Aruba focuses on edge and AI security, and we’ve made significant progress in 5G and 6G development: Som Satsangi, HPE India

In an insightful interview with Express Computer, Som Satsangi, Senior Vice President and Managing Director of HPE India, shares HPE’s impressive growth trajectory, particularly in the Indian market. Som Satsangi highlights key drivers behind this expansion, including regulatory advancements in the BFSI sector, the Digital India initiative, and significant growth in telecom, manufacturing, and hybrid cloud solutions like HPE GreenLake. The conversation touches upon HPE’s pivotal role in cloud repatriation, AI adoption, sustainability efforts, and the company’s ambitious goals in hybrid cloud and networking as it continues to lead innovation across these domains.

Could you share with us the growth of HPE in recent years, particularly in the Indian market? What have been the key drivers of this growth?

This is a great time to discuss HPE’s growth, as we just announced our global results. In Q4, we achieved $8.5 billion in revenue, marking a 15% year-on-year growth and surpassing expectations across key metrics like EPS and free cash flow. For the full year, despite some early headwinds, we achieved 3% global growth, crossing $30 billion for the first time, with cash flow exceeding forecasts at over $2.5 billion.

India plays a crucial role in this growth, not only from a business perspective but also in terms of talent, with over 15,000 employees, including more than 6,000 in engineering and technology. Every HPE product and technology is influenced by teams in our Bengaluru and Chennai centres, highlighting India’s strategic importance.

Several factors have driven our success in India. Regulatory requirements in the BFSI sector, particularly around security and compliance, were beneficial, and we saw significant growth in telecom, thanks to the Digital India initiative and our involvement in 5G and AI projects. The automobile and manufacturing sectors, supported by initiatives like Make in India, also contributed, with companies like Lupin investing heavily in technology. Our work with Lupin on HPE GreenLake, extending their SAP core across global offices, is a prime example.

Compliance, security, and high local content, reaching 80% localisation in our servers, gave us a competitive edge in the Indian market, helping close deals that were pending earlier in the year. While AI adoption is still in its early stages, we anticipate significant growth next year. In 2023, growth was primarily driven by hybrid cloud, HPE GreenLake, BFSI, and telecom.

Additionally, our focus on SMBs and mid-market businesses, helping them build on-premise solutions rather than relying on public cloud, supported geographic expansion. Our R&D and innovation labs in India also played a key role, solving complex challenges and winning large deals. This balanced approach across sectors has been key to HPE’s growth in India.

Hybrid cloud strategies can often be complex and challenging. How does HPE aim to simplify this complexity for businesses? Could you share any success stories or use cases that highlight this?

HPE is seeing a significant trend where businesses, especially those with a strong cloud presence, are re-evaluating their strategies, particularly after the COVID-19 pandemic. Over 60-65% of our customers either started in the cloud or had most of their applications running there. However, many have since decided to move some workloads back on-premises with HPE GreenLake.

One major success story, though not customer-referenceable, involves a large cloud repatriation deal. A leading technology company, previously paying over ₹200 crore annually to a cloud provider, chose to de-risk from providers like Google Maps and Microsoft Azure. They’re now transitioning their entire infrastructure to HPE, including servers, storage, and network, moving away from AWS within the next three months.

This trend is gaining momentum across industries like pharma, manufacturing, and the public sector. Discussions with entities such as MEITY and NIC about sovereign cloud solutions reflect the growing need for secure, compliant, and data-sovereign environments. Hybrid cloud, particularly through HPE GreenLake, is proving to be the best solution for companies facing the complexities of distributed data systems, security, and compliance in the cloud.

You mentioned a significant investment in the cloud space. Does it have any connection to the Morpheus Data acquisition?

No, the Morpheus acquisition is relatively recent, but it will have a significant impact on multi-cloud environments. When integrated with OpsRamp into the HPE GreenLake platform, it will create a powerful unified solution.

Today, most customers operate in multi-cloud environments, managing applications across providers like Amazon, Google, Oracle, and on-prem systems. Each requires separate consoles, making it hard for CIOs to oversee assets and networks.

HPE GreenLake, with OpsRamp providing infrastructure observability and Morpheus handling management and orchestration, addresses this complexity. Customers are already interested, with OpsRamp fully integrated and available to all HPE GreenLake customers in India. Once Morpheus is integrated, it will enhance the offering further.

Recently, we showcased the combined Morpheus and OpsRamp features to 30 top partners, demonstrating improved efficiency in hybrid and multi-cloud environments, and the response was overwhelmingly positive.

At HPE Discover Barcelona, we also launched VM Essential, a critical solution for hybrid cloud customers facing challenges from the Broadcom-VMware merger. It offers an alternative to VMware with more flexibility. These innovations are recent, but we’re already seeing growth in the hybrid cloud space in India.

Let’s bring our focus back to AI. How do you view the current AI landscape, and what trends do you foresee shaping the future of AI? Many enterprises are looking to accelerate their AI deployments. Could you share how HPE is assisting these businesses and the approaches you’re adopting?

Sure. I’ll address this from two or three perspectives. First, when enterprises begin their AI journey, they quickly realise the importance of having properly structured datasets. Although many claim to have sufficient data, it’s often siloed. The first step is consolidating and preparing this data for AI tools to extract insights effectively. While some industries, like banking, are better prepared with structured systems, most aren’t there yet. HPE helps by leveraging our expertise in storage and security to guide businesses on structuring datasets for training, inferencing, and working with LLMs.

Second, infrastructure is key. Some cloud providers push enterprises to move all data to the cloud for LLM modelling, but “data gravity” makes this difficult. That’s why our collaboration with NVIDIA is critical. Together, we’ve developed a private cloud solution for AI, combining NVIDIA’s GPUs and software with HPE’s infrastructure. This solution comes in various sizes, allowing businesses to begin their AI journey quickly, with just a few clicks, enabling AI capabilities and onboarding data scientists within seconds.

Finally, networking is essential, especially in a distributed environment where much of the customer experience happens at the edge. Ensuring seamless connectivity from the edge to the data centre and cloud requires a secure, AI-enabled network. Our strong portfolio, including Aruba and our upcoming acquisition of Juniper, further strengthens our AI networking capabilities. This allows us to offer a comprehensive solution that integrates data, performs inferencing, and executes AI models securely and efficiently.

After our HPE Discover More session, several customers expressed interest in learning more about how we can accelerate their AI journeys. It’s a compelling story that highlights how HPE is supporting businesses in their AI endeavours.

Do you have any timeline for the acquisition of Juniper Networks?

Based on the current scenario, we expect the transition and approval to be completed by early 2025.

Creating a robust and secure network foundation is crucial for AI and hybrid cloud deployments. How does HPE achieve this? What key challenges do businesses face in this area, and how does HPE address them?

The biggest challenge is that traditional networks weren’t built to handle the complexities of hybrid environments or AI workloads. Aruba stands out by offering future-ready networking solutions, unlike many competitors whose networks were designed for legacy data centres. Aruba focuses on edge and AI security, and we’ve made significant progress in 5G and 6G development. HPE has also strengthened Aruba’s capabilities through strategic acquisitions, making it a leader in secure, future-proof networking.

For example, a major public sector bank in India, which uses a competitor’s network solution, chose Aruba for endpoint security across 7 million devices—demonstrating trust in Aruba’s technology. Our ongoing acquisition of Juniper will further enhance our capabilities in telco and AI, building a robust, comprehensive networking portfolio.

Sustainability is a critical focus area for many organisations today. How is HPE driving innovation in Sustainable IT? Are there any specific initiatives or projects you can highlight?

Yes, absolutely. Sustainability today is a priority for almost every CIO in the boardroom. Discussions often revolve around building sustainable infrastructure.

The first step we’ve taken is ensuring all our infrastructure is designed to be more sustainable. We’re actively working to reduce our carbon footprint and energy consumption. For example, our Gen 11 servers consume approximately 20% less power than the previous generation. This trend of developing products with lower power consumption is consistent across all new developments.

Secondly, we’ve introduced a unique sustainability dashboard at HPE. This tool provides CIOs with real-time insights into their energy consumption and helps them monitor and manage these aspects effectively.

Thirdly, we’re advancing a circular economy approach through HPE Financial Services. For instance, in large projects, after five years, instead of discarding infrastructure as e-waste, we take it back, refresh it, and return value to the customer. This practice not only minimises waste but also maximises value.

Internally, we’ve also transitioned to sustainable power sources for our factories and offices, significantly reducing our carbon footprint. All our new offices are powered primarily by alternative energy sources.

Additionally, we work across our value chain, suppliers, integrators, etc., to ensure sustainability at every step.

On the AI side, we’re preparing for increasing power requirements in data centres. Traditional air cooling can handle up to 12-13 kilowatts per rack, but the new H200 GPUs require up to 30 kilowatts per rack. To meet this demand, liquid cooling is the only viable solution.

HPE has the most patents in liquid cooling, thanks to our Cray acquisition, which brought expertise in building some of the fastest supercomputers. For example, we recently announced the world’s fastest computer, El Capitan, at 1.8 exaflops. Much of this liquid cooling R&D happens in Bengaluru. Additionally, our sustainability dashboards are highly valued by enterprise customers, particularly in the banking sector, where they have been game-changing. 

I think discussions around sustainability will only grow as data centre capacities increase in India. With data localisation mandates like the DPDP and the rise of AI-powered data centres, sustainability will remain a critical topic. 

Now, looking ahead, what do you see as the most exciting opportunity and the biggest challenge for HPE in the next year, particularly in AI, hybrid cloud, and networking?

The most exciting opportunity for enterprises in the coming year will be the adoption of AI and turning it into reality. While many customers talk about AI, most are only beginning to explore its potential. Real AI deployment requires substantial compute, storage, and network resources, all of which need to be backed by sustainable infrastructure. NVIDIA’s latest GPUs, like the H200 and Grace Hopper, demand more power—up to 300 kilowatts per rack—making sustainability and liquid cooling essential.

Three factors will shape IT transformation: AI, network and security, and sustainability. Hybrid environments will remain key, with 70-80% of workloads and 60-70% of AI workloads expected to rely on hybrid setups. HPE will play a crucial role in this, with the HPE GreenLake console unifying assets, from discovery to orchestration and cost optimisation.