HPE Pointnext Acquires Azure Cloud Consulting Provider RedPixie
Hewlett Packard Enterprise's Pointnext unit has entered into a definitive agreement to acquire RedPixie, a United Kingdom cloud consulting company that builds and manages Microsoft Azure hybrid cloud solutions for financial services firms.
The eight-year-old cloud consultant, which was a finalist for the Microsoft Country Partner of the Year in 2016, bills itself as one of Europe's largest cloud specialists. The company's LinkedIn profile lists 76 employees.
In a blog post, HPE Pointnext Senior Vice President and General Manager Ana Pinczuk said the deal strengthens HPE's hybrid IT consulting capabilities in a $6 billion market that is growing at 18 percent.
"The reality today is that enterprises face a hybrid IT world," wrote Pinczuk. "Some workloads are best suited to the public cloud, some should live in a private cloud environment and others need to stay in traditional on-premises infrastructure. Finding the right mix will enable businesses to analyze data quickly, efficiently manage workloads and ultimately accelerate business outcomes by driving new business models, creating new customer and employee experiences, and improving operational performance."
The acquisition comes seven months after Pointnext put a stake in the cloud consulting business ground with its acquisition of Cloud Technology Partners, a highly regarded Boston-based cloud consultant.
Raymond Tuchman, CEO of Experis Technology Group, a fast-growing Potomac, Md.-based HPE private cloud powerhouse with its own 80,000-square-foot cloud services data center, said he sees the RedPixie deal as yet another opportunity to partner with HPE Pointnext on consumption-based GreenLake pay-per-use solutions.
In fact, Tuchman is currently working with HPE on an HPE GreenLake deal aimed at taking a $1.5 million capital expenditure project deal to a four-year GreenLake consumption-based deal. "Our strategy is aligned with Pointnext," said Tuchman. "We want to sell recurring revenue, operating expenditure deals instead of capital expenditure solutions. I look at GreenLake as another financing vehichle for us."
Under the GreenLake Flex Capacity model, partners like Experis are paid up front for the deal and then provide ongoing services for the consumption-based deals.
The GreenLake pay-per-use solutions include SAP Hana, edge compute, a big data Hadoop data lake, and a GreenLake database with EDB Postgres.
HPE CEO Antonio Neri has told CRN that the Pointnext HPE GreenLake "business model innovation" opens the door for partners to dramatically increase sales and profits in an era of pay-per-use services.
With ​GreenLake, HPE takes away the high risk of providing consumption-based services -- holding the sales paper on the complex deals -- so partners can focus on adding their own high-value managed services, said Neri.
One top executive for a national solution provider, who did not want to be identified, said he would like to see HPE Pointnext articulate clear rules of engagement as it builds out the cloud consulting services business.
"The question for Pointnext is: Is there a partnering opportunity with these cloud consulting companies?" said the CEO. "If HPE is building out a robust Pointnext services organization what are the rules of engagement? Is there going to be hard deck? It seems to me they need to better articulate the overall partner strategy. All of us work with larger entities. I need to know where exactly is the Pointnext line in the sand."