HPE Ups Hybrid Cloud Ante With Cloud Suite, A New 'Secret Sauce' For A Multicloud Management

Hewlett Packard Enterprise is taking aim at the explosive hybrid cloud market opportunity with a new Helion Cloud Suite aimed at providing multi-vendor cloud orchestration, automation and management.

HPE launched the new software suite -- which comes in Express, Premium and Ultimate editions -- Tuesday at its Discover conference in Las Vegas.

The HPE multicloud management offering fills a void in the hybrid cloud market in which corporate customers are demanding the ability to run multiple clouds, said HPE Cloud Senior Vice President and General Manager Bill Hilf.

[HPE Storage GM: Dell-EMC Are Two 'Declining' Companies Struggling In Full-Stack Converged Infrastructure Era]

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"This is truly the secret sauce as this unfolds into a hybrid IT world where customers" are demanding multicloud application and management capabilities, said Hilf.

HPE is positioning itself as the premier hybrid cloud provider supporting complex heterogeneous IT environments with support for legacy applications in its OpenStack Helion cloud along with the ability to manage applications running in public clouds like Microsoft Azure and Amazon Web Services.

Dean Cappellazzo, CEO of Bedrock Technology Partners, a San Diego, Calif. HP Platinum partner, said HPE's sharp focus on hybrid cloud with its Helion OpenStack cloud offering is paying off for the company and its partners.

"We are seeing more and more customers interested in OpenStack," said Cappellazzo, whose company has invested in a multimillion dollar OpenStack Lab. "It's a great time to be an HPE partner."

Bedrock Technology Partners has leveraged HPE technology to transform itself into a next-generation software defined VAR with proficiency in OpenStack, software defined networking and software-defined data center.

Cappellazzo praised HPE CEO Meg Whitman for driving R&D investments that are bringing partners into hot markets like internet of things, security and cloud. "We listened to what Meg said two years ago and it is paying off for us," he said.

HPE's laser focus on hybrid cloud with its new Cloud Suite offering comes as competitors struggle to find their place in the cloud even as HPE has sharpened it focus on hybrid by exiting the public cloud market earlier this year, he said.

"I love where we are at right now," said Hilf. "We made a decision to move to hybrid a while ago and we have been laser focused on it. What you are seeing now is the fruits of all that engineering and labor since making that change. Some of our largest competitors are trying to fight head to head against Amazon and Microsoft and we are leaning into where our customers are going."

HPE said last Fall that its cloud business now accounts for $3 billion in annual sales with forecasted growth of at least 20 percent annually for the next several years.

Bain & Company market research data puts the compound annual growth rate for private cloud at 24 percent over the next three years, versus 17 percent for public cloud.

Hilf insisted that HPE's hybrid cloud competition is not Cisco or IBM, but rather venture backed startups breaking new ground in the hybrid cloud market.

"Our (cloud) competition is not Cisco," he said. "It is not Cisco. It is not IBM. I never see them on the competitive landscape. We are starting to compete more with spot solutions in some cases -- startups -- which makes me really, really excited. That tells me the value of our products and technical credibility has increased so we are now in bake-offs with the latest and greatest offerings."

The new Cloud Suite -- which comes in Express, Premium and Ultimate editions -- is a "breakthrough" offering that "radically simplifies" private cloud orchestration, automation, management and compliance, said Hilf.

The new Cloud Suite eliminates a "big pain point" for HPE partners and customers who were demanding a "breakthrough for landing and delivering private clouds" on the wide array of HPE infrastructure from blades to Proliant systems to the new Synergy Composable systems.

The Express offering is targeted at the "fastest path" to bringing "step one infrastructure automation" to the huge installed base of virtualized HPE Proliant and blade systems, said Hilf.

The Premium edition provides a full Helion OpenStack private cloud with Helion Stack to PaaS (platform as a service) application platform with full DevOps capabilities, said Hilf.

Finally, the Ultimate CloudSuite edition provides full multicloud capabilities with cloud brokering software, application automation, predictive analytics and middleware automation.

HPE has not yet priced the new software offerings, but Hilf promised that HPE will be "extremely competitive" with current cost per operating system image pricing.

We want to accelerate the channel as they go after not just the very large enterprises but medium-sized enterprises as well," he said.