Synergy gives partners an alternative to the public cloud - HPE channel VP
Lee Hughes claims HPE's composable infrastructure can help partners to compete against public cloud providers
Hewlett Packard Enterprise's (HPE) Synergy infrastructure will give resellers an alternative to the public cloud, according to HPE channel vice president Lee Hughes.
HPE launched the Synergy platform last week and Hughes said that although Synergy is not designed to replace cloud infrastructure options, it will give resellers the chance to take on public cloud providers who in the main bypass the channel.
"We know the public cloud is growing and HPE isn't suggesting that this launch is going to put that on ice. We know customers are being disrupted and that they're needing to launch new services at a pace we've never seen before," he said.
"It brings to that partner the relevance to be reselling a platform that enables customers to compete in the marketplace, as opposed to the public cloud where the channel doesn't see a lot of those revenues, and for what they do see the margins are minimal."
HPE claims Synergy is the first "truly composable" infrastructure, connecting traditional infrastructures with cloud-enabled and next-generation solutions.
The main benefit, it says, is that an end user or service provider can compose and decompose infrastructures in minutes because the hardware itself does not need to be reconfigured as it can be reassigned using HPE's OneView software.
Hughes explained that the main benefit for partners comes in the services they can wrap around Synergy. Resellers, he said, can either resell HPE's own services, or gain accreditation themselves.
"It's a new category in the world of computing that is applicable to legacy [computing], so resellers can continue to sell services and products to the old world, while being relevant to the new DevOps world in which we live," he said.
Bob Jarvis, head of consulting for Computacenter in the UK, France and Belgium, told CRN that he expects to see interest from Computacenter's large enterprise clients who aren't ready to make the drastic transition straight to the cloud.
In terms of smaller resellers, he said it could be an "interesting internal platform" for them to use to compete against public cloud providers in the SMB space, although many of these resellers have "realised they are fighting a losing battle", he added.
"I think there is an opportunity for smaller resellers, if they are a smaller partner who is going to host infrastructure on behalf of their customers," Jarvis said.
"If it's a traditional VAR/reseller-type deal, this is high value - the stuff isn't cheap.
"It is definitely going to be the sort of technology for large enterprises or certainly the top end of the mid-market that are going to be interested."