HPE GreenLake edge-to-cloud platform meets key customer requirements: Som Satsangi

The HPE GreenLake edge-to-cloud platform has emerged as an innovative new choice to power your data-first modernization. It’s the cloud that comes to you, delivering flexibility, scalability, and ease of operation wherever your apps and data live.

Here, Som Satsangi, SVP and MD, Hewlett Packard Enterprise, India, tells us more. Excerpts from an interview:

DQ: What are the key trends driving enterprises to invest in edge-to-cloud framework?

Som Satsangi: Enterprises today need secure connectivity to power the emerging distributed enterprise with remote workforces, while delivering new digital experiences to their stakeholders. The key trends driving enterprises to invest in edge-to-cloud framework are:

• Hybrid cloud is an experience expected wherever data and workloads live.
  The world is hybrid. Cloud is an experience that customers increasingly expect to have wherever their workloads live. The result is a growing demand for multi-cloud experiences – including clouds that live on-premises, at the edge, in colocations or in a public cloud.
  
• Data is the most precious asset in the age of insight.
  We have entered the age of insight, and data is the most precious asset. Digital transformation is creating new possibilities for enterprises, and customers need solutions to extract insights from their data to accelerate business outcomes.
  
• Flexible as-a-service consumption is driving customers to GreenLake.
  The customers tell us they want to address these market shifts, they are increasingly looking to do so through a flexible as-a-service consumption model that enables them to pay only for the IT they use. Customers seeking to capitalize on these market-trend opportunities are turning to HPE GreenLake as their platform of choice.

HPE is in a prime spot to capitalize on the edge-to-cloud megatrends that define the IT industry with GreenLake at the centre of our strategy.

DQ: Why do customers need a data-first modernization approach across edge to data center to cloud?

Som Satsangi: We are seeing massive amounts of data being generated today in the core of the enterprise, in the cloud, from edge devices. That data is crucial, because it can be used to get insights and predictions about customers, business processes, physical objects.

However in today’s world, despite tremendous amounts of investment in cloud and digital transformation, many companies are falling behind and the prime reason is that any digital transformation is incomplete without data-first modernization.

Today, every organisation is trying to understand how best to harness this data and manage it. Also, storage in particular has become very complex, and in traditional setups, IT administrators spend a long time over it. HPE GreenLake Edge-to-Cloud Platform powers data-first modernization to fast-forward your digital transformation, across edge to data center to cloud.

HPE brings a unified cloud experience to apps and data everywhere, eliminating data silos across multi-gen IT, ensuring accessibility of data wherever it resides, and unleashing data as a lifeforce for your company to create rich experiences, accelerate decision velocity, and deliver continuous innovation to move your business forward faster. It allows IT managers to deploy services instead of trying to maintain the infrastructure, allows innovators to have instant and secure access to data for faster time-to-market.

DQ: How is HPE positioned to capture the accelerating market demand for IT-as-a-service?

Som Satsangi: In 2019, we announced that we would make our offerings available as a service by the end of 2022, we are delivering on our commitment by bringing the cloud experience with a flexible consumption model to HPE technology solutions across compute, storage, and networking. In 2022, our as-a-service pivot is accelerating our momentum in key growth businesses. We have significantly advanced our strategy to become the edge-to-cloud company offering everything as a service.

We are seeing a transition in customers’ requirement for a unified operating experience across edge to cloud and the desire to consume IT in a flexible way. This is fueling the tremendous orders growth of our HPE GreenLake edge-to-cloud platform, which saw record demand in Q1, with as-a-service orders up 136% year over year.

The demand we are seeing in the market for HPE GreenLake is driving us to further accelerate the transformation of HPE into an edge-to-cloud company.

DQ: Elaborate on the offerings by HPE GreenLake edge-to-cloud platform.

Som Satsangi: In 2021, HPE had announced a series of cloud services for the HPE GreenLake edge-to-cloud platform, providing customers unmatched capabilities to power digital transformation for their applications and data. This represented HPE’s entry into two large, high-growth software markets – unified analytics and data protection.

HPE recently announced significant advancements to HPE GreenLake, the company’s flagship offering that enables organizations to modernize all their applications and data, from edge to cloud. In March 2022, HPE unveiled 12 new cloud services in networking, data services, high performance computing and compute operations management, which includes the following:

• HPE GreenLake for Aruba networking: As a leading provider and expert in delivering comprehensive edge connectivity networking solutions, HPE is building out its network as a service (NaaS) offerings with HPE GreenLake for Aruba networking. The eight new services simplify the process of procuring and deploying NaaS and allow customers to align network spend to usage needs, while ensuring that the network is always ready to support business objectives.
  
• HPE GreenLake Data Services: New and enhanced services for block storage and data protection join the current HPE GreenLake data services.
  
• HPE GreenLake for Block Storage: HPE GreenLake for Block Storage is among the industry’s first block storage as a Service to deliver 100% data availability guaranteed on a cloud operational model. It helps businesses transform faster and brings self-service agility to critical enterprise applications.
  
• HPE Backup and Recovery Service: Enhanced HPE Backup and Recovery Service is backup as a service built for hybrid cloud. Customers can effortlessly protect their data for Virtual Machines, gain rapid recovery on-premises, and deliver a cost-effective approach to store long-term backups in the public cloud. HPE Backup and Recovery Service is now available for Virtual Machines deployed on heterogeneous infrastructure.
  
• HPE GreenLake for High Performance Computing: HPE is further enhancing its HPE GreenLake for High Performance Computing offerings, making it more accessible for any enterprise to adopt the technology, by adding new, purpose-built HPC capabilities. The new capabilities quickly tackle the most demanding compute and data-intensive workloads, to power AI and ML initiatives, and speed time to insight.
  
• HPE GreenLake for Compute Ops Management: This is a cloud-native management console to access, monitor, and manage servers, this was first introduced at HPE Discover 2021. Compute Ops Management easily automates the compute lifecycle management instantly and securely across a customer’s compute environment.

HPE will continue to add more offerings and services moving along and will enable customers to get their cloud experience everywhere and foray strongly into the Hybrid world reality.

DQ: What are the innovations offered by HPE for its GreenLake edge-to-cloud platform?

Som Satsangi: HPE continues to invest and innovate in HPE GreenLake to provide customers one easy-to-use platform to radically transform and modernize their organization. Here are the comprehensive set of innovations to the HPE GreenLake edge to cloud platform, the industry’s most robust and proven platform for cloud services in the data center, in a colocation center and at the edge. We have announced these platform updates on March 22, 2022:

• Convergence of Aruba Central, a cloud-native, AI-powered network management solution, with the HPE GreenLake platform. Now, more than 120,000 Aruba networking customers, which includes nearly 2 million devices to manage and 2 million API calls per day, can use the HPE GreenLake platform to order services on-demand and manage their assets.
• A new, unified operational experience that provides a simplified view and access to all cloud services, spanning the entire HPE portfolio, with single sign-on access, security, compliance, elasticity, and data protection.

The HPE GreenLake platform provides the foundation for more than 50 cloud services, including electronic health records, ML Ops, payments, unified analytics, and SAP HANA, as well as a wide- array of cloud services from partners.

DQ: How is the HPE GreenLake model helping organisations to optimize costs and increase efficiency of the workforce?

Som Satsangi: HPE GreenLake delivers the simplicity, ease and agility of the cloud experience through a pay-per-use model while also ensuring data security and compliance. This model helps the customer to retain control and exercise choice around the IT Infrastructure and other solution components. Our customers can flexibly choose the way they can consume IT services and also the quantum of services to be consumed.

Using our cloud platform, they can also monitor the consumption of various IT elements, derive insights from the same and use these data driven methodologies to intelligently deploy workloads across various cloud platforms within the organisation thereby driving a lower IT cost envelope.

HPE GreenLake Central also gives organisations a dashboard to monitor and plan daily IT use and spend, to avoid any hidden costs. The customers are able to fast track their digital transformation efforts by eliminating the need for upfront capital investment and overprovisioning costs, while enjoying the benefits of on-premises control, security and compliance.

DQ: What are the growth prospects/opportunities for HPE GreenLake edge-to-cloud platform in India, and the way forward?

Som Satsangi: HPE GreenLake is at the centre of our strategy to pivot the company, and it is generating great demand with impressive profitability across our business. The customers require a unified operating experience across edge to cloud and also desire to consume IT in a flexible way. Hence, HPE GreenLake edge-to-cloud platform is able to meet these requirements.

We added more than 100 new HPE GreenLake customers in Q1, bringing the total count to more than 1,350 customers who have adopted the HPE GreenLake platform for its compelling value proposition.

For HPE GreenLake, we have recently added 12 new cloud services including network as a service, data services, high performance computing functions, and compute operations management.

It is clear from strong customer feedback and momentum across our businesses that we are increasingly well positioned to capitalize on the significant megatrends through our HPE GreenLake platform.

The public sector entities like Steel Authority of India Limited (SAIL) and Oil and Natural Gas Corporation Limited (ONGC) have recently signed partnership with HPE and deployed the HPE GreenLake edge-to-cloud platform to accelerate their digital transformation efforts respectively. We are also seeing traction from other private entities in varied sectors for HPE GreenLake in India.

DQ: How is HPE taking on the competition? There are other players too!

Som Satsangi: HPE’s vision is to become the edge-to-cloud platform company with a strong portfolio of products and services. HPE GreenLake will represent the future of HPE as an edge-to-cloud innovator. It is becoming the platform of choice for many customers because it offers that flexibility in an architecture that is edge to cloud.

Moreover, everything gets delivered through HPE GreenLake, whether it is connectivity to a subscription model, whether it is compute or storage that you can consume elastically with data services running on top of it, whether it is the services to operate in a hybrid world. With our recent advancements to HPE GreenLake, we are far ahead of competition in providing an edge-to-cloud on-premises service that gives customers the competitive edge they require.

The customers want to keep their data on premises or in managed colocation model, hence there is more control and better security with GreenLake. Also,the customers are seeing significant financial benefits from GreenLake as they are only paying for what they use.

We are very excited about the momentum and positive feedback we are getting from customers, we will continue to bring more innovations and enhancements to our HPE GreenLake as we move forward.