Advizex Is Awarded HPE GreenLake Managed Services Status

‘This is a huge vote of confidence in Advizex’s services capabilities,’ says Advizex President C.R. Howdyshell. ‘For the customer this makes Advizex the one single point of accountability. It means we can take care of it all for the customer from setup to running it.’

Advizex, one of the fastest-growing GreenLake pay-per-use cloud service providers, has been awarded a prestigious GreenLake Managed Services (GMS) designation by Hewlett Packard Enterprise.

With the new GreenLake-managed services status, Advizex is now able to provide critical professional services for GreenLake cloud service set up, configuration and support. Up until now, those professional services were only provided by HPE-badged technical professionals.

[Related: HPE GreenLake Is Getting Rave Reviews From Customers: Partners]

C.R. Howdyshell, president of Advizex, who was named a CRN Top 100 executive for his game changing everything as a service sales leadership, said the HPE GreenLake Managed Services designation is a “huge vote of confidence” in Advizex’s services capabilities. “For the customer this makes Advizex the one single point of accountability,” said Howdyshell. “It means we can take care of it all for the customer from setup to running it.”

Advizex Vice President of Cloud Consumption Joe VanPatten said the new designation is aimed squarely at giving customers a “solidly performing” GreenLake solution. “For us to be that closely involved in the installation and configuration of the solution for customers allows us to understand their environment more clearly so that we can be the trusted partner throughout the GreenLake engagement,” he said. “It allows us to be more part of their business success. It’s an honor to be one of the first partners that are able to provide these services.”

Ultimately the GreenLake Managed Services designation opens the door for Advizex to provide more ”value” to customers, said VanPatten. “This allows us to really get in there and help the customer look at all the different directions we can take or things we can do for them to help improve their business,” he said.

The GreenLake Managed Services status also opens the door to additional managed services provided by Advizex, said VanPatten.

Advizex, in fact, provides a wide range of managed services taking complete responsibility for infrastructure and subscription with uptime and service level agreement commitments for everything from on-premise cloud to public cloud to databases and applications.

Among the key workloads that Advizex is focusing on with GreenLake, said Howdyshell, are Epic, SAP and Splunk. Howdyshell credited Splunk Region Sales Director Brian Swisher with helping to build out the pay-per-use consumption model with Advizex.

Howdyshell said GreenLake’s application prowess with software makers like Epic is critical to winning per per use cloud service deals. “Having GreenLake certified with Epic is key,” he said. “When it comes to healthcare there can be zero downtime. It impacts clinicians and patients. With GreenLake it is certified for Epic. We can build an on-premise solution with Epic holistically and manage it for the customer. We manage all the workloads inside of GreenLake so the healthcare providers can focus on taking care of clinicians and patients.”

Advizex’s GreenLake pay-per-use leadership is benefitting customers anxious for business outcome focused solutions, said Howdyshell.

One of the biggest Advizex GreenLake wins was an on-premises cloud services deal with the Mohawk Valley Health System of Utica, New York. Advizex implemented GreenLake Cloud services for Mohawk Valley Health as part of a complex move from four electronic health-care records systems inherited through a merger down to a single Epic Systems software electronic health care records system.

Another big win for Advizex was with $2 billion chemical manufacturer W.R. Grace & Co. which adopted a GreenLake solution as part of a strategy to get out of the data center business and focus more on its core business of helping customers meet fast changing requirements for new specialty chemicals or materials.

In a recent HPE GreenLake Day broadcast, Srini Vanga, vice president and head of information technology for W.R. Grace, said his company’s 15 year trusted relationship with Advizex was as one of the keys to the GreenLake deal. “The account manager and (the Advizex) team knows how I operate and what I expect of the team,” he said. “I can call them 24/7, anytime, day or night, and they always pick up the phone and assist me in a time of need.”

Vanga said the flexibility the GreenLake consumption platform provided with the ability to instantly provide on-premise compute with a 30 percent buffer is key to the model. “We now have a private, on-prem cloud solution that is elastic, fully-scalable and is based on the consumption model,” he said. “That is very similar to what the hyperscale cloud providers have and I love it!”

That ability to scale up or scale down based on the business demands is one of the biggest benefits to the GreenLake model, said VanPatten. “With GreenLake you can start very small and you only have to pay for what you are utilizing,” he said. “You can grow or shrink based on what is going on in the business.”

The flexibility of the GreenLake model is driving VDI adoption of the platform, said VanPatten. “It makes perfect sense to put a VDI environment in a consumption model,” he said. “It can grow with the GreenLake model and you know how much it is going to cost with predefined pricing. So you know exactly how much it is going to cost if you need to grow from 200 users to 300 users tomorrow.”

GreenLake is helping to drive an everything as a service, single point of accountability revolution at Advizex. Advizex’s GreenLake business is growing at a rapid clip with a plan to hit close to $20 million in GreenLake recurring revenue billings next year. That is leading to a sharp increase in Advizex professional services.

Howdyshell praised HPE as the flat-out “market leader” in the consumption based IT market. “We’re getting HPE in front of more customers because of our capabilities to talk about consumption,” he said. “We’re getting HPE a seat at the table in places they have never been before. It’s opening the doors to sell consumption where they only have had a compute presence today.”