HPE Surfs Wave of GreenLake Adoption, Barrels Out Updates

Change is in the air at Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) as the vendor today unleashed a flurry of updates to its GreenLake platform, including new cloud services for bare-metal management and expanded portfolio support for virtual machines (VMs) and containers workloads. Change is in the air at Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) as the vendor today unleashed a flurry of updates to its GreenLake platform, including new cloud services for bare-metal management and expanded portfolio support for virtual machines (VMs) and containers workloads. The new trio of HPE GreenLake cloud services are designed to provide smaller, low-cost entry points for infrastructure capacity. These updates are specifically tailored for mid-market businesses, according to the vendor. HPE announced ALSO Deutschland, Arrow, Ingram Micro, Synnex, and Tech Data as the latest third-party vendors to dive into HPE’s GreenLake platform. The vendor is also deepening its relationships with CyrusOne and Equinix to offer its customers who prefer a colocation model the ability to run GreenLake through a single agreement and invoice.   As for new partner tooling, Aruba released updates to its GreenLake for Aruba partner program that will allow partners to offer customers a dedicated Aruba customer success manager. Additionally, HPE dropped a new simplified billing experience for HPE GreenLake Central in its move to embrace a consumption-based model. The news follows HPE GreenLake’s edge-to-cloud platform-as-a-service (PaaS) announcement in June 2020, and the expansion of its HPC offering as a service for customers on-premises or in a colocation facility in December 2020. GreenLake enables customers to deploy HPE infrastructure in a data center, colocation facility, or at the edge.  HPE continues to update its overarching GreenLake platform that is becoming the embodiment of the company’s shift toward a service-based consumption model across all of its business lines. And cloud services for bare metal management is just the latest addition. The new service will allow customers to discover, provision, and manage compute and storage resources in HPE GreenLake Central to run workloads directly on the server, VMs or containers. The vendor claims this will allow users to build a more tailored platform to control performance, cost, and configuration requirements. New to the VMs cloud service is the option to add backup as a service. The integrated backup service will give customers the option to turn it on and back up their VMs. Finally, users that run workloads on containers now have an entry point to HPE GreenLake cloud services for the HPE Ezmeral Container platform. The platform has seen major success since it launched in 2018. So much so, GreenLake saw skyrocketing year-over-year growth in first-quarter fiscal 2021 earnings represented by an annualized revenue run rate of $649 million dollars, up 27% year over year.  Q1 represented the highest first quarter ever with HPE GreenLake Cloud Services as customer retention rates were above 95%. The vendor gained more than 70 new HPE GreenLake Cloud Services customers during the quarter. CEO Antonio Neri previously called GreenLake HPE’s fastest-growing business. At the company’s annual conference in 2019 he pledged to offer HPE’s entire portfolio as a service by 2022. And true to Neri’s promise, HPE is continuing to expand its product offerings under the GreenLake umbrella. Customers can now essentially order a supercomputing cluster through a self-service portal, and have it up in running in as little as two weeks. “Obviously the shift to a consumption-driven model is in our favor because once we land a customer in GreenLake, basically, they get what they want, whether it’s at the edge or what is in the core, or whether it’s in a managed service for the hybrid model that they are all adopting,” Neri said on the latest earnings call with investors.“We remain very confident in our unique approach and differentiate the portfolio to capitalize on the rapidly growing on-premises as-a-service market.”