India Inc driving small vendors to adopt strong IT infra: HPE India head

Ancillary units or vendors of large enterprises in manufacturing, fintech, ecommerce and government sectors are leading this demand, as they seek to comply with the IT requirements of clients, said HPE India managing director Som Satsangi.

In fact, the company has already reached pre-pandemic demand levels across its SMB market and is rapidly expanding, he added.

“In India, we have seen that enterprises are putting a lot of pressure on their partner SMB ecosystems to improve their IT infrastructure,” Satsangi said. “So, during Q3 and Q4, which was during the second wave of the pandemic, we saw a massive expansion in our SMB base.”

The global management was already bullish about the India market after HPE was carved out of the parent company, and the enhanced focus on the country planned in 2019 has paid off, he said.

In 2015, US-based Hewlett Packard Co. was split into HP Inc. to cater to personal devices and HP Enterprises to handle the enterprise services business. In 2019, HPE announced plans to invest $500 million in India over a period of five years to grow its operations, manufacturing and employee base as well as increase its R&D and services exports from the country.

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Satsangi said the company has seen an uptick from new businesses being set up in small cities. “Be it IT companies or startups, this pandemic has pushed many to set up base in new locations, which has created opportunities for us in the mid-market segment,” he said.

Further, due to the growth in demand for ecommerce, fintech and pharmaceutical/healthcare after the pandemic, it has led to greater engagement with businesses addressing these markets for HPE.

Industry tracker Gartner expects that 60% of midsize enterprise workloads will remain on premise through 2025 because customers need secure, single-tenant environments to run their apps and data wherever they reside.

HPE’s pay-per-use GreenLake cloud platform has also seen greater uptake due to the digital transformation demand across businesses in addition to recent software acquisitions like SGI and Cray.

“Automotive clients implemented heavy IT transformation mandates in recent quarters to automate their processes to reduce human interface. Also, SAP Clinical solutions were already popular among the pharma client base and during the pandemic we saw many more shifts to the HPE GreenLake solution as well,” Satsangi said.

Traditionally, about 60% of its client base was from government and large enterprises, but HPE has also leveraged solutions such as GreenLake and updated its go-to-market strategies to change this customer segment, he said.

“Over the past three years, we have implemented strategies to go after these mid-market clients and smaller businesses. We realised that we were losing out on small businesses because we had one leadership which traditionally worked with large clients. So, we divided our go-to market strategy across different teams for existing large enterprises, new business (including digital native startups) and SMBs, and that has led to a more balanced portfolio,” Satsangi said.

The company has also expanded its partnerships with data centre infrastructure providers to offer flexible public and private cloud solutions for businesses as per their needs.