Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) CEO Antonio Neri delivered the HPE Discover opening keynote from his living room after the global pandemic forced the annual event to go digital and after Neri tweeted last week that he tested positive for COVID-19. But before diving into the company’s cloud and software announcements, he railed against systemic racism.

“The last few weeks has been very hard for me to process,” Neri said. “I have so many emotions: anger, disbelief, sadness, grief, and frustration with the systemic oppression and racism that still exists in our society. HPE as a global company has a responsibility to help shape a world that is equal for all people. I am committed to taking a stand to speaking up to advocate within and outside the HPE for equality.”

Sadly, it doesn’t get more quintessential 2020 trade show keynote than this. It also reflects how both the pandemic and the recent civil unrest triggered by police killing black people have hit all parts of society, on professional and personal levels, and big tech is no exception.

“We are living in in unprecedented times,” Neri said. “The COVID-19 pandemic created many new challenges for your technology, but also for our society as a whole. We consider it our responsibility to help the world navigate this pandemic.”

HPE’s response includes $2 billion in financing for customers and partners, using Aruba to spin up WiFi for students and teachers in Arkansas that didn’t have internet access at home, and giving COVID-19 researchers access to supercomputers as they work to develop a vaccine.

“The future everyone talked about before the pandemic is now here ahead of schedule,” Neri said. “Three years ago, we predicted the enterprise of the future will be edge-centric, cloud-enabled, and data driven. Today, that's no longer a prediction. It is a reality.”

To this point, two years ago Neri pledged that HPE would invest $4 billion in edge technologies and services by 2022. And at last year’s Discover, he committed to delivering HPE’s entire portfolio as a service by 2022.

More recently, this week HPE announced five new return-to-work services: social distance tracing and tracking, touchless entry, fever detection, augmented reality and visual remote guidance, and workplace alerts and information sharing. They use HPE ProLiant servers, HPE EdgeLine Converged Edge Systems, and Aruba AI-powered network infrastructure plus partner technologies including surveillance and thermal cameras and AI software for video analytics.

Neri quoted Mary Meeker’s recent COVID-19 report: “We are awash in data, and lacking connectivity and insight.” We’ve collected an overwhelming amount of data, but we aren’t able to analyze it all, and what we did analyze created conflicting answers about the virus, he said.

“We cannot repeat this failure. I believe we are nearing the end of the information, era, which focused on generating and collecting massive amounts of data, data that could not be brought together to create timely insights and actions to change our future. The next decade will be about insights and discoveries that are shared and elevate the greater wellbeing of every human being on this planet. Today we are entering the age of insight.”

This new era requires connected everything, from edge to cloud, super-computing resources to analyze and act on this data, and security to protect it. “The focus is to build an edge-to-cloud platform that connects, protects, analyzes, and acts on all your data and brings agility to your apps to unlock your enterprise's full potential,” Neri said. “This is possible when you build on open source cloud native technologies optimized for a highly distributed infrastructure model based on proven trust and identity.”

No, he’s not talking about the public cloud. As IT environments move from centralized to decentralized and distributed centers of data at branch offices and edges, public cloud providers are also moving into enterprise data centers and edge locations. “The problem is, these solutions were architected to be very centralized and rely on connectivity to their control plane,” Neri said. “They still don’t address the other 70% of your apps and data. They are not open, and they don’t enable up movement between all the clouds platforms. Data transfer and egress is expensive.”

HPE says the solution to this problem lies in software and involves a one-two punch with HPE GreenLake Cloud Services and its new Ezmeral software portfolio announced today. “HPE GreenLake is the cloud that comes to you,” Neri said.

Competitor Dell Technologies is taking a similar edge-to-cloud approach. Like HPE, it’s angling to be the enterprise control plane across enterprise’s distributed environments with its Dell Technologies Cloud using VMware’s software.