HPE makes catty comments about Dell EMC on hybrid cloud
Denzil Samuels claimed Dell is lagging behind on hybrid cloud during his keynote at Discover
HPE's global channel boss launched a stinging attack on arch rival Dell EMC's hybrid cloud strategy during his keynote at the vendor's Discover 2017 event in Las Vegas.
During the event's Global Partner Summit, Denzil Samuels, chief channel officer at HPE, asked channel partners in attendance if they had attended Dell EMC World, which was held in Las Vegas (in the same venue) last month.
"Three weeks ago, Michael [Dell, chairman and CEO of Dell Technologies,] said [he thinks] the future is hybrid IT. Duh," Samuels said during the event's keynote. "Michael, headline: Meg [Whitman, president and CEO of HPE,] and Antonio [Neri, EVP and GM of enterprise group at HPE,] have been saying that for a couple of years."
Although Samuels hinted Dell is late to the hybrid game, the executive told channel partners that hearing its CEO talk hybrid IT is "great" because it validates HPE's strategy.
"When your competitors start saying the thing you've been saying for a while it's a validation, and at the end of the day imitation is the highest form of flattery," he said.
In response, Dell EMC told Channelnomics that hybrid as the future is "not a new point of view" or strategy for the vendor.
"Take a look at the robust portfolio we've been building for years now and you'll know we've gone well beyond talking about it. We're making hybrid cloud a reality for more and more customers every day," Dell EMC said in a statement.
HPE also claimed its Flexible Capacity services, which provide on-demand capacity with the aim of combining public cloud agility and economics with on premise security and performance, provides more flexibility than similar Dell offerings. During the event's keynote, Neri claimed Flexible Capacity is the only offering that brings "real" pay-per-user experience with actual capacity management at the core.
"Recently Dell has been talking about flexible IT consumption model, but when you really look under the covers, what they really deliver is payment structures. They absolutely forgot one thing: flexibility," Neri said during the event.
Even HPE's Whitman made mention of the competition in her keynote to channel partners, pointing to research by TechValidate that found that 95 percent of surveyed organizations who replaced Dell OpenManage and Active Systems Manager with HPE OneView increased the number of servers managed by 25 percent with the same level of staffing.
"That is incredible efficiency and is what our collective customers are looking for every day," she said.
In response to HPE's claims, Dell EMC told us it would "welcome the opportunity to take a closer look at the comparative data and scenarios HPE is using to benchmark their solutions against Dell EMC" and that it hasn't seen that information made public.
Meanwhile, HPE also took a swipe at Cisco during Discover 2017's Global Partner Summit, with Alain Andreoli, SVP and GM of HPE's datacenter infrastructure group, claiming its Synergy composable infrastructure platform presents channel partners a "multi-million" dollar opportunity to refresh HPE's BladeSystem blade server install base, as well as that of Cisco Unified Computing System (UCS) offerings, and can "crush" Cisco UCS.
"Cisco UCS is not composable," the exec told partners. "Nobody can do composability like [HPE], so they cannot offer customers a cloud-like experience. Second, they have an aging management infrastructure architecture with Cisco UCS and…who knows how many more. They have zero intellectual property."
Cisco declined to comment on HPE's claims.