New capabilities for MSPs on HPE GreenLake cloud

[Cloud_Experts]

By Paul Zinn, Senior Product Marketing Manager, HPE GreenLake Cloud

HPE has announced enhancements to the HPE GreenLake cloud to help managed service providers (MSPs) build their business on HPE GreenLake. Support for another business model and multiple new services to manage give you a larger target market to pursue, a single API endpoint across customer tenants and an authentication-only SSO option help reduce your operational cost, and more granular user assignments give your customers better security and privacy.

First, a little background:  As of May 2024, more than 1,000 MSPs use HPE GreenLake to manage their customers’ environments, with close to half a million devices under management. These MSPs manage many customers, so it’s in their interest to keep to a minimum the number of tasks that they must perform separately for each customer. HPE GreenLake offers an MSP workspace with hierarchical multitenancy, enabling many tasks to be performed once and applied to all customer tenant workspaces. So, for example, when you hire (or lose) a member of your operations team, you don’t have to add or remove that user in each customer workspace one by one.

That’s the experience HPE GreenLake cloud has provided to MSPs, who have, up until now, been able to manage networking for their customers in a business model where the MSP owns the hardware devices and the subscriptions to manage them with HPE Aruba Networking Central. How is that changing?

Let’s start with that business model. MSPs owning the infrastructure to provide services based on that infrastructure to their customers is common, but still less than half of the market. Most customers prefer to own or lease their infrastructure directly and bring in their MSP partner to manage it. HPE GreenLake cloud now supports this model too, opening up a large base of potential customers to MSPs.

The second way that we are expanding the market for MSPs is by giving them more to manage for a customer. I mentioned that up until  recently, HPE Aruba Networking Central was the only service on HPE GreenLake cloud that could be managed in an MSP workspace Now, we have added three more services, enabling MSPs to manage a much bigger part of their customers’ environments:

• Compute ops – HPE GreenLake for Compute Ops Management
• Network monitoring – HPE Aruba Networking User Experience Insight
• Hybrid observability – OpsRamp

And there are more in the works.

Since they debuted this past November, HPE GreenLake APIs have been a key enabler of MSPs lowering their operational cost by automating their workflows and integrating with their existing tools. But each customer tenant required a different endpoint when calling those APIs. Now MSPs can manage all their customers using a single endpoint, significantly reducing the amount of work required to automate. The HPE GreenLake API ecosystem continues to grow, with new APIs added in recent months both for the cloud platform and for the services that run on it, including Compute Ops Management. That gives you a wider variety of actions that you can automate and integrate.

Just like enterprises, MSPs use single sign-on (SSO) with their own identity provider (IdP) to simplify identity management of their operations team. When an MSP manages products and services from multiple providers, modifying their IdP to accommodate the roles from all those service providers can be a burden. HPE GreenLake cloud now gives you the option of using SSO only for authentication, leaving role definitions and mappings to be managed in the platform so that you don’t need to modify your IdP.

Earlier, I mentioned the hierarchical multitenancy that allows more streamlined management from the MSP’s parent workspace. Many MSPs will love being able to add a new member of their operations team to the MSP workspace and automatically give that user access to all of the MSP’s customer workspaces.

But MSPs that manage a high number of customers or manage in multiple geographical regions might assign each member of their operations team to manage a specific set of customers, and for them, giving user access to all customers is an unnecessary security and privacy risk. We’re happy to say that now you can define groups of customer workspaces and give your users permission to one or more of those workspace groups so that they can access only the customers that they are assigned to manage.

Our vision is to enable partners to create flexible and scalable MSP services using HPE GreenLake offerings. These new enhancements enable you to pursue a larger customer base and scale your operations without adding many new names to your roster.

Create your workspace on HPE GreenLake cloud today and try out these capabilities for yourself.

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Meet HPE Blogger Paul Zinn, Senior Product Marketing Manager, HPE GreenLake Cloud

In over 30 years in the enterprise software industry with mature companies and startups, Paul has held roles both for building products and for bringing them to market. Before joining the Marketing team, he led a Product Management team that built usage and cost analytics for HPE GreenLake. Currently, his primary focus is product marketing for the HPE GreenLake edge-to-cloud platform, and he also works to make HPE GreenLake messaging clear and consistent across the company. In his off hours, he makes music with the Sacramento Americana/rock band The Nickel Slots.

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