HPE triples down on agentic enterprise at HPE Discover Las Vegas 2026 with new hardware, software and super-charged partners

If there’s one clear message from HPE Discover 2026 in Las Vegas, it’s this: agentic AI is coming to the enterprise and organisations need to prepare. That means rethinking your hardware, your software and your technology partners.

One obvious caveat here: HPE would say that. After all, its business is founded on delivering new hardware and hooking organisations into its software solutions. But even with this understanding, Rami Rahim – formerly CEO of Juniper Networks and now President & General Manager of the HPE networking business – paints a compelling case.

“AI agents are moving into workflows, connecting to applications, using more data to make decisions, and I think customers… see the potential, they’re starting to act, but I also believe that there’s a warning here,” he said in a pre-briefing session, “and that’s that the market is moving so fast, and many projects will just fail if they’re not built with the right foundation.”

The right foundation, obviously, being HPE’s. Or to put it in Rahim’s words: “[That] means the right controls and the right operating model, and we truly believe that this is not just another AI adoption curve that’s happening in our industry, it’s becoming a technology spending shift, and it requires a really solid architectural foundation.”

The right architecture for agentic enterprise

In HPE’s view, the foundation “of this agentic enterprise starts with a self-driving network, because agentic AI needs secure adaptive connectivity across users, data applications, clouds, and of course, data centres,,” said Rahim.

Anyone who has followed Juniper Networks and HPE will know that self-driving networks is a long-term theme. The idea being that AI, in its case Marvis AI, will anticipate problems before they happen and either take action or recommend actions to network admins.

But now HPE is stepping things up by talking about “the agentic infrastructure”. Over to Rahim: “[This] means very specific things around compute that’s built for faster decisions.

“It’s around data platforms that make enterprise data AI ready, and it’s about private and sovereign control to run AI with trust… Last but not least, it requires intelligent and hybrid operations that helps teams manage, optimise, and protects these environments with less manual effort.”

He added: “Manual effort in this stage just doesn’t cut it anymore,” a statement with which it’s hard to disagree.

Along with advice to help its customers “design, deploy and scale with confidence”, Rahim said that these are “the essentials of an architecture for AI that doesn’t just provide answers, but AI actually acts”.

Hardware, software and partners for the agentic enterprise

So that’s the broader picture. HPE also announced specific products at HPE Discover 2026, much of it built around networking products.

These are:

• HPE Juniper Networking QFX5140 Switch HPE says this is designed for inference clusters and edge AI use cases and that it’s “instrumental in driving HPE AI Data Center Solution to the edge”
• HPE Juniper Networking QFX5252 Switch tray for AMD Helios: HPE describes this as a “scale-up module for AMD Helios AI rack-scale platform, delivering the low-latency, high-bandwidth switching required to maximize AI infrastructure performance at scale”

In terms of extending Agentic AIOps across the portfolio, and “aligning the HPE Aruba Central and HPE Mist AI platforms”, it announced:

• Integration of the HPE Networking CX switching portfolio with HPE Mist. This will give “HPE Networking CX customers flexibility in Agentic AIOps platform while introducing advanced wired capabilities such as AI-native visibility, zero-touch provisioning, wired assurance for layer 2 access, dynamic PCAP, service-level insights, and HPE Marvis AI-driven actions”, the company stated.
• Availability of HPE Marvis AI-powered self-driving capabilities for HPE Aruba Central, “including trusted actions such as wired port remediation to further extend autonomous operations across the HPE networking portfolio” to again quote HPE..

As Rahim put it: “We’re bringing our networking portfolio to HP AI factories and AI infrastructure. We’re accelerating innovation by bringing the best innovations from HP Mist into HP Aruba Central, and the other way around.

“We’re connecting AI ops across the entire portfolio to create a simpler, more unified experience with Marvis as being this common thread, the Marvis AI engine throughout all the different layers, and we’re making security an essential built-in component of any networking solution.”

The final ingredient is HPE’s partners. As we covered on Monday, HPE has united its partner programs with the launch of HPE Partner Ready Vantage.