2. Everything-as-a-Service Offensive

Many solution providers spent much of 2020 ramping up their everything-as-a-service strategies as they sought new paths to profitability.

And they weren’t alone.

Ramping up its GreenLake offering was a huge focus in 2020 for HPE, following the company’s pledge the previous year to move its entire edge, core, cloud, software, and infrastructure business to an everything-as-a-service focus by 2022, giving its channel partners new ways to approach clients who are increasingly looking for infrastructure to be treated more like an operating expense than a capital expense. Several of its key competitors followed a similar path in 2020.

Cisco CEO Chuck Robbins in August said that the COVID-19 coronavirus pandemic has forced his company to re-examine its strategy and transition the majority of its portfolio to an as-a-service consumption model. The move, which will help Cisco cut about $1 billion in costs, will help Cisco better focus on cloud security, cloud collaboration, SD-WAN, and automation to drive simplicity and cost-effective network management. The company will also invest in 5G, Wi-Fi 6, next-generation silicon, and artificial intelligence, Robbins said.

Dell in September also pledged to move the vast majority of its offerings to consumption pricing and as a service, Dell Technologies CEO Michael Dell told CRN. This includes rolling out as-a-service consumption-based models for its massive portfolio of PCs, servers, storage, networking, end-user computing, and hyperconverged infrastructure offerings.

It is a move that is extending to specific parts of the data center infrastructure as well. Storage technology developer Pure Storage CEO Charlie Giancarlo, for instance, in September said his company, which sells only through channel partners, plans to lead the way in turning everything about data into a service.