Champions of Change Sees HPE GreenLake For Private Cloud Business Edition As Cloud Service Game Changer

'What HPE has done with Private Cloud Business Edition is make it attainable and it has opened customer’s eyes to the HPE ecosystem,' says Champions of Change CEO Xara Tran.

When Champions of Change won the first-ever HPE GreenLake Private Cloud Business Edition (PCBE) deal last year, it did a whopping 250 hours of “independent” consulting work to detail the pros and cons of the hybrid cloud service versus public cloud and other competing solutions.

That painstaking consulting work, which showed a 30 to 60 percent pricing advantage for PCBE versus public cloud, was critical to winning the five-year deal with a focus on “total transparency” of the cost and technology pros and cons of the competing offerings versus PCBE, said Xara Tran (pictured above left), founder, chairman and CEO of Champions of Change, the nine-year-old HPE GreenLake superstar solution provider headquartered in Melbourne, Australia.

“Clients know GreenLake is very powerful, tested and reliable, but if it doesn’t reach the price point from a budget perspective they can’t explore it,” said Tran. “What HPE has done with Private Cloud Business Edition is make it attainable and it has opened customer’s eyes to the HPE ecosystem. From my perspective customers are getting a more competitive solution.”

Tran said she was actually “surprised” by the technology and cost comparisons that have come to light with the new wave of cloud services solutions from HPE like PCBE. “From a product perspective, HPE is listening to their clients and they have delivered,” she said.

HPE just last month upped the ante in the battle for private cloud supremacy by announcing that its hot-selling Alletra MP storage platform and HPE SimpliVity Gen11 are now available as offerings with PCBE.

In the case of PCBE, clients are seeing that HPE is innovating well beyond the hardware, said Tran, opening the door for customers to focus on their own business rather than speeds and feeds.

HPE GreenLake for PCBE has also broken open the private cloud market for small and medium-sized businesses, said Tran. “I love that I can now go to a small and medium business and have a GreenLake offering that is quick to market,” she said. “Before with GreenLake Flex offerings it took too long.”

Getting HPE GreenLake PCBE up and running from delivery to project completion was just six weeks compared to eight months for an HPE GreenLake Flex deal from delivery to rollout, said Tran.

The SaaS-based HPE PCBE is dramatically easier to deploy than a GreenLake Flex deal, said Tran. “From a deployment perspective, HPE has taken a lot of the headaches out of the engineering and design by leveraging the (PCBE) platform itself,” she said. “On a GreenLake Flex deal it would normally take three to four months of full-time work for three of our team members.”

One of the hallmarks of Champions of Change, which also was the first solution provider to deliver a GreenLake Flex Capacity 3.0 deal in 2019, is its obsessive focus on providing high level “independent” consulting focused on business outcome comparisons with detailed pricing and technology comparisons for clients.

“I think that kind of detailed consulting work with cost and technology comparisons is missing in the industry,” said Tran. “For me it is always about the work. I love the work! We were more than happy to do the 250 hours of consulting work on that project. We were solving a problem for our client and I couldn’t wait to present it to them! The discoveries were important and it saved them a lot of time.”

Besides the independent analysis on the big HPE GreenLake PCBE win, Champions of Change also did 800 hours of operations and business documentation involving the security and compliance for the PCBE solution, said Tran.

Champion of Change’s focus on business outcomes and HPE next generation cloud services like PCBE has led to the company’s net profit more than doubling in 2024 with a gross profit increase of over 35 percent, said Tran. This with the company delivering triple digit sales growth in the last several years including 256 percent growth in 2024.

Tran says she and her team thrive on helping customers facing “complex and challenging” IT problems. “We are taking a big huge weight off the shoulders of our clients when we do the detailed analysis,” she said. “We do the analyses independently. My whole team and I have the same values which is delivering the best outcome for the client. The client comes first. It is not about Champions of Change. The clients have a business need and we are there to help them solve it in a way that drives meaningful business outcomes.

Tran says she is “immensely” proud of her team providing the independent analysis for the first PCBE win ever for HPE – direct or indirect- especially account director Alex DaNobrega (pictured above right) who she credited for delivering a “best in class per per use” solution that provided the client with a better business outcome than competing solutions.

DaNobrega, a five-year Champions of Change veteran, “understood the business” and the issues facing the various stakeholders, said Tran. “Alex was able to understand what the problems were for all the stakeholders,” she said. “He really cared about the business. Champions of Change is about being a champion of change within companies. That means finding out what businesses want to achieve and then helping them achieve it. That is what Alex does for our customers!”

Tran also credited Justin Farrow, the HPE solutions architect for Australian distributor Dicker Data, which provided assistance on the HPE GreenLake PCBE solution, which included HPE Alletra storage and backup and disaster recovery services for the customer

In the case of the HPE GreenLake PCBE big win, Tran says each of the competing solutions had “unique” product or cloud service “requirements” needed to match HPE GreenLake PCBE, said Tran. “It’s not just a product versus product versus product comparison,” she said. “You have to make sure each solution is interconnected correctly to the customer’s IT environment so it is working to meet the customer’s business requirements.”

Also key to Champions of Change’ GreenLake cloud services sales growth is a CIO as a Service offering that provides highly specialized IT skills tailored to a client’s IT enivironment, said Tran. “Whatever a customer needs whether it is developers, system adminstrators, project managers or senior system engineers, we can provide that,” she said.

Tran says Champions of Change’s culture as a trusted advisor for solving complex IT problems is critical to the company’s success.

“We go through every scenario,” she said. “We are the advocate for the client. We do all the legwork, looking at what are the variables and the things that we need to worry about and the advantages and disadvantages of each solution. It is pure consulting end to end from presales to sales to technical perspective to delivery of the solution. Champions of Change stands up to its name. We are the Champions of Change for the client!”