HPE Set To Unveil ‘Huge’ GreenLake Cloud Services Game-Changer: CEO Antonio Neri

‘The traction we are seeing in the market for HPE GreenLake is driving us to fully accelerate the transformation of HPE into an information cloud company,’ said HPE CEO Antonio Neri. ‘On March 22, we will unveil significant new innovations and enhancements for the HPE GreenLake platform to help customers manage the hybrid cloud more easily, protect and get more value from their data and securely connect at the edge.’

Hewlett Packard Enterprise is set to up the ante in the GreenLake edge-to-cloud services battle against all comers with significant “innovations and enhancements” set to be rolled out on March 22, HPE CEO Antonio Neri told financial analysts Tuesday.

“The traction we are seeing in the market for HPE GreenLake is driving us to fully accelerate the transformation of HPE into an information cloud company,” he said on an earnings call to disclose the company’s financial results for the first fiscal quarter. “On March 22, we will unveil significant new innovations and enhancements for the HPE GreenLake platform to help customers manage the hybrid cloud more easily, protect and get more value from their data and securely connect at the edge.”

Neri told CRN in an interview following the earnings call that the new GreenLake capabilities—which include the ability for partners to integrate their services in GreenLake through an Application Programming Interface—represents a “huge” moment for HPE and its partners.

“It brings the unification of the [cloud] experience in a hybrid approach from edge to cloud, and it brings the partner ecosystem into the platform with that experience,” he said. “It brings partners all the hard work we have done in the last four years on our IT systems. It brings integration with the back end and all the as a service capabilities that channel partners will now have the benefit of. I feel very, very strongly about this.”

GreenLake represents the future of HPE as an edge-to-cloud innovator, said Neri.

“Everything gets delivered through HPE GreenLake, whether it is connectivity to a subscription model, whether it is compute or storage that you can consume elastically with data services running on top of it, whether it is the services to operate in a hybrid world,” he said. “HPE GreenLake is becoming the platform of choice for many customers because it offers that flexibility in an architecture that is edge to cloud. That includes, by the way, the public cloud. That is why when you see the innovation we are going to bring in the next two weeks, it includes the public cloud in the way we manage that.”

Neri described HPE’s full pivot to an as-a-service edge-to-cloud company as the beginning of a new era for the Spring, Texas-based company. “This is just the beginning,” he said. “We have been talking about this and see the momentum, but this is a new beginning to me, which is the next phase of who we are and how we are transforming ourselves.”

Neri has detailed in the past HPE’s drive to redefine the HPE GreenLake platform with a new “front-end experience” with GreenLake.HPE.com. In fact, he has stressed that GreenLake should be viewed as the HPE brand, just as Azure is synonymous with Microsoft or AWS is synonymous with Amazon.

The new GreenLake.HPE.com model is aimed at unifying the complete edge-to-cloud experience, whether it is Aruba’s connectivity as a service, elastic compute as a service or workload-optimized solutions like SAP as a service.

The HPE GreenLake enhancements come with HPE GreenLake momentum accelerating. For the first fiscal quarter, ended Jan. 31, HPE reported a 136 percent increase in as-a-service orders. HPE’s annualized recurring revenue—a critical measure of GreenLake adoption—increased 23 percent to $798 million even in the face of supply constraints, said HPE.

HPE GreenLake channel sales were up 115 percent in the quarter compared to a year ago, said Neri. “That tells you that the channel is embracing GreenLake,” he said. “You will see in three weeks when we talk about new innovation that there are specific channel partners coming on to the platform fully integrated with APIs.”

HPE added 100 new HPE GreenLake customers in the quarter, accounting for more than $500 million of total contract value. That brings the total contract value of GreenLake to more than $6.5 billion with 1,350 total customers.

For the quarter, HPE posted better-than-expected non-GAAP diluted earnings of 53 cents per share, well above the Zacks consensus estimate of 46 cents per share. Sales for the quarter were up two percent to $7.0 billion which HPE said was in line with its outlook.

HPE reiterated its expectations for three percent to four percent revenue growth for Fiscal Year 2022. What’s more, HPE raised its full-year non-GAAP diluted net earnings per share by seven cents per share from $2.03 cents per share to $2.17 cents per share.

With the additional innovation HPE is bringing to GreenLake later this month, HPE remains “far ahead of competition in providing an edge-to-cloud on-premises service that gives customers the competitive edge they require,” said Paul Cohen, vice president of sales for New York-based PKA Technologies, an HPE Platinum partner that has closed a number of HPE GreenLake deals.

“As [Neri] continues to invest and innovate in the GreenLake model, we are pleased that it also provides us with the competitive edge we need to compete with the public cloud,” said Cohen.

GreenLake is gaining momentum because more and more customers want to keep their data on premises or in managed colocation model, said Cohen. “There is more control and better security with GreenLake,” he said. “It is resonating with CIOs, CFOs and CSOs (Chief Security Officers) and CTOs.”

Customers are seeing significant financial benefits from GreenLake, he said. “They recognize that with GreenLake they don’t need to pay exorbitant fees for maintenance or use head count to trouble shoot 24 hours a day. CFOs appreciate that they are only paying for what they use. They know they are saving money and that they can redeploy that capital somewhere else. CSOs are comforted by the fact that their most critical applications remain on-premises. It gives them control of the security of their data.”

The GreenLake model also provides partners with the ability to instantly add capacity, driving additional sales and profits for partners, said Cohen. “For the duration of the contract, all orders come through us, and it makes it easy for the customers because they don’t have to go out to bid for additional capacity,” he said.

PKA’s GreenLake pipeline is growing, with more customers looking to run GreenLake as a colocation service that is managed under the PKASolveIT managed services umbrella, said Cohen.

Cohen praised HPE for staying the course with strong partner enablement for HPE GreenLake. “HPE is best-in-class at supporting partners in both commercial and public sector,” he said. “HPE remains ahead of the field with their continued investments in driving the GreenLake on-premises cloud service model in the channel.”

GreenLake’s ability to provide reserve capacity that can be instantly turned on has made the on-premises cloud service even more attractive to customers in the midst of the current supply chain crisis, said Pat O’Dell, general manager and managing partner for Clinton, N.J.-based solution provider CPP Associates, one of HPE’s top enterprise partners. “That reserve capacity that you can just turn on that HPE is funding is becoming more and more important to the value proposition with the supply chain crisis,” he said. “I doubt the supply chain is going to get better with all the turmoil in Europe with the Russia invasion of Ukraine.”

CPP Associates expects its GreenLake sales to be up “high double digits” for 2022, said O’Dell. “We see GreenLake as the best on-premises cloud out there,” he said. “I see it growing its lead. The reason is because of HPE’s strong investments in sizing properly using deduplication and reduction with Quick Quote, educational services and training the partners on how to sell the value of GreenLake and GreenLake Central.”

The refined GreenLake sizing model is driving an even bigger cost advantage over public cloud, said O’Dell. Without reserved multiyear instances on the public cloud, HPE’s GreenLake is at times coming in at time at a 50 percent cost savings over public cloud in a face off with CPP’s Infrastructure Anywhere Assessments (IAA), said O’Dell.

“There is a place for the public cloud if you are a seasonal company or you need to get up and running quickly, but if you want total flexibility in a 24-hour, seven-day-a-week, 365-day-a-year production environment, you are going to spend substantially more in a public cloud environment,” said O’Dell. “Public cloud without reserved instances is much more expensive.”

No vendor has as strong a portfolio of products and services for edge-to-cloud infrastructure as HPE or as strong a commitment to partners, said O’Dell. He praised Neri, HPE Chief Sales Officer Heiko Meyer and HPE Managing Director North America Paul Hunter for their unwavering channel commitment.

“No one has as strong a commitment to partners or as strong a solution set from the edge to the cloud,” said O’Dell. “Their total solution set through the whole spectrum from server to storage to network to services is No. 1 or No. 2 in the market. Their integrated total solution set is better than any other company’s.”

Neri, for his part, said HPE’s vision to become the edge-to-cloud platform company is spot on. “It is aligned with the megatrends of connectivity, cloud and data that you consume as a service. That is why the future of the company long-term is GreenLake,” he said.

“We are very excited about the momentum, but what excites me the most, honestly, is the innovation we are going to continue to bring in the platform called HPE GreenLake,” he said. “That is why it is my No. 1 priority, because it is working and driving more growth in bookings and better profitability.”

HPE shares were up two percent or 34 cents in after hours trading to $15.75.