HPE Ezmeral software portfolio drives edge-to-cloud digital transformation

[RiazPatel]

Having traditionally been a hardware vendor that relied on software partners to enable customers to extract the maximum value from their IT solutions, HPE’s launch of its Ezmeral software brand marks a move towards enabling customers to leverage existing infrastructure investments to run cloud-native and non-cloud-native applications and data in the same namespace and across locations.

Essentially, we want to provide our customers with a stress-free application redevelopment experience where the infrastructure and DevOps aspects of modern application development are taken care of, enabling scientists to focus on the mathematics, without having to worry about the underlying technology or day-to-day operations.

What is Ezmeral?

Everything that sits within the Ezmeral portfolio is already an existing HPE software product. But we’re trying to make it less confusing for customers by bringing the various different software solution elements together under one umbrella.

So, as a hardware company, we’ve developed a bunch of Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML) solutions to make hardware operations easier, and these fell under the HPE OneView and Infosight portfolios.

They have now been rebranded as IT Operations and IT Automation, and fall under HPE Ezmeral, allowing us to continue providing our customers with the products that they know and love. HPE Ezmeral includes container orchestration and management, AI/ML and data analytics, cost control, IT automation and AI-driven operations, and security.

What it does.

With the advent of cloud, companies have started to adopt new ways of using software, largely centred on how software interacts with data. Traditional enterprise software solutions would consume data that exists within the customer’s Data Centre, but customers are now starting to use data from multiple sources, and in real time.

Moving these applications to the cloud seems like a good thing to do but the monolithic approach to traditional software design makes these packages a poor fit. As a result, the movement to redevelop these applications has been gaining momentum.

However, redevelopment requires a development lifecycle that leverages open source methodologies while still relying on data that resides in an open or closed framework. As part of this redevelopment effort, people don’t always have the skill or experience in running the infrastructure and accessing the data that the new application will rely on, saying: “If we redevelop software, let’s use a vendor integrated open source approach.”

This approach is new, so often the software skills for redevelopment and hardware methodologies, best practices and operations don’t exist. What HPE is doing, is bringing together the various elements of our software, hardware and services portfolio in a framework that allows customers to redevelop their software for the cloud era, without having to worry about the costs, the operations involved, where the solution resides, or what hardware is involved.

The benefits of Ezmeral

HPE Ezmeral is designed to help enterprises accelerate their digital transformation across their organisation, from edge-to-cloud. Hence, by bringing all our software assets under HPE Ezmeral, we can offer customers solutions that help modernise their approach to how applications are deployed as well as how data is consumed. Customers can leverage all or just parts of the portfolio to optimise, manage, run, automate, analyse, as well as secure their application and data experience.

It’s about assisting companies that are facing challenges with working remotely at the moment. The entire model around cloud consumption, delivery and access to data is to try and ease the people, process and risk aspect that companies are faced with, which is now amplified due to the current work from home movement.

For companies embarking on application development journeys, having a company like HPE – that can handle the infrastructure Software Development Life Cycle (SDLC) aspect – allows them to enable their workforce to work where it makes the most sense, without having to worry about the operations element.

What it comes down to is that it is not about the individual IT components, as well as a realisation that each customer is unique. At HPE, we understand this and provide enterprises with the management, operations, as well as the infrastructure, to support their digital transformation initiatives.