HPE GreenLake Health Care Sales Pipeline ‘Growing’ In Midst Of Pandemic

‘The opportunity is with GreenLake,’ said Advizex Vice President of Cloud Consumption Joe VanPatten. ‘Our customers are looking to preserve capital in almost every case. So GreenLake is resonating.’

The global pandemic has helped spark a robust sales pipeline for Hewlett Packard Enterprise’s GreenLake on-premises, pay-per-use cloud service among health care providers, said HPE Healthcare Chief Technologist Steve Cotham.

“Prior to the pandemic, the pipeline was lower than what we would like it to be,” said Cotham in an interview with CRN. “I have personally watched that grow exponentially to a very healthy pipeline today. That is one area of focus for me and my team: that we continue to grow that pipeline, working with our partners like Advizex [HPE’s U.S. As-A-Service Partner of the Year] to mature that pipeline.”

With the pandemic placing financial pressure on health care providers, more of those customers are embracing the secure, on-premises GreenLake pay-per-use cloud service, said Advizex Vice President of Cloud Consumption Joe VanPatten

“GreenLake is a huge opportunity for us,” said VanPatten. “We are seeing the pipeline grow exponentially. We are seeing more and more customers that want to talk about it and understand it. When our reps talk about consumption and as a service to potential prospects, the prospects perk up and just want to hear the message.”

[Related: 5 Reasons HPE GreenLake Is A Hit With Health Care Providers]

VanPatten said health care customers are embracing the GreenLake operating-based expenditure model because they don’t have the financial muscle to make big capital expenditures in wake of the pandemic.

“They are shifting to an Opex model because they might have less capital to spend because of the pandemic,” he said. “With health care facilities, they weren’t doing elective surgeries which is where they make a lot of money. …They are also looking for other ways to save money. They can save money by having us manage their infrastructure.”

Among the big advantages of GreenLake is the ability to seamlessly integrate Epic Systems’ software for electronic health care records into an on-premises pay-per-use model. “The work that my team has done to develop the Epic platform as-a-service offering is a big differentiator for us,” said Cotham. “It’s unique and differentiated. It is not only GreenLake infrastructure as a service. It is a platform as a service. We are delivering up the stack and bringing to our customers the Epic-certified resources to manage those environments. It is very relevant. That Epic pipeline continues to grow. It is growing rapidly.”

HPE is also seeing GreenLake opportunities with medical imaging software vendors. In addition, HPE is “working diligently” to grow its health care AI practice, said Cotham. “There are opportunities around drug discovery, genomics and precision medicine,” he said. “We have already begun some development efforts in those areas and have identified software vendors we will be working with this year.”

The HPE health care team is “leading” in every case with GreenLake, said Cotham. “The opportunity is with GreenLake,” he said. “Our customers are looking to preserve capital in almost every case. So GreenLake is resonating. Paying only for the IT that you consume is a message that is resonating. What we are doing is delivering a cloud experience in their IT environment.”

VanPatten said health care customers’ security concerns around public cloud is driving GreenLake momentum. He said compliance and governance around legal requirements such as HIPAA are paramount for customers. “Everybody is a little fearful of putting their data out to places they don’t have complete control over,” he said. “I keep hearing that over and over again.”

The latest GreenLake win for Advizex was with a genomics research company. “Their intellectual property is their business,” he said. “The results of their research is their business and they made a conscious decision to keep their data on-premises with on-premises infrastructure. They made that decision after debating whether they should put their business in the public cloud or not. They wanted all the advantages public cloud can provide but at the end of the day they decided the risk was too great.”

Advizex has successfully moved several health care customers to GreenLake with rave reviews on the performance of Epic Systems health care records software on GreenLake, said VanPatten. “There is no question we at Advizex and HPE have the expertise to design and implement an Epic infrastructure that performs well,” he said. “Because of GreenLake those health care customers are set up to grow in a very quick and efficient manner at a predictable cost. That’s huge for health care.”

Further driving GreenLake momentum is the ability for health care providers to cut costs by handing over infrastructure management to Advizex and HPE so that they can put more resources into focusing on patient care. “They want their people focused on making sure the clinicians, doctors and nurses are having a good end user experience when they are trying to provide health care to a patient,” said VanPatten. “What we are doing is freeing up those resources so they can focus on making sure that the clinicians are providing the best possible outcomes for the patient. That means taking some of the daily care and feeding of the infrastructure that runs those applications off the plate of the IT folks at the health care facility. That lets them focus on the patient-facing applications.”

Health care customers are being overwhelmed by the complexity of keeping infrastructure secure and performing at an optimal level, said VanPatten. “Customers talk about the number of people to really just keep the lights on in an organization,” he said. “If we can keep the lights on for them and offload those [infrastructure] activities with GreenLake and the services HPE and Advizex can provide, then we are actually enabling the IT folks to focus on the applications that are more relevant to patient care.”

Cotham, for his part, said he sees the GreenLake health care pipeline continuing to grow in HPE’s new fiscal year, which began Nov. 1. “We are heading into the new fiscal year with a very healthy pipeline and really good momentum,” he said.