At this year’s HPE Discover EU conference in London, there was a strange dichotomy in the messaging from the company’s own representatives.

When asked if Hewlett Packard Enterprise Co. is primarily a products or service company, the people in products said it is basically a products company; those in the service arm said it is no more a product company than a service company, according to Dave Vellante (@dvellante) and Paul Gillin (@pgillin), co-hosts of theCUBE (* disclosure below), from the SiliconANGLE Media team. Some may conclude that HPE is flailing into irrelevance — unless they can carve out fresh territory with The Machine.

“We saw some coverage this week speculating that this was a disappointment, that the announcement of The Machine was a disappointment,” he said. “They’ve obviously got some great technology here,” he argued, admitting it is unclear whether The Machine will be a blockbuster for the company. He wondered, “Is this going to become like IBM Power, you know; is it going to become this sort of a not very big revenue base?”

Singular differentiator

Vellante said that The Machine may help HPE make good on its claim that its is a contenders in both products and services.

“I think HP, rightly, when we talk to their product people are saying, ‘Hey, we are different, because we have fluid infrastructure, we have this capability, we’re developing technologies out of The Machine, etc., etc., etc.'”

Pedal to the bare metal

The Machine, as the world’s first memory-driven architecture, will fuse memory and compute, resulting in huge performance leaps, according to HPE.

Where The Machine will be tested is in its custom software and services, which HPE will be gradually trickling to market. “There’s a proof of its concept, and this is technology they’ll be rolling out for years,” Gillin concluded.

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE and theCUBE’s coverage of HPE Discover EU. (*Disclosure: HPE and other companies sponsor some HPE Discover EU segments on SiliconANGLE Media’s theCUBE. Neither HPE nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo by SiliconANGLE