HPE GreenLake Sales Pipeline Is Growing Exponentially

Hewlett Packard Enterprise's GreenLake pay-per-use offerings are a hit with channel partners with the sales pipeline "growing exponentially," said HPE Pointnext North America Sales Vice President David Twohy in an interview with CRN.

"The channel is 50 percent of sales and I'd like to see it at 70 percent," said Twohy, one of the founding fathers and archtiects of the GreenLake Flex Capacity infrastructure solution for partners. "We are going to continue to lean into our partners with this. Every single customer wants to have this (consumption) discussion. HPE and our partners are talking with customers at every single level from IT directors to CFOs to line of business executives and board of directors."

HPE has already trained over 250 channel partners and 1,000 HPE sales professionals over an eight-week period, said Twohy in an interview at HPE Discover where HPE unveiled GreenLake Flex Capacity. "Frankly if we could have we would have trained even more partners," he said.

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Hewlett Packard Enterprise Vice President North America Channels and Alliances Terry Richardson calls GreenLake Flex Capacity the most "significant" partner opportunity he has seen in 30-plus years in the channel.

"Giving customers the opportunity to pay for only what they consume is absolutely game-changing," said Richardson. "Those that are embracing this model are really differentiating themselves from the pack, and they are contributing to an absolute surge in our business, growing many hundreds of percent quarter on quarter."

The initial GreenLake Flex Capacity services for partners provides partners with a whopping five times the rebate incentive that they would get in a traditional Capex deal. The new offerings are for on premises, full-fledged metered consumption services for for HPE ProLiant Microsoft Azure; HPE Synergy 480 compute modules; HPE SimpliVity 380; HPE ProLiant BL460c server blade; HPE 3PAR StoreServ 8200; HPE 3PAR StoreServ 9450; and HPE StoreOnce 5100.

HPE partners, for their part, say the GreenLake Flex Capacity model is a "revolutionary" breakthrough that gives HPE a significant competitive advantage over next generation infrastructure competitors.

"GreenLake is one of the most innovative things HPE has done in the last 15 years," said Jeff Smith, vice president of business development for International Integrated Solutions Ltd. (IIS), an HPE Platinum partner headquartered in Plainview, New York, No 106 on the 2018 CRN SP500 . "We think within the next two years GreenLake will account for 30 percent of our business. Nobody to my knowledge is doing what HPE is doing with GreenLake Flex Capacity."

Smith credited Twohy with evolving GreenLake Flex Capacity into a breakout hit with the latest version of the pay per use model. "You've got to give Dave and his team credit," said Smith. "This is a great partner opportunity with great margins. It's a true cloud consumption model we can offer our customers. Now we can offer a public cloud model with on premises equipment."

GreenLake provides a robust recurring revenue opportunity for IIS sales reps and gives the company the ability to wrap its own services into the pay per use model, said Smith. "Recurring revenue is incredibly important to partners in this day and age," he said.

Smith said he sees HPE CEO Antonio Neri driving the company's legacy as an engineering oriented IT innovator with offerings like GreenLake.

Steve Tepedino, president and CEO of IT Partners, an HPE Platinum partner headquartered in Tempe, Ariz., said the latest version of GreenLake is a home run for HPE and its partners.

"GreenLake 3.0 is really exciting, HPE got it right," he said. "Customers want consumption economics for infrastructure and GreenLake allows us to deliver it. The best part is we get paid well to provide those consumption economics. This is everything for the channel. Nobody else has this. It's a tremendous breakthrough. It's cloud economics and cloud scale. It is the best of both worlds."

IT Partners is seeing more GreenLake deals in the sales pipeline than ever before with the new version of GreenLake Flex Capacity, said Tepedino. "We have four deals in the works and one of them is massive," he said. "My sales reps are excited about the GreenLake economics. It's gone from reps that didn't know what GreenLake was to now wanting to sell it."

GreenLake allows partners to maintain tight relationships with customers in a recurring revenue cloud model, said Tepedino. "The relationship with the customer is preserved and we are delivering breakthrough technology advances like Synergy," he said.

It's not just partners that are raving about GreenLake, said Twohy, noting customers are telling HPE that the company is "miles ahead" of competitors with the pay-per-use services offerings.

Twohy said every partner needs to start the digital transformation customer discussion with a GreenLake proposal as the foundational building block.

Ultimately, GreenLake is driving out significant IT costs and freeing up IT resources to do higher value digital transformation projects such as building new software and services that give companies a competitive advantage, said Twohy.

"Partners can influence people, process and technology with a GreenLake solution," says Twohy. "It changes everything and becomes the building block for the rest of a customer's digital transformation journey."

Once partners implement GreenLake Flex Capacity for customers, they can bring even more value with offerings like Synergy composable infrastructure, a popular DevOps platform, and HPE InfoSight, an AI based predictive maintenance platform aimed at stopping 86 percent of failures before they happen, said Twohy.

"I always tell partners and customers look at consumption first: it is low hanging fruit," he said."GreenLake is a financial, speed of deployment and efficiency of resources discussion. This is about freeing up resources and capital so customers can do higher value things."