Keith White On GreenLake’s Big ‘Leap Forward’ And Why HPE Is ‘Miles Ahead’ Of Dell Apex

HPE executive Keith White says the blockbuster new release of GreenLake is a big leap forward with a far more “holistic” set of solutions than rival Dell Technologies’ Apex as a service.

A ‘Truly Partner-Enabled’ As-A-Service Portfolio

Hewlett Packard Enterprise Executive Vice President of GreenLake Cloud Services Commercial Keith White told CRN the new release of GreenLake represents a “significant” leap forward in making the edge-to-cloud platform “truly partner-enabled.”

“The great thing that I love that we have done as a company is we have made the platform truly partner-enabled and very partner-friendly,” said White, who has played a key role in putting partners front and center in the HPE GreenLake sales charge. “That gives partners the ability to quote what they need to, price and invoice what they need to, integrate into their marketplaces, and to provide their additional value-added services or managed services on top of that. All of that built into the platform with an easy set of APIs to plug into that makes it extremely partner-friendly so that partners can take advantage of what GreenLake has to offer for all of their customers. That is the leap forward.”

The new GreenLake release provides tight API integration for both MSP service offerings. It also includes tight API integration with distributor cloud marketplaces, powering faster side-by-side price quoting against public cloud behemoths like Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud.

“We are very, very partner-focused,” said White. “Our commitment to partners and the ecosystems is unwavering. We are focused on how we make partners successful because if they are successful, we are all successful. We need that deep relationship and partnership as partners move much more into this solutions realm.”

The new unified GreenLake release includes the first standardized versions of HPE GreenLake Networking as a Service (NaaS) featuring eight new Aruba offerings with flex-up and flex-down options including Indoor Wireless as a Service, Outdoor Wireless as a Service, Remote Wireless as a Service, Wired Access as a Service, Wired Aggregation as a Service, Wired Core as a Service, SD-Branch as a Service and Aruba UXI, User Experience Insight, which provides network application and performance management.

HPE also is stepping up its storage cloud services sales charge with what it is calling the industry’s first-ever block storage as a service offering with 100 percent data availability with an on-premises cloud operational model. In addition, HPE is formally launching its GreenLake backup and recovery service for VMware virtual machines. HPE’s backup and recovery service has also added immutable data copies for ransomware protection across all major cloud environments including AWS and Azure.

White said the breakthrough new GreenLake release represents another dramatic step in HPE’s transformation into a cloud services software powerhouse. In fact, he said, the new release goes a long way toward fulfilling the promise made three years ago by HPE President and CEO Antonio Neri to deliver every HPE product as an as-a-service offering by the end of 2022.

“ Antonio committed three years ago that by the end of 2022 everything would be running as a service,” said White. “You are seeing the outcome of that now. It has been a pretty dramatic shift.”

How big a leap forward is this new unified GreenLake experience that HPE is providing with the latest advancements and enhancements?

It is significant. People don’t want to spend a bunch of time in the platform—they want the platform to do all the work for them. They want it to be automated, self-serve. The great thing that I love that we have done as a company is we have made the platform truly partner-enabled and very partner-friendly. That gives partners the ability to quote what they need to, price and invoice what they need to, integrate into their marketplaces, and to provide their additional value-added services or managed services on top of that. All of that built into the platform with an easy set of APIs to plug into that makes it extremely partner-friendly so that partners can take advantage of what GreenLake has to offer for all of their customers. That is the leap forward.

It is important to note that we did this with our partners. This was not Keith and [HPE CTO] Fidelma [Russo] in the backroom [putting this together]. We were partnering closely with the technical leaders at TD Synnex, Ingram, Arrow and a variety of our managed service providers to say, ‘Here is what we are implementing, how does this work for you? How do we make it useful and easy for you?’ That is key. That is why we call it a ‘partner ecosystem.’ This is a partnership. We do this together.

We’ve updated our Quick Quote tool. We are now on version 6.0. All of the feedback and all of the changes were directly attributable to our partners telling us exactly what they needed to help accelerate the business.

This [new GreenLake] platform just opens up new opportunities as we think about customers and their digital transformation and their push to understand what is their cloud strategy, data strategy and edge strategy. Our partners are critical to implementing all of these things. And this platform gives them now the foundation to create new relationships with customers, deeper relationships with customers where they are having a strong back-and-forth partnership. So we are moving out of that transactional world and much more into how do we become a business partner with customers.

Nearly 100 percent of everything we implement has some aspect of the partner ecosystem connected to it. It might be an ISV like an SAP or a Nutanix or a Citrix. It might be a system integrator whether that is an Infosys, Wipro, Accenture or Advizex. It might be a reseller, distributor or managed service provider providing that solution. Nearly 100 percent of the time these services are partner-delivered and integrated.

What are some of the bigger ecosystem announcements that you are driving forward in this new release?

We now have our integrated system out from Microsoft Azure stack. The world is hybrid. The world is multi-cloud. Ensuring Azure and Azure Stack and GreenLake work really well together for our joint customers with Microsoft is so critical because they are all implementing hybrid solutions. That integrated system makes it super simple for our customers to implement and to take full advantage of the value that provides.

The second one is availability in the cloud marketplaces of our distributors. We have been working closely with TD Synnex, Ingram, Arrow all around the world to plug into their marketplaces with true solutions in order to deliver that out to their set of value- added resellers and customers. That has now been implemented.

Another big one is most of our customers want to get out of the data center management business and hand that over to a colo. So us partnering with Digital Realty is massive. As a colo provider around the world, Digital Realty has over 285 data centers on six continents in the top 50 major cities. So with Digital Realty, Equinix and CyrusOne we now have fantastic colo coverage. That is all being integrated into GreenLake so customers and partners can implement those things very, very quickly.

Where is the biggest opportunity for partners to drive revenue growth with these new announcements?

I think the big bang is around three big buckets: the first one is to optimize and modernize their data centers and cloud strategies to build out the hybrid cloud, that is a super-super big opportunity; the second one is around data and how do you monetize that data, how do you get your arms around that data, and how do you leverage that data to do analytics or AI or machine learning in order to drive efficiencies in your business; the third big opportunity is at the edge. It could be cars with autonomous driving, it could be robotics in the factory of the future, it could be lumber mills of the future at the edge, store locations or campuses. All of this edge capability is critical. It has to work seamlessly with a high level of security and it needs to be automated, self-serve and implemented in a real-time atmosphere. You need that on-prem to be able to collect the data and analyze the data very quickly is another huge opportunity. Those are the big three buckets.

So you have Azure from a hybrid standpoint, SQL Server from a data standpoint. Digital Realty from a modernize and get out of the data center standpoint. We have the Aruba announcements, block storage, high availability, ransomware protection to make sure it is secure.

These are critical to all of our customers, big or small, industrywide. So this is a huge opportunity for our partners. They get to focus on their specific superpower. Partners have strength and depth in key areas like industries, customer size or certain solutions. Partners get to leverage the platform. It is all powered by GreenLake for them to be successful.

What is the most important thing partners need to do to align with HPE GreenLake on the as-a-service opportunity?

No. 1 is partners have got to go deep with their customers. They need to have the conversation with customers about what are their transformation imperatives, what are their key business challenges, how can they accelerate their business. They need to identify the solutions required to create a tight partnership with customers.

No. 2 is they need to take advantage of our GreenLake accreditations so they can go deep on the technology and understand how the platform works. That accreditation focuses on how all of the horizontal and vertical workloads and solutions all fit together. They must make sure their folks are accredited.

Third, they need to connect with HPE. This is a partnership. We go in arm in arm with our ecosystem, through our ecosystem, in order to land these opportunities. Significant growth happens when we do that together.

We are very, very partner-focused. Our commitment to partners and the ecosystems is unwavering. We are focused on how we make partners successful because if they are successful, we are all successful. We need that deep relationship and partnership as partners move much more into this solutions realm.

How do the latest GreenLake advances compare with what Dell is doing with Apex?

I can’t control Michael Dell or the competition in any way, shape or form. What I can do is make sure that we are listening to our customers, we are listening to our ecosystem, we are listening to the industry and saying, “What do you need?’

We are miles ahead of what Apex is even trying to implement. We have a core platform from edge to cloud. We have the Aruba capabilities and technologies. We just delivered our first Cray as-a-service offering to one of our top customers. So we have a complete edge-to-cloud offering. We are looking at hybrid, data and the edge. Everyone else is doing piece point scenarios with storage here and a VMware implementation there. Those are important types of scenarios that we have been doing for quite some time.

What we are doing is holistic customer solutions. We are talking to customers about SAP, about VDI—virtual desktop implementations, about mainframe migrations, about data center modernization, about data warehouses, about AI and machine learning operations, about networking, about business continuity. We are talking about a much more holistic set of solutions for our customers than I think any of our competition is even starting to look at.

How important is it that Aruba Central is fully integrated into GreenLake along with the new GreenLake Aruba offers?

Customers are looking for a comprehensive set of edge and connectivity solutions to be implemented into what they are doing. This is not just about doing some networking or NaaS. This is really about what’s happening in that branch office. What is happening with the autonomous driving car? What is happening in that factory of the future? Those are the things our customers are looking for.

So if you look at what we are doing with Aruba offering all these eight new services with Networking as a Service. We are being very targeted for what our customers are trying to accomplish?. This is all built and optimized for our partner ecosystem. They are seeing the growing demand to customers wanting to move to more of Networking as a Service. They have seen the opportunity with all of our as-a-service capabilities.

This goes back to one easy, implementable platform for our customers and our partner ecosystem to solve these business problems and deliver these solutions that we are after.

The other critical thing here is the security aspect of this. Customers want secure connectivity at the edge for that factory, that car or branch office that is housing deep technical scenarios or even connectivity for people that are working from home in the new normal we have.

Look at HPE holistically with what we can deliver with our ecosystem. I always say one plus one equals three when we get together and bring this to our customers. Our partners are seeing the value and growth from that.

What will partners see with GreenLake.HPE.com at the front end with try and buy capabilities?

The big thing we are trying to do is make sure that we are creating an environment for our joint customers to come in and try and buy. Everyone is trialing things up front. They want to see a demo. They are doing their own research.

All of this funnels into a single experience and a single version of our customer capabilities that we can share with our partners. That we can hand to them with leads to follow up on. We can provide them with the interest areas that customers are looking at. That will put partners that much farther ahead with what to have the conversation with the customer on versus cold calling or asking if they want to talk about GreenLake.

This is not only looking at the platform. It is looking at the 50 services we offer. It is offering customers the ability to demo and trial. It allows us to make a qualified lead and a qualified customer opportunity. Partners are loving it. We are doing this jointly. This isn’t HPE off doing something on the side. It is about where is the interest from the customer and how do we do these joint go-to-markets together so we can drive demand for the partner and their solutions and capabilities.

How big a step forward is this in delivering a public cloud experience?

It is significant. We are making it easier for customers to decide where do they want their data and applications to reside in a secure, controlled and regulated environment. Look at all the reasons people stay on-prem. We are giving them that cloud experience on-prem. We have automated all of the capabilities from the front end to the back end so customers can easily provision storage, a virtual machine, or a cluster. We have made it pay-as-you-go. You are only paying for what you use. We are metering all of that. We have integrated in all of these partner solutions so we have an open platform. Customers can run whatever they want. It is very public cloud like. And we are managing a big chunk of this for customers. We are doing patch management, the upgrades, the performance management, the capacity management. We can even manage their entire data center if they want us to.

This public cloud experience—the set of expectations that our customers have—we have now brought it to them, to their premise, to their data center, to their colo, to their edge device. So in this hybrid world they can have a consistent experience across the board with our platform. This is leaps and bounds forward. It’s really exciting to see the momentum and see our partners be very successful, deepening the relationship with their customers.

What are you seeing from customers with regard to public cloud cost and acceptance, security on-premises or in the cloud, and other public versus private cloud trends?

I think what has happened is customers have gotten much more sophisticated and they are asking where is the best place to run this environment, this application, this data set or this set of analytics. In essence they now have choice. They can run it on-prem and get the same experience as if it was in the public cloud. So what is the best place for the customer? Some industries are heavily geared toward on-prem, others are doing more in the public cloud. We are walking into customers with our ecosystem and saying, ‘Let’s talk about where is the best place to run this workload. Let us help you run it in the public cloud. Let us help you run it on-prem.’ Customers are looking at this from a more holistic standpoint.

Our GreenLake managed services team has a large number of customers where we manage their hybrid environment for them. So we are managing Azure and AWS along with GreenLake.

We have a large number of opportunities with our advisory and professional services team that basically looks at what is the right place to run this. ‘Let us help you put this up in the public cloud and make sure those connections are strong back to on-prem.’

So we are viewing this as what does the customer require? We are doing this with our ecosystem and our partners as well. This is really about the customer, their business outcome, the customer solution, accelerating their business, We have got to look at this much more holistically than this is a battle against the public cloud. It is about what is the best right place for the workload. Customers are trying to do a lot. We have an opportunity to help them be successful holistically.

HPE has a Complete Program for third party ISVs. What is the commitment to bring that ISV Complete program into a pay-per-use model with the channel?

Almost 100 percent of these solutions have some sort of an ISV component. The SAP implementation or the virtual desktop implementation or even a mainframe migration or analytics and machine learning—all of those have partners. Our whole focus with them has been, ‘Let’s get into a business model that provides a subscription or pay-per-use-type scenario so our partners can provide these solutions with that holistic monthly payment charge versus those bigger pieces.’

At the same time, we are also saying, ‘How can we make sure our partners are incented to sell a whole solution and not a piecemeal solution?’ This is another great example where we have connected with our ecosystem, we have listened to what their challenges are. Now we are implementing solutions for those challenges to help them do business much faster. We want partners to be incented appropriately and to help them integrate those solutions together. Everything has a partner component.

So we are full steam ahead prioritizing the ISVs. We have a core set that has just been fantastic. And we are going to continue to move that forward. Some of those include what people might think of as competitors: Red Hat, is that a competitor? No way. Veeam, is that a competitor? No way. This is what the customer has chosen to implement for their solution.

The Nutanix partnership has been fantastic. SAP has been fantastic. Go down the list with Microsoft, Google Anthos. Strong partnerships to make sure the best solution is delivered to the customer.

What is the secret to driving an alignment with an ISV with the GreenLake model if you are a partner?

No. 1 you have to push aside any sort of competitive mindset. This has to start with the customer,

Secondly, identify where the win-win is. They have strong technology that our customers require. It might be Database as a Service, VDI implementations, private cloud implementations. You have to look at how you fit in with that solution.

Third, you have got to get the teams together locally. I can sit here at corporate and come up with big ideas, but it has got to manifest itself locally in the geography at the account with the partner. You need joint account plans, joint account calls, joint account solutions. One plus one equals three by going in arm and arm with our best offering. If we solve the customer’s problem as we are doing, great things happen for that customer and business grows for everyone. That is the whole thing about an open platform and leading with your ecosystem versus trying to do it all yourself.

What kind of advantage does HPE have with the edge-to-cloud platform incorporating public cloud?

This is our key differentiator. I talked about technologies earlier with edge and Edgeline systems and with the technologies we have. It is about the solutions that customers are looking at.

The edge has become where a lot of the data is getting generated from. So the question becomes how do you get that data, analyze the data and act on the data that is there.

As we move up into the cloud, now you are talking about the fact customers want this experience, pay-as you go, capacity available on demand, real time, open platform.

When you can connect those things together and it can be open so you can add in these ISVs or solution opportunities, that is what customers are looking for. Not piecemeal solutions around the board that they have to integrate and put together. That is huge.

The hybrid cloud offer we are announcing with Microsoft with Azure Stack—we both recognize our superpowers, where they are very strong and where we are very strong. That solution together creates such an easy implementation. It is important to know we are doing this not just with Microsoft, but with Google and their Anthos implementation and a variety of other hybrid offerings.

Once you start with the customer and understand what the solution is and where you can offer best-of-breed in an integrated fashion for that customer, the sky is the limit.

What is going to be the economic impact on the channel from the GreenLake advances you are announcing?

I would say it is an acceleration. We are getting rid of a lot of the friction. We are getting rid of a lot of the sort of individual components, having a holistic platform. We are streamlining things on the back end and providing open APIs to plug into for our partners to put into their marketplaces and managed services offerings. All those things reduce a ton of friction. Then it lets the partner ecosystem focus on the customer, the customer needs and the solutions. We are expecting that this is just going to help accelerate the already fantastic growth we are doing with our partners and their customers.

What kind of momentum are you seeing with GreenLake?

We are sprinting ahead. It’s been fantastic. The growth has been tremendous. In Q1 we announced over 135 percent year-over-year growth for GreenLake, which was astronomical. Even better, 120-plus percent growth in the channel.

Our partner ecosystem is now grasping the opportunity. I was talking to our Latin American team and they told me that nearly 90 percent of the new logos they established in Q1 all came through the channel.

The channel is seeing this as an opportunity to drive new business and new opportunities.

Is HPE becoming more of a software company and cloud services company than an infrastructure company?

We are. It has been exciting to see. Antonio has made this his top priority. As we have brought in folks like Fidelma Russo, we have really pivoted. I think what you are going to start to hear is our other business groups—the Aruba team, the storage team, our compute organization—all of these people are now delivering cloud services. Antonio committed three years ago that by the end of 2022 everything would be running as a service. You are seeing the outcome of that now. It has been a pretty dramatic shift.

Every time I talk to a partner or a customer the word ‘partnership’ comes up. Not hardware vendor. Not component provider. It is all about ‘Help us solve this problem, help us accelerate our business, help us be that partner.’ GreenLake has really been the catalyst to help accelerate HPE as a company to go and do that. I think it’s awesome.