HPE—Taking an award-winning approach to overcome customer modernization challenges

HPE has a long history of helping its customers overcome even the toughest business challenges. “HPE’s mission is to help people grow and evolve,” says Joseph George, HPE’s global vice president of HPE strategic alliance marketing. “Our mantra has always been ‘Do what’s right for the customer,’” George explains.

For HPE, this means looking at every customer individually, no matter their industry or the problem they approached HPE to help them address. Instead of asking “What do we have in the portfolio that can fix it?” HPE’s first approach is simply “How do we fix it?”

This approach to problem-solving has made HPE very successful in helping customers go from edge to cloud and modernize their entire infrastructure with solutions like HPE GreenLake for VMware, integrated HPE vSAN ReadyNodes, and hybrid workplace, to name a few. And for over 20 years, HPE and VMware have partnered to help more than 200,000 customers overcome their obstacles with digital transformation in enterprises worldwide.

HPE’s customer-centric approach and longstanding and successful partnership earned the company the Worldwide VMware Partner of the Year in the 2023 VMware Partner Achievement Awards. These awards honor VMware ecosystem partners for delivering solutions and services that result in noteworthy performance, impact, and outcomes for customers.

“Our strong partnership with VMware spans decades, and this year we’re thrilled to be the Worldwide VMware Partner of the Year,” George says. “Together with VMware, we’ve innovated in so many ways and have engineered so many great products. It’s been a phenomenal partnership that’s benefited our joint customers, VMware, and us.”

One result of the close collaboration is HPE GreenLake for VMware, announced late last year. The solution brings together HPE GreenLake and VMware Cloud to deliver a fully integrated solution with a simple pay-as-you-go hybrid cloud consumption model.

But rather than rest on the success of a few innovations, both companies continue to pioneer ways to use newly developed technologies to help their customers succeed. “There are always new areas to explore and promote in partnership. We can continue to ask critical questions about how new technologies can apply to business and the best way to make it happen. For instance, I think we’re at the tip of the iceberg in terms of understanding how we make our customers successful at the edge,” George says.

Building a future together

Businesses today operate in a world where things change constantly and quickly—and companies don’t have a lot of time to figure out what those changes mean. They need solutions that address those changes and create new opportunities to grow and improve.

VMware Cross-Cloud managed services now make it easier than ever for customers to become cloud smart and improve time-to-value for implementing and utilizing multi-cloud environments. “HPE is optimistic about the possibilities of VMware Cross-Cloud managed services because it meshes so well with our strategy with HPE GreenLake and the hybrid cloud, making customers successful from the edge to the cloud,” George says.

Enterprises are now thinking about where they want applications and data to reside—on the edge, in the public cloud, in data centers, or in multiple clouds. With VMware Cross-Cloud services, enterprises now have a way to more easily stand up applications and the services to run those applications without having to be the expert that’s managing, administrating, or executing them.

HPE prides itself on being able to solve the big problems. Customers come to them with an idea, such as “I need to figure out how to make my sales force more digitally accessible” or “I want to come up with a way to engage my customer with a new initiative.” VMware and HPE then combine the hardware, software, and services necessary for a complete, multi-faceted solution. “VMware Cross-Cloud managed services make things as frictionless as possible,” George says.

Accelerating digitization For a European manufacturer

Companies in all industries face the challenge of digital transformation to serve their customers better. Stelmet, a leading manufacturer of garden architecture in Poland and Europe for more than 25 years, came to HPE for solutions to modernize their IT. The company needed help standardizing new technologies, including taking their existing SAP instance and migrating it to SAP S/4HANA.

While Stelmet originally had concerns about migrating to SAP S/4HANA, they saw strong business returns after standardizing HPE ProLiant systems coupled with HPE Alletra 6000 storage systems with VMware.

“With HPE and VMware, they were able to have the process and efficiency in place to have a very structured, planned-out S/4HANA migration,” George says. Stelmet reduced their order wait time to 14 days while simultaneously achieving 99.9999% availability, even during the migration. On top of that, the company saw a data reduction of 10.6TB and reduced the data conversion process by 60% to 70%.

Stelmet is just one of many customers optimizing processes across the entire business with HPE and VMware. While many are already standardized on-premises on VMware vSphere, HPE is investigating solutions such as VMware vSAN ReadyNodes as part of a hyper-converged infrastructure solution. This allows HPE to have elegant solutions that are simple to use and easy to deploy.

“For customers who are looking to go even further in their hybrid cloud solution, we look at VMware Cloud Foundation as a basis to get them where they need to go,” George says. “It lets them focus on their business while HPE and VMware focus on the infrastructure that enables their business.”

To learn more about transformative, customer-first companies like HPE, visit the resources on VMware Partner Executive Edge, and check out our Cloud Smart Strategy whitepaper.