HPE Discover 2019: Company Vows Big Expansion of As-a-Service Business

One year after vowing to spend $4 billion over four years on edge computing technologies, Hewlett Packard Enterprise CEO Antonio Neri pledged to make his company the world’s leading supplier of as-a-service solutions for business by making everything it sells available as a service within three years.

Speaking at HPE Discover, the company’s annual gathering of users, partners and others that has drawn thousands to Las Vegas this week, Neri said HPE would meet its goal by massively expanding GreenLake, its as-a-service business.

HPE has argued that businesses are poorly served by the tech industry’s current paradigm, with organizations “forced to accept an inconsistent experience between the data center and the cloud; inflexible, expensive, and proprietary stacks that prohibit choice; and limited in-house IT skills, budgets, and options for financing.”

HPE GreenLake was launched in 2017 as a suite of curated services such as SAP Hana, the Microsoft Azure stack, data backup and more. The goal was (and is) to help companies manage their IT stacks more effectively and inexpensively by letting them pay as they go for what they need and without requiring major on-premises deployments or long-term commitments.

GreenLake Simplifies IT Management

Now, Neri says, everything will be available via GreenLake.

“We are at an inflection point in the market,” said Neri said. “Everyone recognizes 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 capitalize 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.”

A big part of the GreenLake value proposition is giving customers a simpler way to access meaningful data about their businesses, Neri said. “According to Gartner, you only get value out of 6 percent of your data; the other 94 percent is wasted. We must do better. We cannot afford to waste any of that data.”

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