HPE Goes All-In With As-a-Service, GreenLake

(Pictured above: HPE’s Antonio Neri on stage at HPE Discover/Global Partner Summit in Las Vegas.)

HPE DISCOVER/GLOBAL PARTNER SUMMIT — HPE not only has described GreenLake business growth as “hitting it out of the park,” but the vendor on Tuesday formally announced its shift to an as-a-service company – a multiyear transformation – with GreenLake a key part of that strategy. The vendor’s plan is to continue to expand GreenLake with a targeted focus on SMBs.

HPE project it will offer its entire portfolio through the as-a-service, pay-per-use consumption model by 2022, noting its strategy is designed to offer customers choice, and will continue to offer hardware and a software license option — a la the capex way of procuring IT. Not only does this strategy include new HPE GreenLake offerings for the midmarket, but also new services for the edge, and new and expanded partnerships with CyrusOne, Equinix and Google Cloud. In addition, HPE will continue to invest and innovate in its suite of software delivered via a subscription model, including HPE Aruba Central, BlueData, Cloud Volumes, InfoSight and OneView.

“Our vision for our company is to deliver everything we do as a service,” HPE CEO Antonio Neri told partners Monday during his Global Partner Summit keynote in Las Vegas. “We are at an inflection point in the market. Everyone recognizes that customers want technology delivered as a service, but they also want it on their terms. HPE’s unique approach to as-a-service, which empowers customers with choice, flexibility and control, is driving HPE GreenLake’s tremendous success.”

HPE has been investing in its GreenLake for about 10 years, having its roots in an earlier HPE business called Flex Capacity, a usage-based consumption model for on-premises compute. Fast-forward to 2017 with the rise and rebrand of HPE GreenLake, and soon after the HPE GreenLake Flex Capacity for partner program, announced at HPE Global Partner Summit 2018.

HPE’s Flynn Maloy

“That was the company’s third attempt, in the 10 years prior, to get the channel involved in selling, flex capacity,” said Flynn Maloy, HPE Pointnext marketing, enterprise group at HPE, told Channel Futures.

The vendor had some co-sell with the channel but wanted to get partners to do it on their own — an effort that failed twice.

It seems that the third go at it was the charm, with HPE signing up 50 partners per month to sell GreenLake. Paul Hunter, global channel chief at HPE, says 120 GreenLake deals have closed and 400 partners have GreenLake opportunities in the pipeline.

“We will continue to invest aggressively in this opportunity, to capitalize on our market leadership, leverage our world-class channel and partner ecosystem, and deliver our entire portfolio, from edge to cloud, under the HPE GreenLake portfolio. As a result, we will reshape HPE and transform the market, with a new and better way to deliver as a service,” said Neri.

What began last year with seven prepackaged, flex capacity, pre-priced GreenLake solutions available for partners to sell to large enterprise customers, HPE said Tuesday it has five new HPE GreenLake offerings that provide midmarket customers with pre-configured as-a-service workloads for compute, database, private cloud, storage and virtualization.

“What we heard from customers was that the program was going great, large customers love it, but the offers weren’t right for the midmarket customer — they’re too expensive and too complex,” said Maloy.

Partners pushed HPE to offer smaller and lighter GreenLake options for their midmarket customers, he said.

For customers that want to leverage an external data center for their HPE GreenLake applications, the vendor has signed strategic partnerships with CyrusOne and Equinix. To facilitate partner growth, and to help them order and onboard new customers, HPE has two new …