HPE has emerged as the go-to-company for hybrid cloud: Som Satsangi, SVP & MD, HPE India

Today, organisations across industries are undergoing digital transformation to accelerate the speed of business, reimagining the customer experience, driving efficiency, and accelerating innovation. While the enterprises are focusing on digital investments to drive their transformation strategies, the technology vendors left no stone unturned to capture the burgeoning market opportunities.

The story for Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) is no different. The company has been able to cement its position as the global edge-to-cloud company by helping organisations accelerate outcomes by unlocking value from all of their data, everywhere. The tech major has been one of the first to recognise the need to deliver a unified and consistent cloud experience, from edge to cloud, with its HPE GreenLake platform.

“We are doing a lot of work in this direction, as we had promised our customers that we will be the best-in-class in hybrid cloud space and continue to deliver our entire edge-to-cloud strategy and services portfolio. Our entire product portfolio and services address the requirements of all the industries we serve. We are seeing greater acceptance of HPE GreenLake amongst our customers and partners,” says Som Satsangi, SVP and Managing Director, HPE India.

HPE GreenLake & XaaS – the key differentiators

Enterprises are adopting hybrid multi-cloud approach as a key ingredient for their digital transformation strategies. They are looking for a way to unify their multi-generation IT strategy with a consistent cloud experience across all their applications and data. While doing so, they seek the simplicity of a turnkey hybrid cloud that integrates leading software, infrastructure, and services from the vendors of their choice, all delivered from a single strategic partner as a cloud service.

As a long-time leader in technology innovation, HPE offers a full suite of products and services to manage multi-cloud environments with simplicity and enhanced data protection and availability. With HPE, customers can build their cloud strategy, implement multi-cloud environments, and streamline costs and operations using consumption models.

“Our main priority is ‘As-a-Service’ transformation and HPE GreenLake has become the central platform that brings a unified, cloud experience to our customers’ data and workloads and enables them to consume their IT as-a-service. HPE GreenLake also delivers multi-cloud and workloads as-a-service to help you gain more business value, control, and adaptability. To maximise resource usage and manage spending, you gain a single view of usage and aggregate costs across multi-cloud with the visibility needed to handle every detail ,” adds Satsangi.

He further states, “Since we began our as-a-service pivot in 2019, our revenue has more than doubled which is an excellent proof point of future demand. Our as-a-service orders have increased more than 30 percent from a year ago, helping us close the fiscal year with as-a-service orders growth of 68 percent. In the final quarter of the fiscal year/Q4, our as-a-service orders represented approximately 12 percent of total company bookings/wins.”

The key differentiator of HPE GreenLake includes the ability of the customer to retain control and exercise choice around the IT Infrastructure and other solution components. The enterprises can flexibly choose the way they want to consume IT services and also decide the quantum of services to be consumed. Using HPE’s cloud platform, they can also monitor the consumption of various IT elements, derive insights from the same and use these data driven methodologies to intelligently deploy workloads across various cloud platforms within the organisation, thereby driving a lower IT cost envelope.

In June this year at HPE Discover event in Las Vegas, HPE unveiled eight new HPE GreenLake cloud services, giving customers more choice, control, and predictability for their enterprise cloud delivery. Today, HPE GreenLake platform enables more than 120,000 users, powers more than 2 million connected devices, managing more than one exabyte of data. Among its top 100 customers, nearly 80 percent have adopted the HPE GreenLake platform, and that traction is driving momentum across the portfolio.

The company’s partners have also played a crucial role in the creating the growth momentum for HPE GreenLake platform. Taking cognizance of their contribution, Satsangi asserts, “HPE’s partners play an essential role in both shaping and executing its strategy to become an edge-to-cloud platform-as-a-service company. Therefore, our partners are also seeing the relevance of HPE GreenLake with our customers. They have won more HPE GreenLake orders during Q4 FY 22 than the previous quarters. During the fourth quarter, we also saw a greater share of partners winning multiple HPE GreenLake deals.”

The India story for HPE

HPE has been a strong partner in providing IT solutions to large enterprises in India for more than a decade. HPE India has the highest number of employees outside of the United States covering a full range of activities including engineering, sales, global services, operations, and support functions. The company believes that India is one of the largest and fastest growing economies in the world, hence it is a critical market for HPE’s global business.

Living up to the market expectations and delivering on its commitment to serve the customers, during the pandemic period (in 2020), HPE India stepped up to the challenge of quickly responding to customers’ needs, as they had to adapt their own businesses to the ‘new normal’ of remote working. The company witnessed an uptick in demand for its services, including Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI), Hyper Converged Infrastructure (HCI) and security solutions.

“As most of the enterprises embarked on their digital transformation journey, we became their critical infrastructure partner. We served customers across industries, from BFSI, telecom to manufacturing and public sectors. Through our HPE Financial Services (HPEFS), we even extended the support to MSMEs and SMBs by funding their businesses. We also ensured that our employees’ wellness is well taken care of in those unprecedented times,” highlights Satsangi.

HPE has played a significant role in India’s digital transformation programs, ranging from building a pure play data centre to running digitisation programs for the largest insurance company in the country to developing the national identity program.

The tech major is actively supporting the Digital India and Smart Cities mission projects while also partnering with several PSUs to enable digital transformation for their organisations. It is now seeing the adoption of several digital technologies like IoT, AI-ML, analytics, etc., on a massive scale across smart cities and other projects where HPE provides unique, innovative and use case specific solutions from its range of hardware, software IPs along with design, advisory and integration services.

Public sector entities like the Steel Authority of India Ltd (SAIL), SAIL Bokaro and Oil and Natural Gas Corporation (ONGC) have recently signed partnership with HPE and deployed the HPE GreenLake edge-to-cloud platform to accelerate their digital transformation efforts, respectively.

“Some of the very important programmes run on a strong IT backbone and we provide that to the largest stock exchange, most public sector banks and insurance companies, covering majority of the BFSI sector in India. Hence, we have played a key role in crucial digital projects and platforms which fundamentally impact every citizen and business in the country,” says Satsangi.

Gearing up for 5G

According to the Ericsson Mobility report 2022, India will have 31 million 5G subscribers by 2022 end and 690 million by 2028. In order to address the market opportunity, HPE is working with all the top telecom operators in India for their private 5G readiness. HPE provides a re-imagined 5G core as a complete, end-to-end solution—without sacrificing openness or flexibility.

“HPE technologies enable customers to uniquely enjoy the best of both worlds with seamless interworking across both private 5G and market leading Wi-Fi, available as a service that telcos can resell through the network as a service (NaaS) offering HPE GreenLake for Aruba. We are working closely with best-of-breed providers of network functions from across the industry, but pre integrating all these pieces for our customers. When you use the new HPE 5G Core Stack, it looks and acts like a single-vendor solution,” adds Satsangi.

In February this year, HPE announced that it is extending its leadership in enterprise connectivity with unique capabilities for private networking, across both 5G and Wi-Fi, enabling new enterprise and industrial applications from edge to cloud. Pre-integrated with radio access capabilities from leading vendors, the private 5G solution can be deployed quickly, flexibly and as a service with HPE GreenLake.

The private 5G solution from HPE is based on HPE 5G Core Stack, an open, cloud-native, container-based 5G core network solution. It has been enriched with new capabilities for private networking including modular operation and automation, an enterprise self-service portal, agile configuration and change management. Automated operations are managed by HPE Service Director which offers a self-service portal for enterprise users, as well as an advanced portal for service provider administrators, making life easy for customers and telcos.

“With our leadership in both enterprise and cellular connectivity, HPE is the perfect partner to help customers deploy private networks that are future proofed for today’s data-first reality,” states Satsangi.

Future outlook

Satsangi believes that every organisation in India is undergoing digital transformation to accelerate the speed of business, reimagining the customer experience, driving efficiency, and accelerating innovation. Hence, both enterprises and the government sectors will continue to transform and make investments with the evolving times.

Even though the evolving economic and geo-political scenario might have little impact on the customers’ spending, the company is bullish about the economic growth of the country.

“As enterprises continue on their IT transformation journeys, the growth momentum will be maintained. We have the right product, strategy, and portfolio, which we will continue to build on in the coming years,” concludes Satsangi.