“The cloud is not a destination, it’s an experience.” – says Florian Bettges, HPE GreenLake Category Lead, Central Europe. It’s hard to disagree with his words, given the momentum behind HPE GreenLake – a brand that epitomises HPE’s transformation to a cloud platform provider at the core of its as-a-service offering, as Betteges discusses in the interview.
Klaudia Ciesielska, Brandsit: Today, GreenLake is a huge service group with 900 partners and 65,000 customers. However, such a gigantic brand was not created overnight. When did you see the biggest growth in terms of HPE GreenLake’s development?
Florian Bettges, HPE: Everything we do at HPE at the end refers to HPE GreenLake. It is difficult to pinpoint a single moment of breakthrough. HPE GreenLake is growing all the time. Since the very beginning in 2018, we have seen impressive progress, resulting in today’s number of partners and customers. Since then, we have been growing strongly in double digits year on year, and I am of the opinion that the peak of the growth rate is still ahead of us.
Klaudia Ciesielska, Brandsit: Is the continued dynamic growth of HPE GreenLake services influenced by the high level of digitisation of SMEs in recent years?
Florian Bettges, HPE: A huge number of SME companies are already betting on digital solutions in the as a service model, and the number of customers in this sector is growing strongly. This is an opportunity for us to increase our partner network, which confirms that the biggest growth is still to come.
Klaudia Ciesielska, Brandsit: HPE GreenLake is a brand that HPE is successively developing. Why?
Florian Bettges, HPE: HPE GreenLake is of great importance to the company. When we ask customers “What do you think about what HPE does?”, we often hear answers in reference to the success of our brands, such as HPE ProLiant or HPE Alletra – “You are a storage provider, you are a server provider, you make good hardware” and so on. I need to make it clear – HPE has undergone a transformation and transformed itself into a completely different company in the last three years. We are among the world’s leading IT infrastructure providers and this is at the core of our as a service offering. We are a cloud services company and HPE GreenLake is a brand that reflects this change. HPE GreenLake encapsulates the entire vision, perspective and strategy of our business – everything from services to cloud to sustainability.
However, it is worth remembering that HPE GreenLake is also the name of a cloud services platform. This platform enables monitoring and management of multi-cloud environments, including public cloud instances. We have been saying for years that hybrid cloud is the future. Now we see that this future is becoming the present, and we are ready for it.
Klaudia Ciesielska, Brandsit: What are the key cloud challenges?
Florian Bettges, HPE: The cloud is not a destination, it is an experience. So we don’t talk about what the hardware position is in the customer’s data centre, public cloud or co-location. We call it capabilities and user experience and how they engage with IT services. HPE provides these capabilities in the cloud so that the service user can scale, control data and benefit from a fee-for-consumption model.
However, the challenges that organisations face are quite common – including access to know-how and resources, costs and data sovereignty. Based on these challenges, we are already seeing a lot of repatriation in the market – i.e. moving instances from the public cloud back to an on-premises environment. In the long term, running services in the public cloud becomes quite problematic due to increased expenses, lack of knowledge, and not enough qualified specialists. Therefore, such companies are starting to look for someone to manage the cloud and reduce its costs. And this is where HPE GreenLake comes to the rescue, which allows combining the public cloud with other solutions, which is sometimes very difficult for customers.
