HPE’s Keith White: SAP HPE GreenLake Deal Is A ‘Massive Opportunity’ For Partners

The new SAP HANA customer edition on Hewlett Packard Enterprise’s GreenLake cloud service is a ‘massive opportunity’ for the HPE and SAP partner ecosystem, says HPE GreenLake Cloud Services Business Group General Manager Keith White.

‘Integration Opportunities’ For Partners

The new SAP HANA customer edition on Hewlett Packard Enterprise’s GreenLake cloud service will open the door to new integration opportunities for partners, said HPE GreenLake Cloud Services Business Group General Manager Keith White.

“What this does for the channel and the ecosystem is they have a lot more integration opportunities, a lot more opportunity to customize and build on top of the applications,” said White in an interview with CRN. “GreenLake has been on fire. This really just continues to validate the strategy we have and the opportunity to meet our customers where they are at by bringing the cloud to them in this scenario. It is an exciting time.”

HPE will supply, install and manage the infrastructure, while SAP will provide application management services and expertise on integration from the operating system to the database to the cloud.

SAP will begin aggressively selling the HPE GreenLake cloud service in the fourth quarter with delivery expected in the first quarter next year.

One reason SAP teamed with HPE is to offer a broad-based midmarket T-shirt-size offering that goes well beyond the large, multimillion-dollar SAP engagements. In fact, there is no steep minimum contractual commitment for the SAP HPE GreenLake service.

HPE has created a “component-based pricing model” for the SAP HPE GreenLake cloud service so customers can pay as they grow in the SAP environment, said Sunil Patel, head of the global SAP and Deloitte GTM (Go To Market), Alliance and Ecosystem Sales for HPE.

The HPE GreenLake SAP offering comes just two months after HPE launched T-shirt-size offerings of GreenLake as part of a move to a group of 17 “building block” offerings for small, medium and large businesses.

The HPE SAP GreenLake cloud service removes a “huge barrier” for customers contemplating modernizing their SAP environments, said Patel.

“We did an analysis of our HPE installed base running SAP on legacy systems, and I will tell you there are a very high percentage of those that are due to modernize,” he said.

Here is what White had to say about the new SAP HPE GreenLake cloud service and the opportunities ahead for partners.

What is the economic impact of the HPE SAP deal?

This is really what customers are after. They want the cloud experience. They want it on-prem. They want to be able to control it. Seventy percent of apps can’t move to the public cloud. Data is the same scenario.

What we see here is a one plus one equals three opportunity for our customers. You get the market leadership of GreenLake with the market leadership of SAP. We manage it all for you all the way out to the application. That way customers can focus on things that matter to them for their business.

You are in a situation now with COVID-19 where revenue is tight, cash flow is king. Now we can provide this in a very cost-effective, structured way for the customer.

We are really excited about the opportunity. What this does for the channel and the ecosystem is they have a lot more integration opportunities, a lot more opportunity to customize and build on top of the applications.

GreenLake has been on fire. This really just continues to validate the strategy we have and the opportunity to meet our customers where they are at by bringing the cloud to them in this scenario. It is an exciting time.

How big a game-changer is this for partners who are helping customers in enterprise environments move to the cloud?

The reality is our partners are developing a much deeper relationship with our customers. It is not just transactional—what do you need to buy today or tomorrow? It’s about helping them to run their business and their digital transformation, helping them modernize their infrastructure and applications.

So this is just a great example of starting that modernization opportunity with obviously a tier-one, mission-critical application— one of the top ERP applications in the world. Once you have that migration done you can look at what do you want to go do with it—what are the other applications, analytics and the changes you need to do for your business, your customers and your own employees and products”

This is just a massive opportunity. It is a launch pad into all of these other capabilities for the ecosystem to go and build upon. We get to manage it all for SAP so we get rid of that concern on the back end so they can focus on things that matter to them and how they run their business effectively.

How important is it that the HPE GreenLake SAP offering can be customized for the midmarket?

This just validates that T-shirt sizes matter because there are small, medium and large requirements. The fact that we can manage this for SAP on the back end helps tremendously. This even broadens the scope for our broader ecosystem as well. We have a lot of great integrators that are helping SMB and middle enterprise all the way up to the top tier. The great thing is we have an offering for those folks.

This delivers choice. There are already solutions in the public cloud, the SAP data center and now customers have choice on their own and because we do T-shirt-size scenarios, it gives everyone an opportunity to move very quickly. We are excited about this. We have got a ton of momentum.

How important are the Opex versus Capex cost issues here for customers?

In essence the public cloud has brought an expectation to our customer base. They want the cloud experience. They want cloud economics. They want cloud management. What we have done here is one plus one equals three for our customers. They get that full experience, the market-leading application. They get to continue that modernization and that transformation. They can’t stop. COVID hit but they can’t stop moving their business forward. We are just so excited about the opportunity here and helping our customers with that.