HPE: GreenLake Central Is 'the Last Puzzle Piece' in Cloud Experience Strategy

As HPE continues making its shift to an as-a-service company, the vendor today announced HPE GreenLake Central, an as-a-service portal and operations console from where customers can manage and run their entire hybrid IT estate, or edge to cloud. HPE calls GreenLake Central the next generation of GreenLake, however partners need to know that this latest offer is only available direct from the vendor.

HPE’s Flynn Maloy

“HPE GreenLake feels like a cloud experience, it’s scalable, it’s managed for you, you pay for what you use,” Flynn Maloy, vice president strategy and marketing for HPE Greenlake told Channel Futures. “However, as I’ve spoken to partners, customers and analysts about this, they say, ‘Yeah, mostly, but you don’t have that self-service interface you get when you go to AWS or Azure.’ That’s where you can click and add capacity or see how things are doing, move things round or spin up an environment. GreenLake didn’t have that point and click automation to it like when you go to the public cloud. So, what we’re announcing with HPE GreenLake Central is the last puzzle piece to truly offer a modern cloud level experience for your on-prem, single tenant environment.”

HPE GreenLake Central provides the following capabilities:

“We’ve also made available Azure Access Manager and AWS Access Manager inside the tool for a unified experience. You can manage instances of Azure through GreenLake Central. The idea is to provide what customers have asked for — one unified experience for on-prem and off-prem instances,” said Maloy.

HPE recently announced that year-end totals around GreenLake channels is about 300% growth. There are 500 partners worldwide selling GreenLake, with seven GreenLake offers available to sell — or seven top workloads, very infrastructure-, or storage and compute-focused.

HPE GreenLake direct sales have moved up the stack — applications, backup, for example, and, now, GreenLake Central. Today, HPE’s GreenLake business, both direct and indirect, accounts for over $3 billion in contracts, according to Maloy.

Expect to see GreenLake Central made available to partners in the second half of next year. “We should have all of the tooling refined enough to bring on the partners. We also want to make all of the partner’s value-added services available through our marketplace so they can log in and see their customers and partners environments, and also layer on top their value-added services. And for partners who have their own online portals, we want them to be able to connect to GreenLake Central,” he said.

The tools for partners are in the works.