HPE announced that its university upskilling initiative, HPE Academic Alliance Program, has scaled to cover 176 colleges and universities across India, reaching over 18,000 student beneficiaries in 2026, with the program continuing to grow its footprint across the country. Building on its rapid expansion, the program is equipping students and faculty with industry-relevant skills while advancing education and research in AI-native networking, cloud, security, and automated operations, helping strengthen India’s future digital infrastructure workforce.
The expansion of the HPE Academic Alliance Program comes at a time when India is placing greater emphasis on strengthening industry-academia collaboration to build a future-ready technology workforce. This aligns with recent remarks by Ashwini Vaishnaw, Hon’ble Minister for Railways, Information & Broadcasting, and Electronics & Information Technology, Government of India, who called for technology companies to work closely with higher education institutions to co-create and continuously update academic curricula. The approach is intended to provide students with direct exposure to rapidly evolving domains such as networking, AI, cloud, and advanced digital infrastructure.
The HPE Academic Alliance Program is designed to bridge this gap by providing universities with access to structured learning pathways, technical resources, and enterprise-focused curriculum. Under the program, students and faculty receive free, 24/7 access to online learning platforms and cloud-based virtual labs for three months, along with significantly discounted access to HPE’s global certifications. The program focuses on three core pillars: Empowering Students, Building an Industry-aligned Skilled Workforce, and Supporting Faculty Development, through free associate- and specialist-level training courses across critical domains such as Mist AI, Cloud, Security, and DevOps. The program also enables universities to establish AI-native Networking Centers of Excellence (CoEs) at highly subsidized costs, providing dedicated learning infrastructure on their campuses. These CoEs are complemented by bootcamps and technical sessions led directly by HPE experts, giving students and faculty opportunities to gain hands-on experience and deeper exposure to industry expertise.
“As India’s technology landscape evolves and enterprises increasingly seek specialized skills across AI, networking, cloud and security, the expectations from the next generation of engineers are changing,” said Mr. Muthukumar, Vice President – Engineering and Site Lead for HPE Networking India. “Industry-academia collaboration has a critical role to play in preparing students for this shift. Through the HPE Academic Alliance, we are helping bridge the gap between academic learning and industry requirements by providing students and faculty with access to global certifications, expert-led bootcamps, cloud-based virtual labs, and industry-aligned curriculum. By expanding this ecosystem across more academic institutions, our aim is to help build a future-ready technology workforce equipped with the skills to contribute to India’s next phase of digital growth.”
The program’s ecosystem features active integration across some of India’s leading technical hubs, including top-tier national and state institutions such as the National Institute of Technology Karnataka (NIT Surathkal), University Visvesvaraya College of Engineering (UVCE, Bengaluru), and Government Engineering College Hassan (GECH, Hassan), alongside highly respected engineering colleges such as R.V. College of Engineering (RVCE, Bengaluru) and BMS College of Engineering (BMSCE, Bengaluru), serving as a powerful model for curriculum modernization. By embedding HPE’s specialized curriculum directly into their core engineering streams, these partner institutions are elevating student employability and helping bridge the gap between classroom theory and enterprise-ready technology deployment.
HPE is committed to the continuous expansion of the Academic Alliance Program, partnering with additional universities and technical institutions across India to ensure that cutting-edge technology education remains accessible to the country’s vast engineering talent pool.
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