HPE GreenLake Worldwide Sales Leader Arwa Kaddoura On Dell, Public Cloud Repatriation And ISV Support

HPE GreenLake Worldwide Sales Leader Arwa Kaddoura sounds off on Dell, public cloud repatriation and the impact of the global pandemic on the VDI market.

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Hewlett Packard Enterprise is “doubling down” on the VDI market with a new GreenLake VDI (virtual desktop infrastructure) on-premise, pay per use cloud service with major ISV support and predefined configurations optimized for specific workers.

“It’s definitely one of the massive workloads that we are doubling down on,” said HPE GreenLake Vice President of Worldwide Sales and Go To Market Arwa Kaddoura in an interview with CRN. “We already have many customers that have been leveraging VDI on GreenLake. As you can imagine now (with the pandemic) it has just become a much, much hotter topic with all of our customers.”

As part of the sales blitz, HPE has optimized VDI configurations for four type of remote workers (knowledge, task, power and engineering) with specific predefined configurations for 100, 300, 500 and 1,000 or more workers. The new service is available starting in December.

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HPE has also pulled together offerings from VDI leaders like VMware, Nutanix, Citrix and Nvidia as part of the predefined bundles. “We want to make sure that depending on the scenario that we bring in the right VDI expertise from that software and from that platform capability perspective,” she said

Kaddoura -- who worked side by side with GreenLake Cloud Services Senior Vice President and General Manager Keith White at Microsoft -- is helping boost HPE’s ISV support. “What I booted up (at Microsoft) was the whole developer ecosystem,” she said.

At HPE, Kaddoura said she is focused on bringing “end to end integrated services” optimized for specific workloads. “When you do that you are then able to bring in the ISVs, the SIs (system integrators) and the channel that can then help you go to market,” she said.

Dell Validation and Cisco’s Everything As-a-service Shift

Nothing could be more validating than to have Dell finally announce their own version of it (GreenLake) recently. We’ll take that as the greatest compliment.

Cisco announced their as-a-service offering as well. We have been at this for quite a while. Obviously I came here because I am excited to bet on HPE and GreenLake…There is nothing but upside here.

We have one of the most attractive channel rebates of any company that sells the type of solutions that we do so there is a huge incentive for the channel. We have invested quite a bit internally to ensure the channel has access to all of the enablement that our (HPE) sellers do. We’re excited to set them up for success.

HPE’s New Fiscal Year 2021 GreenLake Sales Structure

It’s a recognition by the business of how strategic this (GreenLake pay per use) capability is to the market. The whole hybrid cloud world is finally real. HPE has an amazing solution and rather than manage it as a subservice they are realizing this is an entire end to end capability.

What I love about GreenLake is it is actually the best of HPE’s total portfolio. It’s everything that we have coming together plus our ISV capabilities plus our channel plus our SIs (system integrators). It is by far the most comprehensive set of capabilities (for the on premise pay per use market).

New ISV Capabilities Ahead

Industry solutions is probably where we need to start heading from a focus perspective. I’m pretty proud of the work we have already done from a partnership perspective. Obviously we have the Azure stack partnership that we co-manage. We have a fantastic set of wins with the Azure stack. We obviously have Google Anthos. We obviously have Veeam. We have Qumulo.

We have a pretty robust portfolio today of ISVs that we already represent as part of the solutions portfolio we offer…I think we need to become highly industry focused and hopefully within the next few weeks we’ll start to announce some things with some of those details.

The Work At Home VDI Boom

If 50 percent of employees are going to be working from home and possibly 80 percent would like to have an edge office or a home office you can start adding zeros (to the size of the market). That’s a multibillion opportunity for our channel. It is certainly not a tiny opportunity.

We’re in a new paradigm right now. The customers that have already invested in those capabilities with us obviously found themselves in a really great spot. Unfortunately people now have no choice. People are having to scramble to figure this out. I think we’re going to be there to help our partners and our channel to be sure they are being supported in terms of how they are articulating the value of what we are bringing to market.

VDI – Not A Public Cloud First Workload

We all know that VDI is not a cloud first or public cloud first sort of workload. Now some people have actually done that and probably did it almost out of desperation because they needed the quick capacity. Some of our customers are currently reevaluating and looking to repatriate that workload.

You actually need to reevaluate and ensure that you have put in the right security and compliance to make sure that what you are serving up to your employees in a remote access capability is highly, highly compliant and isn’t opening you up to tons and tons of risk.