Navigating Hybrid Cloud: HPE’s Strategy and the Role of OpsRamp - Six Five On The Road at HPE Discover Las Vegas 2025

How are organizations driving efficiency across hybrid cloud estates, even as AI and automation workloads surge? 🖥️🤔

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Discover the strategic answers live from HPE Discover Las Vegas 2025! Join David Nicholson as he hosts a pivotal session with Varma Kunaparaju , Senior Vice President and GM of Cloud Platform and OpsRamp at HPE. This in-depth exploration will reveal HPE’s evolving hybrid cloud strategy and OpsRamp’s transformative role within the HPE GreenLake ecosystem.

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Key takeaways include:

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🔹OpsRamp's Role in Hybrid Cloud Evolution: A comprehensive look at how OpsRamp deeply integrates into HPE's overarching vision for hybrid cloud, significantly enhancing the capabilities of HPE GreenLake and the broader cloud platform offerings with its unique features.

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🔹Advancing Observability in Complex Environments: Explore the critical importance of robust observability across on-premises, edge, and multi-cloud infrastructures, detailing how OpsRamp is pioneering advancements amidst the increasing demands of AI and automation workloads.

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🔹Conquering Cloud Tool Sprawl: Insights into HPE's proactive strategies to tackle the pervasive challenge of tool sprawl in cloud operations, including OpsRamp's potential to deliver a unified or highly modular approach to comprehensive IT operations management.

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🔹AI-Powered Operations & Future Trajectory: The seamless integration of AI and machine learning into OpsRamp, facilitating enhanced diagnostics, predictive analytics, and autonomous remediation efforts, alongside a forward-looking perspective on HPE and OpsRamp's innovations in the coming 12-18 months.

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Learn more at HPE.

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Disclaimer: Six Five On The Road 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.

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David Nicholson: Welcome to Six Five on the road. I'm Dave Nicholson and I'm here at HPE Discover Las Vegas 2025. I have a very special guest, Varma Kunaparaju. He is HPE's SVP and General Manager of Cloud platform. And we're going to talk about cloud, we're going to talk about hybrid cloud. Welcome.

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Varma Kunaparaju: Thank you. Thank you for having me.

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David Nicholson: Yeah, it's great to have you here. I want to dive right in and get your perspective on where we are in the hybrid cloud space. Specifically, how would you define the modern operating model for hybrid cloud now that we're in the middle of not only generative AI, but agentic AI, what is the operating model for hybrid cloud today?

Varma Kunaparaju: Varma, Great question. You know, if you look at the journey of an enterprise from last decade, the world of IT is more and more a combination of edge to cloud. And that edge to cloud consists of on-prem locations, private clouds, data centers and public clouds. So the infrastructure that an enterprise needs to deal with to run their application workloads is now more than ever before federated from all these locations and enterprises Estates are also multi vendor, not a single vendor in the entire estate and multi cloud. So the operating model for an enterprise is to deal with this hybrid, multi vendor, multi cloud estates and bring all the applications more and more cloud native and more and more AI native applications on top of a variety of runtime environments. In the old days runtime was primarily either running on physical hardware or virtualized hardware. Now with containers and kubernetes and the workloads all kinds of runtime spring into play. So that is what an enterprise needs to deal with to make their end to end customers applications deliver what the outcomes that they need to deliver.

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David Nicholson: Do you think that sort of the dawn of AI and AI workloads has that validated the value of having some IT on premises? Do you see people taking a harder look at on premises parts of their IT because of AI or has that not been a factor?

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Varma Kunaparaju: Yeah, no. For AI, data is one of the most resilient things that ultimately feeds the outcomes for you know, and data is by nature, you know, is spread. It's no longer every piece of the data is in the cloud that you know and the data is resident where the actual collection of the data is taking place. Right. So as a result I see AI bringing some of the workloads and the fine tuning of those workloads. Fine tuning of the AI models really calls for bringing certain aspects of those applications to private or hybrid data centers.

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David Nicholson: And we've heard a lot of announcements this week, starting with a keynote from Antonio and the Sphere. Let's talk about the developments in opsramp and how that fits into an operational model for hybrid cloud. Yeah, what's the latest there?

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Varma Kunaparaju: The latest is two aspects. One aspect is opsramp's native evolution as a product in terms of its roadmap and bringing full Stack observability. With the entire estate and post acquisition of HPE, we have continued our journey in terms of our multi vendor, multi cloud support, not only supporting HP infrastructure, but more importantly all other vendors and multiple hyperscaler support because the workloads are going to be distributed in that. That's number one. Number two is the natural product evolution for Full Stack observability and our AI journey. Last year we announced our copilot for opsramp and we continue to evolve the copilot capability with generative LLM models as well as the models that really allow us to fine tune based on all the data that we collected to be able to do root cause. So the evolution of the root cause and root cause analysis around our copilot is what we are demonstrating on the floor today. And we continue to evolve that observability as a stack where it fits in. The HPE's overall strategy is very interesting. With Greenlake, we wanted every enterprise to be operating their hybrid cloud, multi vendor, multi cloud workload. So opsramp plays a very important role in bringing that observability that is needed, the visibility that is needed to be able to operate those things. So as a result, we integrated OPSRAMP into the GreenLake platform and gave that value proposition both for the consumers of Greenlake platform, where they're consuming HPE solutions as well as a standalone mode consuming that technology for their observability needs.

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David Nicholson: GreenLake's been around for a while and initially it's like, okay, of course HPE needs to have a hybrid cloud, private cloud strategy. Of course AI comes along and I know it wasn't a surprise to us. AI in various forms has been around for a while. But the talk around Greenlake Intelligence makes the case for why GreenLake intelligence is a real thing and not just AI washing of something that you already had. It's a bit of a leading question, it's a softball question because we've seen some of the pretty cool things that you're doing just in networking and storage as an example. But make the case for GreenLake Intelligence, why is it intelligent? Why isn't it just the old regular GreenLake.

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Varma Kunaparaju: Yeah. Nowadays I think I probably frame the answer into two legs. One leg of the journey is the evolution of GreenLake platform. Organic investments that HP made for a long time to bring their edge to the cloud. Our edge to cloud the entire stack as a service to the end customers. That journey has been going on kind of. That's where a lot of investments were made to kind of really make that platform as the single platform to deliver the hybrid cloud edge to cloud delivered as a service. Along the journey we recognize there are assets that are required for day zero, day one provisioning and orchestration, day two, observability and automation. That's where we made the acquisitions, inorganic acquisitions like Morpheus which brings the VME as well as provision, orchestration or automation layer and then the observability layer that comes from OpsRamp. So if you look at all of that stack, the fundamentals of that stack will really allow now a gen AI and AI based intelligence layer to be brought on top of domain specific agentic work that is taking place. You probably heard from the Aruba team about their agentic journey on how they are trying to solve certain common use cases without a human operator involved in resolving network issues. Similarly, in the Storage, our new Electra series is carrying an agentic framework to be able to kind of do domain specific intelligence. Now if you combine these domain specific intelligence layers that are taking place and bring all of them together under a GreenLake intelligence which is a framework for providing agentic AIOps across all the domains and because of the nature of integrations that we did with Observability which is bringing multi vendor, multi cloud sts. Now the intelligence layer that we are bringing in Greenlake can not only support the multi domain solutions that HPE is offering, but for broader operations footprint of an enterprise for improving their meantime to detect, meantime to resolve with human operators equipped with intelligence to be able to kind of carry those tasks.

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David Nicholson: Yeah, it's an interesting point. A lot of people today, business leaders and some with very little technical experience, ask the question: how do I get ROI out of this AI thing? They're often thinking first of answering the question: what kind of shiny new object can I invent that will create a new business? Okay, how does AI make me money? The other side of the coin is how does AI save me money? Do you think it's a relevant answer or a realistic answer to the question: what should I first do with AI? Can the answer be to optimize your infrastructure, focus on infrastructure that's leveraging AI behind the scenes almost in a way that you won't even be aware of, except those efficiencies will deliver cost savings to your business regardless of the business that you're in. I mean, would that be an HP argument for or an HPE answer to the question what's the first thing I should do in the world of AI? I mean, is it focusing on infrastructure?

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Varma Kunaparaju: Yeah, great question. And I think there are two, in my view, two different aspects to that. One aspect is obviously your spend on the infrastructure, whether it's public clouds or private clouds or hybrid infrastructures. How do you kind of basically optimize your infrastructure for capacity and growth and resiliency that you need to do? Right. Number one is improve the meantime to repair, meantime to detect is operational. Aspect number two is how do you make the workloads perform at the level that they need to perform to be able to give the outcomes that need to be given. So both of those aspects in conjunction with optimizing your infrastructure for delivering what needs to be. Remember, if you are optimizing it and not delivering what you need to deliver, it's not going to work. So you need to kind of. These two are orthogonal vectors. In some ways you need to optimize, but at the same time you need to deliver the outcomes that you need to deliver. So that's what I think our GreenLake intelligence is trying to deliver, that value proposition for enterprises.

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David Nicholson: Yeah, I think it's hard for some business leaders to get away from the desire for the shiny object, but the shiny object that sometimes is the most amazing is optimizing infrastructure this way where you're putting dollars to the bottom line. It's really fascinating. Do you have any thoughts on the challenges around cooling or energy consumption in this space? Just out of curiosity, what does that look like from an HPE perspective?

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Varma Kunaparaju: I think if you remember, one of the applications that the Greenlake platform delivers is a sustainability footprint, carbon footprint of, you know, and sustainability overall footprint of the entire stack that an enterprise is doing. And that is a, we call it sustainability insight center that has been delivered on Greenlake platform. Now because of our multi vendor instrumentation that we brought through opsramp into Greenlake platform, we can now get the footprint of the carbon footprint as well as power consumption footprint of all the multi vendor estate and being able to give that insight to an end customer to be able to optimize. Now with AI gen, AI and AI frameworks, you have an opportunity to optimize that carbon footprint by either moving the workloads to where it needs to be where there is better consumption, power consumption and better workload delivery models exist. Those opportunities and insights can be obtained.

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David Nicholson: Through the GreenLake platform today and that green ops pillar if you will. At least in the US that green also translates into green dollars.

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Varma Kunaparaju: Yes.

David Nicholson: So yes, carbon footprint also those efficiencies from an energy perspective always deliver dollar savings. Varma, thanks so much for sitting and having this conversation about hybrid cloud and the operational model. Do you have any final thoughts on this idea of where hybrid cloud and the operation around hybrid cloud is headed?

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Varma Kunaparaju: I think in my view the silos in running hybrid cloud operations it created a lot of opportunities to really bring with AI and Genai journey to a new age of AIOps that brings a unified view into overall operations across SRE, DevOps, Tech Ops, IT Ops bringing them together to be able to efficiently deliver outcomes which are business services that end customers and end business units are asking from either service providers or from enterprises enterprise it. So that's where I think the opportunity to leverage the new advances that took place in the last six months around AI and intelligence and that's what we are driving towards GreenLake intelligence to deliver.

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David Nicholson: It's a great point to wrap on to business leaders out there sometimes chasing the shiniest of objects and the most exciting of use cases. Sounds great, but don't take your eye off of what I would call the infrastructure ball. Operations around hybrid cloud is where it's at. It's where you're going to drive money to your bottom line. And if that's not exciting for you, please move aside, let somebody else take your job. Varma, thanks again.

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Varma Kunaparaju: Thank you.

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David Nicholson: For Six Five On the Road broadcasting here at HPE Discover Las Vegas 2025. I'm Dave Nicholson and thanks for joining us and stay tuned for more interesting content.

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