HPE CEO talks Nvidia AI partnership, IT spend, Juniper trial
Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) is in the middle of its annual Discover event in Las Vegas to showcase its latest technological innovations.
HPE CEO Antonio Neri sits down with Opening Bid host Brian Sozzi to explain how demand for networking and hybrid cloud remains solid, what IT spend looks like right now, and how the company is preparing for its upcoming Juniper acquisition trial with the US Department of Justice (DOJ).
To watch more expert insights and analysis on the latest market action, check out more Opening Bid here.
All right. For this, today's power player, I am locked in on Hewlett Packard Enterprises. Company is holding its annual Discover event in Vegas to show off its latest technologies to customers, especially on the AI front. HPE CEO Antonio Neri is here with me now from the event. Antonio, always great to see with see you. Don't know how you made time for me, but I appreciate it nonetheless. Out of all the announcements that you have come out with here, uh, from Discover, the announcement with Nvidia and AI factories really caught my attention. Why is that such a big thing for HPE's bottom line?
Well, good morning, Brian, and thanks again for having me. What a great week for us here at HP Discover Vegas. I'm standing here on the show floor. It's a seven acres of technology on display. And after a great day yesterday at the sphere, where I gave my keynote. But to your point, yesterday we made a number of very strategic announcements. One of them, obviously, was the expansion of our AI factories with Nvidia. We continue to have a terrific partnership with Nvidia, expanding our solutions for sovereigns, which is an area where we see tremendous interest and growth. Obviously, the continued capex investment in service providers, as well as the continuation of the model builders. And then enterprise. And enterprise here, we have more than 12,000 customers visiting us this week. And they're all interesting to accelerate their journey to AI. And that tells you the interest is super, super high. And that's with Nvidia, we have co-architect, the co-engineered a solution that's easy to deploy it for time to value.
Antonio, um, Keybank out with a good report here today. They surveyed a lot of CIOs who are out there buying tech. Um, they are noting the slowest IT spending growth outlook since 2020. How is that starting to take shape in your business?
Well, look, we don't see a slowdown in IT spend. Uh, in fact, if you really follow the last few quarters of continuous revenue growth, you see that the momentum is across all line of businesses. Look, to deploy AI, continue your journey to a hybrid cloud experience across your enterprise, you need more networking. And so, networking has clearly recovered in the market. And we see that in our growth in our orders, and now in our revenue. Uh, GreenLake has been positioned extremely successful to be that bridge to provide a hybrid experience. And we continue to grow on an average of 35 to 45%. And this week, we announced the agentive approach to our GreenLake cloud. And what they're very interested is using GreenLake as an intelligence, meaning we can bring to them an army of AI agentive kind of capabilities, so they can remove people that are in the loop and put them on the loop. And so those actions can be taken by AI. So, I haven't seen that, honestly, Brian, but obviously there is a lot of uncertainty in the market. There's always geopolitical tension, but I think we'll continue to be a top of mind for enterprises.
And Tony, before we let you go, and I know you're busy guy at this conference, um, July 9th is the Juniper trial. Would you assign any probability to this, I guess this trial not actually happening, that the government drops its case and lets you take battle versus Cisco in this market?
Well, look, everything is possible. We continue to work to try to work a remediation sort of settlement, but fact of the matter is that we are so close to the trial. Our view is that we believe this is pro competitive, we believe this is good for enterprises. Remember, we don't support consumers. And ultimately, we believe we will prevail in court if we have to go all the way there.
All right, we'll leave it there, Antonio Neri. Good to see you, as always. Good to see that HP stock symbol behind you at the conference. I'm digging it. Put something on black for me in Vegas. We'll talk to you soon.
We'll do. Thank you.
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