HPE reimagines customer and partner experience with software and data-driven insights

HPE Storage is on a mission to delight our customers.  We have been on a multi-year journey to transform the end-to-end experience for our customers. This journey began with transforming the support experience with HPE Infosight, the industry's most advanced AI Ops platform. Building on this success, we are now reimagining the upfront experience of planning and procurement for our customers.

Today, I’m happy to formally introduce our Software-Defined Opportunity Engine (SDOE), now available to our partners and resellers worldwide. This new solution is powered by HPE InfoSight and deploys intelligence and deep learning to produce holistic technology recommendations for customers. By utilizing software and data-driven analytics, our partners and customers benefit from real world data that can help them accelerate their IT goals in the most transparent, efficient and cost-effective manner, while also reducing complexity and guess work along the way.

Building on this momentum, I am also very pleased to announce HPE’s acquisition of CloudPhysics, an innovative company with a SaaS-based, data-driven platform for smarter IT across on-premises and cloud. This acquisition extends our ability to bring real world insights to customers and partners across most IT environments. I’ll provide more details about this exciting news later in this blog.

The IT infrastructure buying process is outdated -- at a time when digital transformation has never been more critical

The stakes have never been higher for our customers. The global pandemic has catapulted digital transformation to the forefront of business priorities. But with every IT infrastructure purchase, IT is faced with several difficult decisions: What’s the right infrastructure configuration to meet SLAs? Do we opt for CapEx vs. OpEx? Where should we modernize: on-prem or in the cloud? How do I demonstrate ROI in order to proceed?

There are no uniform answers. Every customer is at a different stage in their transformation journey and they face unique challenges. Partners and sellers are likewise challenged to describe a unique value proposition tailored to the customer’s environment with very little or no visibility.  This can create an IT infrastructure planning and buying process that is inaccurate, time-consuming and wasteful, and without the opportunity to measure value.

We know our customers and partners are relying on us to deliver technology that will help them adjust to new and emerging needs, and through software and analytics we can help them monitor, analyze and optimize their IT operations in new ways and deliver solutions that will enable both breakthrough and routine experiences.

Trusted Advisors Talk with Data

With our new SDOE tool, customers receive fast, tailored quotes, informed by real world data based on their own IT environment, to optimize their infrastructure and accelerate their digital transformations. HPE InfoSight acts as the engine that uses the power of cloud-based machine learning to drive global intelligence and insights across HPE servers, storage and virtualized resources and has analyzed more than 1,250 trillion data points since 2010.

For our partners, SDOE allows them to work as trusted partners with their customers as they gain a real understanding of their customer’s workloads, configuration and usage patterns. The tool auto-generates a quote with the best storage solution for the customer, taking a process that previously took weeks, down to a process that takes approximately 45 seconds. Our partners become more efficient, more strategic, and can achieve better outcomes for their clients.

Both customers and partners benefit from data-driven conversations that focus attention rapidly on the right objectives, based on the unique priorities of each customer and a dramatically streamlined process, eliminating on average 5 meetings from the current sales process.

“Through HPE, our partners get leading technology and support for mission-critical storage,” said Steve Flynn, Vice President of HPE Product Management at SYNNEX.  “SDOE is its next generation of best-in-class intelligent support providing insight and transparency into customers' storage environments.  The platform has dramatically changed the speed, ease and precision in which we can determine the best storage solutions for end-customers' unique needs.  We are excited to offer SDOE to our partners and to enhance SYNNEX’ lineup of solutions.”

A solution like SDOE is truly unique, and I want to thank our passionate engineering team who developed this new sales engine.

CloudPhysics: expanding data-driven collaboration across IT environments 

In order to further empower our partners and benefit our customers with data-driven insights, we acquired award-winning CloudPhysics.

CloudPhysics’ simple SaaS solution can monitor and analyze IT infrastructures, estimate costs and viability of cloud migrations and model a customers’ IT infrastructure as a virtual environment. The solution can be deployed in minutes, generate insights in as little as 15 minutes and has been proven to significantly increase the ROI on infrastructure investments.  The data capture is one of the most granular in the industry and includes over 200 metrics for VMs, hosts, datastores and networks – to date Cloud Physics has collected more than 200 trillion data samples along with data from 1 million VMs instances worldwide.

Through increased visibility and understanding, CloudPhysics transforms the procurement process to be a win-win for both customers and partners. Customers can accomplish their IT goals with more efficient IT infrastructure planning and procurement. Our partners will benefit from shorter sales cycles, an increase in assessed to qualified opportunities and higher close rates. More importantly, our partners become trusted advisors to accelerate the transformation agendas of our customers.

We look forward to the addition of CloudPhysics’ innovative platform and welcome the world-class team to HPE. We will communicate more about this exciting acquisition as we integrate this unique IP it into our SDOE tool. Together, we will be able to expand our data-driven discussions to yield maximum, measureable benefits for our customers across IT use cases: capacity planning, RCA/troubleshooting, performance analysis, risk/health assessments. In the coming weeks after we close the acquisition you will hear more from us on this front.

Accelerating meaningful outcomes for customers

With the worldwide launch of our SDOE tool, and acquisition of Cloud Physics, HPE Storage has taken the next step on its never-ending endeavor to delight our customers. By utilizing software and data driven analytics, HPE Storage is transforming the sales and customer experience with real intelligence -- removing complexity and guesswork, and turning it into a simple and data-driven decision making process, based on the preference and specific needs of the customer.