Editor’s Note – HPE Ezmeral Container Platform is now HPE Ezmeral Runtime Enterprise. For more information on why the name was changed, please click here.

Attendees at KubeCon + CloudNativeCon 2019 were on hand to see the new HPE Container Platform that Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) announced at the event. The HPE Container Platform is the industry’s first enterprise-grade Kubernetes-based container platform designed for both cloud-native applications and monolithic applications with persistent storage. With the HPE Container Platform, enterprise customers can accelerate application development for new and existing apps – running on bare-metal or virtualized infrastructure, on any public cloud, and at the edge. You may be asking yourself, what does this have to do with HPE, a leading infrastructure company?

Everything.

As a developer, you know first-hand how IT depends on software to optimize resources and manage what otherwise would be unmanageable. Almost every business today operates as a software business, as vendors write code to connect their systems to the rest of the universe – whether it’s to ensure operation in the cloud, provide a user interface on a smart phone, collect data from edge devices, or simply check in on stock availability in the warehouse. Code, and its ability to run anywhere and everywhere, is key to today’s businesses.

But it’s not always easy to get your code to run everywhere. Newly written apps? Yeah, that’s really no problem. Containers and Kubernetes orchestration offer DevOps agility and quick creation of cloud-native applications. But other legacy apps, the ones that have been around for a while and businesses rely on, just aren’t easy to move. IT operations (ITops) managers have been scratching their heads, trying to figure out how they can make the most of cloud-enabled economics and still work within the confines of what they’re stuck with. While many good reasons justify hybrid cloud implementations, such as data security, sometimes ITops groups feel as though they just have to accept a hybrid cloud environment, because it would be too heavy a lift and costly to cloud-enable these types of apps.

HPE understands this. After all, as a worldwide enterprise, it has had to deal with these same issues. Phil Davis, HPE President of Hybrid IT, stated, “The cloud is not a destination. It’s an experience and operating model.” In regards to this recent announcement, Phil Davis reiterated this fact and added “… the cloud experience can offer considerable benefits to organizations, such as speed, ease of provisioning, scalability, and pay-per-use. But the vast majority of existing non-cloud-native apps have been left behind. They were written over the past decades and often are the core applications and data which run the business.”

You and your fellow ITops teams, developers, and designers most likely appreciate how containerization for both new and existing apps is going to help your organization move forward. But others in your business may not. They may not understand why they should look toward HPE for the industry’s first Kubernetes platform designed to run legacy and cloud native apps that enables a true hybrid cloud environment across any location – on premises, in public clouds, and at the edge.

You can help them. You can help business managers envision their company as one built on the accumulation of data they can actually put to use to provide a better service to their customers and as one that runs as economically as possible using public cloud services in ways they couldn’t previously imagine.

Start by showing this short video to those around you who don't understand how containers can improve the business. It’s concise and gets right to the point. And it will hopefully open up some conversations you may have been meaning to have for a while.