Memory-driven computing to unleash new opportunities: HPE India

HPE is focused on helping customers leverage the economic potential of their data, from every edge to any cloud. Here, Som Satsangi, MD, HPE India, tells us more. Excerpts:

DQ: What is your view of the performance of the Indian ICT industry in 2019?

Som Satsangi: Our country has a rich ecosystem of product development, software development and innovation. These capabilities have enabled the Indian ICT industry to rapidly innovate and offer products and solutions that deliver benefits and new experiences to customers globally.

At HPE, we are focused on helping our customers leverage the economic potential of their data, from every edge to any cloud. We understand it is imperative for us to innovate faster, better, smarter—and use those innovations to solve our customers’ most critical problems. Many of our partnership projects across healthcare, manufacturing, finance, and agriculture, are leveraging the previously unused data resources to reveal new solutions to address social and environmental challenges.

DQ: What is your view on FY 19 in terms of business and financial performance? Please share any two key highlights.

Som Satsangi: We have been helping enterprises in India redefine experiences, drive intelligent operations and extract value from their data. For instance, we are working with Vodafone Idea, one the largest mobile operators in India, to transform its Service & Network Operations Center (SNOC).

This SNOC controls the telco’s vast network and service offerings to its subscribers using HPE next-generation operations support systems (OSS) and HPE Intelligent Assurance to turn vast amounts of telecommunications network data into actionable insight.

We have also made investments in innovations to support the Indian government’s initiatives to apply technology to drive positive societal change in critical areas such as:

eEducation – Under the National Digital Literacy Mission, we have collaborated with NASSCOM Foundation to establish 50 fully equipped digital classrooms to address the gap of digital literacy among youth in rural areas across the country. Additionally, along with Agastya International Foundation, we are setting-up a Center of Excellence in Gudipalli, Chittoor district, Andhra Pradesh, focused on skilling students in IoT-based agriculture.

eHealth – Our eHealth Centers (eHCs), which are cloud-enabled healthcare infrastructure solution helps improve access and effectiveness of primary healthcare in underserved areas. Over 130 eHCs and 150 mobile eHCs are operational and have collectively facilitated over 800,000 patient visits.

Digital Village – Aligning with the government’s initiative to launch 100,000 digital villages, we are enabling five villages to benefit from a range of services including the HPE Digital Classroom, HPE’s eHealth Center, free public Wi-Fi provided by HPE Aruba and a range of online citizen services.

DQ: What is the way ahead in an environment of declining margins, softer IT spending and tighter outsourcing, and GDPR regime, in the traditional verticals segments?

Som Satsangi: Today, enterprises are embracing digital transformation to differentiate and grow their business while creating new and compelling customer experiences. Hence, they require a consistent experience for their applications and workloads across all of their clouds and their on-premise infrastructure and the freedom to choose the combination of technologies that best meet their needs.

Additionally, businesses are increasingly experiencing an explosion of data, making it imperative for access to products and services that can secure, protect their privacy, and facilitate their operations in a data-rich environment.

However, in the current scenario, businesses are compelled to accept an inconsistent experience between the data center and the cloud; inflexible, expensive, and proprietary stacks that prohibit choice; and limited in-house IT skills, budgets, and options for financing. To empower customers with choice, flexibility, and control, we recently announced our plans to transition HPE as a service company over time.

This includes our commitment to offer our entire portfolio through a range of subscription based pay-per-use and as-a-service offerings by 2022.

DQ: What is your business outlook for FY 20, and what are the key focus areas?

Som Satsangi: To accelerate our purpose of advancing the way people live and work, we believe it is critical for us to focus on - investing in our culture, creating new value for our customers and partners, and doubling-down on sustainable innovation.

Our announcement in July 2019 to invest $500 million in India over the next five years underscores our long-term commitment to the country. Apart from enabling us to grow our operations, manufacturing and employee base, it will also result in the growth of our R&D and services exports, as well technology initiatives to drive positive change for local Indian communities.

DQ: What is the influence of the emerging technologies? How will it impact the next couple of years?

Som Satsangi: The growth of edge computing will shift core computational tasks from the data centers to the edge – to the vast range of devices in the emerging IoT - and enables the collection and analysis of data from connected assets, people and places at the point where it is created to deliver actionable insights.

More broadly, the limitation of our conventional computing systems is one of the main roadblocks for utilizing this vast resource pool of data for the benefit of society and business. Hence, we need to reinvent the most basic functions of a computing system from the ground up. Our researchers are working on new technologies that can scale to handle the data processing demands of the future in an energy-efficient manner.

Memory-driven computing is one such approach that delivers an entirely new way of computing specifically designed for the big data era, reducing the time needed to process complex problems from days to hours. Memory-driven computing has the potential to unleash new opportunities for problem solving and innovation across industries and sectors as disparate as healthcare, transportation, city services and retail.