SAN FRANCISCO — Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) this week at VMworld began offering VMware’s full software stack as a service.

At HPE’s annual Discover event in June, CEO Antonio Neri pledged to deliver HPE’s entire portfolio as a service by 2022. And this commitment also extends to its products and services delivered in partnership with other vendors like VMware, said Paul Miller, VP of product marketing at HPE, in an interview on the sidelines at VMworld.

The new service combines HPE GreenLake, HPE Synergy, and VMware Cloud Foundation. GreenLake is that vendor’s consumption-based infrastructure and services portfolio, and Synergy is its composable infrastructure. Cloud Foundation is VMware’s complete stack that includes compute (vSphere), storage (vSAN), and network virtualization (NSX).

It gives customers a fully managed hybrid cloud environment across on-premises VMware-based software-defined data centers (SDDCs) and VMware’s public cloud partners. These include Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud, IBM Cloud, and some 4,300 smaller cloud providers in 120 countries. It also supports containers with PKS.

“It’s anything that’s in that Cloud Foundation software stack,” Miller said. “People can deploy different elements of the stack. They don’t have to use the whole thing. And then we manage the whole thing.”

Customers also only pay for what they use. “We meter at the VM [virtual machine] level so we’re very granular and precise,” Miller said, adding that GreenLake now has more than 650 customers.

In HPE’s third-quarter 2019 financial results, announced yesterday, the company said its channel business increased GreenLake orders by 112%, and GreenLake channel revenue grew 203% compared to the same quarter last year. HPE has more than doubled the number of partners doing GreenLake deals year over year. “HPE GreenLake is now one of our fastest growing businesses,” Neri said on a call with investors.

Adding VMware’s software stack to the GreenLake portfolio “will be a game changer for sales and our partners because the VMware footprint is so large,” Miller said.

HPE announced VMware’s Cloud Foundation as a service on Monday. On the same day Dell Technologies — which owns about 81% of VMware — announced its Cloud Data Center as a Service is now available in the U.S. The Dell product also runs VMware’s software stack but on Dell EMC hyperconverged infrastructure. It also has consumption-based pricing and marks Dell’s foray into pay-as-you-go infrastructure — which takes aim directly at HPE’s popular GreenLake portfolio.

Miller says HPE’s not concerned about Dell’s competitive product or its consumption-based portfolio. “We used to hear ‘what about Dell’s?’ But the market has chosen GreenLake. Customers are using GreenLake as a verb — can I GreenLake that? We’re the standard, and, frankly, we’re not seeing too much competition.”

In addition to metering and billing customers at the VM level, HPE gives customers broader choice, Miller said. It’s consumption-based, hybrid cloud services are stack agnostic. In April, HPE announced a partnership to sell hybrid cloud a service with HPE servers running Nutanix’s software stack. It also partners with Google on Anthos, the cloud provider’s on-premises hybrid cloud platform, and will offer this as a service via GreenLake.

“The first big difference is choice,” Miller said. “With the Dell offering, it’s VMware only. People want flexibility and that’s what we bring to any application, any service. That’s going to be our biggest thing going forward: it’s your preferred stack. How do you want to run it?”