Everything as a service is on! And HPE GreenLake is here for it.

At their premier conference in Las Vegas last month, Hewlett-Packard Enterprise (HPE) announced it will offer its entire portfolio “as a service” through HPE GreenLake in the next three years.

HPE GreenLake is not new. While customers can already buy solutions from HPE and their Technology Partners (including SUSE, ahem!) through a range of subscriptions, pay-per-use and consumption-based offerings, HPE is now expanding their commitment to reach the mid-market too.

It is a bold move to offer everything as a service (XaaS) by 2022 but Antonio Neri, the company CEO, is “all in”.

What we see is that HPE is fine-tuned with the market. They see customers are demanding not only flexible infrastructure but also choice in purchasing options.

According to Matt Kimball, Moor Insights & Strategy senior datacenter analyst, this is a smart move that will not negatively impact server sales. He says he hears about impact to server revenue since the early days of virtualization and the market still awaits that reality. (1)

HPE GreenLake allows customers to choose technology and services from HPE and HPE Partners and pay only for what they use, all in their own environment. They can choose from: Compute, Storage, Containers, HPC, Software-defined; Hyperconverged; Composable etc. and flex up and flex down as they go.

It is all about flexibility and choice

Antonio wants every HPE solution to be consumption-driven to give customers the flexibility they want. They love the cloud-like experience but do want some workloads to be on-premises, where it is less expensive in some cases, and they can mitigate concerns about control, security and privacy. (2)

Also, HPE is investing in supporting different partner offerings, such as SUSE, to offer customers choice. And in addition to choice, if offers innovation as a bi-product, right?

Bottom line is, HPE understands the power of their partner ecosystem.

Good for them and for their channel partners

HPE Channel Partners are seeing the great success of HPE GreenLake since it was first announced for enterprise customers and now HPE is expanding the offer to mid-market customers.

Channel Partners can add their own managed services into the XaaS model, meaning they can increase their margins in the world of consumption-based IT and enjoy the benefits of recurring revenue.

According to Steven Burke, CRN Editor, HPE GreenLake puts channel partners into the recurring revenue services fast lane and moves the channel model into the cloud-based consumption-based services era. (3)

Paul Hunter, HPE Worldwide Channel Chief, seems to agree and says partners should embrace consumption to keep a healthy growth since customers are asking for it. (4)

HPE GreenLake is delivered through HPE Pointnext but Pradeep Kumar, Senior Vice President and General Manager of HPE Pointnext, makes it clear that the partner owns the relationship with the customer. It gives them the ability to act as trusted advisors, e.g. helping customers choose deployment option for each workload, whether front-end and back-end services are delivered directly or through HPE Pointnext. (5)

Yes! Customers can use SUSE software through HPE GreenLake

 SUSE and HPE have a 25+ year partnership and most of SUSE`s portfolio is available through HPE, which also includes consumption-based offerings available through HPE GreenLake for solutions below:

• SUSE Linux Enterprise Server
• SUSE Linux Enterprise Server for SAP applications
• SUSE Linux Enterprise Server for High Performance Computing
• SUSE Enterprise Storage
• SUSE CaaS Platform
• SUSE Cloud Application Platform
• SUSE Manager
• SUSE Linux Enterprise Live Patching
• SUSE Linux Enterprise High Availability Extension

Make sure you talk to your HPE representative today and ask for the SUSE solution(s) you want to see in your environment when you are exploring HPE`s consumption-based IT.

Learn more

Check the web pages below for more resources:

• HPE GreenLake: https://www.hpe.com/us/en/services/it-consumption.html
• HPE Pointnext: https://www.hpe.com/us/en/services/pointnext.html
• SUSE & HPE Alliance: https://hpe.com/partners/suse

Read more about HPE`s recent announcements at:

1. https://www.forbes.com/sites/moorinsights/2019/06/20/hpe-discover-2019-greenlake-edge-and-intelligence-rule-the-day/#8c186e976c18
2. https://community.hpe.com/t5/Infrastructure-Insights/How-HPE-on-premises-infrastructure-compares-to-Amazon-Web/ba-p/7009977#.XSYnSOtKi6J
3. https://www.crn.com/news/cloud/racing-into-the-future-why-hpe-aims-to-be-first-and-fast-with-data-insight
4. https://www.crn.com/news/cloud/worldwide-channel-chief-paul-hunter-hpe-greenlake-is-a-shooting-star-
5. https://www.crn.com/news/data-center/hpe-pointnext-gm-pradeep-kumar-partners-own-the-customer-relationship