The Strategic Advantages of Anything-as-a-Service IT Consumption

[00:00:00] Terry Sledz: Customers will consume hardware. They'll buy hardware and they'll deprecate it over a term: three or four or five years. In fact, you know, we worked with a customer who sunset a core switch, but had to keep it running in the data center. They had to power it up because the finance team said, "It's still an asset on our sheets. So we got to keep the running."

With GreenLake, we've come along and we've offered customers an ability to consume technology, and pay for it monthly. We do get into some budget discussions, but we do have certainly a technology discussion as well. We talk about the efficiencies of the technology. That continues to evolve and get better over time.

More interestingly and lately are the conversations we're having around virtualization. That's really changed the dynamic of how customers are consuming hardware going forward.  

Cause at the end of the day, it's the outcomes and not the budget that the executive are responsible for.

[00:01:01] Mike Reeves: This is Solving for Change, the podcast where you'll hear stories from business leaders and technology industry experts about how they executed bold business transformation in response to shifts in the market or advances in technology.  

In every episode, we'll explore real world strategies and technologies that fuel successful evolution.

I'm your host this month, Mike Reeves.  

Terry Sledz. Thank you for joining us on Solving for Change. Excited to have you here today. We're not going to talk about technology. We'll maybe touch on technology, but we're going to talk about something different that HPE has certainly transformed their company around in the last number of years.

And, before we get down that road, if you don't mind, it'd be great if you could just do a little introduction.  

[00:01:43] Terry Sledz: Sure. Yeah. Thanks for having me.

My name's Terry Sledz. I'm the Western Canada sales specialist for GreenLake. I've been working with HPE for 14 years based in Edmonton. Last four years I've been solely focused on GreenLake. So, my account base is primarily Western Canada with a few mix and match accounts in Ontario.

[00:02:04] Mike Reeves: I'd like to open it up with a question and we were talking about this before we got rolling.

You know, GreenLake and HPE have really tried to take a leadership position in trying to educate customers and change the game around how customers buy and consume technology. Or maybe I should say, not buy and consume technology in the manner that we've all known for a number of years. Because if you look at companies, they traditionally have a planning cycle. They have capital dollars for a budget, they have expense dollars for a budget. They go away, they plan, they do their thing, and then they say, "Okay," to the groups, they push out the budget and say, "Here's your dollars." And you guys have been first to market, I think, with an amazing strategy around how you want to change that paradigm and approach things differently.

And I'm wondering maybe if you could just spend a little bit of time talking to us and sharing your experience and your knowledge. Cause that's what I'm hoping people will take away from today's session is, I want to change how we consume technology. I'm not quite sure what the best approach is and how to engage in that discussion internally as well as with partners like HPE.

And I'd like you to maybe take a few minutes and you can talk about that.  

[00:03:17] Terry Sledz: What I would say is, historically, you're right. Customers will consume hardware. They'll buy hardware and they'll deprecate it over a term: three or four or five years. In fact, we worked with a customer who sunset a core switch, but had to keep it running in the data center.

They had to power it up because the finance team said, "It's still an asset on our sheets. So we got to keep it running. So, on our balance sheets." So we said, "Okay, fine."  

With GreenLake, we've come along and we've offered customers an ability to consume technology and pay for it monthly and we meter the solution.

So those are the basic tenets of GreenLake. And it's certainly changed the dynamic of how customers consume hardware. It forces them to rethink not only their budget cycles, but how they plan for refreshes of technology or how they plan for projects that are on the books or something that they've maybe over budgeted for in the past and didn't work.

So there's many different reasons and rationales as to why customers are bringing in GreenLake. But you're right the main tenet is that they're not owning the assets any longer. They're consuming a service.  

And so, the service can be as simple as infrastructure-as-a-service, or it could be infrastructure with what we call outtasking services, where we offer an ability to manage the assets for them so that they can have their team focused on other parts of their business: workloads and other things, rather than making sure that the hardware is running in the data center.

[00:04:55] Mike Reeves: I know you've got a whole methodology or an approach that you use when you come in and start an engagement with a customer and I'm wondering maybe if you could talk a little bit about that. Because you really do spend a lot of time looking at how your target customer has traditionally bought and consumed and used the technology. When they buy, how they buy, and the inefficiencies in that model that you basically take off the table when a customer engages with GreenLake.  

[00:05:31] Terry Sledz: Yeah, what I try to do is focus on outcomes. I'm not a technology guru by any stretch. What I'm looking to understand is what is your plan for the next three months, six months, a year? Have you looked that far in terms of what the outcome is for your business, for your company, for your IT department to be able to enable the various groups that you support. So, the conversation generally starts there. We typically have a conversation and it's not all about hardware. It's about what are you trying to accomplish? What are you trying to develop in terms of technology?

How well are your teams supporting the existing infrastructure today? Do you want them to continue doing that? So, it's more about a philosophical. discussion about how they're historically consuming the hardware. Are they buying it? Do they have teams or are they outsourcing the support for that technology?

Are you bringing in all kinds of tool sets to manage that technology? What does your security look like? What are your security platforms? Are you feeling comfortable about ransomware attacks and those sorts of things? And so, we get into these philosophical discussions and then from there, we try to determine a near-term outcome.

Let's start maybe small and then leverage it as maybe a proof of concept, or in some cases it becomes a fully deployed managed solution with a whole host of DR backup solutions that aren't owned by HP, but they're third party ecosystem partners that leverage those technologies and we bring that to bear with our ability to manage.

And in fact we can even ebond our versions of, I guess it'd be in this case Remedy or ServiceNow, because we leverage ServiceNow, and we can take care of that swivel desk. We'll take care of the service and management tasks for you. So, it can be as detailed as that or as simple as a storage solution for some proof-of-concept workload that they're managing.

[00:07:38] Mike Reeves: The next thing I'd like to spend a little bit of time talking about is, and it's especially prevalent now when you're in talking to customers, and that is everyone's talking about AI. And I don't want to spend any time talking about AI specifically, but that again changes the cost curve and the need for agility and the need to potentially scale, to have infrastructure available to be able take on a new, what I would say these days are sudden projects around people trying to bring AI into the organization. And it seems GreenLake's a great platform for customers to be able to have a very agile and quick approach to take on some of these new, typically very strategic and could be large scale projects that they're trying to bring into the organization. And I know you guys within the GreenLake model can be very very responsive, very agile. And really can really respond to customers quickly in terms of trying to help them get this platform enhanced in some way.

[00:08:44] Terry Sledz: So, it's really important that we right size the environment from the start. And part of that is leveraging a host of tools, understanding what their project plans are and getting to know their business. You know, we look for full disclosure. We don't always get it, but we want to understand that we're installing something that they're going to be consuming relatively quickly, but there's a capability for them to burst into a reserve capacity. And they can select what that reserve capacity is.

So typically, we'll install what we call an 80/20 model where there's a minimum commit of 80 percent of that hardware that's going to be billed for monthly, and then they're going to be consuming the other 20 percent and that'll be a variable bill month to month. Now that variability can be 80/20, it can be 70/30, it can be 60/40.

We can scale the variability of what it is they need to accommodate the burst that they're going to see or the business demand that they expect to see. And if we start exceeding that capacity, then we have a very simple way of growing even beyond the capacity that's already been installed on day one.

So, we can invoke what's called a simple change order. Because the customer is already under a contract with us, all of the processes to go through legal and procurement to get that contract in place isn't necessarily something that has to be followed for a change order because all the terms and conditions are already established. We've already established a price band for the customer. So, a customer might be consuming in price band one, but we've already identified the price in bands two, three, and four, should they grow. And those prices are fixed for the term. So, there's no variability in cost to them, to the customer, and they have an ability to forecast on their own.

If we're starting to consume another petabyte of storage, what is it going to cost us? And they can see very quickly what it will be because it's already been defined in the contract.  

[00:10:37] Mike Reeves: That's great. And, and I know you've talked about it and touched on it a bit in the discussion today, but you do have a lot of capability around tools and monitoring to really help the customer. To help them stay as efficient as possible in terms of understanding what they're consuming and how they're consuming it as an extension of the ops team, but you get into this... And when I think about GreenLake and correct me if I'm wrong, but you get into this whole discussion around FinOps and I really look at GreenLake as being a foundational element to a FinOps strategy.

Now there's more to it than just GreenLake. But I don't know if you have any comments or opinions around that as it fits into kind of the base or the platform or the foundation for maturity around FinOps.  

[00:11:30] Terry Sledz: I would say that we're not a FinOps solution, but we contribute to offering more accountability around financial management around the solutions that we bring.

Historically, we manage in a public cloud model. We're a private cloud offering in a public cloud model. And so, we can bring to bear some of those cost understandings with our tooling. So we have an ability to link up to Azure, for example, and compare our costs to Azure. So, if a customer wants to see what workloads are running in the cloud, private cloud versus what it could cost in the public cloud, they can do a very quick comparison.

We offer capability around show back and look back to see what costs are. So, organizations that are developing a services catalog can bill back to different business units if that's how they so choose to manage the environment. But there is certainly more financial accountability in the models that we bring and the tools that we bring with it.

[00:12:32] Mike Reeves: Yeah, that's great. That's one thing that's resonated with me around the GreenLake program is everybody has these capabilities and can certainly build these into their teams and their operational models. But, end of the day, a lot of folks don't have the time or they're just trying to keep the lights on, where you can bring all of this knowledge and ability and technology and operational performance in day one, which I think is great. Especially now with, there's just so much leakage in terms of infrastructure and people just pushing out to cloud or trying to bring workloads back into the cloud. And was that the right decision, not just in terms of the technology piece, but in terms of the cost envelope as well?  

[00:13:14] Terry Sledz: Yeah, I think one area that's critical that we bring to the discussion and the tooling is that there's a host of people that we engage with internally within HP and with our partners when a solution is deployed on the customer prem. There's an opportunity for the customer to educate themselves to how these tools work, but we're lockstep with them along their journey through GreenLake. We have a regular cadence with them to understand what their current business structures are and what their strategy is with IT. But we're also looking at what we can do to help them manage their costs. We have capabilities in the tooling to allow them to do that. And we can share with them what we're seeing, but the tools that we use for say billing are the same tools that they can use for forecasting. And there is some AI built into it because there are thresholds that if we exceed certain thresholds in the tooling, it will alert us. It'll alert the customers so that they can start that conversation about, well, what is the next step of our growth? How do we plan this? Not with a month's notice, but with several months notice.  

[00:14:21] Mike Reeves: Yeah, I appreciate that. And next question, I'm going to kind of switch gears a little bit here. I think everyone's kind of got a flavour of how GreenLake works and some of the benefits to it.

We touched on this a little earlier in the conversation. So, when you go in to see a customer, or somebody that hasn't been exposed to GreenLake, how do you go in and have that conversation? The reason I ask that question is, you can always get a meeting and people are always curious because they're always looking for better ways to consume technology, buy technology. And there's a bunch of different folks that you typically are going to need to have as a stakeholder around trying to buy into and adopt and embrace the model of GreenLake. And I'm just wondering if you have any anecdotes, some experience, some best practices in terms of you're in talking to the IT organization and they're really excited about GreenLake and they need to now take that through the organization and get support for it. So, I don't know if you have any approach experience, best practices, anecdotes.  

[00:15:33] Terry Sledz: I wouldn't say there's any one best practice, but there's several different experiences.

Every organization has their own reasons for leveraging GreenLake. Some of it's financial, but some of it is, they had outages in the environment–I guess that does lead to financial impact if they're non public sector–their systems were down the point-of-sale systems were down for weeks, or not weeks, days or hours and created some problems for them financially.

So, when we go into the customer, it's good to have a good understanding of their history, what their challenges have been, that industry. We also look at some of the technologies that they've historically run out of. In a lot of cases, we're the incumbent, but not in all cases.

So, we have a good handle of what they're doing and how they've consumed hardware over the past. And most of them are capitalizing the gear. They're trying to balance their budgets for the five years. And a lot of times they run out of hardware and the last end of the life of that hardware and they're trying to plan for the next step. So they're debating, do I leverage my support renewal costs, or do I engage in GreenLake and transfer those costs into a new technology under GreenLake? So, there's different perspectives that customers have. It's good to have that understanding to determine what value prop or what value position that GreenLake brings to them.

[00:17:04] Mike Reeves: Because I find that there's a technology discussion that has to be had and then there's a financial discussion that has to be had. And in some organizations, especially if you're engaged with the folks that are operating the technology, it's trying to get all that understood and you start to build that plan and that messaging and that communication that needs to be taken to the other business stakeholders.

And sometimes that can be challenging, within a lot of companies for a variety of reasons. It could be culture. It could just be like some of the things we talked about earlier in terms of how they've traditionally approached annual budgeting and planning. And now, you're bringing this new approach to the table.

So I'm just wondering if there's anything from a senior leadership perspective when you get up into the executive around communication. I'm sure there's an agility discussion to have. There's a financial discussion to have around optimizing costs and utilization of resources.

I'm just wondering if there's anything in particular in there that you find that resonates more so–one or two things than other things–when you're getting up at the executive level.  

[00:18:29] Terry Sledz: Well, I know a lot of times it's the executive that does approve the budget and it's up to the directors to spend it. But if the director is motivated to save money, then over the long term, GreenLake can be that. A lot of that is sort of how the budgets are allocated and dispersed. We do get into some budget discussions, but we do have certainly a technology discussion as well.

We talk about the efficiencies of the technology. That continues to evolve and get better over time. And more interestingly and lately, are the conversations we're having around virtualization. That's really changed the dynamic of how customers are consuming hardware going forward.

So, that is certainly having an impact on the discussions. I would say the financial responsibility is probably a predominant conversation we have with the directors as they take it up to the leadership, but we also focus on the outcomes that they're trying to achieve. Because at the end of the day, it's the outcomes and not the budget that the executive are responsible for.

[00:19:38] Mike Reeves: Well said. And just on that theme, we're getting to the end here and you've talked a bit about the value of GreenLake. I'm just wondering if you want to summarize that again. And, I think about this often and it's: what does good look like? When you go in and work with a customer around GreenLake, what's the checkbox for the customer? How do you provide that value to them? Less concerned about what's good for us and for HPE, what does that good look like?  

[00:20:15] Terry Sledz: Yeah, great question. What I would say is there are those that embrace GreenLake because they've had some challenges and the value proposition around GreenLake meets those challenges. There are those that were a little bit skeptical at first, but once they embraced GreenLake and understood the resourcing, the technical capability of our people, the care and feeding that we provide to our customers on a monthly and weekly basis, that has proven invaluable to the customer.

I believe, they feel that we're vested with them. That we are an extension of their IT community. And it enables full disclosure of what they're doing. And with full disclosure, it allows us to be more capable in delivering a proper solution to the customer. I would say also that I've been doing this for–GreenLake specifically–for seven years and I do see an absolute value in how we bring to bear a consumption model to the customer. Especially as this IT, hybrid IT, environment evolves.  

And HP has done a great job in enabling the tooling that customers need to get there. So, while some of that may have not have been in place in the early inception of GreenLake, it is continuing to be a predominant tenet that HPE follows. And they're all in on, on making sure that that happens for our customer base.

[00:21:53] Mike Reeves: Great. And the two things that come to mind for me when I think about GreenLake is, one is agility. Giving the customer a much faster path to help them solve their technology problems to support the business.

And the other one is just reducing friction. And that's in terms of budgets, in terms of being able to work with HPE and companies like us so they can quickly help address the needs of the business and get project support, et cetera, in. And I think those are really valuable elements to layer in on top of the financial construct.

[00:22:32] Terry Sledz: And just on that point, I completely agree.  

And in fact, if you look at customers that typically procure hardware today, they're looking at their budgets and they're buying or they're leasing. And when they look at GreenLake, they go, "Oh well, we've got this solution and you know, then this is it. This is the end all be all, this is what we're going to go with and we don't have any other options." Well quite frankly, you have multiple options with GreenLake because if you want at the end of the term–when GreenLake's over and you decided you don't want to do GreenLake anymore or leverage a GreenLake services offering–you can go back to the capital purchase or you can lease.

But what GreenLake offers you is an ability to expand, grow under an existing contracting platform very easily, very simply. You can do refreshes, you can extend month to month, you can extend annually. You've got even more options than you did if you were just simply procuring hardware.

[00:23:30] Mike Reeves: I don't have any other questions for you. But the only other thing I'll ask is, I don't know if there's any social media channels or if there's a way you would like people to learn more, get more, contact you.  

[00:23:47] Terry Sledz: Well, certainly can reach out to Terry Sledz at terry.sledz@hpe.com.  

I don't have any social media platforms, although we were looking at OneMob at one point, but that was more of a branding and marketing exercise. But that is one way to reach Terry. Reach out to hpe.com.  

[00:24:06] Mike Reeves: Great. We'll put your email address in the show notes as well so people can have it all in front of them.

But again, I'm very thankful for the time that you've given us today and I appreciate the support here at the event. It's great having you guys. It's a long time relationship to our company. Our team's super excited about GreenLake. It's been wonderful and it's definitely changed the market.

And you know, a lot of companies and customers are super excited about what you folks can help them with and how we can collaborate and partner together to be able to help them solve problems. So, thank you.  

[00:24:42] Terry Sledz: Thank you very much for the opportunity.  

[00:24:43] Mike Reeves: Thanks, Terry.  

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