HPE Gets AI-Based IT Management Boost With OpsRamp Acquisition

‘This is a game-changer for HPE and GreenLake,’ says US itek President David Stinner. ‘HPE has found a vendor who is highly integrated with meeting all the needs of both enterprises and MSP clients. This makes HPE interesting as an MSP vendor.’

Hewlett Packard Enterprise Monday gave its GreenLake on-premises pay-per-use cloud service an AI-based boost with its acquisition of OpsRamp.

The acquisition provides GreenLake with an AI and machine learning IT operations platform aimed at detecting and resolving IT services management issues with intelligent management and hybrid cloud monitoring.

OpsRamp is considered one of the premier AI tools used by MSPs to automate IT services management. The company received a five star rating in CRN’s 2022 Partner Program Guide.

[Related: OpsRamp Ramps Up Partner Program Under New Channel Chief]

“This is a game-changer for HPE and GreenLake,” said David Stinner, founder and president of US itek, a Buffalo, N.Y.-based MSP standout. “HPE has found a vendor who is highly integrated with meeting all the needs of both enterprises and MSP clients. This makes HPE interesting as an MSP vendor. They have been off my radar, but I will now look at the OpsRamp platform. We currently use an AI platform called MSPbots.ai and we are about to roll out a new feature that will take incoming tickets and assign them based on the skill set of our technician, schedule them, and then follow up if the tickets go unattended.”

Stinner praised MSP platform provider Kaseya’s heavy investment in AI-based tools for MSPs. “AI like Kaseya and OpsRamp are providing is definitely the future,” he said. “I expect most of the mundane stuff we have been working on for MSP tools for the last 15 years will be really automated with AI in the next five years, not the way SaaS vendors talk about automation today with a human in control, but with machine learning and intelligence. I look forward to when AI is checking for mundane things like missing patches, as computers don’t get fatigued like technicians do. “

Terms of the deal—which is expected to close in HPE’s third fiscal quarter ended July 31—were not disclosed.

HPE said OpsRamp’s technology will be integrated with the HPE GreenLake platform but did not provide a time frame for the integration.

HPE participated in a $37.5 million round of funding in OpsRamp as part of its Pathfinder investment program three years ago.

OpsRamp also has a strategic partnership with Google Cloud, which hosts the AI-powered OpsRamp cloud management, monitoring and discovery platform on Google Cloud.

Google Cloud also sells OpsRamp on the Google Cloud Marketplace.

In a prepared statement, HPE CTO Fidelma Russo said the acquisition advances “HPE hybrid cloud leadership and expands the reach” of the HPE GreenLake platform into IT Operations Management.

OpsRamp CEO Varma Kunaparaju said in a prepared statement that the “integration” of OpsRamp’s hybrid digital operations management offering with the HPE GreenLake platform will “provide an unmatched offering for organizations seeking to innovate and thrive in a complex, multi-cloud world.” He added that partners and the channel will “play a pivotal role to advance their as-a-service offerings” as customers look for a “unified approach to better manage their operations” from the edge to the cloud.