Mercy Health picks HPE for aged care network upgrade

Mercy Health has selected HPE to upgrade network infrastructure across its Healthy Ageing and Residential Aged Care operations in Australia, according to a Telecompaper report published on 27 May.

The report said the project covers more than 40 facilities and is intended to support more than 2600 residents and more than 400 retirement village units. It said the deployment would introduce a cloud-managed network platform to provide connectivity services for residents, staff, families and visitors across Mercy Health’s national footprint.

No contract value, implementation timetable or customer outcome metrics were supplied in the available material.

The Mercy Health project was also cited in a 28 September iTnews promoted article written by Andrew Fox, general manager for Australia and New Zealand at HPE Networking. In that article, Fox said Mercy Health was modernising connectivity across more than 40 sites through a cloud-managed network designed to improve visibility, reliability and performance across its operations.

Fox described the Mercy Health deployment as an example of network infrastructure being used as a foundation for future digital capabilities, while reducing operational complexity across a distributed organisation. The article did not provide independent validation of those expected benefits.

The HPE-authored iTnews article framed the upgrade within a broader argument that artificial intelligence is changing enterprise network requirements in two ways: “AI for networking”, where AI is embedded into network operations, and “networking for AI”, where infrastructure is designed to support AI workloads.

Fox wrote that AI-native networks could help predict issues, strengthen security and automate operations across complex environments. He also said networks supporting AI workloads would need to handle larger volumes of data, new traffic patterns and higher demands on latency, throughput, reliability and visibility than traditional enterprise applications.

The iTnews article cited Australian Bureau of Statistics figures showing the share of Australian organisations using AI rose from 1 percent in 2022-23 to 12 percent in 2024-25. That statistical reference was presented in the HPE article as evidence that organisations are moving from experimentation towards production AI deployments.

The same article also cited recent research by the Australian Signals Directorate’s Australian Cyber Security Centre, saying it had identified 17.9 million devices visible to the public internet over a two-month period, including about 212,000 edge devices. The article used the figures to argue that networks are becoming security sensors as the attack surface expands.

Fox is scheduled to deliver a keynote address at HPE Networking Day in Sydney on 7 October 2026, according to the iTnews promoted article.