On Tuesday, the second day of HPE’s Discover conference in Las Vegas, HPE announced a new converged system for IoT, updated analytics and security, and new industry partnerships that could propel it to one of the top spots in the IoT market.

Many of the updates were geared toward serving companies focused on energy, telecommunications, and manufacturing, which are often located in remote areas and have trouble properly analyzing and leveraging the data produced by connected devices. A press release announcing the new initiatives claimed that they would enable “real-time analytics and machine learning at the edge, where the ‘things’ are.”

SEE: The Power of IoT and Big Data (Tech Pro Research)

“HPE has built machine learning and real-time analytics into its IoT platforms, and provides services that help customers understand how data can best be leveraged, enabling them to optimize maintenance management, improve operations efficiency and ultimately, drive significant cost savings,” said Tom Bradicich, vice president and general manager of Servers and IoT Systems for HPE.

The new converged systems for IoT are known as the Edgeline EL1000 and Edgeline EL4000/ These systems are converged in the sense that they handle compute and storage, while also providing data capture and control mechanisms and device management. The systems are set up for analytics and data visualization, and can handle physical abuse from vibrations and temperature changes as well.

To further its analytics options for IoT, HPE announced that its Vertica Analytics Platform will run on the Edgeline EL4000, using in-database machine learning algorithms to deliver its IoT analytics. To protect the data as it moves back to the data center, both the EL1000 and EL4000 support Aruba’s Virtual Intranet AccessTM (VIA) VPN client for added security.

Addressing industry-specific IoT solutions, HPE also announced partnerships with industrial giants GE Digital, National Instruments, and PTC. Perhaps the most intriguing is the GE partnership, in which HPE’s IoT technology will combine with Predix, GE’s cloud-based Platform-as-a-Service for the industrial machine data, to provide more focused IoT solutions.

Additionally, HPE unveiled new IoT innovation labs, where it will help businesses refine their IoT deployment plans. The labs are located in Houston, Texas; Grenoble, France; Bangalore, India, and Singapore.

SEE: HPE partners with Docker on hybrid infrastructure play (TechRepublic)

Industrial and manufacturing sectors have long been the potential posterchildren for a real enterprise IoT play, but network issues have held many companies back from adopting the technology. But those issues turned into a business opportunity for infrastructure providers to solve that last mile problem.

Last week, Cisco announced that it was integrating IBM Watson into its routers at the edge to try and bring IoT capabilities to remote workers. Now that HPE has stepped into the ring, the industrial and manufacturing industries could actually benefit from the competition to increase connectivity to those areas of business.

The 3 big takeaways for TechRepublic readers

  1. HPE announced a host of new IoT initiative in security, converged systems, and analytics to help businesses build out their end-to-end IoT deployment.
  2. HPE also unveiled new innovation labs for IoT and partnerships with companies like GE to build out more industry-specific solutions.
  3. Keeping enterprise users connected at the network edge is becoming an important task for the potential future of IoT in the industrial and manufacturing spaces. So far, HPE will be competing with Cisco’s IBM Watson partnership to address that problem.