In a follow-up to last year’s interview with Sue Preston of Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE), Express Computer spoke exclusively with Marc Waters, Senior Vice President of Customer Success, Services & Solutions at Hewlett Packard Enterprise, during his maiden visit to India. Waters shares his perspectives on the next phase of HPE’s sustainable IT journey, the company’s AI-driven transformation, and how customer success is being redefined through full-stack partnerships and sovereign-ready platforms.
Last year, Sue Preston highlighted HPE’s commitment to sustainable IT transformation, including innovations like liquid cooling and the Sustainability Dashboard. How are these initiatives evolving in 2025, and what new sustainability-led innovations is HPE co-developing with global or Indian enterprises?
Firstly, we are absolutely focused on executing what we started with the Sustainability Dashboard. A few weeks ago, I met with the representatives of a major Indian bank. Based on our previous discussions, we progressed from piloting and evaluating to a full-scale deployment of the Sustainability Dashboard for their organisation, which had a considerable impact. We also discussed horizontal expansion into their subsidiary companies and vertical expansion into additional business areas related to sustainability.
There’s been a big effort on execution, starting with innovation, then scaling it. With direct liquid cooling, we’ve made significant progress. At the NVIDIA GTC, we launched an AI Mod Pod, a modular, performance-optimised data centre for AI and HPC workloads, which can include NVIDIA accelerated compute. This modular and cost-effective data centre supports up to 1.5 MW per module and can be delivered with speed to drastically reduce time to market. It can be deployed almost anywhere there is power and connectivity, enabling customised computing close to users, compliance with local regulations, and support for remote operations. This innovation is progressing globally. Since I’ve been in India, nearly all my meetings have touched on sustainability and liquid cooling.
India is a very partner-led ecosystem. With HPE positioning itself as a full-stack, outcome-driven partner, how are you ensuring customers move from pilot purgatory to scalable enterprise transformation, especially in AI and sustainability use cases?
It’s very important to deliver outcomes and value. At HPE, we have a clear framework and approach to technology projects and programs—including substantial intellectual property that we use across the lifecycle. We cover Day Minus One (advisory and consulting), Day Zero (planning), Day One (implementation), and Day Two (managed services).
Proper planning is key. That includes not just technology planning but also aligning with business value. In the Day Minus One phase, we focus on identifying the business problem, accelerating benefit realisation, and how to measure it. Without this, organisations often rush into proofs of concept without a business case, which leads to getting stuck in a loop of PoCs. AI is vital, but it’s easy to get lost if you don’t plan correctly. Thankfully, our methodology helps us avoid that trap. We pride ourselves on fast benefit realisation.
Absolutely, and not just AI. With so many emerging technologies, business alignment is critical. Many leaders I speak with say if you’re not using AI, you’re already behind. For sectors like BFSI and manufacturing that deal with massive data, AI is essential.
I agree, and it’s also linked to sustainability. AI requires significant power, which generates heat. That needs to be managed not only for business but also for the planet. There’s a great quote about planting a tree under whose shade you will never sit, and I think AI planning with sustainability in mind fits that idea.
Do you agree that AI is here not to eliminate humans but to elevate us?
Completely agree. We’re already using AI extensively within HPE. For example, we’re applying it to harness vast data and intellectual property—work we’ve done for customers worldwide—and making it easily accessible to teams globally. That’s a strong internal use case, enabling fast value extraction from large, structured and unstructured datasets.
Sue also spoke about HPE’s support across Day One and Day Two of transformation. Can you elaborate on how this lifecycle approach is shaping AI deployments, especially with private cloud becoming the preferred platform for GenAI workloads?
A unique value of HPE is our ability to provide platforms and our deep expertise in sovereign platforms, especially for AI workloads. A key part of any platform is software. Under our CEO Antonio Neri’s vision and executed by our EVP & CTO Fidelma Russo, we’ve combined acquisitions and organic innovation into a hybrid cloud operations software suite.
This suite enables automation, observability, IT operational efficiency, and data management. It is built on secure networking and industry-leading infrastructure and is brought to life by our services teams from Day Minus One through to managed services. That’s our unique full-stack value, supporting AI and business-critical services alike.
You earlier mentioned your partnership with NVIDIA. Could you share examples of how HPE and NVIDIA are working together to accelerate AI outcomes in India and APAC?
We view AI through four lenses, like skills, data, architecture, and solutions.
First, in terms of skills, we’re NVIDIA’s global partner for deploying their Deep Learning Institute training in India and APJ. Then comes data, where readiness, preparation, and pipelining are foundational.
Next is architecture. We co-developed Private Cloud for AI with NVIDIA, a turnkey AI platform built on HPE’s sustainable infrastructure and NVIDIA’s software stack. It’s pre-tuned for out-of-the-box use and integrated with NVIDIA NIMs, blueprints, and HPE’s solution accelerators.
At HPE Discover Las Vegas 2025, we’ve further announced enhancements to the portfolio of NVIDIA AI Computing by HPE solutions that support the entire AI lifecycle and meet the unique needs of enterprises, service providers, sovereigns, and research & discovery organisations. These updates deepen our integration with NVIDIA AI Enterprise—expanding support for HPE Private Cloud AI with accelerated compute and launching the HPE Alletra Storage MP X10000 software development kit (SDK) for the NVIDIA AI Data Platform. HPE is also releasing compute and software offerings with the NVIDIA RTX PRO™ 6000 Blackwell Server Edition GPU and the NVIDIA Enterprise AI Factory validated design.
Through new Unleash AI ecosystem partners, the latest NVIDIA AI Blueprints, and internal professional services, HPE delivers more than 75 AI use cases to customers. The Unleash AI partner ecosystem now features software solutions for agentic AI, sovereign AI, smart cities, industrial and manufacturing applications, data governance and privacy, responsible AI, video analytics, security, and cybersecurity.
In India, we’ve had great success with fraud and anomaly detection in banking. Even a 1–2% recovery can have a massive financial impact. We’re also seeing use cases like call centre chatbots, recommendation engines, internal content generation, and AI-assisted development.
My personal favourite is AIOps—using AI for IT service management, alert reduction, and root-cause resolution. It’s making a big difference.
As we talk about the cloud, India leans towards a multi-cloud approach. How is HPE modernising its strategy to tackle challenges like app sprawl, interoperability, and data sovereignty, especially in regulated industries like BFSI and government?
Sovereignty has been a consistent theme in India. Globally, we’re a leading provider of secure supercomputing for governments, so our capabilities in this space are proven.
On virtualisation, we launched HPE VM Essentials, built on KVM, and HPE Morpheus Essentials and Enterprise. These offer choice in virtualisation to avoid concentration risk, particularly relevant in financial services.
In fact, recently at HPE Discover Las Vegas 2025, we announced the furthering of our long-term, strategic relationship with Veeam® Software, the #1 global leader by market share in data resilience, furthering their ability to offer customers comprehensive data backup and resilience solutions. Veeam Data Platform will integrate with HPE Morpheus VM Essentials Software to give customers a simplified and unified way to protect modern applications and data.
Our hybrid operations software enables management of bare metal, containers, multiple VMs, and public cloud environments even across third-party technologies. It provides a cohesive view, allowing technology departments to regain control of sprawl and ensure sovereignty.
Building on the foundation of advisory and professional services, how do you see customer expectations shifting in 2025 and beyond? Are there any new delivery models like AI-as-a-Service or Sustainability-as-a-Service you’re exploring?
Customers always have high expectations, and we welcome that. India is one of our largest markets for services now, and our teams in Bengaluru drive much of our global innovation.
Today’s CIOs want to operate as internal service providers. We’re helping them build multi-tenant platforms with usage-based billing, AI workload catalogues, and accountability dashboards. This not only drives efficiency but also sustainable behaviour like powering down unused resources.
On delivery models, we deliver platforms in a consumption-based model through GreenLake. We have SaaS-based software, CPU/GPU services, and managed services that enable true AI-as-a-Service and Sustainability-as-a-Service models.
As we look to the future, what are the critical focus areas that will shape your roadmap for the year ahead?
My top priority is always customer success, ensuring seamless adoption and fast time-to-value. I sponsor 10–12 global customers at HPE over multi-year engagements. I’m taking on two new Indian customers this year as part of my commitment to this vibrant, high-growth market. I’ll be visiting India more often and eating more Indian food in India, not just in London!