HPE GreenLake Is Getting Rave Reviews From Customers: Partners

‘There are a lot of people out there dabbling today (with on premise cloud as a service) but when you can say you have a proven solution and it is working in (IT) environments today- that is key,’ says Advizex Technologies President C.R. Howdyshell. ‘For our customers thus far the customer experience has been exceptional.’

Hewlett Packard Enterprise’s GreenLake service has effectively reshaped the cloud landscape with a full fledged, on-premise pay-per-use cloud that is getting rave reviews from customers, said HPE partners in a GreenLake day webcast.

C.R. Howdyshell, president of Advizex Technologies, No. 110 on the CRN 2020 Solution Provider 500, a top HPE GreenLake enterprise partner, said GreenLake has proven to be an on-premise cloud game changer.

“Number one, it works,” said Howdyshell (pictured above), speaking about why customers are adopting GreenLake at an increasing pace. “It works as advertised. As a service is a big step. There are a lot of people out there dabbling today (with on premise cloud as a service) but when you can say you have a proven solution and it is working in (IT) environments today- that is key… For our customers thus far the customer experience has been exceptional.”

“Number one it works,” said Howdyshell (pictured above), speaking about why customers are adopting GreenLake at an increasing pace. “It works as advertised. As a service is a big step. There are a lot of people out there dabbling today (with on premise cloud as a service) but when you can say you have a proven solution and it is working in (IT) environments today- that is key…For our customers thus far the customer experience has been exceptional.”

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In fact, Advizex recently had its first GreenLake customer from 18 months ago sign a new deal in an intensely competitive face-off against competing cloud providers. “They just said- ‘Look it is proven! It works! And it gives us that cloud experience,” said Howdyshell. “We have had a lot of great success thus far and we are looking forward to more!”

Another Advizex customer was able to quickly integrate a $570 million company into its fold as a result of the “seamless integration” that comes with the GreenLake model, said Howdyshell. “They are looking at the flexibility to add to GreenLake as a big opportunity to integrate for acquisitions,” he said. “GreenLake really brings the cloud experience and as a service to our customers. With HPE GreenLake it is best of breed.”

The “positive” GreenLake reception comes with customers looking closely at cloud models, said Howdyshell. “The C-Suite wants to hear about cloud and hybrid cloud fits,” he said. “We are seeing more adoption from customers where it may be their first foot into the cloud.”

HPE used the GreenLake day event to unveil a number of new GreenLake cloud services including new compute and storage instances sized at 100 virtual machines in standardized blocks of 4,8, 16 and 24 compute nodes along with a new backup as a service option for those instances

In addition, HPE unveiled a new GreenLake service for bare metal servers expands the partner opportunity to customers demanding a fully dedicated server.

Overall, GreenLake cloud services sales in the most recent quarter through the channel were up 116 percent year over with the number of active partners up 62 percent.

GreenLake has provided customers with the ability to leverage existing infrastructure, but “modernize it and update it so it looks and feels a lot like the cloud,” said Harry Zarek, president and CEO of Compugen, No. 51 on the CRN SP500. ”But they have the security, they have the protection that they need to have for reasons that are dependent on their industry and business to allow them to run on prem. So the GreenLake philosophy is perfect. It allows customers to actually have one foot in the cloud, one foot in the traditional data center, but modernize it so it actually looks like one enterprise entity.”

The GreenLake model is also providing customers with the ability to pay for IT services when they actually generate revenue, providing huge liquidity advantage for Chief Financial Officers, said Zarek. That GreenLake capability is a huge game changer for CFO’s considering the SAP HANA Enterprise Cloud Customer Edition on GreenLake, he said.

“SAP is very, very popular, unfortunately it takes six months to two years to get that application, set-up, installed, validated, tested and then moved to production,” said Zarek. “You know what used to happen before? They would buy all that capacity up front and it would basically sit there for two years. And then when they finally went to full production then they were really getting value out of that investment. But they actually lost a couple of years of technology literally sitting almost idle. From a CFO perspective this ability to support the development of those applications as it scales- GreenLake is the ideal solution that allows them to do that!”

The GreenLake as a service model provides partners with a “continuous on-going relationship” with customers, said Zarek. “When you move to a GreenLake model you are actually helping customers manage that (cloud environment),” he said. “You are in the core, in the heart of their business. There is no better place to be if you want to be sticky, relevant and always there for them.”

Ron Nemecek, business alliance manager for CBTS, the $1 billion HPE Platinum partner with 260 plus HPE certifications, said GreenLake is a “rock solid solution” that eliminates development costs and egress charges associated with the public cloud.

At the same time, GreenLake eliminates “over-provisioning costs and the maintenance costs on aging infrstructure hardware,” said Nemecek. “Our customers only have to pay for actual infrastructure usage with no up-front capital expense, that achieves true utilization to cost economics with HPE GreenLake from CBTS,” he said.

Benjamin Klay, vice president of alliances for Arrow Electronics’ enterprise computing solutions business in North America, said GreenLake is now available in the ArrowSphere cloud marketplace.

“We’re excited today to have GreenLake live in our (cloud) platform available for our partner community to consume,” said Klay. The ArrowSphere platform is available in more than 20 countries with “thousands of resellers transacting on the platform on a regular basis,” said Klay.“That creates an opportunity for both Arrow, HPE and our partner community, so we are excited,” he said.

Ultimately, GreenLake is driving business value conversations with customers, said Howdyshell. “You are solving a business problem versus trying to have a technology conversation,” he said. “To me that is clear differentiation for HPE GreenLake.”

Keith White, senior vice president and general manager of the GreenLake cloud services business unit, promised that HPE is going to continue to innovate and push the on premise cloud envelope.

“Our ears are wide open, we are listening to our customers on what their needs are, what their requirements are, so we are going to expand the use cases, expand the solution sets that we provide in these workload optimized offerings to a very, very broad set of customers as they drive forward with digital transformation and modernization,” he said.