Two years after landing at Hewlett Packard Enterprise with the position of chief technology officer (CTO in the usual acronym), Fidelma Russo has been awarded with more skills, making her responsible for a newly created internal structure, Hybrid Cloud. ), central axis of the strategy set by Antonio Neri, executive director since 2018. The promotion does not end there: Russo will be in charge of GreenLake, a business model through which companies can acquire any product or service from the HPE catalog, by subscription or pay per use. And, if she didn’t have enough, she’s been tasked with righting the ship in data storage.
Thus said, it is explainable that in the ranks of HPE there are those who see it as de facto invested as number two of this corporation that is about to expand its perimeter when, towards the end of 2024, regulators validate its acquisition of Juniper Networks for 14,000 million dollars, announced by both companies this Wednesday.
Interviewed in Barcelona in early December, Russo stated: “We have decided to bring together the company’s fundamental assets to unleash its energy and its ability to generate more business. Consequently, we have reorganized the sales force and support teams in response to that objective.”
In a curious play on words, I would then say that “GreenLake is a hybrid cloud per se, while our hybrid cloud is identified with GreenLake, which encompasses the entire HPE offering, including Aruba Networks and supercomputing products, with their own internal organizations.” In storage, which revolves around the Alletra family systems, he recognizes that “in this market, if you want to gain or recover market share, you have to be willing to fight a battle that, in our case, has rivals as a counterpart. such as Dell and Pure Storage, to whom we are gaining customers based on the multicloud principle, which we have applied for years.”
In order for the lawsuit to assume that GreenLake is something that goes beyond pay-per-use, Russo intends to “build what we call value services on top of the platform” and incorporate acquisitions such as OpsRamp, whose software layer is responsible for managing assets that can be in on-premises or cloud environments, the essence of what is expected from a hybrid cloud. He hopes to announce this year the implementation of a third-party managed services model on HPE storage. Other approaches are greener: “Over time, everything will revolve around GreenLake, a long-range strategy that is moving from its nature as a payment service to another in platform format and that customers will be able to acquire as a service.”
On the other hand, in December, days after Broadcom took ownership of VMware, it would have been foolhardy to expect from Russo a confirmation of the mutual oaths between VMware and HPE, which have worked well for years, even when the former was controlled by Dell, sworn adversary of the second. “It is too early to know Broadcom’s plans, so we will wait to find out its movements, as the entire industry is doing. I have to say that the cooperation between the two is very important for us and we trust that it will be maintained.”
The day after the conversation, in a room at the Fair, HPE announced an update of the current agreement with Nvidia, a key piece in the artificial intelligence strategy that it has adopted and which, it was said, will be another of the competencies that Fidelma will accumulate. Russo in his wallet.
