Category Archives: HPE

HPE and Blackstone agree $825 million deal for Indian IT services business

Plant in front of a creative working deskHPE has announced its intention to sell its majority stake in Mphasis in a deal with Blackstone, believed to work in the region of $825 million.

The company said that Blackstone has agreed to purchase at least 84% of its stake in Mphasis for INR 430 per share. Blackstone will purchase the maximum amount of the remaining 16% stake that is permitted by Indian securities laws and subject to the outcome of a mandatory tender offer between signing and closing. Assuming the values are correct, HPE’s in the Indian business would be values in the region of $825 million.

Indian IT Services company Mphasis has been part of the HPE group since 2008, after its parent company EDS was wholly acquired by HPE. The company had 23,000 staff at the end of the quarter, delivering both business process outsourcing and IT services.

“While our financial relationship is changing, the business and commercial relationship with Mphasis remains an important part of our service delivery strategy,” said Mike Nefkens, GM of HPE Enterprise Services. “We remain committed to our strategic partnership with Mphasis and to providing our customers with the high level of service and support they expect from HPE.”

It is believed that the deal represents a move from HPE to remove business components which do not line with future business objectives. In recent weeks, the company has made moves to improve its position in a number of markets including cloud infrastructure equipment market and machines learning. While the deal may represent HPE moving away from the Indian IT services market, it will not affect the commercial relationship between the two companies.

HPE plans to renew the current master services agreement with Mphasis for another five years in connection with this transaction. It is estimated that HPE business accounted for 24 percent of the Indian company’s total revenue of rupees 15 billion in the fourth quarter of 2015.

HPE holds off Cisco for cloud infrastructure top spot

HPE street logoFindings from Synergy Research Group have HPE as the number one provider in the cloud infrastructure equipment market, narrowly outperforming Cisco over the course of 2015.

Total revenues for the cloud infrastructure equipment segment reached over $60 billion in 2015, with HPE accounting for just over 12%, and Cisco just under. Dell, Microsoft and IBM complete the top five, each controlling about 7% market share.

“There continues to be particularly impressive growth in the public cloud infrastructure market as AWS and other cloud operators are having tremendous success in attracting enterprises to their ever-expanding range of service offerings,” said Jeremy Duke, Synergy Research Group’s founder. “But enterprises too are buying ever-larger volumes of infrastructure to support their private or hybrid cloud deployments. Across the board there is a massive swing away from enterprises running workloads over more traditional and inflexible IT infrastructure.”

Synergy’s research showed between Q4 2014 and Q3 2015 total spend on infrastructure hardware and software to build cloud services exceeded $60 billion. Spend on private cloud accounted for more than 50% of these revenues, though public cloud is growing at a faster pace. HPE currently leads the private cloud space, with Cisco in second, however the roles are reversed for the public cloud segment.

While HPE and Cisco remain dominant in the server and networking segments, both companies have been releasing a number of new products in recent months to diversify their offering. Last week, HPE launched its ‘machine-learning-as-a-service’ on Microsoft Azure, which combines 60 API’s to provide machine learning capabilities. While HPE is seemingly capitalizing on the growing ‘as-a-service’ trend, Cisco is focused on its cloud-based collaboration service, Cisco Spark, which was launched with Verizon recently.

Market share graphMicrosoft features in the list due to its position in the server OS and virtualization applications market, where as Dell and IBM have demonstrated strong offerings in a broad number of cloud technology markets. Servers, OS, storage, networking and virtualization software combined accounted for 95% of the Q4 cloud infrastructure market.

While hardware and software to build cloud services revenues exceeded $60 billion, other areas of the industry demonstrated stronger growth. Public IaaS/PaaS services had the highest growth rate at 51%, followed by private & hybrid cloud infrastructure services at 45%.

“In many ways 2015 was the year when cloud became mainstream. Across a wide range of cloud applications and services we have seen that usage has now passed well beyond the early adopter phase and barriers to adoption continue to diminish,” said Duke. “Cloud technologies are now generating massive revenues and high growth rates that will continue long into the future, making this an exciting time for IT vendors and service providers that focus on cloud.”

HPE launches ‘machine-learning-as-a-service’ on Microsoft Azure

HPE office logoHPE has upgraded its Haven OnDemand proposition to deliver it as ‘machine learning as a service’ via Microsoft Azure.

The product offers a freemium model and has collected around 12,000 registered developers since the beta launch in 2014. Through the leadership of Haven OnDemand CTO, Chris Goodfellow, the service is built on the mantra of ‘the sum is greater than the parts’, utilizing more than 60 API’s which combine to provide machine learning capabilities.

“The software industry is on the cusp of a new era of breakthroughs, driven by machine learning that will power data-driven applications across all facets of life,” said Colin Mahony, GM of HPE Big Data. “HPE Haven OnDemand democratizes big data by bringing the power of machine learning, traditionally reserved for high-end, highly trained data scientists, to the mainstream developer community”

Haven OnDemand includes features designed for applications such as sentiment analysis in text, text extraction from images, face and logo recognition, social media analysis and speech recognition. Developers can also build a set of self-learning functions that analyze, predict and alert based on structured datasets. French start-up Ayni utilized the speech recognition API to help it create text transcripts of live audio streams on its foreign language education app.

Alongside the product development over the last 12 months, HPE has also run an active global hackathon program, which has provided feedback to help optimize the offering.

All HPE Haven OnDemand APIs and services are hosted on Microsoft Azure, building on the long-term strategic partnership between the two tech giants. Back in December, the partnership was extended as HPE appointed Microsoft Azure as a preferred public cloud partner. In return, HPE was granted preferred partner status in providing infrastructure and services for Microsoft hybrid cloud offerings.

“Organizations have massive quantities of information that can hold insights into business transformation, but harnessing it can be challenging,” said Garth Fort, General Manager, Partner and Channel Marketing, Cloud and Enterprise at Microsoft. “Leveraging the high performance and scalability of Azure, HPE Haven OnDemand brings our mutual customers a compelling solution to help turn their data into value.”

Whitman thanks partnerships for strong HPE Q1

HPE street logoHewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) has claimed earnings of $300 million in its first quarter of 2016 show it is shaping up for the cloud more strongly than expected.

HPE CEO Meg Whitman claimed that the success of the company was a consequence of a strong product offering. “Our portfolio is truly the best we’ve had in years and is driving strong customer traction,” said Whitman, who claimed the company was in better shape for the cloud, describing it as ‘agile and nimble’. In January BCN reported how HPE is faced with making 72,000 more redundancies this year, according to IT market watcher Trip Chowdhry at Delaware-based Global Equities Research.

The results created earnings of 41 cents per share in HPE, exceeding the expectations of Wall Street analysts, who reportedly expected non-GAAP earnings of 40 cents a share. While Wall Street had estimated HPE’s revenue to be $12.68 billion, the unexpectedly good revenue figure was marginally higher, at $12.7 billion.

According to HPE, the earnings for the next quarter could be as high as 43 cents a share.

Whitman told analysts that HPE is in a much better position, being the main infrastructure provider for SAP HANA with double the number of shipments of its nearest competitor. Another important deal, with Canadian comms company Rogers, helped HPE establish its credential as a leader in creating hybrid cloud infrastructures for enterprises as the move away from their existing traditional IT systems. In January BCN reported how hybrid cloud management is the main focus of HPE’s cloud strategy.

Meanwhile, HPE’s networking revenue showed 62% growth on the same period last year. This was attributed to the acquisition of wireless networking specialist Aruba Networks in March 2015, which has created record revenue from China revenue performed well in other regions. “We are seeing strength in China,” said Whitman. Aruba also grew double digits at an operational level and the vendor enjoyed demand for HPE’s switching portfolio to complement Aruba’s wireless offerings.

Enterprise group revenue was up 1% on the equivalent period in 2015, at $7.1 billion. Networking revenue grew by 54%, through Aruba’s wireless tech sales, however server and storage sales declined, falling by 1% and 3%. More worryingly perhaps, enterprise service revenue is also in decline, falling by 6% to $4.7 billion, while software revenue dropped by 10%.

HPE scoops two telco client wins for cloud service projects

HPE office logoHewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) has announced partnerships with telcos Swisscom and Telecom Italia subsidiary Telecom Personal to share its cloud service expertise and boost its presence in the comms industry.

In the Swisscom project HPE’s brief is to impose a network function virtualization (NFV) discipline on the IT and telecoms infrastructure, using its OpenNFV systems. Swisscom claims it is one of the world’s first communication service providers (CSPs) to pioneer the use of NFV to offer virtual customer premise equipment (vCPE) to its business customers.

In January BCN reported that HPE has launched an initiative to simplify hybrid cloud management for telcos using a new Service Director offering. Among the productivity benefits mooted for HPE Service Director 1.0 was options for pre-configured systems to address specific use cases as extensions to the base product, starting with HPE Service Director for vCPE 1.0.

In the Swisscom project HPE will use its HPE Virtual Services Router and HPE Technology Services in tandem with Service Director to create Swisscom’s new vCPE model. The objective is to allow Swisscom to manage its customers’ network infrastructure from a centralised location and provide networking services on-demand. This will cut costs for the telco, speed up service provision and boost the availability of services. It could also, claims CPE, make it easier to create new services in future.

Argentina based Telecom Personal has asked HPE to modernise its network in order to use 4G/LTE technologies to cater for an increasing appetite for data services among subscribers. HPE has been appointed to re-engineer the infrastructure and expand and upgrade part its network core. The success of the project will be judged on whether HPE can give a measurable improvement in service experience, network speeds and capacity, according to Paolo Perfetti, Telecom Personal’s CTO.

Yesterday BCN reported that HPE has launched AppPulse Trace, a service that developer clients can use to monitor their cloud app performances.

HPE launches AppTrace Pulse to monitor cloud apps

HPE street logoHewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) has launched a service that developer clients can use to monitor their cloud app performances.

The HPE AppPulse Trace is intended for developers and DevOps teams to use for isolating and fixing problems. The new module fits into HPE’s Application Performance Monitoring (APM) software suite and is integrated with HPE’s analytics engine Vertica.

HPE claims it can pinpoint the exact lines of code and server location at the root of every glitch in the cloud. It achieves this by trawling massive volumes of data produced by applications and end user interactions. AppPulse Trace can find faults in user interactions, analyse crashes and measure resource usage, according to HPE. The intelligence can then be used by developers to fine tune apps, create new tools and rethink their approach to building applications.

AppPulse Trace works alongside two other modules already available, AppPulse Active and AppPulse Mobile. Active lets developers emulate real-user behaviour with scripts and synthetic transaction robots. This helps to model events and identify problems to fix before apps are put into production. AppPulse Mobile tracks the digital user experience of mobile apps in production, giving developers and DevOps teams real-user data so they can prioritise the issues affect users most. It also gives instant insight into the health of any application.

With developers under pressure to deliver apps at short notice this could be an indispensable tool according to Tony Sumpster, general manager of HPE’s IT Operations Management.

Beta test user Chris Trimper, Application Services Manager at Independent Health Association said it saved him nearly a whole week of work. “The worst way to monitor performance is to wait for someone to complain. With HPE AppPulse we saved 36 IT hours a month by reusing scripts and we reduced our average app response time from 12 seconds down to 4 seconds,” he said.

New Service Director from HPE could simplify hybrid cloud management for telcos

HPE street logoHPE claims its new Service Director system could put comms service providers back in control of their increasingly complex hybrid computing estates. It aims to achieve this by simplifying the management of network function virtualisation (NFV).

HPE claims that Service Director will automate many of the new management tasks that have been created by the expanding cloud environment and provide a simpler system of navigation for all the different functions that have to be monitored and managed. The new offering builds on HPE NFV Director’s management and orchestration (MANO) capacity and bridges existing physical and new virtualized environments.

As virtualisation has expanded it has extended beyond the remit of current generations of operations support systems (OSS) and the coexistence of physical and virtual infrastructure can introduce obstacles that slow the CSPs down, HPE said. It claims the Service Director will help CSPs roll out new offerings quicker.

The main benefits of the system outlined by HPE are automation of operations, shared information, flexible modelling of services and openness. With a single view of the entire infrastructure and dynamic service descriptors, it aims to make it easier to spot problems and create new services, HPE claims. As an open system the Service Director platform will have interfaces to any new third party software defined networking controllers and policy engines.

Since there is no such thing as a green field NFV set up there has to be a system to rationalise the legacy systems and the new virtualised estate, said David Sliter, HPE’s comms VP. “Service Director is a transformational change in the relationship between assurance and fulfilment, allowing the OSS resource pool to be treated, automated and managed as a service,” said Sliter.

The telecoms industry needs an omnipotent service orchestration system that can span every existing NFV MANO and OSS silo, according to analyst Caroline Chappell, principal analyst of NFV and Cloud for Heavy Reading. A model-driven, fulfilment and assurance system like Service Director could speed up the delivery of services across a hybrid physical and virtual network, Chappell said.

HPE Service Director 1.0 will be available worldwide in early 2016, with options for pre-configured systems to address specific use cases as extensions to the base product, starting with HPE Service Director for vCPE 1.0.

HPE opens first EMEA customer engagement centre in London

HPE office logoHewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) has unveiled a new 14,000 square foot demonstration facility next to its new offices in London’s financial district.

The new City of London-based Customer Engagement Centre (CEC) is part of a new 67,000 square foot single occupancy on Aldermanbury Square, London. The demo centre is HPE’s first in the EMEA region. The plan is to use business experts and leaders to show potential customers what HPE’s new systems and services look like and how they can be tailored to improve the client’s productivity.

HPE said it aims to prove how four key areas of expertise can help customise each service to suit every client. The four pillars of expertise are in building hybrid IT, creating a data driven culture, security and increasing productivity.

HPE’s first area of expertise, ‘Transforming to hybrid infrastructure’ will be used to help clients bridge their existing IT with cloud environments and get the best performance from their mixture of resources.

Its expertise in ‘empowering data-driven organisations’ will be applied to help companies develop analysis techniques. HPE has promised to show them how to get faster and more meaningful insights, with a view to improving decision making and customer satisfaction, and to identify new business opportunities.

The ‘protecting digital enterprises’ strand of its expertise will be used to advise companies on risk management, protection from cyber threats and sustaining operational integrity.

The fourth area of expertise, ‘enabling workplace productivity’, will be used to help clients get the best possible options for employees, customers and partners through mobile and networking solutions, said HPE.

“We see the EMEA region as one of the world’s most dynamic technological hubs and fertile environments for this revolution, hence our decision to create the first CEC outside of the US in London,” said Peter Ryan, HPE’s MD for EMEA. The UK is HPE’s second largest market.

Meanwhile HPE Ventures has invested in software defined storage provider Scality as part of an ‘enhanced partnership’ between the companies.

“The enterprise storage market is diverging into latency-optimized and capacity-driven segments,” said Manish Goel, GM for storage at HPE. “As the leader in enterprise and hyperscale servers, and the fastest growing vendor in all-flash storage with HPE 3PAR StoreServ, this Scality partnership gives us a leadership position in capacity-driven storage as well.”

Cloud28+ promises to clear up the cloudy issues of compliance

Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) claims its new Cloud28+ cloud service catalogue will simplify the search for compliant cloud services for European enterprises.

Cloud 28+ is a community of commercial and public sector organisations aimed at expanding cloud service adoption across Europe. The Cloud28+ catalogue, on the other hand, is a centralized enterprise app store which now lists 680 cloud services from 150 members across the range of Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS), Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) and Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) offerings. To date 1000 end user organisations have pre-registered to use the catalogue.

The matchmaking Cloud28+ service online catalogue, now on general availability, promises a broad range of benefits for European customers. It allows customers to specify data centre locations and providers, in accordance with local laws and business requirements. It will helps users to find cloud-native independent software vendors with whom they can partner and it will help companies market themselves more expansively by letting them publishing their own services in the catalogue. This could allow end user organisations to turn their IT teams into ‘revenue-generating engines’, claims HPE.

The main benefit of the Cloud28+ service catalogue, HPE claims, is that it gives open access to huge numbers of enterprise cloud services. This will help cloud buyers to compare the cloud market, on functional and non-functional criteria, including price, service level agreements and certification levels.

One of the main selling points of the system is that is makes it easier to comply with increasingly strict data protections laws in the EU, according to James Kinsella, founder of Zettabox a cloud storage and team sharing system and the latest addition to the Cloud28+ catalogue. “It’s a logical community for Zettabox to join, as its mission is to build a cohesive and collaborative cloud environment, for Europeans by Europeans,” said Kinsella.

The Cloud28+ technology framework is based on HPE Helion OpenStack. This will give it the portability of cloud services and eliminate vendor lock-in, said Xavier Poisson, Hybrid IT VP at HPE. “This is an important milestone on the journey to a European Digital Single Market,” said Poisson.

The overturning of the Safe Harbour agreement in European courts had tremendous implications for cloud service providers, according to one analyst. “It certainly makes services that comply with European data privacy requirements more attractive,” said William Fellows, analyst at 451 Research.

HPE to give customer access to IaaS from NTT Communications

HPE customers can now get instant infrastructure as a service (IaaS) from NTT Communications portfolio following an agreement with the Japanese telco’s NTT America division.

The enterprise level service offers public, private and hybrid cloud options, plus NTT America’s professional services including cloud migration, data centre consolidation, managed infrastructure services and disaster recovery-as-a-service (DRaaS).

Demand for IaaS is rising, according to analyst Transparency Market Research which says the $15.6 billion online infrastructure market of 2014 will grow to become a $73.9 billion IaaS trade by 2022.

NTT American will be one of a few global IaaS partners to HPE, said its executive VP of Global Enterprise Services Jeffrey Bannister. Only integration of best of breed technologies within NTT’s own infrastructure can help customers stay ahead of their competition, said Bannister.

NTT Com’s secure network coverage (VPN) reaches 196 countries through a Tier 1 IP network and it has 140 data centres across the world with an enterprise-grade cloud footprint in 14 global markets and a planned expansion to 15.

In August BCN reported how NTT Com launched a multi-cloud connect service with direct private links to Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure and other top tier cloud service providers.

What was once a disruptive innovation is the new norm as businesses shift to off-premise systems, said Chuck Adams, HPE’s Partner Ready Service Provider Programme director. “IaaS is IT infrastructure without the overhead,” said Adams.