HPE goes on the warpath, seeks to scalp AWS over vendor lock-in
Interview Migrating your data to the machine that is Amazon Web Services is a little like booking into the Hotel California, the title track from The Eagles late 1970’s album of the same name, the rub being that customers, like guests at the hotel, can check out anytime they like but never truly leave.
This is the view of HPE CEO Antonio Neri, who told The Register that contrary to early claims from the the likes of AWS, the cloud is not democratising IT, nor is it an open environment, just the latest form of vendor lock-in.
At the Discover event in Munich, Neri – who started out at HPE in a Netherlands call centre and rose through the ranks to replace Meg Whitman as the boss of HPE on 1 February 2018 – noted the General Availability of AWS Outposts in early December: an on-premises rack running native AWS or VMware environments that hooks up to to AWS’s public cloud.
“The first message there is I think [AWS] has finally recognised the world is hybrid,” he said. “The world is hybrid and apps and data live everywhere, and so for them to continue to drive the growth they need to bring the cloud to the data.”
According to HPE’s estimates, three-quarters of data will be created outside of the data centre and outside of the cloud, at the “edge” – everywhere else except the bit barn or the cloud.
“It is cheaper and physically easier to move the cloud to where the data is, not the data to where the cloud is. What the public cloud really wants is your data, [providers] don’t care about your workloads, and so once you check your data in the public cloud you are kind of locked in, it is like checking into Hotel California – you check in and you never check out.”
Data, he said, has a “gravitational force and once that data gravitates to a place it’s very hard to move it… I think the customer is realising now that the cost of [taking] that data out of the cloud is the biggest part of expense.”
He said: “Maybe five years ago or 10 years ago the cost of [public cloud] compute was very attractive to [customers] because they don’t have to deal with labor, power, cooling, de-appreciation, all the things that you normally go through when you deploy infrastructure, and that was appealing. Plus the simplicity, right, I don’t have to deal with all the software, the maintenance aspect of this. I don’t have the skill sets to move to the cloud – the cloud should be all about speed and agility, enabling faster delivery of services, all that was interesting and good.”
Neri claimed AWS, via Outposts, is giving customers a “tentacle” to extend its public cloud into their own data centre.
“The reality, they’ve [AWS] already told you, [is it] will cost you more, at least 30 per cent more than moving your data into the public cloud. So it is a way to attract you back to the public cloud. What we want is an open approach, a true, multi-cloud approach where you have choices, you have the flexibility to move data and apps to where it makes more sense, whether it is for security purposes or for experience purposes or cost purposes.”
Lots of easier workloads have moved to the cloud – email, dev work – but the vast majority of traditional enterprise scale workloads remain on-premise. IDC reckons that as of 2023, 70 per cent of these workloads will remain on site.
Neri is an engineer by profession but as CEO he seamlessly slips into salesman talk. “We believe we have a better approach, an open, cloud native approach. Intelligent and secure. And this is why we announced our unique partnership with a company that is led by my friend, John Chambers, called Pensando, and in order to deliver that edge cloud experience you need to implement different architectures.”
In October, HPE led a Series C round of investment of $145m in Pensando – Pensando sells programmable software-defined cloud, computing, networking, storage and security services at the edge. This cash came from HPE’s Pathfinder programme that seeks to invest in startups.
