Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) made a number of major announcements at the recent HPE Discover event. Not least of which, their partnership with Docker, the company behind the open platform that enables organisations to build, ship and run distributed applications on any infrastructure.

What does this mean?

The collaboration between HPE and Docker will help customers transform and modernise their data centers to benefit from a more agile development environment. HPE's Docker ready server program is at the heart of this alliance, which ensure HPE servers are bundled with Docker Engine and support.

Essentially, this will enable customers to create distributed applications that are portable across any infrastructure. The combined strength of these two industry heavyweights will deliver hybrid infrastructure solutions and an application portfolio ranging from legacy to microservices applications, fully supported by HPE.

“In order to survive and thrive in the idea economy, companies must transform the IT experience so that lines of business and developers can innovate faster, smarter and fearlessly,” says Alan Hyde, VP and GM, Enterprise Group, Hewlett Packard Enterprise South Pacific. “Hewlett Packard Enterprise is innovating across its entire datac entre portfolio to help customers with that transformation. Together with Docker, we are making it easier for IT to deploy and manage containers, while giving organisations solutions that optimise their investments and power a new generation of applications that are the business.

Hyde reveals that Gartner statistics show that by 2018, more than 50 percent of new workloads will be deployed into containers in at least one stage of the application life cycle. This is where HPE's Composable Infrastructure combined with Docker's Container-as-a-Service (CaaS) will really come in handy, providing the kind of predictability and management that enterprise IT expects.

“The default availability of Docker's technology on every HPE server and HPE's hyper-converged platform enables enterprises to take advantage of the benefits of containerisation while leveraging their investments in existing systems and process,” says Ben Golub, CEO of Docker. “Having a strategic alliance that starts with Docker Engine but extends to include our commercial end-to-end platform, Docker Datacenter, provides HPE customers with a comprehensive solution that covers all of their requirements over time. Enterprises leveraging this joint solution can achieve immediate efficiencies while focusing on existing applications, which can include a 20X optimisation on their infrastructure, while shipping their applications 13X faster.

As part of the strategic alliance, HPE and Docker will deliver unique, value-added commercial solutions and services through all major HPE channels, including:

• Docker ready HPE Servers
• Docker ready Converged and Composable HPE Systems
• Joint go-to-market for Docker Datacenter
• Enterprise-grade Docker support and consulting services

This is in addition to a huge range of new container-enabled technologies from HPE and Docker's collaboration that are integrated and tested with Docker.

General availability of the Docker ready HPE Servers and Docker-integrated Converged and Composable HPE Systems are targeted for the fourth quarter of 2016. The Docker-integrated solutions spanning HPE's storage, networking and software assets are available today.