Positioning your service provider business for the as-a-service spending surge

Edge-to-cloud architectures deliver speed, flexibility and freedom while bypassing the inefficiency of over-provisioning and the risks of under-provisioning. With HPE GreenLake edge-to-cloud platform, service providers can achieve increased security while maintaining optimal control.

The pandemic has accelerated the shift towards agile, pay-per-use cloud service models. For cloud, telecom and managed service providers, this could spur significant growth in the years to come—provided they can put in place flexible, cost-efficient IT infrastructure that enables them to respond quickly to end-customer needs.

Spend on consumption-based offerings is predicted to rise

The pandemic has accelerated the shift towards agile, pay-per-use cloud service models. For cloud, telecom and managed service providers, this could spur significant growth in the years to come—provided they can put in place flexible, cost-efficient IT infrastructure that enables them to respond quickly to end-customer needs.

The revenues at stake as the world transitions towards consumption-based IT spending are considerable. According to IDC, organizations will spend $6.8 trillion on IT through to 2023—and 41% of that spending will be tied to cloud computing.¹ Furthermore, it forecasts that over 75% of infrastructure in edge locations will be consumed and operated as-a-service by 2024, as will more than half of data center infrastructure.² (Read more about infrastructure as a service.)

To capitalize on this opportunity and compete more efficiently with hyperscale cloud providers, service providers need to resolve their provisioning dilemma. Like other organizations, they need to avoid overprovisioning IT infrastructure, because money spent on unused resources is money wasted. Yet under-provisioning, on the other hand, could lead to loss of business or failure to meet a customer’s peak demands or ad hoc capacity requirements. Service providers are managing IT services on behalf of a wide range of customers with unpredictable capacity demands, so they must have spare capacity available to deal with unexpected spikes.

The end result is that service providers need flexible access to a “Goldilocks” level of provisioning for whatever their current requirements might be—not too much, not too little, but just right.

A solution to the provisioning conundrum

The resolution to this challenge for service providers is the same as it is for their end customers: Hand over the challenges of day-to-day infrastructure provisioning and maintenance to someone who can do it more efficiently and cost-effectively than they can. This frees service providers from the large capital costs and resources involved in managing their own IT infrastructure, so that staff can focus on more strategic business opportunities.

HPE GreenLake edge-to-cloud platform enables service providers to pay for the compute, storage, and networking they use—in turn, letting them offer their end customers efficient hybrid cloud services. The pay-per-use³ pricing, point-and-click self-service, scalability and flexibility of HPE GreenLake platform ensures that they can deliver operational improvements and increased cyber security, while maintaining optimal control.

The benefits of HPE GreenLake edge-to-cloud platform

Leverage proven expertise

From the most demanding workloads to everyday infrastructure to multi-cloud management, HPE GreenLake edge-to-cloud platform is bringing the right cloud experience to thousands of customers around the globe. HPE GreenLake platform enables faster time to market and cost optimization, coupled with Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) savings, scalability and simplified IT operations across service providers’ data centers and clouds.

Built-in services take care of routine support and remedial work, while optional HPE GreenLake Management Services add remote monitoring, operating, updating, and management capabilities. In parallel, service providers can speed time to revenue by rapidly deploying a broad portfolio of HPE GreenLake cloud services, such as machine learning operations, containers, storage, compute, virtual machines, data protection and more. By using standardized building blocks and transparent pricing, service providers can quickly get started or develop a new project, in as little as 14 days.

Overall, with HPE GreenLake platform, service providers gain substantial benefits in speed, flexibility and freedom.

Speed

• Speed to provision: With HPE GreenLake platform, provisioning new services or adding extra computing power is as easy as turning it on, or using the self-service capabilities in HPE GreenLake Central for automated deployment. Ongoing joint capacity management ensures that additional capacity is brought in as needed, ahead of demand.
• Speed to market: Service providers and their customers can deploy new services and offerings much faster. According to Forrester, HPE GreenLake shortens time to deploy IT projects by 75%.⁴
• Speed to payback: Lower costs and higher productivity accelerate the time to payback for service providers’ technology investments.

Flexibility

• Flexible costs: Paying for capacity when they use it enables service providers to better synchronize costs with revenues. The efficiency translates into lower TCO.
• Flexible provisioning: Because they can quickly access new capacity when they need it, service providers circumvent the danger of over- or under-provisioning.
• Flexible operations: Service providers have access to infrastructure that evolves with the changing needs of their business and their end customers; and they benefit from using the latest technology.

Freedom

• Freedom from uncertainty: Transparent pricing brings more predictability to service providers’ costs, enabling them to build end-customer pricing models with confidence.

• Freedom from unplanned downtime: Powerful automation and management tools, combined with expert technical resources, translate into less downtime. With HPE GreenLake, customers experience 85% less unplanned downtime.⁵

• Freedom to grow: Service providers can now create or optimize their own cloud platforms, with the option to link to hyperscale services when needed to support a hybrid environment. This enables them to offer end customers competitive pricing for both on-premises and public cloud services. Service providers can also run test pilots, experiment and pay for what they use, with the added benefit of no egress charges if they downscale.

Partnering with organizations on their digital journeys

Many service providers around the world are already shifting to HPE GreenLake edge-to-cloud platform to optimize their business outcomes. In so doing, they are able to better position themselves as innovative partners to end customers, who themselves are on their own digital transformation journeys.

UK-based Wavenet is one such service provider, using a consumption-based model to offer its customers the ability to rapidly scale capacity. Through its collaboration with HPE GreenLake, Wavenet optimized its ability to quickly scale up resources, while preserving cash flow, controlling spend and reducing the cost of overprovisioning.⁶

In the words of Wavenet CEO Bill Dawson: “The combined experience of our businesses and technology powered by HPE GreenLake will create a fantastic proposition for our customers. We will now be able to offer the very best of both private and public cloud infrastructure, giving customers access to world-leading and highly secure technologies, built from the ground up for the cloud.”

As examples such as Wavenet show, mature, edge-to-cloud architectures offer service providers and their end customers the simplicity, agility and economics of public cloud, combined with the security and performance benefits of on-premises IT. Moving to HPE GreenLake edge-to-cloud platform helps service providers to accelerate time to value, align IT economics with business priorities, simplify IT operations and gain better control.

Find out about scalable IT provisioning for fast-paced service providers by downloading our ebook Flexible IT for Agile Service Providers, or contact us to start a conversation about how HPE can accelerate your business.

1. Cloud And Edge Computing Are Key To ‘Next Normal’: IDC CRN.com article

2. The Datacenter in 2020 and Beyond: More Edge, ‘As-a-Service’ and AI Redmondmag.com article

3. Reserve may apply.

4. The Total Economic Impact™ of HPE GreenLake: Business Benefits and Cost Savings Enabled by HPE GreenLake. Forrester Research: Forrester Total Economic Impact™ Study commissioned by HPE, June 2020.

5. The Business Value of HPE GreenLake Management Services IDC white paper, sponsored by HPE, January 2020

6. Wavenet chooses HPE GreenLake to power its industry-leading portfolio of cloud and hosted services. HPE press release, March 2021