5 Companies That Came To Win This Week June 23

For the week ending June 23, CRN takes a look at the companies that brought their ‘A’ game to the channel including Hewlett Packard Enterprise, Amazon Web Services, Intel, MongoDB and Avaya.

The Week Ending June 23

Topping this week’s Came to Win list is Hewlett Packard Enterprise for debuting its new AI Public Cloud Service this week at the company’s HPE Discover 2023 conference.

Also making this week’s list are Amazon Web Services for investing $100 million in a new Generative AI Innovation Center; Intel and HPE for completing the installation of what may be the world’s fastest supercomputer; a financially rejuvenated Avaya and its revamped service operations; and next-generation database developer MongoDB for offering new system migration tools to spur owners of legacy relational databases to switch.

HPE Launches AI Public Cloud Service At HPE Discover

Hewlett Packard Enterprise made a big move this week into the red-hot AI space this week with the debut of HPE GreenLake for Large Language Models, a public cloud service that for the first time provides supercomputing in a consumption-based model.

HPE, which held its HPE Discover 2023 event this week, is offering a wide range of AI services including AI workload strategy, design, operations and management as part of HPE GreenLake for Large Language Models, a form of generative AI.

Along with the AI services HPE is providing expertise to help customers build AI models and supporting software for what the company calls “capability computing” – an optimized supercomputer architecture for running large-scale AI and high-performance compute workloads.

When it becomes available later this year the HPE GreenLake for Large Language Models service will be powered by HPE Cray XD Supercomputers with Nvidia H100 GPUs.

HPE also launched a new, easy-to-deploy SaaS version of its GreenLake private cloud, GreenLake for Private Cloud Business Edition, that the company says dramatically accelerates the deployment of GreenLake private clouds.

At the HPE Discover Partner Growth Summit HPE moved to expand its Partner Ready Vantage everything-as-a-service program with new hybrid cloud competencies and plans for future offerings in AI and high-performance computing.

AWS Launches Generative AI Innovation Center

Amazon Web Services, already a major player in the artificial intelligence space, is investing $100 million in a new program to help customers build and deploy generative AI solutions, the company said this week.

The cloud giant said the AWS Generative AI Innovation Center will connect AWS AI and machine learning experts with customers to help them “envision, design, and launch new generative AI products, services and processes,” according to a company statement.

The center will provide strategists, data scientists, engineers and solutions architects to work with customers. It will also offer no-cost workshops, engagements and training to help “imagine and scope” potential AI use cases. AWS cited healthcare and life sciences companies accelerating drug research and discovery, manufacturers reinventing industrial design and processes, and financial service companies providing customers with more personalized information and advice as examples.

AWS indicated that generative AI experts from partners will be part of the initiative. “Customers will work closely with generative AI experts from AWS and the AWS Partner Network to select the right models, define paths to navigate technical or business challenges, develop proofs of concepts, and make plans for launching solutions at scale,” AWS said.

Intel, HPE Load Aurora Supercomputer With Over 63,000 GPUs, 21,000 CPUs

Intel, working with Hewlett Packard Enterprise, this week completed the installation of more than 10,000 compute blades in the U.S. Department of Energy’s Aurora supercomputer – a system that could become the world’s fastest with Intel’s latest CPUs and GPUs when it goes online.

Intel announced the milestone Thursday and said the supercomputer could be the world’s first to achieve a theoretical peak of more than 2 exaflops (more than 2 quintillion floating point operations per second) when it goes online, which is expected later this year.

Aurora’s 166 racks at the DOE’s Argonne National Lab are now loaded with 10,624 server blades, each of which weigh 70 pounds and contain two Intel Xeon CPU Max Series and six Intel Data Center GPU Max Series processors. This amounts to a total of 21,248 Intel Xeon CPUs and 63,744 Intel data center GPUs installed in a space that is equivalent to two professional basketball courts, according to Intel.

Avaya Touts Financial Health, Revamps Services Operations

Unified communications giant Avaya held its Avaya Engage 2023 this week and used the annual event to showcase the company’s return to financial health and unveil its newly revamped services division.

Avaya had filed for bankruptcy in February following cloud subscription accounting problems in 2022 that led to substantial earnings and revenue target misses. Avaya emerged from bankruptcy last month.

At Engage 2022 Avaya CEO Alan Masarek made clear that the company has put those problems behind it and is using its “genuine financial strength” – including a strengthened balance sheet and capital structure – to “go on offense,” he told CRN.

Avaya also launched a revamped professional services division, Avaya Customer Experience Services, which takes a new approach to professional services by integrating cloud, AI and digital technologies into the cloud migration process to customize the cloud experience for enterprise and government customers.

MongoDB Steps Up Competitive Database Migration Push, Launches AI Initiatives

Next-generation database developer MongoDB this week announced the general availability of MongoDB Relational Migrator, a tool for simplifying the transformation of aging applications running on legacy relational database systems and migrating them to the MongoDB Atlas database and its document-based data models.

With MongoDB Relational Migrator the database vendor is going after businesses and organizations who run applications on “legacy” relational databases including Oracle Database, IBM DB2 and Microsoft SQL Server. Relational Migrator streamlines database migration projects by analyzing older installed databases, automatically generates new data schema and code, and executes a migration to the MongoDB Atlas cloud database.

MongoDB, which held its MongoDB.local NYC developer conference in New York Thursday, also debuted the AI Innovators Program to help businesses and organizations build applications using generative AI technology. And the company launched an initiative with Google Cloud to help developers leverage generative AI and build AI-powered applications.