Data is Your Strategy: Building Tomorrow Begins with Your Storage Infrastructure - Six Five In The Booth at HPE Discover Las Vegas 2025

In a world increasingly driven by AI and data, how is storage evolving from a mere repository to a dynamic enabler of business value? 

‍

From HPE Discover Las Vegas 2025, join David Nicholson and Keith Townsend from The Futurum Group as they host an insightful session with HPE's Jim O'Dorisio, SVP and GM, HPE Storage. Tune in as they explore, in detail, the transformative role of storage in our data-driven era and how HPE is strategically shaping the landscape to meet contemporary and future demands.

‍

Key takeaways include:

‍

🔹Market Forces Shaping Storage: A deep dive into how prevailing market forces, including rapid AI advancements, escalating cybersecurity threats, significant industry acquisitions, and urgent sustainability demands, are directly influencing HPE's data storage strategy and shaping its robust portfolio.

‍

🔹Unlocking AI Value from Unstructured Data: Insights into the critical challenges organizations face in realizing tangible value from AI, particularly concerning unstructured data, and HPE's actionable strategies to help customers overcome these barriers for substantial ROI.

‍

🔹AI for Data Management Efficiency: Explore the proactive role of AI in significantly enhancing HPE’s capabilities to manage data with greater efficiency, detailing how AI technologies are being embedded directly into operating models to streamline complex data management processes.

‍

🔹Cyber Resilience in the AI Era: The paramount importance of data protection and cyber resilience in today's heightened threat landscape, especially as AI applications consume data in increasingly differentiated ways, highlighting HPE's forward-looking stance on cybersecurity.

‍

Learn more at HPE.

‍

Watch the full video at Six Five Media, and be sure to subscribe to our YouTube channel, so you never miss an episode.

‍

Or listen to the audio here:

‍

Disclaimer: Six Five In The Booth is for information and entertainment purposes only. Over the course of this webcast, we may talk about companies that are publicly traded, and we may even reference that fact and their equity share price, but please do not take anything that we say as a recommendation about what you should do with your investment dollars. We are not investment advisors, and we ask that you do not treat us as such.

‍

Keith Townsend: You're watching Six Five In the Booth. HPE Discover Las Vegas 2025, Keith Townsend, Co host Dave Nicholson and we have with us SVP in GM of Storage at HPE, Jim O’Dorisio. I love that name. That's flair. You have flair. Dave, storage had a big highlight at the keynote today.

‍

David Nicholson: It did, it did as it should. Because as a knuckle dragging storage guy myself, it is the most important thing. It has always been the most important thing. Jim, do you agree ?

‍

Jim O'Dorisio: I agree. It's all about the data.

‍

David Nicholson: It's all about the data, it's all about the storage of that data. But what came out of the keynote today, what's special about what you're doing right now?

‍

Jim O'Dorisio: I think, look, we're helping our customers deliver really beneficial outcomes. And like I said, it's all about the data and it's all about extracting value from the data. And so what you heard today in the spotlight is some highlights around the X10K, our integration with MCP, you know, supporting agentic AI frameworks and it's really about giving, allowing customers to get insight out of their data. And you know, customers are looking for that for a couple reasons. They're either looking to drive operational benefit out of AI projects or they're looking to, you know, understand and reach their customers at a different level. And AI is, you know, a key element of that, of that effort.

‍

Keith Townsend: So big in this is unstructured data. You know, it's not something that we've been able to take advantage of in the past in the enterprise, not without a lot of effort with third party tools, et cetera. How is HPE helping customers take advantage of unstructured data for their AI pipeline?

‍

Jim O'Dorisio: Yeah, we've got a couple of things going on quite frankly. You know, one, one element is how do we activate the enterprise? We brought a converged platform, the private cloud for AI platform together last year. That's literally storage, networking, compute, GPUs all packaged up with our own AI software along with Nvidia software to accelerate time to value for our customers. And it's very much a turnkey solution, right, so customers can focus on their value creation and less on building the infrastructure. And then we brought to market the X10K, the Electramp X10K which is an intelligent data platform that leverages a key value store. So we're all about inline data enrichment and doing, rather than post processing, we're doing inline data enrichment and most recently we're doing Instant RAG pipeline. So as the data lands on the platform, we're literally calculating the vector embeddings and making the data, you know, making it the data available for chat right away. So pretty exciting stuff. So it's all about building intelligence into the platform. So we're taking a very different approach with our unstructured capabilities, but it's all about getting customers value that much quicker.

‍

Keith Townsend: So second level customers are looking for ROI on their investment from this unstructured data. Chatbox, I think was AI 1.0 from last year to this point. Agents and this investment in data. How are you helping customers see a return on value?

‍

Jim O'Dorisio: Obviously in a variety of ways. You heard us announce today the Greenlake intelligence platform and that's a huge effort towards really creating that ability to leverage all of this agentic AI capability that's out into the market. So it's not only the AI we're bringing, but it's all the AI that's already out there and making it easy for the customer to consume. We also announced with the X10K today, MCP support. And again, that gives us the ability to have an agentic AI interface directly with our storage platforms. These are the sorts of things that truly differentiate us from many of the other competitors in the market.

‍

David Nicholson: Yeah, you bring up MCP as an example of the AIification of storage. We hear a lot of folks AI washing their products and I come in with a healthy dose of skepticism. Actually a colleague of yours was touting how awesome your storage was that's coming out and I'm like, yeah, yeah, nice word salad. And then we see what you're actually doing, some of the stuff you described, but you know, hit on that again, this idea that there is an AI element to this in terms of how the data is stored, where the data is stored. We were struck by no more discussion of speeds and feeds. It's all about the important integration of these AI workflows. But how does MCP play into this specifically?

‍

Jim O'Dorisio: You know, there's so much being done, so much, you know, enhancements that are being made to AI models and now the agentic AI, because these agents are, they're learning agents, they're smart agents and they're sitting on the edge. And their ability to access the storage directly and for the storage to access intelligence from the agentic AI frameworks is huge. An MCP is like a switchboard. It's a standard interface that allows those agentic AI capabilities to access the storage directly. And that just kind of accentuates the value of what we can bring to market that much quicker.

Keith Townsend: So AI accelerates everything. It also accelerates the threat vectors to the data. Customers are fixated on getting as much value out of their data and recognizing that there's much more value than they thought. And with any asset that you discover, brand new data, new money. And if you have this new money and people are constantly trying to attack it, what's HPE's perspective helping data with data protection, specifically around cyber. With these evolving threats powered by AI.

‍

Jim O'Dorisio: In some sense certainly we have a comprehensive data protection portfolio at HPE and one of the things we're doing is everything from cyber resilience. So we have a cyber resiliency product that's based on the Zerto technology that literally gives us a physical air gapped environment so you can recover in minutes, you know, relative to what you might recover if you had an air gap in the cloud. So that's one element. We just introduced anomaly detection in our electramp B10000 which is critical because now we're looking for anomalies as the data is landing in the storage environment and then being able to trigger snapshots so that you can then investigate for malware and the like. So we're really taking the approach of, yeah, you know, cyber top of mind for most enterprises and quite frankly it's becoming a board level conversation just as AI is. A board level conversation is how do we create value? Cyber is such a threat, an existential threat to businesses. It's a board level conversation. And so we're having, you know, we're continuing to build out functionality there and quite frankly one of the reasons, you know, data is being repatriated from the cloud is because of security concerns. And now that value creation is happening more and more on prem with customers and then we're going to be right there to help them protect that data with a combination of traditional data protection, multi layer data protection, including cyber.

‍

Keith Townsend: Well, Jim, we really appreciate you stopping by the booth. The Six Five in the booth is basically free consultations.

‍

David Nicholson: Thank you very much.

‍

Keith Townsend: Yeah, thank you very much. Please don't send an invoice. Dan and Pat won't pay for it.

‍

Jim O'Dorisio: Hey, I enjoyed the conversation. Awesome.

‍

Keith Townsend: Make sure to stay tuned for more Six Five coverage of HPE Discover Las Vegas 2025 for me and my co host, Dave. Thank you.

‍