IDC MarketScape report recognizes HPE differentiators in Cloud Professional Services

[Toby_Weiss]

Assessing the strengths, challenges and differentiators of 17 vendors, the analyst firm identified key elements that prospects should take into account as they consider engaging with each specific vendor.

When HPE talks to prospects looking for a partner to provide cloud professional services, we highlight several strengths, starting with our experience, our edge-to-cloud market strategy and our ability to bring customers’ digital visions to life.

The recent IDC MarketScape: Worldwide Cloud Professional Services 2022 Assessment (doc #US48061322, April 2022), addressed some of these themes. Assessing the strengths, challenges and differentiators of 17 vendors, the analyst firm identified key elements that prospects should take into account as they consider engaging with each specific vendor.

The IDC MarketScape said HPE should be considered when “you want a company committed to the idea that you should be able to consume all of your IT, including hybrid/on-premises solutions, using an as-a-service delivery model. Likewise, if you want a company not to do everything for you in the cloud, but to help make sure you do it right, HPE has a long history of developing numerous productized services to jump-start clients' efforts regardless of their maturity level.”

The IDC MarketScape named HPE as a Major Player in the Worldwide Cloud Professional Services market. We believe this is a fair and accurate assessment. We may not yet have the market share or scale of some other systems integrators, but we believe our technology, our methodologies, skills, capabilities, and talent stand out in the marketplace.

The reference to our as-a-service model attests to the strength of HPE’s GreenLake strategy. With HPE GreenLake edge-to-cloud platform, we’ve brought a new kind of cloud experience to all apps and data. No matter where resources live – in the cloud, on-premises, or at the edge – companies can take advantage of secure, agile services delivered in an as-a-service model. More than 1,000 enterprises have taken advantage of HPE GreenLake platform. It’s the cloud that comes to you. 

Interesting phrases aside, the truth is we are fulfilling our ambitions and serving clients’ needs by bringing the cloud experience on-premises and at the edge. Additionally, we have a deep on-premises experience which for years helped our customers modernize data centers (including modular); consolidate and co-locate; achieve their optimized ROI targets; and update aging architectures as we moved to modern cloud platform services.

We believe the reference to making sure customers “do it right” speaks to HPE’s ability to serve all enterprises regardless of size, geographical ties, industry focus or maturity level. We are a channel-rich company that appreciates the capabilities in our partners. We also have a unique approach to digital transformation that helps customers identify and act on key “moments” on their own individual digital journeys. Our Digital Next Advisory approach sets the foundation for a successful DX journey by fully addressing the challenges of each aspect and mitigating the drawbacks that commonly set transformations on the road to failure. This approach helps many of our customers bridge the gap from vision to execution.

The IDC MarketScape report highlighted several HPE strengths: the company’s employee strategy, financial funding model, delivery capability, customer service and marketing functions. Here’s how they all fit together. Our employee strategy is focused on capitalizing on acquisition knowledge and systematically enabling a larger global population of team members to deliver. Our funding model includes the investments required to see this through. The delivery capability we’ve developed includes systematic training and certification in all cloud platform technologies, including hyperscalers. And our support and service functions are aligned to the new methodologies and multi-stack requirements of our customer base. Last, you will notice our well known thought leadership journal called The Doppler is alive and well.

The IDC MarketScape noted that the cloud professional services market has evolved in recent years, with customers putting more emphasis on innovation and less priority on using cloud as a cost takeout play. We agree. While cost will always be a factor, customers increasingly are becoming more strategic in their cloud implementations, using them to deliver better customer experiences and drive value throughout the entire operation while maintaining compliance, latency, and performance requirements of mission-critical applications.

As HPE continues to invest in cloud native professional services, important themes evolve such as workload balancing, automated assessments, and cloud-native code re-engineering through AI-based code analysis and extraction. Customers have mandates that are more about smart cloud migrations, resilient delivery of hybrid cloud services, and integration and management of hybrid platforms that connect a multi-cloud world. We have invested and continue to mature new offerings in multi-cloud platform management.

HPE takes its role as a cloud facilitator seriously. We understand that you can’t succeed in cloud professional services without continually investing in innovation. That’s why we have established unique offerings like Right Mix Advisor that provides a “recipe” for workload placement through automated assessment and cloud native code re-engineering.

Another offering, HPE’s Edge to Cloud Adoption Framework, provides a structure and common language for customers to understand where they are in their adoption journeys, benchmark against best practice, and prioritize the right next steps for their organizations.

A third example of our innovation is HPE’s intelligent multi-cloud management platform for hybrid cloud. HPE has developed a proven methodology and functional reference architecture to design, build, and operate a viable multi-cloud management platform.

The cloud is not a destination – it’s an experience and a journey. Customers need help navigating the different platforms, application architectures and technology choices they’ll encounter along the way. As we’ve proven through the years, HPE is a Major Player in this game.

Toby Weiss
VP WW Hybrid IT Practice Area
Hewlett Packard Enterprise

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