We were delighted to welcome over 500 of our partners and customers to London’s Tottenham Hotspur Stadium during our UK&I Atmosphere ‘23 event on Thursday, June 29. Joining us at one of the world’s smartest and most connected stadiums were our key executives from across the business.
Reflecting on the main themes of the day and discussions with attendees, I wanted to share my takeaways and thoughts on what comes next.
Executive Vision
Phil Mottram, our EVP and General Manager of HPE Aruba Networking, outlined the three core elements of our strategy: AI-powered automation, network as a service (NaaS), and Zero Trust. Phil talked about the recent acquisitions (Athonet for private 5G and Axis Security, the security service edge platform) and how they will further enhance our portfolio.
Lily Gassner, VP of Global Business Transformation, joined Phil onstage to highlight HPE Aruba Networking’s strong commitment to sustainability and impressive progress with our circular economy framework. The figure that resonated for me was how much of our equipment is now recycled – 85%.
Spotlight on Customer Success
We were delighted to welcome three innovative customers to the stage.
As CIO of Tottenham Hotspur Stadium, Sanjeev Katwa was on his home turf. Michael Taylor, CIO of Mercedes-AMG Petronas F1, and Dominic Woods, Senior Networking Engineer at Royal Devon University Healthcare, NHS Foundation Trust also shared the stage to discuss how their partnerships with HPE Aruba Networking help their respective organisations innovate.
Sanjeev shared his vision to future-proof the technology at the Tottenham Hotspur Stadium for its lifetime. Essentially, the executive team projected their technology needs 10-15 years ahead and then built a digital foundation that is agile and adapts quickly to their ever-changing needs.
Michael highlighted how attention to small details leads to big outcomes. A focus on incremental improvements and marginal gains enables the Mercedes-AMG Petronas F1 team to win. But winning also takes a team. Michael noted the importance of working with effective and efficient partners who have a deep understanding of their business. A single race weekend creates a massive amount of 7 million data points. Fortunately, HPE Data Analytics – part of the wide range of HPE solutions the team relies on – is ready to make sense of that data so the team can make the most of every microsecond on the track.
A real ‘wow’ moment for me was when Dominic explained how the Nightingale Hospital in Exeter was built from the ground up in only 57 days in response to the COVID crisis—and how the state-of-the-art facility continues to serve the community. Dominic described the technology from HPE Aruba Networking as "amazing.” Despite the chaos and confusion in the earliest days of the pandemic, IT only needed a single change window on Day 0, which was achieved with zero network outages.
Continued Commitment to Innovation and Responsibility
As the audience was inspired by their peers’ innovation, the focus shifted to two core parts of our portfolio: Distributed services data centre and unified SASE. Our Pensando Distributed Services platform is an entirely new way of thinking that will allow organizations overcome today’s IT constraints to accelerate digital transformation.
We now have first-mover advantage with our SASE vision and solutions in a world of heightened cyber-risk. Jon Green, our CSO, and James Robertson, Technology Strategist at HPE Aruba Networking, kicked off an insightful discussion about why we need to debunk the myth of the fortress mentality. Zero Trust security is the way forward and creating a Secure Service Edge (SSE) is critical to safeguarding operations and data privacy for organizations of all types and sizes.
Winning with a Collaborative, Energized Community
I was struck by the collaboration and excitement at the event. Whether it was in the business breakouts, the channel partner forums, the Airhead technical sessions, or our closing executive panel where the audience could ask no-holds-barred questions (and we would answer), our customers and partners are excited about the future. We are too, as we focus on continued innovation and leadership in our core business areas.
We’re committed to sustainability to help make the world a better place. We believe that our leadership in software-defined networking and HPE Aruba Networking Central cloud-managed platform for wired, wireless, and SD-WAN will help customers accelerate their digital transformation while minimizing the environmental impact of technology.
Spending the time exploring our customers’ and partners’ business needs really energised the HPE Aruba Networking team, and the attendees’ feedback was exceptional. We are looking forward to helping everyone accelerate what comes next.
