‘Perfect storm’ creating public sector opportunities for HPE

Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) is building on its recent momentum in the public sector, said the firm’s public sector director, Pauline Yau.

The growth is down to “a perfect storm,” said Yau, who noted the recent “softening of the language” used in the UK Government’s updated Cloud First policy, which now recognises other solutions outside of public cloud.

HPE has been a notable critic of the Government’s focus on the public cloud. Now, said Yau, “We’ve gone from, ‘it’s got to be public cloud’, to more of a recognition of ‘Oh, hang on a minute…’”

Yau cited HPE’s 2021 research that said 75 percent of public sector workloads cannot move to public cloud.

“What’s left is this big chunk; the vast majority of workloads are still on premise,” she said.

Yau said public sector customers have “done what they can” with public cloud, but with costs higher than anticipated, HPE wants to “help them transform” what’s left.

MOU with Crown Commercial Service

Around the same time as the update to the Cloud First policy, HPE 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.

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.

Yau said it provides more options to those managing the 75 percent of workloads not in the cloud.

“That was a long time in the making. The MOU really sets out to a give surety of cost on HPE infrastructure to public sector organisations. But it really puts the focus on HPE GreenLake,” said Yau.

“The uptake on that has been great. We invite organisations in to talk to us about how they are thinking about sustainability. What does your estate look like? What could be improved? One of the services that we offer is Right Mix Advisor, which looks at where do you have your workloads today, and where are they best suited.”

“All of these things happened around the same time: the MOU, the adjustment of the language of the Cloud First policy, so it feels like a perfect storm.”

Working with DWP

HPE also recently worked with the Department of Work and Pensions (DWP) to achieve £7 million of savings and remove capacity constraints as part of their digital transformation.

“It wasn’t easy. It’s not just the technicalities of it; the procurement journey is difficult. So, Crown Commercial Service (CCS) really wanted to help other organisations understand how it can be achieved because you’re essentially moving from a CapEx to OPEX model, and we know that public sector finances are still in the CapEx world.”

While the challenges of selling into the public sector remain, Yau said it gets a little easier with each new GreenLake customer.

“There are certain parts of public sector who are accelerating quicker than others. We still see challenges in local government,” said Yau.

“Somebody said to me the other day, ‘Who do you think your biggest competitor is?’ And I said, ‘I think our biggest competitor is our customers deciding not to do anything.’ That’s the biggest challenge.”