If there’s one thing that midmarket companies pride themselves on – and rightly so – it’s their agility. Many mid-sized organizations remember the excitement of their start-up days and still foster the entrepreneurial spirit of those times. Looking forward, they see very real opportunities for expansion by pushing into new product lines and exploiting market opportunities that the bigger players may have overlooked.
But midmarket companies’ IT departments can’t always provide the flexibility to cash in on those opportunities. Procurement of IT infrastructure is often a drawn-out process, installation is time-consuming, and management may balk at the upfront expense. Capacity planning is tricky. Let’s say you launch a successful sales campaign in a new region, which results in a sudden surge in demand – but then you find that you’re pushing up against your capacity limits for compute and storage and running into performance issues. Or perhaps your workloads have grown over the years to the point where building a data center, or expanding your current one, makes sense. But then you’re likely looking at significant upfront costs, not only for the IT assets, but also for the facilities footprint.
Then there’s the skillset challenge. Finding the right expertise for new technology initiatives is tough for businesses of all sizes, of course. But it’s especially difficult in midmarket businesses, where IT folks tend to be generalists, operating all across the shop. Where a large enterprise might have multiple teams of security specialists, a midsize IT organization may have one or two admins who take care of that in between working on networking, as well as patches and updates and all the rest of the vital keep-the-lights-on tasks.
Workload solutions tailored to the midmarket
Scenarios like these explain midmarket companies’ strong and growing interest in our HPE GreenLake family of consumption-based IT services. HPE GreenLake solutions apply advanced usage-metering technologies to deliver a cloud-like, pay-as-you-go experience for on-premises infrastructure. We supply a complete, curated solution for your required business outcome – including hardware, software and expertise – along with a buffer of capacity that you can quickly and easily scale up or down as needed. We bill you via a single monthly invoice. You get the streamlined economics of cloud, with all the control of on-prem.
Today we announced that we’ve made it even easier for your organization to tap into those benefits with HPE GreenLake for midmarket the new solution offers:
Purpose-built, pay-as-you-go infrastructure, right-sized for midmarket workloads. We’ve tailored HPE GreenLake for a close fit to this market segment, delivering the most critical business outcomes, as well as extensive proactive support. You can choose your workload solution from:
- Virtualization: Put the power of virtualization to work for your web servers, web applications, batch processing, and more. Choose VMware or HPE SimpliVity, our groundbreaking hyperconverged platform, for virtualization of your general-purpose workloads.
- Database as a Service: HPE GreenLake for midmarket delivers complete solutions for your Oracle, Microsoft SQL and open database environments, running on HPE ProLiant DL380 or DL385 Gen10 server
- Compute as a Service: Run your business applications and productivity applications on our ProLiant DL380 and DL385 servers.
- Storage as a Service: Leverage our HPE StoreOnce 5200 backup appliances, including end-to-end data protection, with options to move up to our all-flash HPE 3PAR StoreServ Storage.
- Private Cloud: Leverage HPE ProLiant for Microsoft Azure Stack, our hybrid cloud solution that enables you to run Azure-consistent services in your data center, providing a single, integrated environment for your developers and admins.
Quick access to facilities capacity for your workloads through colocation. The pay-per-use model that’s driving the marketplace success of HPE GreenLake is popular in the data center facilities sector, too. Colocation providers enable companies to sidestep the usual upfront outlays for IT’s physical footprint. With that in mind, we designed HPE GreenLake for midmarket to simplify companies’ access to services from two industry-leading colocation vendors: CyrusOne and Equinix.
The solution offers instant-on capability for your virtualization or Microsoft Azure Stack workloads at sites operated by CyrusOne or Equinix; your data center will be ready quickly for all of your workloads, instead of going through a long construction or expansion cycle. And you can satisfy your needs for location-dependent workloads and cloud adjacency, all in a professionally-run site. For other workloads, we can stand up the infrastructure in a matter of days, as opposed to the months it might normally take in your own on-site data center. By eliminating the need to order, ship and prepare the systems, you massively reduce time-to-value.
Taking the brakes off innovation
In the sheer breadth of workloads that it transforms, HPE GreenLake for midmarket is a solution that we think is unique in our industry. It unshackles IT shops from cumbersome infrastructure strategies that hamper innovation. It frees up IT leaders to work with line-of-business managers on crucial strategic initiatives that could turn out to be the next step in the long journey from start-up, to midmarket player, to industry leader.
tammie_aron
I am the director of marketing for HPE GreenLake and have had the opportunity to work with many HPE experts and colleagues on our as a Service offerings.
