Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) announced plans to expand its GreenLake portfolio with multiple new cloud services, platform capabilities, and ecosystem partners. The GreenLake platform now offers more than 70 cloud services across the entire enterprise computing stack.

“We offer cloud services across the various layers of the enterprise computing stack,” Vishal Lall, SVP and GM of HPE GreenLake cloud services solutions said during the pre-briefing for the announcements ahead of the vendor's HPE Discover event. “You'll see these services expand over time because it makes the overall platform more attractive for customers and they can just run multiple services on the same infrastructure.”

One of the latest additions is the HPE GreenLake for Private Cloud Enterprise, which is designed to bring the cloud experience to applications and data at a lower latency than public clouds can provide, Lall claims. It’s “a flagship product for enabling hybrid cloud strategies for customers,” he said. 

Compared to the "single-use, custom" private cloud service HPE provided five years ago, the new service brings a public-cloud-like experience, supports the deployment of bare metal, virtual machines (VMs), and container workloads, and optimizes the infrastructure for those workloads, Lall explained.

The service is “very different as an automated, scalable, modular private cloud that can run multiple workloads on it while leveraging a marketplace versus in the past it was systems-integrated driven, single usage, Snowflake [type], designed for one application,” he said.

Plus, the new private cloud has “the ability to provision infrastructure fast, consume it on the fly” and pay-as-you-go, Lall added.

“Green Lake is the cloud that comes to you,” echoed Flynn Maloy, VP of HPE GreenLake cloud services marketing. “GreenLake is a very important part of a multi-cloud strategy bringing the cloud to what is coming at the edge and needs to be in a private colocation, private data center.”

HPE also added eight new services to the GreenLake portfolio including data fabric, hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI), block storage, disaster recovery, backup and recovery, compute operations management, and industry-vertical cloud services for customer engagement and payments

Red Hat also joined the GreenLake ecosystem ahead of this year's Discover event. The move will enable Red Hat’s open source technologies, such as Red Hat OpenShift, Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL), and Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform, to be deployed on the GreenLake platform.

“We've been working with Red Hat for 15 years,” Maloy said. “What we intend to do is we're putting together a partnership of joint engineering where we're going to work together to further enhance the joint offerings that we have.”

The partnership will bring benefits such as full integration, code configurations, and better performance, while customers only need to deal with a single vendor with one contract and one configuration, he claims.

SUSE also announced a similar partnership with HPE GreenLake.

HPE's GreenLake expansion pushes the vendor a step closer to its pledge to offer everything as-a-service.

“Three years ago at HPE Discover, HPE committed to delivering our entire portfolio as a service by 2022,” HPE president and CEO Antonio Neri said in a statement. “HPE GreenLake is now the de-facto platform for hybrid cloud and private cloud, and our industry-leading catalog of cloud services enable organizations to drive data-first modernization for all their workloads, from edge to cloud.”

As competitors such as Cisco and Dell Technologies continue to push and expand their as-a-service portfolio, Maloy claims GreenLake has more customers for hybrid cloud services than any other vendor. “We believe it's the largest business of its type. We have more service offerings in our catalog than any other vendors.” 

Backing that claim, Lall noted the platform now has more than 1,600 enterprise customers across more than 50 countries and more than $7 billion in total contract value, which is “so much ahead of all of our competitions."

Despite the focus on the as-a-service offerings, HPE will for now keep a capex purchase option open for customers, as “$7 billion in TCV is a smaller portion of our overall revenues of $30 billion as a company,” Lall said. “We see that those two trains run in parallel for a while.”