Last week I was fortunate enough to be invited to by HPE to the HPE Discover 2023 event hosted in the Venetian Hotel in wonderful city of Las Vegas, here is my blog on the event and the fun I had around the event.
Focus on HPE
For a few years now Simoda have focused on the value that HPE technology & solutions deliver to our customers, we are as Lee Wragg our Technology Solutions Director says 'XXXXX Deep with HPE'. We truly see the value that HPE GreenLake brings and are excited to see what the future holds.
Making a week of it
This year I decided to make a week of the event and was fortunate enough to be able to take my wife Michelle with me. Michelle doesn’t work in the channel she works for Sheffield College as a Technical Trainer however she probably knows more about GreenLake than some of the channel partners !!
We arrived into Las Vegas on the Friday before the event started and decided to take a walk around to see what Vegas has to offer. The first thing we both noticed is that wherever you want to go around the strip everywhere looks in walking distance, wow were we wrong. We walked in the 38 degree heat from the Venetian hotel all the way to the famous Las Vegas sign, if you want to get your daily steps in Vegas is the place for you.
The next day I made Michelle walk with me to East Flamingo road, the place where Tupac was murdered on September the 7th 1996 in a drive by shooting, I love Hip Hop so this was something I just had to do as last year I didn’t have the time.

Wedding day with Elvis
When we got married 18 years ago we promised ourselves that we would renew our vows on the 20th anniversary however In December last year we lost the legend that was Michelle's dad Malcom and this changed our minds, we decided that when in Vegas what would be better than renewing our vows with the legend that is Elvis Pressley. Ok so its not the real one, according to some conspiracy theorists he has just retired from working as a bricklayer in Doncaster.
Anyway we made our way to the Graceland Chapel in downtown Las Vegas where Jon bon Jovi was married, not that I am a JBJ fan but hey ho, in true Vegas style we had our renewal ceremony with EP.
After the ceremony we left to get a taxi back to the strip via the famous Gold & Silver Pawn shop from the TV show

When in Vegas what do you do for your wedding meal ? That’s right BBQ.
What a day it was Elvis singing to me and my amazing wife & BBQ, what more could I want.
HPE Discover 2023
Day one was focused on HPE partners and started with a Keynote speech where they talked about the event focus which was expanding opportunities, something that really resonates with me. HPE confirmed that 70% of their existing business is through the partnership channel, which was very reassuring for us as we are BD !!

A common theme across the whole event was 'outcome focused' this fits exactly with Simoda's value proposition, we introduce ourselves as an outcome based business that focuses on our technology 1st strategy.
After a short talk from HPE CEO Antonio Neri (more from him later in this blog) Fidelma Russo was brough to the stage to discuss innovation. 'Innovation is key to be more relevant' she talked about the HPE labs & technical community of which we already see lots of value, she also spoke about how they see the future.
Multi-vendor, Cloud native & AI Driven
UKI Roundtables
During the day I attended a couple of the UKI round tables discussing Storage & GreenLake, I loved the debate and it gives me real comfort that we have the right strategy and the right technology partner in HPE.
UKI Awards Dinner
In the evening I attended the HPE UKI Awards Dinner at the fantastic Smith & Wolensky steak restaurant located in the Grande shopping mall in the Venetian, I had a great evening with fantastic company. A few stella's and a fillet later and unfortunately we didn’t win any awards this year, however we are determined to make our mark for next year and disrupt the usual suspects, congratulations to all the winners, keep the trophy clean for us please.
Antonio Neri Key Note Speech & Theme of the Event
There is something really comforting about the way Antonio Neri approaches his key notes, I guess it is his Italian roots that he is not all yee haw & whoop whoop !!. Anyway he started the keynote on how he is optimistic of the future after a few years of turmoil with HPE's focus on hybrid & sustainability, something that really hits the spot with Simoda.
Sustainability
The key to driving sustainable IT strategies is to find the right technology partners, HPE help deliver this with their commitment to being net zero by 2040, Antonio spoke about sustainability dashboard in the HPE GreenLake console, this gets a massive yes from me.
Edge - Hybrid Cloud - A.I
Edge
HPE have had a focus on the edge for a long time and Antonio continued to drive HPE's message of intelligent edge, by talking about how we are currently data rich but insights poor, he also explained that 70% of global workloads are still on premise and this is a trend that we are not going to loose for a while.

To demonstrate the value of the edge Antonio invited Head of global deployment for International Hotels Group (IHG) Kerrel Hurt to the stage to talk about the success they have had with their edge strategy. The key point I took from this was how passionate Karrel was about IHG customers and how they want their customers to love their hotel experience, again something we have been looking into, how do we make Simoda a great experience for our customers, so good they want to tell others about us.

Inspired by IHG, powered by HPE (love this)
Hybrid Cloud
This is where we really thrive, the hybrid drive is something we at Simoda have a real passion about. Antonio talked about being hybrid by design and not accident, the world of hybrid is critical for businesses who want to be a data 1st organisation. In the hybrid world it is important to have the right partnerships in place and he announced a closer working relationship with AWS by introducing Matt Wood the Vice President of AWS to talk about the strategic partnership between HPE & AWS, Matt talked about how GreenLake now supports AWS RDS, EC2 and is HPE SaaS offerings are available on the AWS marketplace, again this really gives us comfort as we also have a partnership with AWS.

HPE GreenLake for private cloud enterprise
This has been available for a while now and is an automated flexible private cloud where pools of resources are viewed and managed through the GreenLake management console.
Here is a great technical paper here
HPE GreenLake for private cloud business edition
I was very excited to here Antonio talk about this latest launch in response to growing customer demand HPE have combined self-managed private cloud and hybrid cloud VM management for greater agility in private cloud solutions, you can build your self-service hybrid cloud on demand where you need it in your data centre, across colocation sites, at the edge, or in the cloud.
Over the coming months we will be bringing you more detail on this fantastic offering.
VMware
If Antonio hadn't already won the audience with his guests he then introduces the CEO of VMware Ragu Raghuram to the stage to talk about the growing partnership between these 2 heavy weights. They talked about joint strategies and how businesses need to be 'cloud smart' (choose the right cloud for the right workload) this leads nicely onto:
HPE GreenLake for Cloud Foundations.
Designed to deliver a single consistent cloud experience across public and private clouds, GreenLake offers VMware Cloud Foundation and HPE Synergy as a service. A tightly integrated solution, where you can keep your apps, tools, and data in place while achieving the benefits of cloud without major application rewrites or data migration.
Equinix
Antonio also introduced Equinix and announced an expanded partnership with them to extend the HPE GreenLake private cloud portfolio into Equinix data centres. HPE will pre-provision HPE GreenLake for Private Cloud Enterprise and HPE GreenLake for Private Cloud Business Edition at strategic Equinix data centres around the world, giving customers rapid access to a broad range of private cloud offerings, for greater speed, agility, flexibility, and choice in their hybrid cloud strategy.
A.I
The final part of the keynote was around Artificial Intelligence, you know the story, robots take over the world ect ect, you have seen it in hundreds of films, well the actual truth is much more interesting, A.I is the most disruptive technology to hit the IT industry since the introduction of the internet many moons ago.

Antonio talked about A.I giving even the smallest business super powers, HPE for large language models is a super computing framework that provides the power to train, tune and deploy large-scale A.I models. Antonio introduced Jonas Andrulis the founder and CEO of Aleph Alpha and discussed trusted A.I and used the phrase Edge to Exascle.
As a data focused business Simoda already see the value in A.I, this is why we bought Data Trainer last October to help elevate our customers data strategy, we are keen to see how HPE & A.I will develop over the next few years, however I made lots of notes in how we currently use A.I in Simoda and how we can adopt the technology more across our business to delivery better business outcomes for our customers.
The rest of Discover 2023
I want to thank the UKI HPE team who did a fantastic job, Joe, Grace, Heather, Adam, Lewis. I had the pleasure of meeting lots of the global HPE team across Security, Sustainability, Edge & Cloud and I am very excited to see what the future holds for us and our relationship with HPE.
Last few days in Vegas
Big Elvis
After Discover had finished I have a few days spare with the newly married again Mrs Bumby. We decided to take in more of the Vegas sights, we both like Elvis (if you hadn't already guessed) so when in Vegas you must see Big Elvis perform at Harrahs, when I say perform I mean sit and sing, but I tell you what he lacks in an Elvis type performance he makes up for in his voice.

During his performance he asked for people to put requests forward for songs, not just Elvis songs but other American artists, and as a Blade I thought who better to sign John Denver Annie's Song than Big Elvis, to my surprise he didn’t know it……… What the actual, I did think about getting up and signing the greasy chip butty version but I hadn't had enough beer to brave it.
Fremont Street
We decided to head up to Fremont street to see what old Vegas was all about, it didn’t disappoint, it is exactly what you see in the films, old casinos and new entertainment go hand in hand. I don’t know what was more interesting the zip line in the sky or the Heart Attack Grill (These Americans know how to eat) I wanted to go in but Michelle said no, thankfully lol.
Mob Museum
Located just around the corner from was the Mob Museum, dedicated to the history of USA's organised crime, based over 3 floors in the old court house it was great, from the valentines day massacre wall, bullets & autopsy reports, Al Capones revolver & DEA officer Stephen E Murphys gun and warrant card (if you have watched Narcos you will know) we loved it.

Elvis - Spirit of the King Show
You simply don’t do Vegas without seeing Elvis at least 3 times, well this time we headed off to the arts district to a new theatre called the Lamarre, when Covid hit Vegas simply shut down, this is when the owner of the venue decided to build a new attraction in this up and coming area.

Steve Connolly is Elvis and his show takes you through EP's musical journey, from the early days where he plays guitar and really brings his rock and roll roots to life through to the later years where his hips and moves do the talking. We sat right at the front and engaged a few times with Steve, he did a very good English accent and his Elvis wasn’t too bad either.
We had a great night and it was a fitting way to end a great week in the Sin City.
Would I go back, your dam right I would however I will need a small mortgage to afford it.
In summary it was a fantastic week, HPE were fantastic hosts, the event was brilliant, Elvis was mega and Michelle married me again, I would say that is an awesome result.
If HPE is your thing or you would like to discuss who is the best Elvis to see while in Vegas just drop me a line and I will be your EP guide, just don’t have suspicious minds & be sure to avoid the jail house rock.
Alexa play Elvis Pressley (go on you know you want to)

Thanks for reading
Daniel
0114 553 3600
Daniel.bumby@simoda.co.uk
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