HPE Acquires Cloud Assessment ‘Crown Jewel’ CloudPhysics

‘For partners, whether they want to go win a new account or service an installed base, we are bringing cloud-native software technology to them in order to drastically reduce the sales cycle, reduce the amount of engineering time to propose a new solution, and help really increase the velocity of their business,’ says HPE Storage Senior Vice President and General Manager Tom Black.

Hewlett Packard Enterprise Tuesday added a breakthrough AI-based hybrid cloud assessment tool to its arsenal with the acquisition of CloudPhysics.

The deal provides HPE with a SaaS-based tool that analyzes on-premises IT environments and provides quick return on investment recommendations for cloud migrations, application modernization and infrastructure.

The acquisition of the 10-year-old venture-backed company provides HPE with “highly strategic” software that will “speed up” HPE’s partner-led “go to market” sales engine, said Tom Black (pictured), senior vice president and general manager of HPE’s storage business.

“CloudPhysics is a market-leading platform to do on-premises assessments of a customer’s environment,” said Black, the driving force behind the deal. “It’s all done in software literally in seconds or minutes back to the customer. Some of the largest brands in the industry have been working with CloudPhysics. I like to say that we snagged a crown jewel. It’s a very talented team. They are extremely gifted and skilled.”

[RELATED: HPE’s New AI Opportunity Engine Takes Sales Proposals From 45 Days To 45 Seconds]

Terms of the deal were not disclosed.

Some of HPE’s biggest solution provider partners had already been offering the CloudPhysics assessments under a long-standing partnership and had fallen “in love” with the SaaS platform, said Black. The beauty of the CloudPhysics platform is it provides the basis for a “deeply intimate, highly technically qualified first discussion based upon what the software discovers and knows about your IT environment,” said Black.

For the channel, the CloudPhysics software is a go-to-market game-changer to assist customers grappling with complex cloud migration and application modernization issues.

“For partners, whether they want to go win a new account or service an installed base, we are bringing cloud-native software technology to them in order to drastically reduce the sales cycle, reduce the amount of engineering time to propose a new solution, and help really increase the velocity of their business,” said Black.

For customers, the breakthrough is faster time to solution with less time in discovery mode analyzing the current IT infrastructure. “We are using the software to do the [IT assessment] grunt work,” said Black.

The CloudPhysics data lake—which includes more than 200 trillion data samples from more than 1 million virtual machines—provides a one-two AI sales punch when teamed with HPE’s InfoSight AI-based predictive analytics data engine.

InfoSight—which collects information from HPE’s massive installed base to automatically remediate infrastructure issues—has 1,250 trillion data points in a data lake that has been built up over more than a decade.

“Our current data lakes work for our installed base, but CloudPhysics has this massive data lake with the ability to go in and assess any enterprise [IT] environment,” said Black. “The strategic intent of this acquisition is to bring that team and technology into HPE. Now, not only do we have our AI-driven installed base data lake but the CloudPhysics data lake to do on-premises assessments of a customer’s environment.”

HPE plans to give customers and partners free access to the CloudPhysics assessment tool, which provides detailed information on workloads, performance of workloads and insight into the broad range of IT products and solutions being run by the customer.

The HPE plan is to combine the CloudPhysics and InfoSight data lake as part of a massive AI-based Software Defined Opportunity Engine (SDOE) that provides customized sales proposals. “We already prototyped the integration to prove it before we made the integration offer,” he said.

The SDOE—which was launched in tandem with the CloudPhysics acquisition—slashes the time it takes for partners to do custom sales proposals from as much as 45 days to just 45 seconds.

The plan out of the gate is to use the SDOE for storage upgrades with a sharp focus on moving the 3Par installed base to Nimble or Primera.

“If we discover a competitive storage technology at a certain size and certain performance, we can then feed our AI engines and our data pipeline from that data lake and generate an HPE-specific proposal on what was a competitive incumbent,” said Black. “So we have the InfoSight AI data lake and now we have the CloudPhysics AI data lake.”

Black is urging all partners to take advantage of the CloudPhysics assessment tool to develop custom sales proposals for customers. “If you want to know what’s going on in your environment, deploy the assessment tool,” he said. “It will tell you everything that is going on and then provide a new set of proposals based on what we observed.”

Both HPE AI platforms, CloudPhysics and InfoSight, are being “piped into” the breakthrough SDOE platform to deliver a “fully, highly qualified proposal” to the customer, said Black.