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HPE touts affordable converged IoT solutions

But may only be amazing "in two years" says IoT and Moonshot manager

HPE says its latest foray into converged IoT systems will deliver solutions at a price that customers will be "pleased" with, adding that it plans to aim its IoT analytics at an "entirely underserved market where there's little or no connectivity".

The conversation came about when Computing sat down with HPE's business development manager for IoT and Moonshot - the firm's "energy efficient, software-defined servers" that form the base technology for yesterday's new entries in its range of Edgeline IoT systems.

JR Fuller described the new hardware - which basically crunches and analyses IoT data locally at speed to send on to a data centre - as "not [just] gateway products", that have been "liberated" from a data centre intact, as opposed "skinnying it down".

As seems to have become the norm at HPE's Discover 2016 conference in Las Vegas this week, Fuller didn't shy away from throwing a quick barb at rivals in the space:

"There are people in this industry right now who are taking things from the data centre and skinnying it down, and then putting it on the edge, and saying, 'Oh look, I'm doing it on the edge'. But we've taken the compute out of data centres so you don't need to do that," he said.

But Computing - who recently carried out research to discover if the IoT represents "hope, hype or hazard" for end users - asked Fuller whether the ongoing push into IoT was in response to customer need, or simply a perceived opportunity that nobody had actually asked for yet.

"Just like with with everything, there is a range of customers," said Fuller.

"So there were customers in specific verticals that were saying, 'We wish we could do more, and how do we do that?'

"They didn't specifically say 'Give me a server on the edge'. And at the same time, probably simultaneously, we were saying, 'Why can't we leverage Moonshot and move it out here and provide some capabilities?'"

But Fuller maintains some industries "will be able to adopt [IoT] very quickly" with technology such as EdgeLine.

"Healthcare - processing of medical images, things like that," he said.

"But I think the most exciting part of this is the a-ha! moment," he said, shoring up Thomas J Watson's proclamation that there would be a market for only five computers, or Bill Gates' (rather more mythical) assertion that "64 kB ought to be enough for anybody".

"I was asked today by a customer, 'Why do I need more than a gateway?' said Fuller.

"And I said, 'Today you might not need this, but here it is. Bill maybe never saw beyond 640 kB, and you may not have seen Uber, until you had this convergence of the technology'."

Fuller sees HPE's target as the operational technology (OT) market - "with a completely underserved segment of the market which hasn't been able to take advantage of the technological advances that everyone else has".

"We are now leapfrogging - no, that's too small of a word - this is an evolutionary step for some of these people," he continued.

Fuller cited an unnamed customer who - he alleged - "had guys out there still running Windows 3.1".

The HPE plan is to use IoT to "bring over to the IT department, make it acceptable, and even bring it 25 years ahead of where it is now".

Which is fine, but UK public sector departments still running Windows XP on the sly, or non-profit organisations unable to connect their bespoke legacy systems to IoT devices share one overriding problem: budget. Can HPE pledge to deliver its "pioneering" technology at a realistic cost?

"So, we haven't published cost data," said Fuller, predictably.

"But I would say what we're looking at - I think people are going to be very pleased with, and be able to say 'Let me try this'.

"And you've got an entirely underserved market where there's little or no connectivity," he continued.

"We were trying to put four cameras on a school in South America. It would take 27 hours to transmit 24 hours of video. 90 per cent of it was useless, but you only knew thst if you anlaysed it in the cloud. But now, I could use an EL4000 and send the results of the analysis to the data centre."

Fuller also added the caveat that "in two years, it's going to be amazing what's running on these systems," so don't expect an overnight change, whatever the suck-it-and-see cost might end up being.

Meanwhile, Fuller believes HPE's proposed four IoT "innovation labs", the Houston-based one of which he's personally working on, will contain a panoply of "things" on which people can experiment with use cases and educate themselves as to the possibility of IoT.

For Fuller, offering basic uses cases is "like real estate":

"When you want to sell a house, they always say 'paint it all white', because some people don't have the imagination to imagine a different colour if you've already done it in blue."

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