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.
Good Equals Progress provides industry research and analysis on the topics of Environmental, Social, and Governance (ESG) and Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI). These columns are for educational purposes only and should not be considered in any way investment advice.
The original version of this article was first published on Futurum Research.
Image Credit: HPE
