Editorial

Crown Commercial Service signs MoU with HPE to accelerate sustainable IT in public sector

The agreement provides the public sector with new HPE GreenLake cloud services and enables access to sustainability reporting and assessment offerings.

Posted 19 May 2023 by Christine Horton


Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) has signed a new Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) with Crown Commercial Service (CCS) to provide UK public sector organisations with HPE GreenLake edge-to-cloud solutions that support the UK government’s net zero commitment.

Philip Orumwense CBE, commercial director and chief technology procurement officer at CCS and Andrew Young, VP of UK & Ireland sales, HPE

In addition to HPE’s range of compute, storage, networking and cloud solutions, public sector organisations will have access to value-added sustainability services at no additional cost.

CCS – the UK’s largest public procurement organization – supports the public sector to achieve maximum commercial value when procuring common goods and services. In 2021/22, CCS helped the public sector to achieve commercial benefits equal to £2.8 billion.

“CCS has renewed and extended our relationship with HPE through this updated Memorandum of Understanding which will help our customers accelerate their IT modernisation, achieve sustainability and utilise systems that harness the power of data to improve services for citizens,” said Philip Orumwense CBE, commercial director and chief technology procurement officer at CCS.

“This MoU extends to cover all areas of HPE’s portfolio including new key areas such as HPE’s pay-as-you go GreenLake platform – making it easier for all public sector bodies, no matter how big or small, to get value for money.”

Legacy IT still a factor in public sector

HPE has long been critical of the UK government’s cloud-first policy. Noting that the UK public sector still has critical services running on legacy technology, it said: “Organisations are pressed to put the right strategy and tools in place to manage their workloads and resources efficiently throughout their inevitably hybrid infrastructure, not just to reduce costs, but also their environmental footprint.”

It claimed its GreenLake platform will enable customers to flexibly scale and actively manage infrastructure utilisation at a granular level, eliminating overprovisioning and optimising energy consumption.

“At HPE we know from the research that we have done that over 70 percent of UK public sector organisations have on premise workloads that can’t easily move to the public cloud for a variety of reasons,” said Pauline Yau, public sector director at HPE UK. “Our mission is to help those public sector organisations to modernise those workloads and thereby deliver better outcomes for UK citizens, students and patients through efficient and innovative use of technology.

Sustainability assessments

Additionally, as part of the new MoU with HPE, there are free sustainability assessments for the first 100 customers to help them create a sustainability strategy. The assessment provides an analysis of energy efficiency, providing guidance on IT transformation considerations, datacentre optimisation, as well as engineering and transformation project services to drive sustainability.

Public sector organisations will also have access to annual reports detailing factors like sustainability savings, IT asset up- and recycling, and the value of resold upcycled assets. These will help to quantify the environmental impact and savings achieved through IT asset lifecycle solutions and can be leveraged by the organisations for their sustainability reporting. 

“With the revisions to the government’s 2050 net-zero emissions strategy the pressure on the UK public sector is increasing to deploy sustainable solutions while balancing their IT needs and cost between legacy technology and the government’s cloud strategy,” said Andrew Young, VP of UK & Ireland Sales, HPE.

With the new MoU, CCS and HPE are expanding the portfolio of compute products available, adding systems like the composable, software-defined infrastructure for hybrid cloud environments and high performance compute (HPC) for artificial intelligence applications. It now also includes crucial storage capabilities, ranging from the full breadth of intelligent HPE Alletra Storage systems, covering general purpose to business-critical workloads, and storage solutions for mission-critical applications.