HPE Updates Hybrid Cloud Management Software

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Hewlett-Packard Enterprise (HPE) on Monday unveiled updates to its software-defined infrastructure and cloud portfolio, allowing partners to initiate more cloud conversations with their customers.

With the new enhancements to HPE OneView and HPE OneSphere, customers now can automate and streamline data-center operations, gain insights more quickly across their hybrid clouds, and enhance service delivery to their internal customers. OneView now has 1 million licenses.

HPE’s Paul Miller

“Now [partners] can participate and have technology that you can sell, and differentiation you can sell, in any cloud conversation – public, private, on premise[s] – or even if you have your own services to be a host of those services,” Paul Miller, vice president of marketing for HPE’s software-defined infrastructure group, told Channel Partners.

“If you go back two years ago, everyone was saying, ‘Oh my gosh, the cloud’s coming,'” he said. “Well, the cloud’s coming and it’s a good thing. We’re seeing great growth in on-premises private clouds, and now we have tools for them. And in the public cloud we have tools for them. So our big message to partners is, get involved in these technologies and get involved in those conversations where you felt you were locked out.”

OneView 4.1 includes new firmware and driver-update enhancements .

“Roughly 80 percent of OneView is sold and deployed through partners, so they’re adopting this really well,” Miller said. “What partners are telling us is it enables (them) to go into a client and have a conversation around IT modernization, simplifying the deployment and management of infrastructure, with a software-defined conversation that enables them to up-level the way that they sell — not going into selling hardware, but selling the experience that customers are going to achieve enabling private clouds, enabling DevOps experiences across the board. And when they do that, their sales are richer. They get to pull services around these as well as increase the margin profile, and then it’s sticky because now they have not just hardware, but they’e really building around customers’ tool chains, which become quite sticky in the process.”

OneSphere enhancements include expanded support for Microsoft Azure public cloud.

“What partners really are looking for is to engage in any cloud conversation a customer is having,” Miller said. “Now with OneSphere they can go to a customer and say, ‘We understand you’re deploying these public clouds and here [are] some use cases that I can engage in.’ It’s SaaS and they sell it as a subscription. Partners can sell the subscription and the more a customer uses either on-premises or public cloud, and managed through OneSphere, the more revenue they make. So it’s not about fearing the public cloud; you can now profit along with a public cloud as it grows as well.”

OneView and OneSphere are available now.

“As enterprise cloud adoption continues to mature, organizations are developing a comprehensive strategy for managing both on-and off-premises infrastructure,” said Ric Lewis, senior vice president and general manager of HPE’s software defined and cloud group. “HPE OneView brings together all aspects of everyday life-cycle management across compute, storage and network resources into one place, giving companies the cloud performance they need to meet today’s rapidly evolving business needs.”

HPE also has completed its acquisition of hyperconverged network (HCN) vendor Plexxi. Plexxi provides software-defined data fabric networking technology. HPE said it will expand its market and strengthen its offerings for customers and partners.