The News: At their flagship conference HPE Discover this morning, HPE announced new vertically optimized GreenLake cloud services focused on particular industries and key workloads. This portfolio of services is designed to deliver on the requirements of application modernization specifically in the domain of mission critical workloads and specific industry verticals.

The announcements focused on new cloud services for healthcare, financial services, and telco providers 5G. HPE also announced new vertical solutions with Epic, Splunk, SAP. Microsoft, Lusis, and others.

These GreenLake services are available as cloud offerings on premises, at the edge, or in colocation centers. When commenting on the announcement, Keith White, senior vice president and general manager of HPE GreenLake Cloud Services said, “For the industry-critical workloads that power their business, organizations shouldn’t have to choose between the cloud experience, or the security and control of keeping their apps and data on premises.” Read the release from HPE here.

HPE Announces New Vertically Optimized GreenLake Cloud Services at HPE Discover

Analyst Take: The three highlighted areas from the HPE announcement at HPE Discover include:

Healthcare. HPE GreenLake for Electronic Medical Records (EMR) brings validated configurations, management services, and a cloud experience for flexibility that is optimized for highly sensitive patient records. HPE is partnering with Epic, a leader in the EMR space on this solution stack.

Financial Services. HPE is also introducing GreenLake for Core Payment Systems in partnership with Lusis. Customers will apparently benefit from complete payment solutions and pay per transaction with a platform that supports contactless payments and easy to maintain compliance with a cloud experience. Phillipe Préval, President and CEO of Lusis commented, “Partnering with HPE has been a critical part of our growth and success as we expand into international markets…”

Telecommunications. According to HPE, by deploying HPE GreenLake for 5G core, carriers will get a purpose-built, open, cloud-native 5G core with minimal up-front investment. The solution scales according to demand and is ready to support changes in demand and business growth. Customers also have the option of paying per subscriber, making the offering even more attractive.
HPE has been vocal about its plans to move its traditional upfront CapEx heavy engagement model to a more pay-per-use model with the introduction of GreenLake. I believe these announcements are a strong indication of the importance of hybrid cloud solutions and the acknowledgment that public cloud only solutions will not suit all market verticals or workloads.

Of course, I will need to get closer to the offerings announced today and then fully digest the solution stacks to better understand how deep the integration is with the various software vendors. It would be great to see more detail at the solution architecture level published on these solutions in the coming days from HPE. I am, however, curious to learn what HPE is doing to focus on key industry verticals and mission critical workloads as a counterpoint to wider public cloud adoption.

It is my belief that we will see a growing importance of hybrid solutions in highly regulated verticals such as healthcare and banking, as well as the emergence of edge and co-located solutions as prevalent approaches within the industry. As many of the key players in these industries already operate at scale, it will be interesting to watch the level of Cloud Repatriation for these key workloads as cost models mature over time.

Disclosure: Futurum Research is a research and advisory firm that engages or has engaged in research, analysis, and advisory services with many technology companies, including those mentioned in this article. The author does not hold any equity positions with any company mentioned in this article.