Digital transformation in various sectors is redefining the growth of organizations as the next generation technologies deployment has a great influence on their efficiency. Accelerated business transformation in the light of data-first modernization approach helps companies reach new heights and achieve operational excellence. HP Enterprise (HPE) is currently meeting the needs of their huge customer base across India and providing exceptional cloud experiences for them. HPE enables a unified experience for organizations with the HPE Greenlake edge-to-cloud platform to accelerate their digital transformation efforts. In line with the growing adoption of latest technological solutions across all industry verticals, Rajeev Ranjan, Editor, Digital Terminal recently had an exclusive conversation with Rajesh Dhar, Senior Director - Infrastructure Hardware Growth, HPE, India. The discussion revolved around the market position of HPE, increasing digitization, their offerings and etc. Read the excerpts below:
Rajeev: How do you look at the growth of HPE’s storage business? How HPE is currently positioned in this segment in India?
Rajesh: As an innovation leader in enterprise storage, we have helped organizations across industries including some of the renowned Fortune 100 enterprises to power their mission-critical applications with data. Leading the way with storage as-a-service, we have successfully raised the bar and set improved standards for reliability and performance. Accelerating the adoption of HPE GreenLake consumption model for HPE storage solutions, several HPE customers across the country have redefined their pace of customer experience through industry leading AIOps.
IDC’s recent estimates forecast that the total amount of data created, captured, copied, and consumed globally will increase rapidly, reaching 180 zettabytes in 2025. As the amount of data created and replicated reaches a new high, it has become the life force of organizations. Hence, simplifying data management has become the key to accelerate business transformation with a cloud operational experience for apps and data.
HPE is uniquely positioned to deliver to customer’s digital transformation needs with a data-first modernization approach which starts by simplifying data management with a cloud operational experience. For us at HPE, the advantage of having a really large, robust wide portfolio and thought leadership is that there is a solution for every segment, every complexity and every workload. Our latest innovations and offerings bring the cloud operational model to where data lives, accelerates digital transformation, streamlines data management, and helps our customers innovate faster than ever before. We will continue to introduce more and more choices in the portfolio, to power our customers’ data and applications. The goal for us, is to take away as much of the complexity away from our customers.
Rajeev: How do you see the adoption of the HPE GreenLake edge-to-cloud platform in India? Where do you see the demand is coming from?
Rajesh: Cloud computing has come a long way to become a critical part of today’s IT infrastructure. The public cloud has been around and has matured for more than a decade now. While it bought in cloud dynamics for a consumption-based IT strategy, it still lacked meeting several customer needs like security, latency, compliance etc.
Hence, HPE was the first to identify the need for delivering an as-a-service cloud experience on premises and at the edge with the HPE GreenLake cloud platform. HPE GreenLake delivers greater choice and simplicity with a unified experience and new cloud services that come to you and helps modernize your apps and data wherever they live. We have seen great acceptance for HPE GreenLake in India, leading to 3X growth in our new customer acquisitions. Our existing HPE GreenLake customers who had signed up for a few specific workloads, have been steadily bringing more and more workloads on the HPE GreenLake platform with the value that they have experienced. Some of the workloads that have seen greater acceptance with customers are SAP HANA as a Service, Data Recovery as a Service, and Infrastructure as a Service.
Additionally, several data center providers (DCPs) and independent software vendors (ISVs) see a great value in partnering with HPE GreenLake to build their offerings on it. We are seeing great interest and traction in our conversations with customers for HPE GreenLake offerings, specifically from sectors like manufacturing, banks for certain workloads, SMEs, few public sector units as well as government entities.
Rajeev: Please brief about the government projects where HPE is engaged currently. How do you align with the government’s digital transformation agenda?
Rajesh: HPE has played a significant role in India’s digital transformation programs, ranging from building a pure play data center to running digitization programs for the largest insurance company in the country to developing the national identity program. Also, we have played a key role in crucial digital projects and platforms which fundamentally impact every citizen and business in the country. HPE is actively supporting the Digital India and Smart Cities mission projects while also partnering with several PSUs to enable digital transformation for their organizations. We are 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 IP’s along with design, advisory and integration services.
Public sector entities like Steel Authority of India Ltd (SAIL) 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. After successfully working with many government departments on their digital journey, we believe that as we move ahead in the digital curve, the mix of applications would become more complex and unpredictable. Also, provisioning IT resources for this ever-fluctuating app demand would be a big challenge. To address this challenge, we are working on as-a-service partnership model which is a unique consumption-based offering from HPE. This model not only has the ability to keep the IT environment updated with the latest technological advancements but is also elastic which scales up and down depending on the demand fluctuations.
Rajeev: How do you sell your solutions in the Indian market? Please elaborate on your business model as well as the current channel strength across all markets in India.
Rajesh: At HPE we are committed to provide cutting edge solutions to our customers in a hybrid world. We have a comprehensive portfolio to deliver seamless experience and better business outcomes on the core, edge and the cloud. HPE’s route to market is through the partners and a majority of our business in India flows through our partners’ universe. In line with our worldwide structure, HPE India’s business consists of a strategic distribution and channels engagement model as per which, the partners are trained and skilled to lead with HPE portfolio to deliver outcomes for our joint customers.
Globally, at HPE, we have categorized our partnership into various categories depending upon the certification levels and revenue contribution. We continue to invest more funds and efforts to upskill our extended ecosystem. Within the country, we have a dedicated team focusing on large SIs, emerging SIs, key ISVs & service providers for joint collaboration and go to market.
HPE’s partner ecosystem carries capabilities around Sales, Pre-Sales and Services Delivery for HPE portfolio along with their own expertise in specific industry verticals. The solution sets comprise of core and edge infrastructure, security, cloud computing, HPC & AI, to name a few. Depending upon customer’s business outcome requirements, we encourage our partners to help customize HPE’s portfolio offerings coupled with their own services and third-party systems integration expertise to create best experiences for our joint customers.
Rajeev: What are your channel plans/program to further boost your market share in the storage business?
Rajesh: In the current digital transformation era, we understand data is most precious asset to any organization, keeping this in view we have given specific emphasis on our storage portfolio while designing the partner ready program framework for our India Partner ecosystem.
We have very strong momentum with HPE channel partners for our storage business. The enclosed programs ensure that our partners keep a strategic focus in positioning our wide range of Storage solutions to their customers which will in return help in increasing market share for our Storage business.
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. As a firm believer in partner enablements, we offer online support tools like Seismic, HPE Sales Pro, HPE Tech Pro. Recently, we have also hosted multiple storage based partner enablement physical and online events to empower our partners with deep dive insights on our storage portfolio.
Rajeev: How do you assure the best tech/service support to your loyal customers? What are your investment plans to further enhance the current service and support capabilities?
Rajesh: HPE has always been focused to deliver superior customer experience by continuous improvement of Skills, Process & Tools. We have successfully aligned HPE’s service delivery objectives to customer’s business outcomes, which eventually helped us to address their dynamic business demands and challenges. We have the best of experience across the complete services spectrum of Assessment, Design, Build & Deliver from Data Center build to Monolithic systems to HPC to XaaS platforms to solve different complex problems.
We deliver solutions for all Industry verticals spanning across heterogeneous technologies namely HPE Infra, 3P Products, Software Tools and Packages, which is unique. With the advent of hybrid cloud models, we have developed unique capabilities across all technology trends like Edge, Cloud, Security, IoT and Data platforms. Being one of the largest system integrators (SIs) in India delivering cutting edge mission-critical projects across all verticals and cities, we have a strong combination of highly skilled SME’s and Governance teams apart from leveraged augmentation models.
We have made specific investments across multiple state of the art tools & platforms, to highlight a few we have:
With early investments across people, process and technology, we are on this continuous journey to delight customers and in turn help deliver their business goals.
