New GreenLake Business Edition Accelerates Private Cloud Deployment

‘I foresee partners electing to standardize on Private Cloud Business Edition as their desired architecture for their customers—that is how big it is,’ says HPE Vice President of SaaS Infrastructure Services for HPE Storage Chris Schin. ‘I think it literally brings everything that you need together in one place. It is easy to use, preintegrated. I foresee partners just stamping these out to their customers all over the place.’

Hewlett Packard Enterprise Tuesday launched a new easy-to-deploy SaaS version of its GreenLake private cloud, GreenLake for Private Cloud Business Edition, that dramatically accelerates the deployment of GreenLake private clouds.

PCBE—a click-to-deploy virtual machine private cloud service based on HPE’s popular disaggregated hyperconverged infrastructure solution (dHCI)—is a “breakthrough for the partner community” anxious for an easy-to-deploy private cloud, said HPE Vice President of SaaS Infrastructure Services for HPE Storage Chris Schin.

HPE has, in fact, established a “service-level objective” of delivering the hardware that powers the private cloud service from click- to-order to customers within 12 business days, said Schin. “This is changing the traditional paradigm,” he said

The click-to-order-and-deploy PCBE is in sharp contrast to the fully managed GreenLake for Private Cloud Enterprise, which is based on a statement of work that can take months of back and forth to finalize the terms and conditions. PCBE makes it easier for partners to quickly deliver a virtual machine private cloud with their own managed services with the full 17 percent up-front rebate that has become a staple of GreenLake for Private Cloud Enterprise, said Schin.

“PCBE is basically all the hardware you need, all the software you need, and the unified control plane to be able to get storage, compute, networking, the ability to manage all of those, the ability to manage the virtual machine infrastructure that lives on those and the ability to manage anything that might live on a public cloud all through one pane of glass,” said Schin.

PCBE—one of the breakout announcements at HPE Discover this week—has a “ton of buzz” because of its ability to open the door for partners to bring more customers to the GreenLake pay-per-use cloud, said Schin. “The biggest opportunity here is for the channel,” he said.

“I foresee partners electing to standardize on Private Cloud Business Edition as their desired architecture for their customers—that is how big it is,” he said. “I think it literally brings everything that you need together in one place. It is easy to use, preintegrated. I foresee partners just stamping these out to their customers all over the place.”

The click-to-deploy SaaS experience allows partners to quickly deploy a GreenLake private cloud and then easily manage those private clouds for customers, said Schin.

“Pick your mom-and-pop VAR or even a larger one with a service arm—they can buy a [PCBE] pod, have it delivered to their customer and then log into a web browser from their sofa at night when they are watching ‘Ted Lasso’ and figure out what is happening to the infrastructure, checking out what is happening to their virtual machine infrastructure, they can spin up some instances of AWS if they want, it is all part of the same experience,” said Schin.

The GreenLake PCBE is part of a new wave of GreenLake platform-based offers like HPE GreenLake for Block Storage, Aruba Central, HPE GreenLake for Compute Ops Management and HPE GreenLake for Backup and Recovery.

“These solutions, unlike the traditional GreenLake solutions which came typically with services, we have carved that real estate out for the channel to be able to monetize,” said Schin.

The PCBE dashboard allows partners to quickly add other cloud services like GreenLake for Backup and Recovery or even an Amazon Web Services virtual machine.

“The traditional GreenLake solutions typically start with a blank statement of work with desired outcomes and we would just pull from the entire universe of technologies, not just HPE technologies, anything that exists and we would create a solution that we could deliver and manage for you that would solve your problems,” he said.

The problem is it takes a “long time to work through the statement of work, the legal, the deployment, the implementation, [issues]” said Schin.

With the PCBE cloud service, the partner simply logs into the Partner Ready portal and places an order for compute, memory and storage, said Schin. “We give them the price and they put whatever services they want on that invoice and deliver it to the cuystomer,” he said.

The portal experience also allows partners to quickly add new storage and compute resources, said Schin. “This is really changing the paradigm of both the initial sale, the interaction with the customer and as the customer grows it is very easy to just seamlessly expand the subscription to the service,” he said.

HPE has been previewing PCBE since August and already has 70 to 100 customers that are using the private cloud service, said Schin.

Schin urged partners to reach out to their HPE reps to get “educated” on the new sales opportunities that PCBE opens up to them. “This is a great opportunity for them,” he said. “We have all kinds of training and enablement materials. People can get ramped up very quickly.”

Pat O’Dell, general manager and managing partner for Clinton, N.J.-based CPP Associates, said he sees PCBE as a means to drive new private cloud efficiencies that provide choices for smaller and midsize customers. “This provides cost and sales cycles efficiencies if you can leverage an off-the-shelf package,” he said. “More options are better for our customers.”