HPE Adds Hybrid Cloud-as-a-Service Offering to GreenLake Cloud Platform

LAS VEGAS—Hewlett Packard Enterprise is expanding its focus on the cloud and the branch office, two areas of the enterprise that are evolving rapidly to adapt to challenges being presented by such trends as mobility, the rapid growth of the amount of data being generated and the internet of things. At the company’s Discover show here June 19, HPE officials unveiled the latest addition of its GreenLake cloud computing platform, a hybrid cloud-as-a-service offering that gives organizations an automated cloud operating model for running workloads in both public clouds and private on-premises environments. The new offering builds on previous GreenLake solutions unveiled last year, including an infrastructure as a service (IaaS) that delivers a pay-per-use model with metered usage and flexible capacity management capabilities. HPE in November 2017 also ran out a workload as a service that offers backup services for SAP Hana, databases, big data analytics and other applications. Meanwhile, the company’s Aruba business introduced the concept of the software-defined branch, which integrates the various aspects of the network in branch offices—including switches, gateways, access points, software-defined WAN (SD-WAN) and management—into a single solution for more simple operations, reduced costs and improved security. Tying all these together also enables easier scalability of the branch network, Kishore Seshadri, vice president and general manager of cloud solutions at Aruba, said during a press conference at the show. This is important given the rapid changes that are putting greater pressures on the branch, including that 85 percent of IT is embracing a multicloud agenda in 2018, the more than 20 billion connected devices expected by 2020, the continuing disaggregation of hardware and software, and the increasingly distributed nature of computing.