Johannesburg, 24 Feb 2021
South African demand is picking up for HPE GreenLake – the on-premises cloud-like solution bringing the best of cloud and on-premises infrastructure to budget-conscious businesses concerned about data sovereignty. This is according to Dino Psoulis, HPE Solution Architect at Axiz.
“Axiz was the first distributor to deliver the first HPE GreenLake contract in South Africa, and we’re now seeing growing interest from local customers who are looking to move away from capex and manage their resources better, yet still grow their businesses and remain competitive,” he says.
Solutions that matter
Psoulis explains that HPE GreenLake addresses organisations’ need to achieve the scalability and cost savings of the cloud, without moving to the public cloud. Enterprises often prefer to have critical applications and data on-premises for data gravity, latency, application dependency and compliance reasons, he notes, but they also need to control costs and simplify IT management. HPE Greenlake addresses these needs by bringing the cloud experience to apps and data everywhere, with public cloud services and infrastructure as a service on-premises, fully managed by HPE in a pay-per-use model at the edge. “It’s scalable, simplified IT, with a broad portfolio of HPE and partner technologies available, managed for you by HPE,” he says.
“IDC expects as a service revenue to exceed spending on products for enterprise IT this year. At Axiz, we know that the ‘as a service’ trend is real and that it delivers a very good experience to customers. Our response is that we will deliver that experience to on-premises IT, participating in both sides of this market,” Psoulis says.
“In light of the global adoption of as a service models and the huge success of solutions such as GreenLake, HPE is moving to become an as a service company by 2022. HPE has structured the GreenLake as a service model to offer fixed rand pricing for the duration of the contract, so the rand-dollar exchange and inflation rate have no impact on the customer’s budget. Customer case studies demonstrate a measurably lower total cost of ownership over five years, compared with public cloud or traditional on-premises infrastructure,” he says.
Greenlake offers faster time to value, and to ramp up projects, customers do not have to embark on new procurement cycles – they simply sign a change order request and have additional equipment installed on-site quickly and easily.
A study commissioned by HPE and carried out by Forrester Consulting among HPE GreenLake customers found that with HPE GreenLake, time to deploy projects can be shortened by 65%. In addition, HPE GreenLake can help simplify IT operations, achieving a 44% reduction in time spent “keeping the lights on” and 40% increased IT team productivity by reducing the support load on IT. HPE GreenLake delivers cloud economics on-premises, with a 30% capex saving due to eliminated need for over-provisioning.
HPE GreenLake also offers several benefits to channel businesses looking to deliver solutions to address their customers’ biggest challenges today. “GreenLake is a low-risk, fixed pricing solution, and because GreenLake Central offers a single platform to manage all of the GreenLake partner’s contracts, it simplifies contract management and service delivery,” says Psoulis. “The fact that there is a 99% retention rate after the HPE GreenLake contract is over speaks volumes about the success of the solution. End-users typically expand on their initial contracts.”
HPE GreenLake addresses the needs of businesses challenged by the need to control budgets and stretch resources while remaining compliant and growing the business, he says. Also, HPE offers direct support to channel partners and customers, and HPE Financial Services delivers a range of services to help businesses in uncertain times. Among these service offerings are innovative financing structures with payment deferral and payment relief; accelerated migration to convert owned IT assets into incremental cash sources; technology buyback programmes; and phased deployment schedules.
Share