HPE pledges to offer its entire portfolio as a service by 2022

HPE says the move is part of the firm's transition to an as-a-service company

Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) has pledged to offer its entire product portfolio as a service by 2022.

The vendor said the move is part of its "transition into an as-a-service company", which will let customers buy on a consumption basis through its GreenLake offering.

HPE CEO Antonio Neri described it as a reshaping of the HPE business.

"We are at an inflection point in the market," he said. "Everyone recognises that customers want technology delivered as a service, but they also want it on their terms.

"HPE's unique approach to as-a-service, which empowers customers with choice, flexibility, and control, is driving HPE GreenLake's tremendous success.

"We will continue to invest aggressively in this opportunity, to capitalise on our market leadership, leverage our world-class channel and partner ecosystem, and deliver our entire portfolio, from edge to cloud, under the HPE GreenLake portfolio. As a result, we will reshape HPE and transform the market, with a new and better way to deliver as-a-service."

Yesterday HPE channel boss Paul Hunter (pictured) said that the vendor would update its GreenLake quote generator, taking the length of time to generate a quote down to around 15 minutes.

He also revealed that GreenLake is the fastest-growing segment for HPE, with 400 opportunities currently in the pipeline with partners.

Distributor Westcoast revealed in February that it had completed the largest GreenLake deal to date, with MD Alex Tatham claiming the process was complex but likely to be smoothed out as more agreements are completed.

Hunter told CRN that HPE has worked over recent months to remove some of this complexity.

"We launched it a year ago and I think there are still opportunities to continue to build out the sophistication of the offer, but it's a six-month sale cycle on average," he said.

"So the growth we're seeing is coming from six months' worth of work.

"Key to it is how quickly we're able to execute; how quickly you're able to take the quote, and deliver a solution when making improvements to the speed with which we can stand up infrastructure."

Hunter said that HPE is making GreenLake more accessible to partners and customers by building a set of packages, rather than requiring customers to configure every element of the solution themselves.

"We're reducing the functionality which increases the speed, and increases the ease with which our partners are able to understand, sell, deliver and contract," he added.

James Hardy, deputy managing director at CCS Media, said the reseller is now looking at GreenLake as a viable option because of the improved simplicity.

"The initial launch was for very global-centric organisations," he said. "Now the focus is on the mid-market which is our space, so we had to wait for that transition and now we are absolutely looking at it.

"But it is not just GreenLake as a standalone. The challenge is, when you compare it with cloud, a lot of cloud-centric organisations are at the extreme end of cloud - it is everything in the cloud.

"With GreenLake it's a consumption model from a payment standpoint, but you get all the technology you need, so it is more focused on the customer, as opposed to saying ‘we've built this, buy it'."