The News: HPE announced today at its HPE Discover event Salomon’s selection of HPE GreenLake to provide a next-generation, on-premises cloud environment. Salomon Group is a French sports equipment manufacturer based in Annecy, France. Salomon will use HPE Synergy and HPE Nimble Storage in the deployment, according to sources. The HPE solution was deployed by Cheops Technology, an HPE partner. Read the press release from HPE here.
Salomon’s Selection of HPE GreenLake Designed to Aid in Meeting its Ambitious Sustainability Goal
Analyst Take: The key takeaway from this announcement is that Salomon’s selection of HPE GreenLake’s edge to cloud platform to provide a next gen, on-prem cloud environment was a strategic one, with a goal of both driving business agility and increasing data center sustainability and, equally relevant, serving to meet the company’s needs now and into the future.
Changing business demands, accelerated by a global pandemic, are causing business leaders to escalate the modernization and streamlining of IT infrastructure. Solutions like HPE GreenLake are becoming increasingly attractive because they can provide both flexibility for developers, as well as increased scalability and the financial flexibility that IT leaders seek.
Salomon’s selection of HPE GreenLake is focused on not only modernizing IT and enabling greater business agility, but also on helping the company reduce the environmental impact of IT and helping the company meet its ambitious sustainability goal of achieving a 30% reduction of carbon emissions by 2025.
Eric Gauffre, IT Infrastructure and Services Director at Salomon, said, “We believe innovative technologies have a critical role to play to reduce companies carbon footprint. Better capacity planning helps us achieve greater long-term growth and allow us to adapt our business to the ever-changing environment.”
The Increasing Importance of Environmental, Social and Governance (ESG) and the Role ESG Plays in Enterprise IT Decisions
What’s ahead? I continue to see a more bullish outlook on HPE’s GreenLake range of offerings, and this client win with Salomon is just a further endorsement of HPE’s approach.
However, for me the most interesting takeaway from this announcement was not that HPE has won another client, but rather that the focus of the announcement was on the reduction of carbon footprint. It is clear that environmental, social, and corporate governance (ESG) is becoming a board level concern, and companies are being increasingly vocal about their desire to reduce their carbon footprint. This ESG momentum is likely to continue into the foreseeable future, and IT vendors are likely to see this focus as a way to engage clients and drive differentiation.
I believe that the growing importance of ESG, specifically related to carbon emissions, will drive the narrative around flexible pay-as-you-grow offerings, be they on-premises or in the cloud. As IT organizations look to deliver on the commitments made by their C-Suite, they will need to be able demonstrate that the solutions they choose are not only the right ones from a technical perspective, but also that they have also chosen the most environmentally friendly approach.
With IT delivery reportedly responsible for two percent of worldwide carbon emissions, the focus on reducing carbon footprint is to be applauded by vendors and organizations alike. Of course, I will need to get closer to the HPE offerings chosen by Salomon and then fully digest the exact linkage to the claimed 30% emissions savings to be able to comment further, but I am impressed by the focus of this announcement. Vendors will be better served if they provide more clarity around the claims made in these announcements going forward to move beyond marketing headlines and into actionable insights that can drive purchasing decision.
Overall, I was pleased to see Salomon’s selection of HPE GreenLake as a solution and very interested in the sustainability aspect. I’ll be looking ahead on this one with interest.
Disclosure: Futurum Research is a research and advisory firm that engages or has engaged in research, analysis, and advisory services with many technology companies, including those mentioned in this article. The author does not hold any equity positions with any company mentioned in this article.
Other insights from Futurum Research:
HPE Announces New Vertically Optimized GreenLake Cloud Services At HPE Discover
HPE Acquires Determined AI To Accelerate ML Training Capabilities
HPE Sees Strong Q2 Growth Led By XaaS And Edge
Image Credit: HPE
Author Information
Regarded as a luminary at the intersection of technology and business transformation, Steven Dickens is the Vice President and Practice Leader for Hybrid Cloud, Infrastructure, and Operations at The Futurum Group. With a distinguished track record as a Forbes contributor and a ranking among the Top 10 Analysts by ARInsights, Steven's unique vantage point enables him to chart the nexus between emergent technologies and disruptive innovation, offering unparalleled insights for global enterprises.
Steven's expertise spans a broad spectrum of technologies that drive modern enterprises. Notable among these are open source, hybrid cloud, mission-critical infrastructure, cryptocurrencies, blockchain, and FinTech innovation. His work is foundational in aligning the strategic imperatives of C-suite executives with the practical needs of end users and technology practitioners, serving as a catalyst for optimizing the return on technology investments.
Over the years, Steven has been an integral part of industry behemoths including Broadcom, Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE), and IBM. His exceptional ability to pioneer multi-hundred-million-dollar products and to lead global sales teams with revenues in the same echelon has consistently demonstrated his capability for high-impact leadership.
Steven serves as a thought leader in various technology consortiums. He was a founding board member and former Chairperson of the Open Mainframe Project, under the aegis of the Linux Foundation. His role as a Board Advisor continues to shape the advocacy for open source implementations of mainframe technologies.
