HPE Unveils ‘Revolutionary’ Edge To Cloud HPE GreenLake Service

‘The HPE GreenLake Central portal provides a single pane of glass experience for workloads whether they are managed at the edge, on premises or off premises in a true as a service model including a catalog of service for developers,’ says HPE CEO Antonio Neri.

Hewlett Packard Enterprise CEO Antonio Neri Tuesday launched what he is calling a ‘revolutionary’ step forward in his edge to cloud everything as a service sales blitz with the launch of HPE GreenLake Central.

The next generation GreenLake hybrid cloud platform provides partners and customers with an as-a-service portal/management console that for the first time allows them to do cost, performance, governance and security comparisons for all workloads from the edge to the core to multiple clouds including Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Microsoft Azure.

[Related:HPE CEO Antonio Neri: GreenLake Channel Sales Are Up 326 Percent]

“The HPE GreenLake Central portal provides a single pane of glass experience for workloads whether they are managed at the edge, on premises or off premises in a true as a service model including a catalog of service for developers,” said Neri in a conference call with partners.

GreenLake Central’s open Application Programming Interface (APIs), in fact, allows “partners to add their own services on top of it so we can create a significant better integrated experience than people just thinking about public cloud,” said Neri, who unveiled GreenLake Central at the HPE Discover More conference in Munich, Germany “This is what customers are looking for.”

GreenLake Central has been released in beta and is being piloted with an intial set of customers. It will be available in the second half of 2020.

GreenLake Central is a “huge” leap forward in the GreenLake hybrid cloud customer experience, said Erik Vogel, global vice president of customer experience for HPE GreenLake. He said it allows partners and customers to do “true apples to apples” workload comparisons between GreenLake on premise workloads and AWS and Microsoft Azure.

“This is really about taking GreenLake to the next level,” Vogel said. “We’re actually providing a hybrid IT experience. Customers and partners can now import their AWS and Azure bills and do comparisons. They now have the ability to look across all of their hybrid environments and do what if scenarios.”

Besides the cost comparisons, GreenLake Central also features cloud automation and orchestration capabilities that allows developers to “self provision” much in the same way they would in an AWS EC2 cloud, said Vogel. “Now a developer can simply point and click and provision a virtual machine or an Apache web server within GreenLake Central,” he said. “It’s a full EC2 experience in an on premise environment.”

Vogel said he expects GreenLake Central to provide a much needed as a service offering for customers who have had difficulty moving mission critical applications to the cloud.“We are giving an on premise GreenLake option for customers running into data gravity issues, application issues, interdependency issues, security issues, compliance issues,” he said.

Partners, for their part, said GreenLake Central marks the biggest leap forward yet in Neri’s pledge to provide the entire HPE infrastructure and software portfolio to as a service by 2022.

Dan Molina, chief technology officer for Nth Generation, San Diego, one of HPE's top enterprise partners and No. 354 on the CRN SP500, said GreenLake Central is a major breakthrough that sets HPE apart from competitors in the race for hybrid cloud supremacy.

“What GreenLake Central promises is the ability to manage workloads across different destinations, allowing you to choose the destination that makes the most sense based on cost, performance, security, governance, compliance and SLAs (Service Level Agreements),” said Molina. “This puts customers in control which at the end of the day is what really matters. This is a big deal. HPE is providing a lot of functionality with GreenLake Central.”

Michael Goldstein, CEO of LAN Infotech, a Fort Lauderdale, Fla.-based solution provider, said HPE is breaking new ground in the hybrid cloud computing world with GreenLake Central.

“With GreenLake Central HPE is becoming a one stop shop for on premise, public, private or hybrid cloud,” said Goldstein. “The ability to do workload based comparisons on premise and in different clouds is a game changer. What GreenLake is doing is making sure our customers can get the best price performance for any workload whether it is at the edge, on premise or in any public cloud loke AWS or Azure.”

The GreenLake Central introduction comes with the GreenLake pay per use channel sales pipeline soaring. In the most recent quarter, the GreenLake channel sales pipeline surpassed the $850 million mark, said HPE Worldwide Global Channel Chief Paul Hunter.

GreenLake channel sales up 326 percent in the fourth fiscal quarter ended Oct. 31 said Hunter. For the full fiscal year, HPE GreenLake channel sales were up 231 percent, he said.

HPE has doubled the number of sales specialists focused on helping partners close GreenLake deals, says Hunter. “We’re adding resources and sales expertise both in country and from a worldwide perspective to help work alongside distributors and partners,” he said.

Nth Generation is one of the partners seeing increased momentum with 300 percent increase in GreenLake sales, said Molina.

Molina praised HPE for putting partners at the center of the pay per use sales effort. “HPE is really listening to us, truly taking into account partner input so we can monetize and be a part of the GreenLake platform,” he said.

Customers are demanding the pay per use model so they can free up cash flow to focus on IT initiatives aimed at creating big competitive advantages and dramatic improvements in customer experience, said Molina.

Molina said he sees GreenLake helping customers control “skyrocketing” public cloud bills.”We see customers wanting to come back on premise, but it’s very expensive to get their data out of the public cloud,” he said. “They don’t want to continue to migrate additional or incremental workloads based on the experience they have had. What HPE is doing with GreenLake Central allowing customers to do the cost analysis. That is going to be huge for customers.”

Molina said Neri’s big bold bet to transform HPE into an edge to cloud platform as service company is accelerating with HPE GreenLake Central. “Antonio has HPE moving very fast to deliver on his everything as a service vision,” he said. “We are only two years away from 2022. Today we are already experiencing significant success with GreenLake. We are about to close our biggest GreenLake deal. I see our sales shifting into double digits coming from GreenLake in 2020 and then moving to one third of our sales. I don’t see why we couldn’t move to close to half of our business under GreenLake in 2022.”