All the announcements from HPE Discover

Hi, I'm Jane McCallion. I'm the managing editor of ITPro, and I am just out of Antonio Neri's keynote address this morning, opening up Discover Las Vegas 2026. It was a pact. I think there was a lot of positive energy in that. In terms of announcements, as I'd suspected, there was a lot of networking. Having bought Juniper Networks, which completed just after Discover 2025, the company just really wants to, I guess, make use of that acquisition. So they're very much pitching networking and Juniper, as well as existing Aruba technology. But it is Juniper, because that, as they say, brings all their networking into the data center. That, in the words of Neri, is the foundation of AI from their perspective. It's what AI runs on, it's how agents work, and it's all part of their idea of the self-driving network. I think it was, I wouldn't go so far as to say it was an impressive keynote. There were no rabbits being brought out of the bag. The hardware announcements were fairly kind of, well, nothing explosive, let's put it that way. Anybody looking to do lots of AI stuff and AI agents will be pretty happy with what they heard. But nevertheless, being predictable isn't necessarily a bad thing. And perhaps no rabbits means that everybody is getting more of what they want. I guess it's a bit early to be talking about what's gonna happen in six months' time at HPE Discover in Barcelona, which normally takes place in sort of November, December. But maybe we will hear a bit more building on these. I think that this idea of the self-driving network and what they've mentioned with Electra needing to, I guess, have a place for data to go, data to be organized, because that's what AI draws on. I'm not one to quote a cliche, but I'm sure we've all heard about it being the new oil. It's gotta go somewhere, in my opinion. This is fine, but in the next six to 12 months, we need to hear just a little bit more. Anyway, I'm making my way out of the Discover showcase. I will have some more footage from that later. But for now, those are my first thoughts on the first keynote of the first day of HPE Discover 2026 in Las Vegas.