GreenLake Superstar Advizex Wins HPE U.S. As-A-Service Partner Of Year

‘What we are able to do with GreenLake is to bring customers a best of breed, multivendor on-premise cloud solution fully supported by Advizex,’ says Advizex President C.R. Howdyshell. ‘We manage and monitor it with our managed services. What that means to the customer is a single point of accountability and a single bill with no finger pointing.’

Advizex, which is in the midst of a massive shift to an everything-as-a-service model, has been named Hewlett Packard Enterprise U.S. As-A-Service Partner of the Year.

C.R. Howdyshell, president of Advizex, which earlier this year was awarded HPE GreenLake Managed Services status, said the award is a “huge honor” that reinforces the increasing customer appetite to consume IT in an everything-as-a-service model.

“What we are able to do with GreenLake is to bring customers a best of breed, multivendor on-premise cloud solution fully supported by Advizex,” he said. “We manage and monitor it with our managed services. What that means to the customer is a single point of accountability and a single bill with no finger pointing. This is not selling a point solution. This is a customer strategy. It clearly differentiates Advizex with customers.”

The award – which was announced at HPE Discover virtual 2021- comes with Advizex seeing higher adoption rates and more interest in the everything as-a-service model, said Howdyshell, who was named a CRN Top 100 executive last year for his everything as-a-service sales leadership. “For customers it is extremely easy to adopt this GreenLake solution,” he said. “This is an on-premise cloud feeling and experience without having data off premise at a variable cost. We are going to continue to bring the cloud to customers.”

The Advizex no holds barred commitment to as-a-service has been key to the company’s success, said Howdyshell (pictured above). “This isn’t about dipping your toes into the water,” he said. “This is about jumping in. You have to be committed to the strategy and immersed in it and you have to invest in it. We are doing it!”

Howdyshell credited Advizex Vice President of Cloud Consumption Joe VanPatten for doing yeoman’s work educating customers on the value of everything as a service. “What Joe has done is really show customers what on premise as a service can be for them and what it means to their business,” he said. “There is a real educational opportunity for customers to understand what on premise as a service can be.”

VanPatten, for his part, said the everything as-a-service model is resonating because it allows customers to consume IT in a way that makes sense for their business.

“From an operational perspective this is all about making on-prem hardware feel more like a cloud experience,” he said. “When we do that we typically are able to take anywhere from 50 to 100 percent of the operational tasks away from the customer. So they can free up their time and focus on making their business more competitive.”

VanPatten – who is leading the everything-as-a-service sales charge- said every single customer is interested in the as-a-service model. “I am on some sort of customer call or lead generation call every single business day and I have yet to have a single organization say they are not interested,” he said. “Everybody sees the value in it and they see the way it can be plugged into their cloud strategy.”

Advizex’s everything-as-a-service prowess has led to a number of longtime Advizex customers moving to the GreenLake model including $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. That move to GreenLake allowed W.R. Grace & Co. to focus more on its core business of helping customers meet fast changing requirements for new specialty chemicals or materials.

Another significant Advizex win: a GreenLake deal with the Mohawk Valley Health System of Utica, New York. That on-premises cloud services move allowed Mohawk Valley Health to move from four electronic health-care records systems inherited through a merger down to a single Epic Systems software electronic health care records system.

Key to Advizex’s GreenLake success is its deep knowledge of each long standing customer’s business, applications and IT environment, said Howdyshell. “Customers know we understand their business and can execute,” he said.

The HPE US As-A-Service award is especially gratifying given the larger competitors Advizex was up against in the as-a-service category, said Howdyshell. “This isn’t about being bigger, this is about being better at executing as-a-service,” he said. “The fact that HPE has made a commitment to everything as-a-service and its investment in the channel has allowed Advizex to make a big bet here. This award reinforces that we are able to execute on as-a-service. It is exciting to be out in front.”

Advizex expects to double its GreenLake total contract revenue this year, said Howdyshell. “We are going to continue to work together with HPE to drive the momentum and accelerate our opportunities,” he said. “We really appreciate HPE recognizing the investments we have made in everything as-a-service. We are committed to accelerating.”