Rebooting the composable PaaS - HP Certifications

HPE Pathfinder’s investment in Agile Stacks affords us the opportunity to redefine a category

My investment philosophy and personal drive is always envisioning where enterprises need technologies to remain competitive. This led me to cloud six years ago then to the new stack and edge most recently. Moving over to HPE was a triumph of personal and professional ambitions, executed with ideal timing. The opportunity to lead an investing team which makes category leading investments across the stack from edge to cloud -with HPE as a powerhouse- was too interesting to pass up.

Pathfinder’s model is central to Antonio Neri’s three pronged vision for innovation at HPE: organic, acquisitions, and partnerships. As the investment and solutions arm of HPE, our modus operandi is looking primarily across HPE’s two strategic pillars: Hybrid IT (infrastructure, cloud, applications) and Intelligent Edge (to be covered in a future post). Hybrid IT encapsulates all the big and small changes happening around the new stack creating thematic areas within which we will invest: from adoption of microservices based architectures, DevSecOps, transition to containers and eventually serverless as a mainstream technology for the enterprises. You’ll see us actively making investments across these areas, a shining example is our most recent investment, Agile Stacks.

Investments in companies like AgileStacks keep HPE on the bleeding edge

Redefining a category

Founded in 2016, Agile Stacks spent their early years building the core of their platform in secrecy, coming out of stealth in late 2017 after they already had prospects lined up and customers in pilots. Delivering on their moniker, customers -for the first time- accelerated software delivery using a DevOps-first architecture to deploy composable, automated, full-function cloud stacks within minutes, using their tools of choice. This is the promise which the Kubernetes powered world promised for developers, but the path to get there has been riddled with big cloud engineering teams, talent gaps, and buying into complete ecosystems (pivotal, openstack). Agile Stacks is the first company to solve this by incorporating a range of popular, best-of-breed open source products that are pre-tested, integrated and work together from the instant they are deployed. The stacks support the predictable performance, agility, scalability and reliability, all of which is table stakes for enterprise customers.

Let’s take a small detour to how we got here, noting the key term ‘scalability.’ In the early days of 2016, a market battle raged for container orchestration leadership between Google’s Kubernetes, Mesos Marathon and Docker Swarm. I think we all know the winner. Agile Stacks made the bet to align with Kubernetes, a time when much of the K8s ecosystem was the wild-west. That bet is paying huge dividends as forward momentum in market timing and confidence in feature releases on de jure container orchestration. Customers inherently receive the benefit of a Kubernetes infrastructure out of the box.

The traditional PaaS plays have ingested and grown beyond recognition. Think about the stories you hear of multi-year, multi-million dollar deployments espousing the promise of developing and running all enterprise software under one umbrella. Then ask those very same development and ops teams whether they got to pick the tools they wanted to use to get their job done more efficiently.

Agile Stacks aligns with our vision for hybrid cloud powered by DevOps automation so customers are free to choose from their infrastructure, applications and tools. Agile Stacks is a powerful, yet simple solution which provides our customers revolutionary flexibility and composability in a cost efficient manner. Succinctly, we are making choice a first-class citizen like it should always have been.

Creating solutions, that’s HPE Pathfinder’s first and foremost differentiating factor

Hewlett Packard Pathfinder as an enabler of growth

While it’s really important to have an innovation hub like Pathfinder within a company and many companies these days have some flavor of it; what is unique for Pathfinder, is that on top of making investments, we also partner with our portfolio companies to create solutions.  We help scale them to enterprise customers, and give them access to expertise and resources (in addition to capital).  Creating solutions, that’s our first and foremost differentiating factor.

Investments in companies such as AgileStacks keep us on the bleeding edge - they keep us on trend, let us see that trend happen and be a part of it, taking it to the conclusion. Looking forward, we’ll continue to accelerate - both in the velocity and number of investments we’re making, but also in the diversity of investments too. I envision a strategically opportunistic future with a mix of early and later stage investments. The Pathfinder acceleration business model is not changed, but if anything we are amping up the pace.

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Replacement programs and Battery Recall Update - HP Certifications

The quality and safety of all HP products is our top priority. We learned that batteries provided by one of our suppliers for certain notebook computers and mobile workstations present a potential safety concern. We took immediate action to address the issue and are replacing the batteries in question. This action pertains to approximately 0.1 percent of the HP systems sold globally during the recall time period.

Customers can visit HP’s site to learn if their battery should be replaced. Impacted customers will have their batteries replaced free of charge and may continue safely using their device by placing the battery in Safety Mode and connecting to an external power source.

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Aruba Certified Design Expert Guideline For Candidates - HP Certifications

Aruba Certified Design Expert (ACDX) V6.4

This certification validates that you can design complex, enterprise level networks with the Aruba product line.  This certification verifies that you can design a Mobile First Networking solution that includes mobility, redundancy, security, RF planning, QoS, authentication, and integration with existing infrastructure.

Why earn this certification?

•   Position yourself as an design expert for large Aruba Mobile First Networking deployments   using Aruba Controller, Access Point, Instant, ClearPass and AirWave product lines
•   Demonstrate your ability to design highly scalable, custom Mobility First Networking           solutions that support enterprise business requirements
•   Enhance your career and job satisfaction as an Aruba Certified Design Expert

Candidate

Typical candidates for this certification are networking IT professionals with a minimum of three to five years of experience in designing complex enterprise-level Mobile First Networks. Successful candidates have familiarity with building detailed bill of materials using Aruba Controller, Access Point and AirWave products for secure, guest and voice deployments.

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Technology is the perfect travel companion - HP Certifications

After a 15-hour journey from San Francisco to Sydney last month, I faced the ordeal of wending my way through Australian immigration and customs. It’s a typically frustrating but expected byproduct of travel, especially during the ultra-busy holiday season ahead of us.

Except that it wasn’t an ordeal at all. Interestingly, not once did I or any of my fellow passengers interact with a human throughout the process – no security officer, customs official or anyone else in a formal capacity.

Thanks to Sydney Kingsford Smith International Airport’s trial of end-to-end biometric-enabled passenger processing, featuring facial recognition technology that compared me to my passport photo, no one handled – or even stamped – my passport. Technology shepherded me through, every step of the way. And it was fast, easy, efficient and blissful.

Every industry is being transformed by technology, but the changes to travel have been among the most dramatic. And they are strikingly obvious to – and welcomed by -- the billions of people who pass through the world’s WiFi-enabled airports, train stations, public parks and promenades, hotels and restaurants while traveling for business or pleasure.

That’s because just about everything we need is in, or can be accessed from, the palm of our hand. Thanks to advancements in connectivity, storage and processing power, smartphones have become the de facto key to searching and booking flights and lodging, arranging transportation to and from the airport, navigating security and making on-the-fly, spontaneous scheduling changes. They can even help us envision what the trip will be like, before we even arrived, thanks to digital maps and VR-enabled previews of tourist destinations. Not to mention the constant connectivity with friends and family.

But well beyond the view of the typical individual on a journey are technologies – especially those enabled by the Internet of Things (IoT) – that are refining all links of the travel value chain, from booking to operations, predictive plane maintenance to ground control. As a result, the travel experience is different, and decidedly better, today.

For instance, Travelport – a commerce platform that provides distribution, technology, payment and other solutions for the global travel industry – is leveraging HPE’s Memory-Driven Computing architecture that puts memory, not processing, at the center of its composable computing platform.

Why? Because consumers expect their travel queries to be answered immediately, and with the most updated information possible; thus, the HPE Superdome Flex in-memory computing system is rearchitecting key Travelport algorithms to help consumers explore all relevant travel options, in an instant. Response times are faster, information more accurate and operating costs have decreased – the right formula for sustainable success.

Similarly, London Gatwick – already the world’s most efficient single-runway airport -- has partnered with HPE for an IT network overhaul is increasing resiliency to disruption from power outages while gaining in-the-moment insights from advanced data analytics to further enhance the customer experience. Doing so has made the Gatwick network capable of handling the ongoing exponential increase in data required to drive future technologies, too.

And travel technology promises to get even better as data processing extends to the edge of enterprise networks, enabling lightning-fast, real-time applications. Autonomous vehicles are likely just a few short years away from mainstream, and commercial space travel – even to Mars – seems destined to happen in my lifetime.

In fact, the possibility of a Mars mission is why HPE and NASA have launched a supercomputer into space on the SpaceX Dragon Spacecraft. We’re testing the ability of the Spaceborne Computer to function in the harsh conditions of space, as a year-long mission to Mars will require sophisticated computing capabilities to cut down on communication latencies and ensure astronauts’ survival.

As these next generation technological advancements evolve from ideation to activation, the travel experience will become even more pristine and exciting.

Where shall we go next?

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Technology and the Future of Healthcare under Tech Impact 2030 - HPE Certifications

Decoding the first human genome required $2.7 billion and took 15 years. Remarkable advances in sequencing technologies have brought the costs of genome sequencing to less than $1,000, making personal genomes a reality and opening a path for affordable, equitable access globally. This data provides the potential to gain insight and actionable guidance from patient genomic data in clinical settings, a critical step toward realizing the promise of affordable healthcare tailored to an individual patient’s needs: precision medicine. It allows researchers to determine the answer to questions like:

What is the connection between the three billion base pairs that comprise the human genome and human wellness?

How does variation in the genomes affect the likelihood of a patient developing cancer or heart disease?

Humans’ genetic uniqueness presents significant challenges to clinical care. Even within the parts of the genome whose disease-relevance is well established, less than one percent of the genetic variants in the population are clinically understood. Existing processes and standards to interpret this information within clinical laboratories are heavily reliant on manual pattern recognition and correlation. This barrier slows medical research and limits the scalability, utility and integration of genomic information in clinical workflows for real-time patient diagnosis and management.

“We firmly believe that to realize the value of genomic data, we need to look beyond changes in the sequence of a patient’s genome and into the changes induced to molecular and cellular function,” said Carlos L. Araya, CEO, Jungla Inc. “To do this, we’ve built computational and experimental systems that can provide unprecedented levels of insight to clinical teams. This has required massive increases in the scale of data and the processes to generate and analyze it.”

Jungla’s Molecular Evidence Platform (MEP) models the effects of variants on biological systems at scale and translate the insights into clinical practice. This integrated platform arms patients and healthcare providers with accurate, clear and transparent support for the interpretation of findings in genetic and genomic tests. As the MEP evolves, Jungla is integrating increasingly detailed, mechanistic approaches – including high-resolution molecular analyses– that can reveal how variations in the genome alter cells, such as DNA damage that can lead to cancer.

“Traditional computational systems were making it impossible for Jungla to compare its data sets at scale,” said Michael Woodacre, HPE Fellow. “After systems analyzed the data, researchers still needed to manually review the data to identify patterns. But with its unprecedented capacity to process data at scale, Memory-Driven Computing has allowed Jungla to use its analysis platform as a scientific instrument, reducing the risk of human error and dramatically speeding time to results.”

Enable real-time, personalized medical care for patients

In addition to its work with Jungla, the team at HPE is collaborating with researchers in life sciences and clinical medicine from the Living Heart Project and the German Center for Neurodegenerative Diseases (DZNE) to explore technology’s potential to transform multiple areas of the life sciences industry. Each of these research communities is pioneering new approaches to health science to  find answers hiding in plain sight and look beyond the silos of scientific disciplines and the inadequacy of traditional computational infrastructure to scale.

Tech Impact 2030

Earlier this year, HPE and the Forum announced the challenge to “Help Solve World Hunger” by 2030, inspired by results from Purdue University’s 1,400-acre research farm and its application of precision agriculture to increase crop yields while drastically conserving resources. By leveraging massive amounts of data collected from connected platforms and devices and processing it at the edge, HPE is providing fast insights that can inform quicker decisions for farmers.

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Hewlett Packard Enterprise launches edge platform solutions accelerating business efficiency and innovation

Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) today announced new HPE Edgeline Converged Edge System solutions that speed the deployment and simplify the management of edge applications, enabling customers to act on the vast amounts of data generated by machines, assets and sensors from edge to cloud. Based on an open platform, enterprises can seamlessly integrate a broad ecosystem of applications and operational technology (OT) devices for edge deployments – driving efficiency and innovation in industries like manufacturing, energy, and telecommunications. The new solutions include:

• HPE Edgeline OT Link Platform, an open platform that automates the interplay between diverse operational technologies (OT) and standard-IT based applications at the edge to enable intelligent and autonomous decision making;
• HPE Edgeline systems management, the industry’s first systems management solutions designed specifically for the edge to ensure enterprise-grade reliability, connectivity and security;
• HPE Edgeline EL300 Converged Edge System featuring HPE Edgeline OT Link Platform and HPE Edgeline systems management, providing superior resilience against harsh edge environments for a broad range of industrial deployments; and
• HPE Edgeline Field Application Engineering Services are available from HPE Pointnext to help customers plan, build, and customize Internet of Things (IoT) and cyber-physical systems based on HPE Edgeline OT Link Platform.

Simplifying deployment of edge-to-cloud IoT and cyber-physical systems

Today, setting up an IoT or cyber-physical system is a laborious undertaking. It requires custom coding to orchestrate OT networks, control systems, and data flows with drivers, middleware, and applications running on IT systems. HPE Edgeline OT Link Platform is an open platform that significantly simplifies this process, reducing cost and time to market. The solution includes:

• HPE Edgeline OT Link Platform software, an open workflow engine and application catalogue, allowing customers to orchestrate components, data, and applications via a graphical drag-and-drop user interface. The HPE Edgeline OT Link Platform integrates an ecosystem of third-party applications running from edge to cloud – including AWS, Google, Microsoft, SAP, PTC, GE, and more – to make insights from the edge available across the enterprise and supply chain.
• HPE Edgeline OT Link certified modules, HPE-developed adapters that connect to a broad range of OT systems, enabling bi-directional, time-sensitive, and deterministic control and communication, including high-speed digital input/output, CAN bus, Modbus, or Profinet. APIs and SDKs for these adapters are made available to the industry to facilitate third-party designs of HPE Edgeline OT Link modules. This will also include FPGA modules to give customers maximal flexibility to connect to any industrial input/output device.

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HP Commits to Educate 100,000 Across Africa in the Next Three Years

•  HP pledges to empower 100,000  learners across Africa in next three years through the HP   Foundation’s HP LIFE (Learning Initiative for Entrepreneurs) program
•  HP opens a tech-enabled HP LIFE Center in South Africa, aimed at supporting local               entrepreneurs
•  Commitment supports HP’s goals to enable better learning outcomes for 100 million people     by 2025, and to enroll a million HP LIFE users between 2016 and 2025 

Today at the Global Citizen Festival: Mandela 100, HP (NYSE: HPQ) announced a new commitment to reach 100,000 learners across Africa over the next three years through the HP Foundation’s HP LIFE program, and kicked off the commitment by opening a new tech-enabled HP LIFE Center in South Africa. HP’s pledge supports the United Nations Sustainable Development Goal 4 and furthers the company’s goals to enable better learning outcomes for 100 million people by 2025 and to enroll a million HP LIFE users between 2016 and 2025, as outlined in the HP 2017 Sustainable Impact Report.

By 2030, Africa will be home to 32% of the population under the age of 30, and the largest working age population by 2035. Yet, today’s youth unemployment in Africa is up to 3x higher than adult unemployment. HP LIFE offers free, online learning for users to gain the skills to start and grow their own business or improve their employment opportunities. Building on the success of this global program, HP is working with partners to open technology-enabled HP LIFE innovation centers to further support entrepreneurship and workforce development across the continent.

“We believe that education is a human right, that technology in the classroom is a critical component for a 21st century education, and that in today’s economy our learning is never done,” said Nate Hurst, Chief Sustainability and Social Impact Officer, HP. “Africa is experiencing rapid urbanization and digitization—and it’s essential that people have access to learn skills for the work of tomorrow. This new HP LIFE Center provides a launchpad for innovation and opportunity across the continent.”  

In 2017, on the global stage at the Global Citizen Festival in Hamburg, Germany, HP announced a commitment to enabling better learning outcomes for 100 million people by 2025. The commitment to education is a part of HP’s broader Sustainable Impact strategy – a strategy to use the scope, scale and expertise of HP to drive positive, lasting change for the planet, its people and the communities where we live, work and do business.

“Sustainable Impact is fundamental to our reinvention and core to achieving our vision – to create technology that makes life better for everyone, everywhere,” said Hurst.

HP LIFE

In collaboration with institutions such as the Ekurhuleni West TVET College in Katlehong and its Centre of Entrepreneurship Rapid Incubator, HP opened the HP LIFE Center in South Africa on November 30, a technology-enabled hub to facilitate learning, collaboration and entrepreneurship in a physical, face-to-face setting.

Built on the belief that entrepreneurs are the backbone of the global economy, HP LIFE offers 30 free, online courses focused on business and IT skills – from business planning and marketing, to raising capital and design thinking. To date, HP LIFE has reached 744,000 learners in 200 countries and territories. All users need is a computer and Internet connection to access HP LIFE, and the new, physical center in South Africa will create a more formal educational environment. HP LIFE has an enrollment goal of 1 million users between 2016 and 2025.

At the World Economic Forum’s 48th Annual Meeting in January, Youth for Technology Foundation (YTF) and HP Foundation announced a new 3D printing course to be delivered through the HP LIFE platform. 3D printing will fundamentally change the manufacturing industry. $4 to 6 trillion (USD) of the global economy will be disrupted in the next five to 10 years, shifting economic value and jobs across the globe. This new course is helping individuals to learn how to use 3D printing and create entrepreneurial opportunities.

HP and Global Citizen in South Africa

HP has been a proud partner of the Global Citizen movement since 2013, including supporting the Global Citizen Festival: Mandela 100, a first for South Africa. Ahead of the December 2 festival in Johannesburg, HP ran several awareness and engagement building activities to highlight the partnership and HP’s commitment to Sustainable Impact, and to engage customers, employees and the public in acting on pressing global issues.