New HPE Consulting Solution Identifies The Right Mix Of Hybrid Cloud

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Hewlett Packard Enterprise introduced Tuesday a unique consulting solution that aims to speed migration of enterprise applications to hybrid cloud environments, helping partners get a jump on digital transformation projects.

HPE Right Mix Advisor combines in-house and third-party tools with expertise within the company's Pointnext consulting division to offer migration recommendations tailored to the needs of enterprise clients. It then helps them start operationalizing those referrals, Erik Vogel, global vice president of HPE Pointnext, told CRN.

"We're targeting enterprises that want to take that holistic view, strategic view as they're taking up hybrid," Vogel said.

[Related: HPE Picks Company Veteran As New Pointnext Leader]

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The advisory service evaluates an enterprise's entire application portfolio and recommends the best "landing spots" for select applications, be they public or private clouds, Vogel said.

"If you're going to modernize these applications, we'll recommend that new target environment, and make a recommendation as to what has to be done to that application," he said, which could involve refactoring, rearchitecting, rewriting or rehosting.

Target environments could be Microsoft Azure or Azure Stack, AWS, Google or Ali Cloud. The service might also suggest a refresh of a traditional piece of infrastructure, or adoption of a hybrid technology like HPE GreenLake consumption-based infrastructure, or even a container platform running on a bare-metal server.

The aim is not to make suggestions across the client's entire portfolio, Vogel said. Instead, HPE looks to answer the question: "Of all the things they can do, what are the 10, 20 things they should do tomorrow morning?"

Right Mix Advisor serves up suggestions in weeks—not the typical time frame of months. The only bias is toward performance, Vogel said, gained from the Pointnext division's experience migrating thousands of customers to public cloud.

"We have a good perspective of what works well in public cloud, and which public cloud. We have an experience bias," Vogel said.

Enabling the advisory solution are two HPE acquisitions of channel powerhouses: Cloud Technology Partners and RedPixie.

"Customers don't want to wait 3 to 6 months, and have their staff doing interviews and questionnaires, they don’t want to see spreadsheets. They want to know what they should focus on right away, and trust that these are the right recommendations," Vogel said.

Often, Right Mix will simply recommend retiring some applications, as enterprises that have made acquisitions often develop redundancies.

The solution is highly scalable.

For smaller customers, the Right Mix assessment might involve looking at a single data center. Then there are customers like a services provider involved in the pilot for which HPE evaluated 140,000 servers within 37 data centers.

"We're really targeting customers looking to take advantage of hybrid and do it in a systematic fashion. Every enterprise customer is a hybrid customer today, but most clients got their sort of accidentally or by an ad hoc basis," he said.

Hybrid cloud options are changing rapidly. New offerings like AWS Outposts and upgraded Azure Stack capabilities are "constantly changing the calculus of where things should go and how they should make those decisions," Vogel said.

Right Mix Advisor assesses 200 factors and weighs their importance to specific clients. Some value performance over cost, others security above all, he said.

HPE has already done some pilot projects with the Right Mix service.

Partners haven't yet become involved, but the Right Mix tools will soon become accessible to the channel. HPE looks to give partners a competitive advantage in the market by fast-tracking projects delivering follow-on migration and modernization services, Vogel said.

Partners will also be able to resell the HPE Application Migration Plan for Cloud that's enabled by Right Mix Advisory technology.