HPE has announced an exciting extension of their Pointnext Services with HPE GreenLake Hybrid Cloud. Channel partners will have to wait a while to get their hands on the new offering however, since HPE wants to establish a smooth motion for the service itself before opening it up to the channel.

LAS VEGAS — Today, at HPE Discover, Hewlett Packard Enterprise has announced HPE GreenLake Hybrid Cloud, an extension of their consumption-oriented services model designed to help customers develop a coherent hybrid cloud strategy, by managing and optimize both their on- and off-premises clouds. It’s a significant extension of HPE’s GreenLake strategy. It is not, however, one that partners will be able to participate in immediately. While HPE just announced yesterday that their GreenLake services model has now been opened up to partners in a specifically channel-friendly way, this particular service will be direct for the time being, while HPE develops and fine tunes it. The plan, at that undetermined point, will be to make it available to the channel as well.

“Exending HPE Pointnext to the hybrid cloud is a momentous occasion,” said Ana Pinczuk, SVP and GM of HPE Pointnext. “A year ago, we announced Pointnext as our future-facing services organization responsible for advisory, professional and consumption-oriented services, to help customers move along their digital transformation journey.”

HPE GreenLake Hybrid Cloud deepens the dimensions of that journey

“Forrester has projected that 60 per cent of the world will be hybrid,” Pinczuk said. “Hybrid is all about having the right mix of solutions. Our goal is to make hybrid IT simple – and it hasn’t been that simple at times.”

Customers who lack cost optimization processes will overspend significantly in the public cloud. Many also lack the automation and simple tools to take advantage of the cloud’s ability, as well as the continuous monitoring of controls and compliance frameworks to manage risk. HPE GreenLake Hybrid Cloud addresses all these issues with an automated cloud-native model. It sets up processes to manage cloud resources in a customer’s environment, whether public cloud, private cloud, or both. It then establishes specific cost, security and compliance controls, and manages those resources on behalf of the customer.

“We provide three key capabilities,” Pinczuk said.  “The cloud management capability is super-critical for our clients, and we are able to manage cloud assets on- prem, in the private cloud or public cloud.”

The ability to execute cost controls by being able to meter appropriately is the second element, and the solution has a critical amount of flexibility there.

“The flexibility of the metered usage was enabled by our CloudCruiser acquisition, which allows metering to be done many ways, including per VM, per container or per core,” Pinczuk said.

The third capability is around continuous compliance controls.

“We have assembled a set of rules that see over 1000 types of compliance capabilities, and provides a way to automate what is sometimes a very challenging task,” Pinczuk stated.

HPE OneSphere plays a key role in the solution, providing the unified GUI and capabilities and management platform.

“When we conceived of OneSphere, we knew we would offer it as part of our vision for the hybrid part of the cloud,” said Ric Lewis, SVP and GM of the HPE Software Defined and Cloud group. “It was always part of the vision. OneSphere was announced in December, and customers have loved it thus far. For the GreenLake Hybrid Cloud context, there are many offerings on the market that will give advice and help in that environment. But if you want to do things in an efficient repeatable way, you have to build around a core set of IP. OneSphere provides that building block, so that each design isn’t its own unique snowflake.”

HPE sees GreenLake Hybrid Cloud as bringing several new advantages to customers.

“We held early embargoed briefings with some of our customers on this,” said John Treadway, SVP Strategy and Portfolio at Cloud Technology Partners, an HPE company. “Getting to agility, which is what clients are looking for with this kind of model, is very hard. GreenLake Hybrid Cloud allows us to take on that heavy lifting. What it does is not the most value-added thing an IT organization should be doing. This allows them to move faster. We can accelerate their journey to get to scale, from taking several years, to taking several weeks. They were really excited about our ability to do that for them.”

HPE has a deep relationship with Microsoft, and given that Microsoft addresses both the public and private stacks with Azure and Azure Stack respectively, GreenLake Hybrid Cloud addresses a key issue for many Microsoft customers.

“For some customers, their hybrid Strategy is Azure and Azure Cloud,” Lewis said. “However, customers don’t always know that even though they have the same code base, they are separate solutions, and you need services to manage them together effectively. With GreenLake Hybrid Cloud, we can help customers stitch them together.”

Lewis also stressed the importance of HPE’s true multi-cloud strategy to enhancing the utility of GreenLake Hybrid Cloud.

“Our strategy is very much multi cloud – not just one cloud or another cloud – which is very unique in the industry,” he said, stressing that they plan to extend cloud support beyond the large hyperscalers to a large variety of clouds, including regional ones. “We are unique in our multi-cloud approach. We will be able to enable whatever the customer wants with our GreenLake Hybrid Cloud offering.”

“The GreenLake Hybrid Cloud is also a base platform on which we can build blockchain and other applications,” Treadway said. “It will provide a consistent experience to lay these things out in a hybrid way. There’s a tremendous amount of opportunity.”

The rub, however, for HPE’s channel partners, is that that opportunity will not be immediate. While HPE just announced yesterday at their Global Partner event that they have developed a model to allow partners to profitable sell GreenLake services to customers directly, that won’t apply to the new GreenLake Hybrid Cloud, at least right away. Pinczuk said that this is because the service is brand new, and HPE wants to work out any kinks itself before expanding the go-to-market model.

“The goal over time will be to enable GreenLake Hybrid Cloud through partners as well,” she said. “As we proceed, we will build through that whole stack with our channel.”