Social Media Round-Up

If you are a fan of Twitter, the headlines out of HPE have been coming thick and fast. And it would be hard to ignore the many stories about HPE and its GreenLake program and even though this topic is addressed elsewhere in this issue, looking at what has been appearing on social media channels has generated considerable interest.

First item that caught the attention of those who follow HPE on twitter was the announcement of a major HPE win with GreenLake at Wells Fargo. Of course, getting any news about technology shifts among USA’s biggest financial institutions has always been a difficult proposition, so hearing about HPE making inroads into this particular bank was indeed newsworthy.

HPE’s head of its GreenLake platform said Wells Fargo
will be using the technology for a
large digital transformation project.

According to Keith White, HPE’s head of GreenLake as-a-service platform, in an article published in ZDNET, this win at Wells Fargo just happens to be the biggest win for GreenLake to date. “Wells Fargo, said White, selected HPE ‘as foundation for important digital transformation work,’ work that includes building a ‘unified data repository.’ The project, said White, includes collaboration with software maker Splunk. Wells Fargo is embracing Kubernetes and containers, noted White.”

Interesting to read Kubernetes and Splunk referenced in this article suggesting that HPE is serious about its commitment to Kubernetes even as Splunk continues to dominate the market for visualizing data – naturally solid support for HPE’s GreenLake mission to change the way technology is consumed even as it pioneers bringing the “cloud experience on-prem.”

As ZDNET wrote, “They have to collect all this data, and they were trying to use the public cloud for that, the costs were pretty significant because of this data egress charge that the public cloud providers charge the customers to take data out.” This is something that more and more data center managers have begun complaining about as public cloud offerings rapidly grow more expensive and indeed disproportionally so as their services are taken up by users.

Somewhat related to this good news for HPE and GreenLake came news about SAP not doing quite so well. On October 26, 2020 SAP saw $35 billion wiped off their market cap (their worst trading day in 12 years). How so, you might ask? Seems like moving to a model not too dissimilar to HPE’s GreenLake doesn’t come without pitfalls. “While customers pay considerable sums upfront for SAP’s on-premise software packages, most of the payments for cloud subscriptions come down the line, SAP said. As a result, the company is abandoning medium-term profitability targets and warned that it will take longer than expected to recover from the pandemic.”

This comes after SAP had announced that it was going “all-in on cloud computing competing with the likes of Oracle and Salesforce,” according to a CNBC interview with SAP CEO Christian Klein. While SAP isn’t quite in the same market as HPE is with GreenLake, it is significant that even the biggest software vendors are struggling with the shift away from upfront payments.

And this isn’t entirely lost on the NonStop partner community. Which led me to pose the following question on LinkedIn:

Software vendors: transitioning to consumption pricing. For those in enterprise marketplace, how do you plan on transitioning from up-front fees mostly, to a more gradual slope. Check SAP stock prices today as it is a challenge even for the biggest software vendors; how will smaller / specialty vendors survive the transition?

While this attracted many views to date there has been no response so I will be posting more on this topic to see what further feedback might be provided. If this is of interest to you then please feel free to become active on social media in this regard.

As for where NonStop will likely play a role, it has already been reported that there have been agreements reached with HPE customers on GreenLake that have included NonStop but to date, full participation by NonStop in the GreenLake program is very much in its infancy. Work will be needed to be done on both sides so it is with interest that news has come that Karen Copeland is on the agenda for the upcoming virtual NonStop TBC where on Wednesday at 12:45 Pacific Time, she will be giving a presentation, “NonStop Future with GreenLake.”

In another tweet, news broke of HPE’s plans to focus its salesforce on more aggressive selling through partners. “We are opening up a lot more of the customer base to the channel as we head into the next fiscal year,” HPE GreenLake Cloud Services Business Group General Manager Keith White told CRN last month. “We are realizing they have the tools, resources and capabilities to really serve a much broader set of our customer base. I expect there to be a significant uptake with these customers going forward.” What triggered these remarks by HPE’s White, was news that the reshaping of its sales and marketing programs included numerous layoffs that, according to my sources, had started some time ago.

In truth, it was HPE CEO Antonio Neri who had told investors that HPE was going to be making bold changes to its go-to-market strategy. At the briefing back on October 1, 2020, he had said, “We are re-envisioning our go-to-market strategy to elevate the customer experience and accelerate our as-a-service mix, and will be making changes to these teams to provide a more seamless, holistic sales experience.” All the same, it is hard to ignore how the channel is aligning with GreenLake and this only further fuels HPE’s desire to be a presence in the on-prem, cloud-like, future of IT.

It is way too early to suggest to the NonStop community to drop what you are doing, revisit your plans for NonStop and check out GreenLake. That’s not the intent for now and as we know, the biggest NonStop customers have demonstrated a conservative approach to new ways to embrace technology so it’s unlikely there will be any kind of a rush to GreenLake. And yet, there will be those curious about the wins appearing on Twitter such as was the case with Wells Fargo (where NonStop continues to have a presence according to my sources), and in so doing begin to consider digging deeper into what GreenLake has to offer.

Which, by my books, is encouraging to see all the same. NonStop has come a long way since NonStop X  and vNonStop were announced – aren’t you glad to know that HPE continues to invest in NonStop even as we are certainly encouraged by all that is planned to be presented at the upcoming virtual TBC. See you all there and again, if you have missed any of the advance tweets about my own presentation, sponsored by HPE – the ABCs of NonStop TCO – I sure hope to see you find the time Wednesday morning to join me as I walk through the research note that first appeared in this publication.