The theme of this year’s HPE Discover conference in Las Vegas, emblazoned in the atrium of the Sands Expo Center, is “accelerating your success from edge to cloud”.

It may have come as something of a surprise, then, for delegates to hear CEO Antonio Neri close out his keynote speech by declaring his vision for the future is “cloudless”.

“We need to radically simplify and democratise the way developers and users access tools, services and data that power today’s enterprise applications,” Neri said. “And it needs to be … a new approach that obliterates the distinction between publicness and privateness and leverages the full … vibrant cloud-native computing development community for the benefit of all.”

Declaring that cloud was not a destination but an “experience”, Neri said that within five-to-ten years while the world would still be hybrid, “the illusion of interconnection will be replaced by the reality”. This “secure interoperability across clouds” is what underpins the concept of cloudless.

According to Neri, there are three ingredients, or “fabrics” as HPE is terming them, that make up cloudless.

The first is security – the “trust fabric” – which operates under a zero trust model and automates privacy and data sovereignty.

Next is the optimisation – the “connectivity fabric” – and finally embracing open source – the “value fabric”.

For now “cloudless” is very much a concept or philosophy. There are no products, there is no roadmap. However, according to Neri, we can look forward to hearing more about it at next year’s conference.