Addressing an audience of IT leaders at HPE Discover in June, HPE’s CEO Antonio Neri said: “More and more of you tell me that you don’t want to spend resources managing your infrastructure, whether it’s at the Edge, in the cloud or in the data center, legacy or cloud-native. You just want to focus on your applications data and your business outcomes.”
It’s a straightforward observation, and one that resonates with companies struggling with tight budgets, increasingly complex IT environments, and limited in-house skills. But HPE’s response to this market need is truly momentous. It will reshape not only HPE itself, but the industry at large – and it may well transform how your company consumes IT. Antonio continued: “I am making this commitment to you: In the next three years, HPE will be a consumption-driven company, and everything we deliver to you will be available as a Service. We are defining the next chapter for the IT industry.” (See our press release to learn how HPE will offer its entire portfolio as a Service by 2022.)
Paradigm changer
We’re changing the business model – way more than offering a different way to finance IT gear. As the cloud shows, the “as a Service” model delivers services, not products; flexibility, not rigidity; and costs that align to business outcomes. And it’s hybrid, meant to optimize the way workloads are delivered, whether in a data center, at a co-location facility or in the public cloud. (See David Rand’s article 5 important questions you should ask consumption IT vendors.)
To understand HPE’s commitment to this model, you need to know a bit about HPE GreenLake, our portfolio of “as a service” IT solutions that give companies all of the performance and control of on-premises infrastructure, with all of the financial flexibility and scalability of the cloud. Based on our groundbreaking usage-metering technologies, HPE GreenLake delivers a pay-as-you-go model for on-prem assets, enabling you to closely align IT spend with actual usage. HPE provides a buffer of capacity right-sized to your needs. You pay for what you use, bypassing the usual upfront costs, extended purchasing and implementation timeframes, and overprovisioning headaches. You can quickly scale capacity up or down as needed, and you pay via a single simplified monthly invoice.
To say that this model has received a warm welcome in the marketplace would be a serious understatement. I’ve written before about Forrester research showing that HPE GreenLake can shorten time-to-market for IT projects by as much as 65 percent. That’s one of the biggest benefits I hear about from customers – they can quickly get what they need to get started with their projects and roll out new products really fast. And companies love being able to skip the big upfront expenses; that’s not always the case with public cloud, where a lot of times you get the best price by paying for reserved instances (see my post What Lyft’s AWS Deal Tells Us About Cloud at Scale).
Add to that the potential reduction of routine support, operational, admin and planning tasks, and it’s not hard to see why HPE GreenLake’s popularity is soaring. Indeed, it’s the fastest-growing business in the company, with over $2.8 billion in contract value and more than 600 customers, and a 99 percent renewal rate. We’re currently in the middle of a big drive to help channel partners sell HPE GreenLake (see Max Ramos’s blog A Home Run for the Partner Channel), and that’s paying off in a big way, with year-over-year growth of over 275%.
As a service, edge to cloud
The sheer breadth of the offerings in our HPE GreenLake portfolio means that right from the start you can focus on the outcomes you want to achieve, rather than the IT assets you’ll need to deploy. You want to build a private cloud and do some virtualization? We can offer HPE GreenLake for infrastructure and whatever server, storage, network and VMs you might need. You’re thinking more in terms of a specific workload? We’ve got you covered with workload solutions for backup, SAP HANA, database with EDB Postgres, hybrid high performance computing, and more for your HPE GreenLake environment.
You want to migrate some workloads to cloud and gain control over cloud usage? HPE GreenLake Hybrid Cloud, our managed cloud solution for Microsoft Azure, and soon for Microsoft Azure Stack and Amazon Web Services, gets you up and running fast. It solves many of the cost control, compliance, and data governance challenges that often hamper companies’ public cloud initiatives.
More use cases, more market segments
We’ll continue to expand HPE GreenLake’s use cases and customer segments and as we navigate what Antonio calls “an inflection point in the market” – the rising demand for technology delivered as a Service. Our announcements at Discover include a couple of great examples of how we’ll do that. HPE GreenLake with colocation makes it easier for companies to gain the benefits of HPE GreenLake when their IT assets are hosted by a third-party premises provider. HPE GreenLake for midmarket offers purpose-built, pay-as-you-go infrastructure right-sized for midsize businesses.
To learn more, check out Antonio Neri’s keynote at HPE Discover – the whole video is well worth your time, offering some stunning insights into the current state of the art in IT and what’s next. If you just have a few minutes, jump in at around 36:30, where Antonio covers the rise of as-a-Service and HPE’s transition to the consumption-driven model.
Related posts:
The numbers are in! The business value of HPE GreenLake
A home run for the partner channel: Introducing HPE GreenLake Flex Capacity for partners
Hybrid IT with all of the benefits and fewer headaches: HPE GreenLake Hybrid Cloud
Pay-as-you-go infrastructure for your hosted data center: HPE GreenLake with Colocation
Pay-as-you-go IT just got easier for midsize businesses: Introducing HPE GreenLake for midmarket
Don_Randall
WW HPE Pointnext Marketing. Reach me at @donrrandall on Twitter.
