A Path to Consumption
As businesses around the world continue to shift to a consumption IT model, what does that mean for you? In this article, we explore the “why” behind this shift and how your business can reap the rewards of pay-as-you-go IT infrastructure with insights from Bardia Khalilifar, Region Leader at HPE GreenLake, shared at our 2021 HPE and Metropolitan Computers & Supplies Customer Webinar.
The Next Wave of Digital Transformation
In the current climate, more and more businesses are pursuing digital transformation fuelled by applications and data everywhere. And in many cases, hybrid cloud has happened by accident. When public cloud was deployed, a lot of businesses wanted to host some of their other important applications and data within the public cloud but also maintain some of their important applications and data in their own private environment.
This shift from a net revenue perspective is also reflected in the numbers. For example, in Q4 of 2010, the technology industry’s net revenue equalled $202 billion with services making up 36% and product making up 64%. Fast forward to Q4 of 2020 and you’ve got a net revenue of $214 billion made up of 63% services and 37% product—so you can see it’s flipped. There’s now more demand within the cloud-first response but also in as-a-service because the market is transitioning. The hardware enterprise network solution is reducing more and more due to costs and management associated with this model.
Businesses of all sizes and across every industry are now operating in the hybrid edge-to-cloud world and a large majority of businesses have a cloud-first mentality. This idea of cloud-first is really hybrid cloud-first. In fact, over 95% of organisations have both public and private cloud environments.
So, let’s talk about the value of moving from a more enterprise-grade, hardware only solution, or public cloud option, to a more hybrid model. With a hybrid cloud-first approach, a business can tackle four of the biggest challenges of our time—agility, scalability, cost-effectiveness, and complexity. To solve these issues, solutions like HPE GreenLake transition customers into a consumption space where they only pay for what they use and can adapt rapidly by adding or removing storage or compute capacity as needs change. It also allows businesses to host their apps and data anywhere.
What is HPE GreenLake?
To give you a bit of an introduction to what HPE GreenLake is, it’s an edge-to-cloud platform that allows applications and data to be co-located at any location, in any data centre. Some of the biggest benefits businesses gain from this consumption-based model is self-service, pay-per-use, the ability to scale up or down, and a completely managed platform.
The GreenLake ecosystem features the latest technology including enterprise-grade AI/ML and analytics, powerful Intel® processors, and modern security measures. To tie everything together, it has a single-pane dashboard where your business can manage your own workloads, consumption, and capacity, while also being able to identify how it stacks up against the cost model every month. The
Pay-per-use means that if your business tends to scale up or down, you will only pay for what you truly consume as opposed to the assets itself. A lot of businesses don’t operate in a static environment—all business experience downtimes and uptimes depending on fluctuating demands. HPE want to support and fuel this by giving businesses the ability to easily scale capacity up or down, providing a more cost-effective way of operating. On top of this, HPE partner with IT companies such as Metropolitan Computers & Supplies to provide the management aspect so that businesses can free up resources within their own IT teams.
The Benefits of a Consumption Model
When you’re looking at the benefits of a consumption-based model like GreenLake, there are four key advantages.
- 80% shorter time to deploy digital projects: GreenLake gives time back to businesses so they can focus on what’s appropriate for themselves as opposed to just keeping the lights on.
- 85% reduction in risk: Less unplanned downtime due to the additional capacity that can be deployed within a day or two as opposed to months.
- 45% reduction in total cost of ownership (TCO): Lower costs associated with purchasing hardware outright, adding capacity over the years, and investing in resources to manage the platform.
- 40% increase in IT team productivity: Using GreenLake managed services boosts IT team productivity while providing better control and insights.
How Does HPE GreenLake Managed by Metropolitan Computers & Supplies Work?
If we take a 5-year term as an example. Your business might experience times of growth or it could go the other way at times. When you compare GreenLake to a standard Capex offering, the latter has a huge overhead cost from day one. With the GreenLake consumption model, Metropolitan Computers & Supplies provides a minimum commitment level at the beginning so that you don’t pay for anything you don’t need.
Metropolitan Computers & Supplies do an assessment and scope your environment to determine what you actually need. We then give you what you need right now as well as, say, 20% variable usage capacity that you can dip into when you need to add a new site or location. You can simply add what you need without experiencing downtime.
GreenLake also has a buffer zone so that when there’s a spike happening within your environment, you can use that buffer zone to dial your capacity up when required. The great part is that you don’t have to pay for that buffer zone when you don’t require the capacity. You can also simply dial it back once you no longer need it.
As part of GreenLake’s offerings, HPE assigns Account Support Management to sit with Metropolitan Computers & Supplies and our clients to assess the environment and advise how much capacity is utilised each month, helping you optimise your usage. In addition to this, if you need more capacity deployed, it can be done in 72 hours instead of 3 months. By taking this approach our team and HPE help your business minimise overhead costs.
What are the Billing Options?
One of the key benefits of consumption IT is flexibility, so we allow businesses to choose the term agreement that works for them—this could be three, four, or five years. The payment is then measured on a monthly basis.
How Does Consumption IT Impact My Teams?
GreenLake doesn’t just benefit your IT teams, it’s great for plenty of other key areas in your business. Below are some of the ways it can make life easier for other teams.
- Developers: Can speed up development and release code faster.
- Finance: Have a clear dashboard to see what is being spent and where.
- Legal and compliance: Security and compliance features of GreenLake prevent business risk.
- IT: Know when more or less capacity is required.
- Data scientists: Gain insights to take their ML pilots to production.
- Chief Information Officer: Doesn’t need to manage IT infrastructure services and can instead focus on other important projects.
Can Legacy Infrastructure be Combined with a Consumption Model?
If you’ve got a third-party legacy kit that’s still current, HPE has the ability to tie this into their GreenLake agreement. Their financial services team can arrange a buyback of this kit and then get your business set up with GreenLake. Or, if you want to maintain the kit, the managed service aspect of GreenLake can be deployed with that until you’re ready to upgrade.
With a consumption model like GreenLake, the power is put back in your hands. As we’ve discussed, it means your business can save money, scale when you need to, and cut back on management time. It also gives you the power to host applications and data where you need to without causing complexity issues. If you’d like to learn more about consumption IT and what this would look like for your business, get in touch with our experts for an obligation-free chat.