Barclays snubs public cloud giants and hardware rivals for HPE GreenLake private cloud
(2021/12/16)
- Reference: 1639674192
- News link: https://www.theregister.co.uk/2021/12/16/barclays_hpe_greenlake/
- Source link:
Hewlett Packard Enterprise's direct salesforce has inked a 10-year contract with Barclays Bank to provide a global private cloud via its GreenLake platform.
Under the agreement, understood to be worth many millions of dollars, HPE will refresh the infrastructure in multiple Barclays' data centres and co-location facilities based in the UK, US and Asia, people close to the deal told us.
The GreenLake managed service will establish a minimum level of spending with the bank, and includes an option to reserve workloads and run them on demand. The pricing for compute, memory, and storage is based on utilisation.
[1]
The private cloud platform is intended to host thousands of apps across the Barclays group of banking entities and more than 100,000 workloads including virtual desktop infrastructure, SQL DBs, Windows Server, and Linux.
[2]
[3]
HPE's Pointnext professional services division will undertake the migration from legacy infrastructure to its new home, along with Barclays' techies.
This seemingly marks a change in direction for the bank. In 2018, Barclays talked of being 24 months into a project to shut its own data centre and move wholesale to AWS, at least according to [4]one report .
[5]
That no longer seems to be the case. Moving those workloads to the public cloud would have inevitably involved re-architecting them and perhaps a smidge of coding.
We asked the bank to comment but it refused.
The agreement with HPE is not thought to be connected to regulatory compliance, such that those workloads could have run in the public cloud should Barclays have wanted them to. We did ask the bank what its desired outcome is – the press statement mentioned "delivering an enhanced personalized banking experience" for customers.
[6]
HPE confirmed to us that its direct salesforce penned the contract with Barclays. As we revealed last week, just 1.125 per cent of HPE's 80,000 "channel partners" have [7]thrown their weight behind GreenLake for various reasons, including claims from some that customers don't want to buy hardware as a service.
[8]What a pain in the aaS: HPE signs up just 1.125% of its channel to sell hardware delivered as a service
[9]Meg Whitman – former HP and eBay CEO – nominated as US ambassador to Kenya
[10]HPE sees 'no indication' its tech was sold to Chinese military, seeks answers from Uncle Sam on sanctions
[11]Now here's HPE with the weather in Northern Europe
Barclays obviously wasn't among those being referenced by the resellers we spoke to.
GreenLake is the mechanism under which HPE will make its entire portfolio available to buy as a service next year. Being reliant on the channel for circa 70 per cent of its revenues means the company will need resellers on board to scale GreenLake, although winning the Barclays logo against cloud giants and historic hardware rivals is a fillip for HPE.
Executives at HPE and Barclays issued statements that were not really quote-worthy but it's Christmas so...
"Today our customers expect an intelligent, contextual and personalized digital experience with seamless performance. With HPE GreenLake we're building a cloud platform that will enable the agility and operational performance needed to achieve this ambition while providing a modern economic model for private cloud," said Craig Bright, group chief information officer at Barclays.
Marc Waters, HPE senior veep and MD for the UK, Ireland, Middle East and South Africa, said: "Banking systems are critical national infrastructure. Resilience, sustainability and security of the underlying technology platform are the non-negotiable fundamentals that enable the provision of personalized digital experiences.
"Our fully managed HPE GreenLake platform provides infrastructure, software and services that enable automation, control, flexibility, exceptional experience and a positive commercial advantage."
The exact financial details of the agreement were not disclosed. The length of the contract, a "decade-long partnership," was [12]revealed by HPE's social media wonks this morning but that post was pulled, perhaps indicating that Barclays wanted this information kept out of the public domain. Whoops. ®
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[4] https://www.computerweekly.com/news/252443653/Barclays-banks-on-DevOps-to-support-all-in-move-to-AWS-public-cloud
[5] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_onprem/front&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=4&c=44YbvFJz@W3LS-uc-A-uedEwAAAIc&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D4%26raptor%3Dfalcon%26pos%3Dmid%26test%3D0
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[7] https://www.theregister.com/2021/12/10/hpe_aas/
[8] https://www.theregister.com/2021/12/10/hpe_aas/
[9] https://www.theregister.com/2021/12/09/meg_whitman_nominated_as_ambassador_to_kenya/
[10] https://www.theregister.com/2021/11/29/hpe_china_sanctions/
[11] https://www.theregister.com/2021/11/11/hpe_united_weather_centres/
[12] https://www.linkedin.com/posts/hewlett-packard-enterprise_barclays-selects-hpe-greenlake-for-private-activity-6877170443762110464-H-gL/
[13] https://whitepapers.theregister.com/
Under the agreement, understood to be worth many millions of dollars, HPE will refresh the infrastructure in multiple Barclays' data centres and co-location facilities based in the UK, US and Asia, people close to the deal told us.
The GreenLake managed service will establish a minimum level of spending with the bank, and includes an option to reserve workloads and run them on demand. The pricing for compute, memory, and storage is based on utilisation.
[1]
The private cloud platform is intended to host thousands of apps across the Barclays group of banking entities and more than 100,000 workloads including virtual desktop infrastructure, SQL DBs, Windows Server, and Linux.
[2]
[3]
HPE's Pointnext professional services division will undertake the migration from legacy infrastructure to its new home, along with Barclays' techies.
This seemingly marks a change in direction for the bank. In 2018, Barclays talked of being 24 months into a project to shut its own data centre and move wholesale to AWS, at least according to [4]one report .
[5]
That no longer seems to be the case. Moving those workloads to the public cloud would have inevitably involved re-architecting them and perhaps a smidge of coding.
We asked the bank to comment but it refused.
The agreement with HPE is not thought to be connected to regulatory compliance, such that those workloads could have run in the public cloud should Barclays have wanted them to. We did ask the bank what its desired outcome is – the press statement mentioned "delivering an enhanced personalized banking experience" for customers.
[6]
HPE confirmed to us that its direct salesforce penned the contract with Barclays. As we revealed last week, just 1.125 per cent of HPE's 80,000 "channel partners" have [7]thrown their weight behind GreenLake for various reasons, including claims from some that customers don't want to buy hardware as a service.
[8]What a pain in the aaS: HPE signs up just 1.125% of its channel to sell hardware delivered as a service
[9]Meg Whitman – former HP and eBay CEO – nominated as US ambassador to Kenya
[10]HPE sees 'no indication' its tech was sold to Chinese military, seeks answers from Uncle Sam on sanctions
[11]Now here's HPE with the weather in Northern Europe
Barclays obviously wasn't among those being referenced by the resellers we spoke to.
GreenLake is the mechanism under which HPE will make its entire portfolio available to buy as a service next year. Being reliant on the channel for circa 70 per cent of its revenues means the company will need resellers on board to scale GreenLake, although winning the Barclays logo against cloud giants and historic hardware rivals is a fillip for HPE.
Executives at HPE and Barclays issued statements that were not really quote-worthy but it's Christmas so...
"Today our customers expect an intelligent, contextual and personalized digital experience with seamless performance. With HPE GreenLake we're building a cloud platform that will enable the agility and operational performance needed to achieve this ambition while providing a modern economic model for private cloud," said Craig Bright, group chief information officer at Barclays.
Marc Waters, HPE senior veep and MD for the UK, Ireland, Middle East and South Africa, said: "Banking systems are critical national infrastructure. Resilience, sustainability and security of the underlying technology platform are the non-negotiable fundamentals that enable the provision of personalized digital experiences.
"Our fully managed HPE GreenLake platform provides infrastructure, software and services that enable automation, control, flexibility, exceptional experience and a positive commercial advantage."
The exact financial details of the agreement were not disclosed. The length of the contract, a "decade-long partnership," was [12]revealed by HPE's social media wonks this morning but that post was pulled, perhaps indicating that Barclays wanted this information kept out of the public domain. Whoops. ®
Get our [13]Tech Resources
[1] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_onprem/front&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=2&c=2YbvFJz@W3LS-uc-A-uedEwAAAIc&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D2%26raptor%3Dcondor%26pos%3Dtop%26test%3D0
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[4] https://www.computerweekly.com/news/252443653/Barclays-banks-on-DevOps-to-support-all-in-move-to-AWS-public-cloud
[5] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_onprem/front&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=4&c=44YbvFJz@W3LS-uc-A-uedEwAAAIc&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D4%26raptor%3Dfalcon%26pos%3Dmid%26test%3D0
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[7] https://www.theregister.com/2021/12/10/hpe_aas/
[8] https://www.theregister.com/2021/12/10/hpe_aas/
[9] https://www.theregister.com/2021/12/09/meg_whitman_nominated_as_ambassador_to_kenya/
[10] https://www.theregister.com/2021/11/29/hpe_china_sanctions/
[11] https://www.theregister.com/2021/11/11/hpe_united_weather_centres/
[12] https://www.linkedin.com/posts/hewlett-packard-enterprise_barclays-selects-hpe-greenlake-for-private-activity-6877170443762110464-H-gL/
[13] https://whitepapers.theregister.com/
Anonymous Coward
Barclays backed off AWS because they spent a rumoured-to-be-nine-figure sum to AWS in the space of a couple of years attempting a "Cloud Native Services For Everything" strategy and found themselves having spent all that money but having migrated the sum total of fuck all in that time.
Plenty of new/organic services going on up there - especially in the retail banking space where customer proximity and resilience really matter - but the grand strategic plan to move on premises stuff to cloud using excusively AWS native services failed and failed badly - the Barclays "Cloud Architects" drunk the AWS kool aid hard and regret it. Mostly from recently-acquired new jobs elsewhere.
This deal isn't as all-encompassing as HPE would make out. Barclays have always been a significant HPE customer - most of their kit is HPE kit and they buy plenty of software from them - so this is mostly a restructuring of existing deals onto a new PAYG pricing structure. There's no appetite to replatform shedloads of stuff onto HPE's half-baked MapR castoffs, and the reality is Barclays already have huge on premises "private clouds" from VMWare and Openshift, which HPE aren't going to be challenging any time soon.
Anonymous Coward
Hmmm...
Good for them
AlanSh
As an ex HP employee who worked on data centre migrations, I am pleased about this. Moving stuff to the 'cloud' was killing the enjoyment (for me) - which is why I left.
I hope they all do well.
Alan
A big Green Lake of dollar bills perhaps! One that some of the 1-percent can swim in etc. But seriously, my thoughts are with those underlings instructed to migrate the system(s) across and keep it all secure and running 24/7. Please make it all work nicely!