HPE
HPE Discover 2026: Neri heralds ‘unique’ placement to transcend network bottleneck
CEO talks up HPE’s self-driving future, as well as partnerships with eight companies in its mission to blaze the trail for hybrid classical-quantum applications
Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) president and CEO Antonio Neri used this year’s Discovery conference keynote to underline the firm’s sprawling self-driving network strategy and rapid acceleration of quantum technologies.
Addressing attendees in Las Vegas on Tuesday, the networking equipment giant’s earnest commander was at pains to run through a lineup of product launches intended to stave off his rivals, pitching HPE as the outstanding candidate to push beyond bottlenecks to high performance.
Neri also rushed to chime into the pervading chorus on agentic artificial intelligence (AI), leading with a routine eulogy of the technology’s transformative potential.
“Today, we are witnessing one of the largest technology platform shifts in history,” he said. “Workloads are now being driven by both users and AI agents: agents that will fundamentally transform how we design and build, how we serve our customers, and how we operate our businesses.”
Neri illustrated the importance of getting AI integration right with a comparison to architecture. “You don’t design a building around a single room,” he said. “You design a structure that allows the whole system to flow and develop over time. Architecting for AI demands the same focus and discipline. Fundamentally, AI is only as strong as the data foundation beneath it. If the foundation is not robust, nothing else holds.
“Across networking, cloud and AI, HPE is delivering the essential building blocks that make your AI-ready foundation possible,” said Neri. “Networking, to connect to your infrastructure and workloads at scale; cloud, to enable you with a hybrid operating model to run new workloads and applications where they belong; and AI, to turn your data into intelligence and put it to work.”
Juniper integration
Among the announcements were HPE Aruba Networking’s CX switch management from Mist, and the Marvis Actions dashboard – introduced as the first network assistant to bring conversational artificial intelligence to the network.
HPE was able to trumpet these AI-native integrations thanks to its $14bn acquisition of Juniper Networks, a deal that closed in July 2025 to bolster the former’s AI and security capabilities after overcoming the US Department of Justice’s intense antitrust scrutiny.
“For years, HPE Aruba Networking has helped you deliver secure connectivity across campus, branch and the edge, creating the digital on-ramp that connects your users, devices and data,” said Neri. “With the addition of Juniper Networks, we have extended that leadership into the datacentre and across the critical networks, connecting the AI era, scale-up, scale-out and scale-across. With our combined HPE Networking organisation, our goal is to deliver the best user and operator experience possible.”
Quantum designs
The unavoidable challenge of what most C-suites consider the next industrial revolution lies in the exponential strain it puts on the network, and part of HPE’s answer is to apply AI to its research to increase system scalability.
“Today, our researches are applying AI to improve AI systems themselves, making them more scalable and more sustainable,” said Neri. “This is where HPE has a unique advantage. We engineer the compute, the complete architecture, from compute servers, networking, storage, software and security, and we apply that system expertise across the full stack.”
Through its research relationships with Intel, IQM, Qblox, Quantinuum, QuEra Computing, Quantum Machines, Rigetti and Riverlane, the company aims to expedite hybrid classical-quantum computing and propel it to the mainstream.
“Yesterday, we took another major step forward with the announcement of an expanded industry collaboration to advance hybrid quantum,” said Neri. “Together with these leading companies, we are building a full-stack, hybrid quantum platform that extends our world-class HPC [high-performance computing] and AI infrastructure, and moves quantum closer to real-time and real-world deployment.”
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