As organizations reassess their virtualization strategies amid rising costs and shifting vendor dynamics, HPE is positioning its portfolio as a path for partners to help customers modernize infrastructure without sacrificing flexibility.
During his HPE Discover keynote, President and CEO Antonio Neri pointed directly to growing customer frustration with the economics of virtualization.
“Rising virtualization costs are pushing many of you to look for more flexibility and choice,” Neri said. He highlighted HPE’s software portfolio, including Morpheus, OpsRamp, Zerto, and GreenLake capabilities, as part of a unified platform designed to help organizations “modernize on your own terms.”
Morpheus and GreenLake become the operational layer
A key part of HPE’s virtualization strategy centers on providing partners with tools to manage increasingly complex hybrid environments, rather than simply replacing one hypervisor with another.
During his Discover keynote, Neri said HPE has unified Morpheus, OpsRamp, Zerto, and GreenLake capabilities into a single operating experience designed to help organizations modernize infrastructure while retaining flexibility around workload placement and cloud strategy.
“This enables you to modernize on your own terms, while simplifying how you provision, preserve, and protect your hybrid routines and environments,” Neri said.
READ MORE: our full coverage of Neri’s keynote at HPE Discover is available here.
Agentic AI capabilities enable scale without added complexity
The company also highlighted GreenLake Intelligence, which uses agentic AI capabilities to automate operational tasks, correlate telemetry across environments, assist with virtual machine migrations, and identify infrastructure issues before they become business disruptions.
According to HPE, the platform can prevalidate migration plans, test compatibility requirements, evaluate storage access and network configurations, and reduce work that traditionally takes weeks to minutes.
For partners, those capabilities create opportunities to offer virtualization migration services while reducing operational complexity for customers moving between platforms or modernizing legacy environments.
HPE is also adding financial incentives to make migration projects more feasible, offering steep discounts, such as waiving the first year of software fees, to entice organizations wary of maintaining two licenses during their environment migrations.
Visibility becomes key for partners managing multiple customers
Thrive COO Scott Steele said the company’s private cloud offering is built on HPE’s infrastructure stack and increasingly relies on the visibility and management capabilities delivered through Morpheus and GreenLake.
“The Morpheus environments allow us to make sure that people can have the observability around where services should be going, where the workload should be done, how do you cost optimize and all that,” Steele said.
Steele added that customers increasingly want a clear understanding of where workloads belong and why.
The combination of automation, observability, and policy-driven management helps providers simplify those conversations while maintaining transparency around performance, costs, and operational outcomes.
Steele said a unified management approach allows teams to monitor diverse environments through a common operating model rather than managing multiple disconnected tools, helping providers deliver consistent governance, resiliency, and customer outcomes across private cloud, public cloud, and managed environments.
Channel partners become strategic advisors
The shift in the virtualization market is also creating a larger role for partners as strategic advisors rather than technology resellers.
That advisory role aligns closely with how HPE partners describe their virtualization opportunity. Rather than simply replacing one platform with another, partners are helping organizations evaluate workload placement, resiliency, governance, cloud strategy, and future AI requirements.
For HPE, the opportunity extends beyond software replacement. The company is betting that partners can use virtualization modernization projects as an entry point to broader conversations about hybrid cloud, data management, security, and AI.
As enterprises continue reassessing virtualization investments, that combination of infrastructure flexibility and partner-led services could become one of the channel’s largest modernization opportunities over the next several years.