For years, enterprise cloud conversations centered on migrating workloads to public cloud platforms. At HPE Discover 2026, however, executives and partners painted a different picture: artificial intelligence is accelerating demand for private and hybrid cloud environments rather than replacing them.
“The single most powerful hybrid workload is AI,” Jim O’Dorisio, senior vice president and general manager of HPE Storage, told Channel Insider.
“We’ve implemented a hybrid cloud. We think we know more about it. We implemented the disaggregated storage architecture. It plays really well into supporting multiple workloads, and AI is just one of them.”
AI projects are reshaping infrastructure priorities
Rather than viewing AI as simply another workload, HPE executives argued that enterprise AI fundamentally changes infrastructure planning because organizations must manage data, governance, security, and compute resources across multiple environments.
During his Discover keynote, HPE President and CEO Antonio Neri described AI as increasing the importance of hybrid infrastructure, saying the company is focused on giving customers a common operating model spanning traditional infrastructure, virtualization, and AI workloads.
For many organizations, however, infrastructure isn’t the biggest obstacle.
“The single biggest impediment to activating AI projects is you really don’t know where your data is,” O’Dorisio said.
Why private cloud and on-premises conversations are returning
Customers often struggle to identify sensitive information or to understand which data can be safely used for AI initiatives, making governance and data management foundational requirements before broader AI adoption can occur.
To address those challenges, HPE has expanded its data intelligence capabilities around the Alletra Storage MP X10000 platform and integrated them into its Private Cloud AI portfolio, enabling organizations to prepare and govern data closer to where AI workloads run.
To Brandon Harris, VP of Partner Alliances and Marketing at HPE partner Logicalis, customers are beginning to rethink the last decade of public cloud demand.
“Being that we’re primarily a data center-centric partner, I think what excites me is that there was kind of that shift to the cloud, which I think made a lot of us nervous for what was going to happen to our infrastructure business over time,” Harris said.
“What excites me [about the future] is that AI is actually almost creating the opposite effect of what cloud created. We know that we’re going to continue to sell network and storage and compute to our clients to support these AI initiatives, because a lot of them don’t want that data sitting in the cloud,” Harris continued.
Partners see hybrid cloud becoming an outcome conversation
HPE’s channel ecosystem also sees customer conversations moving beyond infrastructure refreshes toward broader operational transformation.
Vince Stemen, vice president of vendor management at TD SYNNEX, said HPE’s hybrid cloud strategy has matured significantly over the past several years, citing GreenLake’s evolution into a management platform and new Morpheus capabilities as evidence that customers are looking for operational simplicity rather than standalone products.
“Today, it’s a management plane,” Stemen said of GreenLake. “IT organizations at large want help. They want to be able to manage it more effectively and efficiently. There’s a lot of complexity to it.”
“Customers are less interested in buying just boxes and speeds,” O’Dorisio said. “They’re really looking for outcomes.”
That focus on customer outcome rather than solely the consumption of technology itself has been a predominant theme across the channel for years. Now, as AI demand touches virtually every buying segment, partners have a new opportunity to achieve a trusted advisor status with their customers.