HPE Discover, Las Vegas – HPE (NYSE: HPE) is kicking off its flagship Discover event this week with a slew of cloud communiqués, all focused on strengthening its GreenLake hybrid and private cloud portfolios.
The chief announcements include the closing of its acquisition of OpsRamp, a deal announced back in March, bringing the company’s solutions as a software-as-a-service (SaaS) offering to HPE’s Greenlake platform; new and expanded SaaS and network-as-a-service (NaaS) offerings to GreenLake as well as to the Amazon Web Services(AWS) marketplace; and expanded partnerships with VMware and Equinix for its private cloud offerings.
HPE CTO Fidelma Russo said during a press briefing that these announcements are “the next step in the evolution” of HPE’s hybrid cloud strategy.
She explained that in 2019, the company committed to delivering its entire cloud portfolio service by 2022. “With that, we committed to a platform-based architecture and offers that go across, you know, both technology offers and offers for partners. We really have been executing along this vision,” she said.
“At the core of our platform, our common services such as identity, authentication, authorization… support the infrastructure offerings that we have — everything from secure connectivity through networking, all the way through storage and data management services,” she continued.
Operation: cloud management
HPE has been on an acquisition spree for the past year. Finalizing its efforts to integrate OpsRamp software into the GreenLake platform (as well as HPE’s sustainability dashboard) was a logical next step following its investment in the company in 2020.
“First and foremost, we recognize that operating in a hybrid cloud environment is incredibly complex because you're dealing not with just your current IT assets on-prem, you're also dealing with assets in the public cloud. You're dealing with assets potentially out in colocation, and this is why we acquired OpsRamp,” Russo said.
She also emphasized that HPE will offer additional OpsRamp services through HPE Complete Care Service and GreenLake Managed Service “to provide a vendor-neutral, cloud-neutral operating model for all our customers no matter where they are on their journey.”
Giving more SaaS
Along with the OpsRamp update, HPE is expanding the Greenlake hybrid cloud portfolio with added SaaS offerings for data backup and machine learning. The company also tapped into its ongoing relationship with AWS to bring the HPE NonStop Development Environment, an enterprise computing service, and HPE’s fraud risk management to AWS Marketplace.
Within its private cloud portfolio, HPE added capabilities to its fully managed GreenLake for Private Cloud Enterprise (PCE), including “new container support for Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform” and capabilities “to easily self-provision workloads” with AWS, Google Cloud Platform, Microsoft Azure and VMware.
The company is also adding a new non-fully managed offering, Private Cloud Business Edition (PCBE), for customers to accelerate virtual machines (VMs) across hybrid clouds. Here “partners can take that same offering and they can provide existing or additional value by managing and operating it,” HPE VP Bryan Thompson explained during the press briefing.
“We've chosen to lead with a PCE and PCBE, our two private cloud offerings. Part of it's because of the standardization of those. It allows us to pre-stage repeatable, scalable building blocks of infrastructure [in a way] that makes sense from a cost profile and that ability to deliver an on-demand experience,” Thompson said.
To support these services, HPE also expanded another partnership to make the private cloud portfolio pre-provisioned at Equinix data centers around the world. “We recognize that customers sometimes want their solutions self-managed, sometimes want us or other service provider partners to manage their solutions for them, and increasingly want to have an option where these solutions are pre-provisioned and pre-deployed as data centers, and ready to use,” Russo said.
Russo, a former VMware executive herself, also mentioned the deepened partnership with VMware. The collaboration expands HPE GreenLake for VMware Cloud Foundation capabilities allowing the VMware Cloud Foundation to be fully managed through HPE infrastructure to help enterprise IT shift resources and “avoid overprovisioning,” HPE said in a press release about the partnership.