HPE’s New Ezmeral Software Is ‘Extremely Price Competitive’ With Public Clouds

“We think it is going to be significantly less expensive than if you had bought all of those foundational data services from one of the (public) cloud providers,” said HPE Ezmeral Worldwide Sales Vice President Steve Shattuck.

Hewlett Packard Enterprise’s new Ezmeral Software release, which has been revamped as a more robust AI (artificial intelligence) platform, has a new consumption based subscription model that makes it ‘extremely, extremely price-competitive with the public clouds,” said HPE Ezmeral Worldwide Sales Vice President Steve Shattuck.

The new simplified Ezmeral platform – which was unveiled Tuesday- is aimed at providing “predictable and transparent economics” that effectively eliminate the “unpredictable costs and risk of vendor lock in” of public cloud environments, said HPE.

The new release of HPE Ezmeral Software effectively reduces the number of software products or tools it takes to produce and deploy AI and ML (machine learning) based applications with unified analytics in a public cloud or multicloud environment, said Shattuck.

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HPE did not release specific Ezmeral Software consumption pricing but Shattuck said the new release effectively reduces by one third to one half the number of tools a customer would have to subscribe to from a public cloud provider in order to develop and deploy AI based applications.

HPE Ezmeral’s multicloud capabities means the number of tools it takes to run and deploy multicloud AI based applications is reduced even further, said Shattuck. That’s because there will be a “commonality” of tools with the Ezmeral edge to cloud data fabric across on premise and multiple cloud environments, he said.

“We see the number of tools that people are going to have to adopt dramatically reduced and with that the corresponding associated price cost,” he said.

HPE Ezmeral at a data fabric level provides file, object, real-time streaming , and database access at a single monthly subscription price, said Shattuck. “We think it is going to be significantly less expensive than if you had bought all of those foundational data services from one of the (public) cloud providers,” he said.

If that isn’t enough, HPE is also providing within its unified analytics software offering “all the tool sets for data engineering, data analysts, some visualization, machine learning operationalization,” said Shattuck. “That is again another four or five tools you would have to acquire within one of the ([public cloud) providers.”

The new Ezmeral release is the first time HPE has been able to provide consumption based economics for the edge to cloud data fabric and unified analytics platform, said Shattuck.

“One of the things we knew we had to do is we had to be able to support opex consumption and consumption based billing for the platform,” he said. “We were traditional subscription based software in the past. What we have done is that we have engineered consumption based metering and billing into the product. So each product has its own metering and billing engine built into the product down to the workload level within unified analytics.”

That metering and billing at the workload level allows HPE partners and custopmers to see which specific workloads are consuming the most resources, said Shattuck. That opens the door to analyze workloads to see where they operate most economically- a key differentiator for HPE GreenLake. The consumption based capability was built by the HPE Ezmeral development team and is not based on the CloudCruiser functionality in HPE GreenLake, said Shattuck.

The consumption based fucntionality opens the door for HPE Ezmeral to be part of a “comprehensive consumption based billing solution” for infrastructure or software in conjunction with ISVs or direct metering billing back to the customer, said Shattuck.

“In the past we were never able to do that,” said Shattuck. “In the past we have always had to sell term subscription for the software. Now we’ll be able to sell the software to our customers in a way they are used to consuming the cloud based on the amount of consumption that you are using.”

The new Ezmeral billing model also gives visibility into the AI and ML based toolsets so customers can do a “cost analysis” in terms of where workloads operate most efficiently, said Shattuck.

That consumption based analytics effectively provides real time consumption based billing across multicloud envioronments, said Shattuck. “You are not going to have to wait until the end of the month to see a bill,” he said. “You are going to have a real time dashboard into the tool, showing your current utilization and cost, regardless to whether it is on prem or in one of the hyperscalars.”

The complexity of the public cloud billings leave many customers with “no idea” on what they are spending on with regard to AI based applications, said Shattuck. “We are going to be able to provide a real time live dashboard in the application so you will know at any given moment both historically and real time what are consuming the resources and what it is costing you,” he said.

That billing visibility will open the door so customers know exactly what they are paying for whether it is in a prepaid cloud credits model or being billed monthly, said Shattuck. That capability is part and parcel of the HPE Ezmeral Software GUI (graphical user interface), he said.

Michael Shrader, vice president intelligence and innovative solutions for Carahsoft Technology Corp, , a master government aggregator that works with solution providers and systems integrators, said he sees HPE Ezmeral driving a new wave of AI based projects into the government market.

“This represents a huge opportunity (for partners) to support various customers looking to move their AI workloads into the mainstream with the need to manage them based on today’s standards,” he said.

Shrader praised HPE for providing a “wealth of incentive based channel pricing programs” for HPE partners to drive AI based solutions. “The reseller community would be well-served in investigating and exploring how to build a business around these incentives,” he said. “Partners are well positioned to benefit and profit from helping take these products to market…HPE has a tried and true methodology for how they rtake products to market through the channel and are applying lots of those best practices and resource to this capability.”

Shrader said Carahsoft – which has had an AI practice for the last six years - is “excited” about the HPE Ezmeral opportunity. “Our focus on bringing AI and ML capabilities into government is growing rapidly,” he said.

Carahsoft, in fact, has been sharply focused on where AI government projects are taking place, said Shrader. “There are lots of customers and prospects we can go take this to right off the bat,” he said.