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The ability to ensure and defend a customer’s IT infrastructure is in fact a specialty comprised of many aspects. From the outside, the focus is on the technical portion, but behind the curtain, the importance of management, processes, and policies is indisputable.
This is particularly the case when one is managing a large global organization with a presence in more than one hundred countries and serving more than 20,000 users. This is the story about how specialized know-how and contract management paved the way for the largest ever HPE GreenLake agreement originating in Denmark.
A Peak into the Darkness
The relief was grand when we, at Danoffice IT together with HPE, were able to plug the cord into the wall and activate two large south European datacenters. Together, these datacenters are the largest of their kind created by a team based out of Denmark. The team consisted of us at Danoffice IT and HPE in a close collaboration with our common customer which is a large global organization headquartered in New York.
Steffen Hansen, Presales Consultant says the following about this feat: “The logistics is a massive brainteaser in itself and a massive amount of work which some no longer put enough effort into, but which can destroy everything. Because security needs to be top-notch, the solution is designed in part as a dark site”.
A Trusted Advisor
In order to comprehend this case fully, we need to take you back to 2017 when the GreenLake agreement was entered into with the customer. At Danoffice IT, we have been a trusted partner of HPE for many years and we have been a leading supplier of their solutions to nonprofit organizations on a global scale. Therefore, we are also ambassadors, and we take pride in providing the right solution in the best way possible, truly because HPE’s solutions are in themselves top-shelf products.
“What is critical in this large case is that it is a re-win of an existing contract which can be dated back to 2017. This was one of the very first global GreenLake agreements sold by HPE Denmark. It may even have been the very first one”, Thomas Bjørn Hestbæk, Key Account Manager, says and adds: “As we were getting closer to the termination date of the contract in 2022, we went to Spain to present the perspectives to our customer and they quickly realized an opportunity for a collaboration between us and HPE to handle the matter jointly and directly. They also recognized the ability to continue the contract and expand the GreenLake solution. This contract became a reality in August of 2023.”
The crux of the matter in short is: Can we extend it again or do we need to issue a demand for tenders?
We specialize in maintaining and re-negotiating contracts and this expertise was highly beneficial in this case because the project started to expand in every way possible. Another helpful aspect of this case was our long-term close relationship with the customer.
Thomas explains: ”We were dealing with well-known terminology called sole sourcing which consists of three criteria: known supplier, known technology, and continuation of an existing contract,” he says. “As a trusted advisor, it is important to us to ensure that the customer was situated in the best way possible for the next 5 years and therefore, the counseling becomes a essential piece of the puzzle. We spent an incredible amount of time on this case. Our time spent was exciting and because we are so close with the customer, it is important for us to separate the technical piece from the financial piece. We were successful in doing so”.
“As a trusted advisor, it is important to us to ensure that the customer was situated in the best way possible for the next 5 years and therefore, the counseling becomes a essential piece of the puzzle”
Thomas Bjørn Hestbæk, Key Account Manager, Danoffice IT
Anchored at the Top
No two datacenter projects are the same, but when you get to the size that we were dealing with in this case, the comparable centers are few and therefore, you are left with two critical parameters: experience and know-how. “Because we could see that all sole-sourcing criteria were satisfied, we quickly moved on to the technical solution. We gathered our team of technicians and pre-sales all stars from HPE, Danoffice IT and the customer.
The reason why we started there is that the technical platform will define the financial piece which is subject to approval. We outlined a process and set a deadline of August of 2023; Thomas explains. “This was a firm deadline because the existing contract expired at that time. Potentially speaking, we could lose the contract and the customer could lose the equipment, so we took a proactive approach to helping the customer get to the other side”.
In cases such as these, there are only a few moments to rest. “The next obstacle was the contract itself because it needed to be approved at the top of the corporation. We were not nervous about winning, but we were nervous about making it in time”, Thomas confirms and adds to this: “It was highly complex”. As such, Thomas went back to New York. “The process in New York was very drawn out because it was a very large sum of money and because the GreenLake solution is so detailed.
This customer’s internal processes are created by several inter-dependent layers of decision making and ongoing approval along the way. That said, I had about a full week of not sleeping,” Thomas says.
A Greener Solution
HPE GreenLake was, and still is, a progressive technology platform within which you are tinkering with well-known conventions such as consumption and payment in a radical way. We are making in-depth investments in environmental, social, and financial sustainability initiatives and this is where HPE GreenLake is a superb match.
The customers share a cloud-based capacity in a manner of speaking, and they are then billed in accordance with usage. Thereby, several of the parameters in the work towards greener IT have been achieved through this platform and sustainability was also an important factor for this customer who happens to be a global player in these arena.
Expanding Together
Performance and sustainability go hand in hand on the GreenLake platform and those were also two of the operative words in this case. “The two datacenters in southern Europe have been under pressure for a long time and the customer noticed an increasing need for performance in the system. Therefore, a determination was needed as to how many SAPs were needed for both capacity and performance. This is also where budgeting became a huge challenge from a well-known metric: the customer’s usage measured in RAM and storage space had increased. Therefore, the option of adding more hardware is not ideal since this would add pressure to the existing budget. Therefore, the GreenLake option was selected because a GreenLake contract outright states that you have the option of expansion. Furthermore, the payments are made ongoingly rather than the classis annual invoicing,” Steffen Hansen explains.
The core of the GreenLake solution is that the customer frees up large amounts of resources since all maintenance and operation is included in the contract. This was a determining factor for these two datacenters. ”The Customer has quite a bit of staff members who are managing labor-intensive tasks. By removing maintenance and operation, those resources are freed up. Now, HPE is in charge of the operations, monitoring, support, and we at Danoffice IT will handle the specialized tasks in the solution such as backup, validation, and proactive dialogue to support future projects”.
The Complete Package
Two large datacenters in southern Europe. Loads of technology. “In a case such as this one, there would normally be a need to lease all sorts of things, but instead, we can put everything into one package and one contract,” Steffen Hansen says. “Here, we are dealing with technology which communicates internally, and we do not need to perform a complex migration. Servers are really just that, servers, but then not. Superdomes from HPE are ahead of the game compared to other brands, so there is a true benefit there and everything is serviced all the way down the line. In addition to all that, we have the GreenLake portion. Nobody on the market has such a complex solution as HPE has with GreenLake”.
Two Tracks, Ten Months
Concurrently with the efforts made by Steffen and his team together with HPE as the technical piece, Thomas has been unstoppable with his negotiations. “It quickly became clear to us in this process that we needed to drive the process forward full steam ahead on two concurrent tracks. We needed the technical track to reach the finish line, but we could not lose momentum on the negotiations and all the contractual pieces, so we ran both concurrently,”
Thomas says. “We created workshops, and they became more and more detail oriented. They were so detailed that we were able to include pricing, which we were also asked to do in order to notify headquarters in New York on an ongoing basis. Furthermore, we were able to put our technician into the lead of the process of the technical solution with Steffen. The solution was extended, renewed, and expanded and the entire ride took months.”
Steffen adds to this: ”The entire project management went well. We were met with wonderful goodwill by the customer which enabled us to reach the finish line on a huge project in a short amount of time. That said, HPE was also a very active player in the process. The collaboration with HPE has been outright fantastic and we were able to utilize each other’s strengths in an ideal way. Whenever we would add an inquiry to a task, their team executed it immediately. Therefore, we were able to conclude that everything would be built in time for us to connect the power to the completed racks,” he says, but he adds this to the “difficult” part of the IT project: “Testing and documenting is a massive undertaking, but the collaboration with HPE’s experts, factories, and logistics was powerful. Therefore, we were ready to develop the completed solution exceptionally quickly.
People were working around the clock, and during holidays which they get a well-deserved pat on the back for,” Steffen adds and concludes: “Building a solution based on GreenLake which spans across two datacenters with a high level of security and complexity is unique. Therefore, we are thrilled to have been a part of it all the way to its core. In order to ensure that the process is running according to schedule, we ensure that our own service department, Delivery Management, is highly involved. Even when the service is up and running, we continue to hold the customer’s hand here and we follow proactively along with all parts of the project.”
