Paul Hunter: HPE GreenLake Just Posted Its Fourth Consecutive Quarter of Triple-Digit Channel Sales Growth

‘We continue to make great progress with the (HPE GreenLake) consumption led offer,’ says HPE Worldwide Channel Chief Paul Hunter, singling out the 112 percent year over year sales growth of GreenLake through partners in the most recent quarter.

Hewlett Packard Enterprise’s GreenLake pay-per-use cloud offering has just completed its fourth consecutive quarter of year-over-year triple-digit sales growth through partners, said HPE Worldwide Channel Chief Paul Hunter.

HPE GreenLake orders through partners were up 112 percent in HPE’s third fiscal quarter ended July 31, said Hunter in a conference call with partners after HPE posted better than expected earnings for its third fiscal quarter ended July 31.“We continue to make great progress with the (GreenLake) consumption led offer,” said Hunter.

HPE has plans to ratchet up the GreenLake partner sales charge even further with a plan to double channel sales next year, said Hunter.

As part of that sales offensive, HPE is poised to offer more HPE GreenLake workloads and put additional distribution firepower behind the model, said Hunter. “We continue to improve the ease of execution for GreenLake,” he said.

The Pointnext services business through partners, meanwhile, posted seven percent sales growth in the quarter with installed base renewals growing at a double digit clip.

Partners are “doing a really nice job selling more (Pointnext) proactive services” including HPE’s DataCenter Care service and support offering, said Hunter.

HPE’s stepped-up (SMB) small medium business sales charge, which has resulted in more aggressive pricing in the SMB server market, is starting to pay off, said Hunter.

HPE’s SMB transactional compute business grew five percent in the quarter, said Hunter. “We believe we are starting to take share in a market that overall is pretty flat,” he said.

Another sign of HPE’s more aggressive SMB posture: the introduction two months ago of Aruba Instant On- the first ever Aruba wireless offering for small businesses.

“What we see is small businesses increasing their investments in Wi-Fi because it is transforming the experience that customers have,” said Hunter.

The Aruba portfolio continues to be a big software sales growth driver for partners.

Aruba’s cloud network management offering grew by 12 percent in the quarter. The Aruba Central cloud management analytics platform posted a robust 59 percent increase in sales through partners.

Aruba’s Meridian location based services software, meanwhile, grew by 73 percent.

In the hybrid IT business, HPE’s Nimble all flash sales with the InfoSight AI based predictive analytics grew at 16 percent in the quarter with strong growth in North America and Japan.

HPE is also seeing a new wave of new accredited technology professionals from partners, said Hunter. HPE certified technology professionals is up 33 percent in the current fiscal year, he said.

“The community of technicians and archtiects that are working with customers to advocate on platform decisions is growing,” said Hunter. “Our engagement with our partners is becoming more community based.”

Nalit Patel, CEO of All Solutions, a Livingston, N.J-based solution provider, said HPE GreenLake is gaining momentum in the channel because of HPE’s steadfast partner commitment. “HPE is a 100 percent channel led business,” he said.”They stand behind their partners.”

GreenLake is also gaining channel traction because of the increasing customer frustration around higher-than-expected public cloud bills, said Patel. “Customers are looking for a way to curtail the public cloud monster,” he said.

GreenLake provides customers with a secure, predictable pay-per-use model, said Patel. What’s more, he said, HPE GreenLake is generally priced at a 30 percent plus savings versus public cloud.”HPE is giving customers a complete end to end cloud solution from a company that creates the hardware, deloys the hardware and supports the hardware,” he said. “That is the secret sauce of HPE’s GreenLake sales growth.”