what they had to say on the shift to everything-as-a-Service, embracing intelligence and automation, and beyond:

Next-generation networking will be more intelligent

Keerti Melkote, President and Founder, Aruba Networks:

“The fast growth of IoT devices has established new edge-to-cloud architectures to support where the majority of the world’s data is now being created. This will usher in the need for machine-learning-based network security to mitigate additional risk caused by these new attack vectors.

Additionally, AI-powered automation will really take hold to enhance the effectiveness of corporate security arsenals, improve enterprise-wide application availability, and simplify IT operations. Analytics will increasingly become a natural extension of automation, allowing businesses to achieve greater network insights benefiting orchestration, availability, and agility.”

Intelligence will redefine hyperconverged

McLeod Glass, VP and GM, HPE SimpliVity and Composable Software:

“Today’s enterprises are under relentless pressure to streamline operations and accelerate innovation, but in order to achieve this agility, they require an intelligent underlying architecture for virtualized environments that automatically speeds time to market and eliminates complexity. While HCI inherently accelerates service delivery and resource efficiency, traditional HCI offerings still require IT to react to unexpected disruptions and application delays, and make tradeoffs as enterprises scale their environments. In 2020 HCI offerings will need to go beyond software-defined, ushering in AI-driven infrastructure that infused artificial intelligence to transform IT operations by predicting and preventing issues.”

Harnessing the explosion of data with HPC and AI

Peter Ungaro, senior vice president and general manager, HPC and AI:

 “Data has undoubtedly become invaluable and there’s more of it than ever. Enterprises are looking for advanced ways to use it, unlock insights, and drive outcomes. HPC systems are the new architecture powering AI and analytics models, enabling us to solve some of the world’s toughest problems by processing and analyzing large volumes of complex data. Now to truly harness an impending era of data explosion and make a significant impact, enterprises will need new Exascale Era technologies and capabilities to converge workloads and workflows such as simulation and modeling, with AI, machine learning and big data analytics.

By having the ability to consume this technology as a service and expand the use of high-performance computing systems in the enterprise, we can expect breakthroughs in a range of industries; from scientists identifying root causes of cancer and climatologists predicting the next hurricane path, to energy companies simulating oil reservoir production in just minutes and optimizing new well placements. We will see companies, small and large, tackle their digital transformation initiatives.”

Cybersecurity gets intelligent, and so do cybercriminals

Liz Joyce, Chief Information Security Officer, HPE:

“Every sector of the technology landscape is quickly shifting to as-a-Service, and cybercrime is no exception. In 2020, we will see the continued industrialization of cybercrime, with hackers and organized e-crime rings selling their expertise and intellectual property online in the form of cybercrime-as-a-service. Today, cybercriminals are organizing among themselves en masse with very complex, very sophisticated supply chains and specializations and this will rapidly accelerate. As a result, we will increasingly see adversaries packaging up and selling threats as software services, complete with subscriptions, updates, customer support, and guarantees of numbers of infected devices. The cybercrime economy is just so formalized today, you don’t even need to know code or be a smart hacker to launch a formidable attack—and for enterprises, that’s a scary thing.”

“On the flip side, cybersecurity teams will increasingly embrace proactive, intelligence-driven cyber defense to do battle with these rising threats, embracing AI, automation, behavioral analytics and orchestration to detect threats dramatically faster. At the same time, we will see cybercriminals leveraging AI and automation as their weapons more and more, as well as targeting enterprises in a bid to gain access to valuable data sets and AI algorithms. So AI in cybersecurity is a double-edged sword, and cyber and IT teams need to constantly up-level their game to stay one step ahead.”

Next-gen technology evolves into container-based solutions

Kumar Sreekanti, senior vice president and chief technology officer of Hybrid IT, HPE:

“2020 is the year containers and Kubernetes go all-in on the enterprise. 2020 will mark the rise of bare metal – for containers, AI, and ML workloads. In order to transform and compete in their industry, enterprises will need to innovate faster and modernize their applications. To develop apps faster and drive innovation, they’ll be using containers and Kubernetes to build cloud-native applications.”

AI-driven intelligence continues to be the game changer

Jeff Kimmel, Storage CTO, HPE:

“The move to an AI-driven infrastructure is still going to be highly relevant in 2020, where we are going to see an industry shift, utilizing AI for day 2 operations and beyond. Using AI to help enterprises derive insights from their data will give them a competitive edge in a world where the data explosion continues. By utilizing AI in the data center, businesses can bring new applications to market and IT can keep up with demands without being tied down administering, tuning and supporting infrastructure.”

Creating new experiences with edge-driven data

Gerald Kleyn, vice president and general manager, Moonshot, Edge and IoT Systems

"Vast amounts of data generated from data centers and the cloud have enabled tremendous digital growth. That same explosion of data is happening now at the edge where connected sensors have become ubiquitous. Every industry is producing a high volume of data that can drive actionable insights in near real time. Enterprises are looking for reliable solutions that can collect, manage, filter and curate edge-driven data to make quicker decisions.

Having this capability will significantly impact a number of areas from transportation, where train conductors will be cautioned against risk or advised on when it’s safe to move again, to manufacturing where predictive maintenance can prevent system failure and associated downtime. As the process to collect and analyze data gets even smarter and faster, we’ll begin to see new business models emerge based on edge-driven data, creating new experiences. We will also see the same best practices used in the data center, such as strengthened security in operations that extends data protection to all endpoints, refactored for the edge.”

¹ Findings sourced from survey commissioned by HPE