HPE GreenLake As-a-Service: Partner Sales and Revenue Clues -

Hewlett-Packard Enterprise (HPE) is describing GreenLake As-a-Service revenue and partner program growth in multiple ways, but HPE isn't quite ready to share exact quarterly revenue figures for the GreenLake sales push.

The big picture looks like this: For Q4 2021 specifically, HPE's ARR (annualized revenue run rate) was $796 million, which was up 36% year-over-year. Also, total as-a-Service orders rose 114% year-over-year, HPE said during a November 30, 2021 earnings call.

Sounds good. But consider this: The annualized revenue run rate (ARR) essentially boils down to about $200 million in actual as-a-service quarterly revenue -- a small slice of HPE's overall $7.4 billion in quarterly revenue.

HPE GreenLake: More Revenue Clues

The additional anecdotes from the earnings call included:

In fiscal year 2021, HPE-as-a-Service orders increased 61% year-over-year, with HPE GreenLake orders increasing 46% year-over-year.

HPE added more than 300 new GreenLake customers during fiscal year 2021, bringing total GreenLake customer count to more than 1,250.

HPE added more than $1.5 billion of GreenLake total contract value over the last year, bringing the total to more than $5.7 billion.

More than 900 partners sell HPE GreenLake.

All that said, GreenLake revenues are likely a small slice of overall HPE quarterly revenue ($7.4 billion in Q4 of 2021).

HPE GreenLake vs Public Clouds, Dell Apex and Cisco Plus

Meanwhile, HPE's long-term fortunes will involve competition against public cloud providers (Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud and Microsoft Azure) and traditional rivals that are pivoting toward as-a-service options. Dell Apex and Cisco Plus certainly come to mind.

HPE has vowed to make all its products available as a service by 2022, Cisco has aggressively adopted a recurring revenue mindset, and Dell shared some Apex business performance clues during an earnings call in November 2021.

Amid that backdrop, Dell continues to add more as-a-service options to the APEX portfolio. For instance, Dell and VMware are building an infrastructure-as-a-service relationship — known as Dell Technologies APEX Cloud Services with VMware Cloud — to provide “secure and consistent operations across multi-cloud environments.” Details about the Dell-VMware effort surfaced in October 2021.