‘Big Win’ For HPE: CDW Picks HPE GreenLake To Power UK Desktop-As-A-Service

‘This deal solves the two biggest challenges of VDI which is cost and complexity,’ says the CEO of a VDI company, who did not want to be identified. ‘It allows CDW to scale ServiceWorks up and down for hybrid work solutions like call centers where there is big elasticity in demand.’

CDW has inked a deal to use Hewlett Packard Enterprise’s GreenLake on-premise cloud service to “accelerate deployment” of its growing CDW ServiceWorks UK desktop-as-a-service (DaaS) offering in the midst of the global pandemic.

Under the deal, ServiceWorks – CDW’s private dedicated DaaS solution for UK customers based on HPE Moonshot and Citrix- will rely on HPE GreenLake to “meet growing customer demand while avoiding costly overprovisioning and unnecessary upfront capital investment,” the $20 billion channel titan ranked No. 5 on the CRN SP500 said in a statement.

The deal moves the CDW hardware procurement for its DaaS offering from an annual capital expenditure to a GreenLake pay-per-use model. Now, CDW said it is able to provide customers “faster time to market, offering immediate deployment when and where” it is needed.

The deal comes just two months after CDW stepped up its services charge with its $2.5 billion acquisition of Sirius Computer Solutions, one of the largest channel deals ever.

The CDW DaaS solution includes virtual desktop-as-a-service; fixed price infrastructure as a service; colocation services; backup as a service; and disaster recovery as a service.

The CEO for a top VDI company, who did not want to be identified, said the deal is a “big win” for HPE GreenLake.

“This deal solves the two biggest challenges of VDI which is cost and complexity,” said the CEO. “It allows CDW to scale ServiceWorks up and down for hybrid work solutions like call centers where there is big elasticity in demand.”

The deals comes with the VDI market experiencing explosive growth as employees moved to work at home, remote office in the midst of the pandemic. “HPE GreenLake allows customers to embrace a highly distributed workforce in secure and cost effective manner,” said the CEO. “This deal is another sign of the increasing tailwinds behind VDI.”

HPE and CDW said the two companies are using HPE GreenLake Central to “manage costs, utilization, compliance, and security across CDW’s cloud and desktop platforms.

CRN reached out to HPE and CDW for more details on the deal but had not heard back at press time.

Chris Lillie, Head of Cloud Operations, at CDW UK, said in a prepared statement that the use of the GreenLake pay per use platform “means we can accurately match our costs to revenue and deliver improved predictability, visibility and control, while investing more in the continued development of our service portfolio for our customers.”

Sue Preston, vice president and general manager, HPE Pointnext and HPE GreenLake, UK, Ireland, Middle East and South Africa, said in a prepared statement that the deal “further enhances our global partner ecosystem for HPE GreenLake and provides customers with more choices for their different applications and workloads.”