HPE Executive Changes Put Focus on The Machine

The latest major changes at Hewlett Packard Enterprise this week put a spotlight back onto The Machine, a bold move to reimagine data center architecture. In a post on the company blog , HPE CEO Meg Whitman announced some executive changes that involved in large part who will oversee the development of The Machine, an ambitious effort to build a machine with new technologies and which is being designed to handle the massive amounts of data that will be generated through such trends as the cloud, data analytics, the proliferation of mobile devices and the Internet of things (IoT). The Machine was announced two years ago, and longtime HPE veteran Martin Fink—the company's CTO and head of HP Labs—has been the key driver behind the system's development and roadmap. In her blog post, Whitman announced that Fink will retire at the end of this year after 30 years with the company and that HP Labs will be folded into HPE's Enterprise Group, which is headed by Executive Vice President and General Manager Antonio Neri. According to the CEO, having HP Labs more closely tied with HPE's enterprise business will make it easier for the company to create ways to get some of the new technologies being developed for The Machine—including silicon photonics, custom processors, a new operating system and the advanced memristor memory technology—into other systems."This move will also help align our R&D work on The Machine with the business—particularly how we integrate key components like photonics and memristor into existing product lines—by bringing together our innovation roadmap with our business roadmap," she wrote.HPE officials last year announced that the company would have a prototype of The Machine ready later in 2016, a timeframe that Whitman said is still on schedule. She noted that "The Machine has been a passion of Martin's for nearly 10 years. The prototype will bring The Machine to life and serve as the capstone of Martin's leadership.