HPE Service Provider Executive Summit

[Chris_Dando]

The HPE Service Provider Executive Summit in early June brought together IT Managed Service Providers from across the UK, Ireland, Middle East and Africa. An opportunity to explore current trends and future themes, we looked to the next wave of digital transformation and the implications on Service Providers’ offerings to their customers.

IT Service Providers are increasingly seeing a need to address two fronts of change: diversify beyond their traditional offerings whilst also transforming the traditional services they supply. With IT demand expanding in a constantly shifting market, organisations are facing growing challenges. Limited budgets, IT skills shortages, growing regulatory requirements and challenges in provisioning are forcing innovation and requiring many Service Providers to redefine the customer experience, with customers seeking a simple way to consume IT whilst achieving market-leading results.

Growth across the board

The Service Provider market continues to grow, with Gartner reporting a 13.5% growth in spend on managed services for cloud and edge, and an 8% increase in spend on hybrid cloud and IT consulting, as well as a 6.3% increase in spend on hosted and private infrastructure. With business decisions now incorporating new sources of information, beyond traditional database orientated systems, the next wave of digital transformation is increasingly edge-centric and data-driven with customers requiring the cloud experience from wherever the data is stored and processing performed.

Whilst technologies and services evolve and expand, the breadth of skills required also increases, creating skills gaps challenges for most organisations. Companies are expecting IT Service Providers to help with driving innovation and harnessing these new and emerging technologies whilst being ever-mindful of their budgets and sustainability goals. Enterprises are thinking beyond IT infrastructure when considering energy efficiency and sustainability and with net-zero targets to reach, sustainable IT solutions and services are a real consideration. There is also a growing pressure to provide a cohesive data service capability regardless of where data resides, to enable organisations to harness all their data, whilst also helping enterprises simplify the adoption, development and deployment of AI to solve business problems.

What did our attendees say?

To get a closer look at their challenges, we sat down with some of our attendees.

Jeremy Nash, CEO of Centerprise International told us, “The value of data has never been more highly focused than it is today. UK Service Providers have a significant role to play in ensuring that we protect the value of that data. Service Providers offer the ability to make sure that we are able to extract the value of that data, because we want to make sure that our customers are never going to get to the point where the cost of being able to access and derive insights and value from the data becomes prohibitive, because that will stifle innovation.

“For us, it’s about making sure UK industry can continue to innovate – we are a nation of innovators. We need our customers to feel secure and confident that the value of the data is not going to diminish over time.”

HPE also works with partners to help Service Providers to extend the reach of services and portfolio, but combining partner offerings into the HPE portfolio such as HPE GreenLake. Jonathan Langbridge, Vice President and General Manager, EMEA, at Morpheus Data highlighted the importance of their relationship with HPE. “We’re still relatively young, but the partnership with HPE is so fruitful, providing access to customers, allowing us to grow into the next level, which is key to us as a business.

“Looking to the future, we’d like to continue with the HPE e success we’ve had; in the sessions here at the summit, customers were talking about how Morpheus can tie in with HPE GreenLake, so I’m excited to expand that further and have more joint wins.”

What’s next for Service Providers?

Analytics and AI continue to present an opportunity for greater development and customers are looking for ways to deploy AI that will deliver a return on investment. Equally important is the evolution of data architectures, analysing and filtering data where it resides rather than taking it all to a central location. Technology has never stood still and is the basis of industry and societal evolution and development. However, taking a data-driven approach is easier said than done, and Service Providers may well be looking to automation and packaged solutions that simplify the launch of new services to meet the demands of their end customers in an efficient and proven approach. Above all, a focus on becoming trusted advisers to help customers maintain sovereignty, navigate complexity, manage services and upskill to close the talent gap is crucial.

Jeremy gave his thoughts on the event as a whole. “There has been some really good content presented. We may have come into the event a little guarded, surrounded by other Service Providers, but in reality, we now see each other as collaborators, rather than competitors. It’s a big marketplace, and if we come together, we can share insights and knowledge of what’s worked, what hasn’t worked, and even share services, then our customers will be better off for it.”

Find out more about how we work with service providers at HPE: https://www.hpe.com/uk/en/alliance/ready-sp.html

Chris Dando
Hewlett Packard Enterprise

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