HPE partners say the Nvidia AI Computing By HPE collaboration raises the bar in the battle to develop the deepest enterprise generative AI integration and go-to-market model with AI superstar Nvidia.

Hewlett Packard Enterprise partners said the Nvidia AI Computing By HPE collaboration raises the bar in the battle to develop the deepest enterprise generative AI integration and go-to-market model with AI superstar Nvidia.

“Nvidia is the 800-pound gorilla, setting the pace and the innovation for AI for the industry so HPE taking a leadership role with an as-a-service offering built in partnership with Nvidia is a game-changer,” said Mike Vencel, president of Comport Consulting, Ramsey, N.J., which has invested heavily in the AI market over the past eight years with both Nvidia and HPE. “It’s incredibly important that HPE has developed some unique IP with Nvidia and turned this into a fast route for clients to get productive with AI. It’s a huge deal.”

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The first ever co-developed, co-branded and joint go-to-market model for HPE, including a turnkey private cloud with Nvidia—HPE Private Cloud AI—aims to go much deeper with GenAI compute, storage and networking infrastructure integration with Nvidia than rivals Dell Technologies and Cisco Systems.

The keynote address Tuesday at the Sphere featuring Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang on stage with HPE President and CEO Antonio Neri speaks volumes about the tight relationship between the two companies, said Vencel. He credited Neri for making the deep AI investments at a “pace that far exceeds” competitors, setting HPE and its partners up for success in the AI solutions market.

“Antonio has been repositioning HPE for the future ahead of its peer group for the last five years,” said Vencel. “It’s been impressive to watch him look through his crystal ball to keep HPE and its partners ahead of the pack in areas like AI. That is going to pay big dividends for HPE and its partners.”

Key for partner success is investing heavily in areas like AI, high- performance compute, HPE GreenLake and networking, said Vencel. “We want to invest where the puck is going and not just look at these as one- or two-year investments, but multidecade opportunities,” he said.

Neil Anderson, vice president of cloud infrastructure and AI for World Wide Technology, the $20 billion St. Louis-based solution provider behemoth that is investing $500 million in its AI Proving Ground, said he expects the Nvidia AI Computing By HPE offering to double or triple his HPE AI business over the next several years. “We’re very excited about the [HPE-Nvidia] announcement,” he said. “We believe there is going to be a ton of market opportunity for private cloud AI workloads.”

HPE and Nvidia are simplifying the complex integration that comes with creating a private cloud AI solution from servers and high-speed networking and storage to GPUs and the AI software stack, said Anderson.

“The fact that someone like HPE can step into this and create a prepackaged solution where they have preintegrated those components removes the complexity of specifying it, choosing the technologies, building as well as operating it from the cloud with GreenLake,” he said. “We’re excited because we see substantial opportunity for these kinds of preintegrated and prevalidated solutions. This kind of move is just going to accelerate our customers’ ability to adopt AI. It gets AI out of the PowerPoint concept to let’s actually do something.”

Dan Molina, co-president and CTO of Nth Generation, San Diego, No. 278 on the 2024 CRN Solution Provider 500, said he sees what he calls the “unbeatable” HPE-Nvidia combination giving more customers the confidence to move forward with AI solutions on the Nvidia AI Computing By HPE portfolio.

“We couldn’t be more thrilled to have such an unbeatable combination of technologies to help our clients along the AI journey,” he said. “This is an amazing development that takes the long-term partnership between Nvidia and HPE to the next level. There is no better quality and more secure compute platform on the planet than HPE and there is no more widely adopted, advanced and high-performing AI solution than Nvidia.”

The branding for the combination—Nvidia AI Computing By HPE—recognizes the $3 trillion-plus market capitalization of Nvidia as the gold standard for AI solutions, said Molina.

“HPE is marrying their reputation of high quality and security for their compute platform to the planet’s most highly valued AI company,” he said. “That co-branding is extremely powerful. I believe that our enterprise customers will trust that combined branding. It’s the best, most secure, high-quality compute with the best-performing AI processing technologies on the planet.”

Molina said he expects the co-development, integration and co-branding will ultimately make it easier to architect AI solutions that “will deliver the results organizations are looking for from their AI projects.”

Molina said he expects customers are going to find that many workloads that require intensive computing with access to vast amounts of data combined with latency issues and security will show a much better total cost of ownership for an offering like HPE Private Cloud AI than a public cloud AI solution. “I think when customers look at their AI life-cycle journeys they are probably going to gravitate to on-premises AI solutions,” he said. “It looks to me like the HPE-Nvidia combination is going to provide what the clients need.”

The AI channel enablement from a combined HPE and Nvidia should also accelerate time to market for partners, said Molina. “Nvidia has been providing AI training for many years and they have excellent skills to accelerate the learning and AI enablement with HPE,” he said. “That is going to scale Nvidia’s AI reach through the channel.”

Stan Wysocki, president of Houston-based Mark III Systems, which was singled out at HPE Partner Growth Summit as an AI superstar that began its AI journey eight years ago, said he sees the HPE and Nvidia channel enablement as a major breakthrough for partners trying to get up to speed on building AI solutions.

“What HPE and Nvidia have put together with enablement and training for partners is a blessing,” he said. “We didn’t have that eight years ago. We did it on our own. If I had that eight years ago, I couldn’t imagine how much further along we would be and the world would be. I think what HPE and Nvidia [are doing] is spot on in terms of what the partners need. I think it is going to accelerate what partners are doing with AI.”

Chris Miller, CTO of Advizex, a Fulcrum IT Partners company that has made significant AI solution investments and is building out a hybrid AI offensive, said he believes the HPE-Nvidia partnership with HPE Private Cloud AI could provide enterprise customers a “significant savings” versus public cloud.

“HPE Private Cloud AI looks like the most complete single-source AI offering on the market,” he said. “If it works the way we think it will, it is going to dramatically reduce the time it takes to bring a generative AI solution to market. It’s an easy button for customers who no longer have to worry so much about how to assemble the various pieces and can now focus on the AI outputs.”

Miller sees the HPE-Nvidia AI partnership as another example of HPE taking complex solutions and making them easier to adopt and consume, said Miller. “HPE has always been really good at taking the hard stuff and then productizing and making it simple for customers to adopt,” he said.

Xara Tran, founder, chairman and CEO of Champions of Change, the Melbourne, Australia partner that sold the first HPE Private Cloud Business Edition solution, said she expects the Nvidia partnership and the HPE Private Cloud AI to drive at “minimum” 100 percent sales growth over the next year for AI solutions.

“This is going to give the current HPE technology stack a massive boost to serve clients,” she said. “It is basically going to provide better compute and processing from a GPU perspective within the HPE server technology.”

Tran said she sees the HPE-Nvidia partnership and HPE Private Cloud AI driving a positive impact on customers’ ability to drive revenue gains or cut costs. “The guesswork of assumptions is gone,” she said. “Customer experience is powered by customer data. When you hit the sweet spot it’s very lucrative for the client, the partner and HPE. Everyone comes out winning.”

WWT’s Anderson, for his part, said he sees Neri’s leadership marked by the AI offensive along with HPE’s pending $14 billion acquisition of Juniper Networks as a watershed moment for the company. “When they come out of this on the other side they are going to have a fantastic enterprise network portfolio, a fantastic data center and AI portfolio,” he said. “People are going to look back on this time and think ‘Wow, this is a turning point for HPE.’ Not that they aren’t already a great company. But look at what Antonio has been able to do with these technology plays. It is going to be really phenomenal for the company.”