On Monday, Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) announced its intention to acquire OpsRamp, which offers a multitenant AIOps-powered IT operations management (ITOM) solution for hybrid cloud environments. Its AIOps solution will be integrated into HPE’s GreenLake edge-to-cloud Platform. OpsRamp’s 300 employees will join HPE’s office of the CTO. Terms of the OpsRamp acquisition were not announced, but the deal is expected to close in Q3 of fiscal-year 2023.

Why OpsRamp?

The OpsRamp acquisition is an unsurprising move, as GreenLake’s current monitoring capabilities are built atop OpsRamp. And HPE Ventures recently invested in the company. Furthermore, OpsRamp’s modular, multitiered architecture and its vast library of integrations across hybrid environments fill a crucial gap in HPE’s hybrid cloud management offering. In the past year, HPE has been aggressively acquiring companies to beef up its GreenLake software portfolio. The OpsRamp acquisition is the fourth in a string of 2023 acquisitions and marks a continued multiyear effort by HPE to expand its hybrid cloud capabilities with AI, security, and data management.

OpsRamp’s offering is geared primarily at managed service providers (MSPs), global system integrators (GSIs), and OEMs, some of which are HPE competitors. OpsRamp differentiates with its simplistic yet powerful plug-and-play monitoring templates and in its ability to reduce noisy alerts. If paired successfully, both HPE and OpsRamp clients stand to benefit from this acquisition. HPE clients get an established operations management platform.

What Are The Competitive Implications?

While it’s unclear where HPE will focus its marketing and future development efforts, a successful integration could mean market differentiation in ways that HPE has not seen before in hybrid cloud. Competing vendors in the hybrid cloud and AIOps markets will need to keep a close eye on how the integration of the two offerings comes about.

Similarly, competitors should watch for how HPE promotes OpsRamp going forward. Will organizations, including HPE competitors that are OpsRamp customers, continue to have access to the stand-alone OpsRamp AIOps solution? Will HPE limit OpsRamp’s purpose to solely enriching GreenLake’s monitoring capabilities, or will OpsRamp be established as a separate business unit to handle this newly combined offering?

Competitors have reason to fear. After all, OpsRamp’s integration architecture and history of supporting MSPs and GSIs could prove daunting to midtier vendors and be perceived as a formidable opposition to market leaders. The combination of major players that, on their own, span ITOM, AIOps, and hybrid cloud management markets will put many vendors on notice. Competitors that may not have been keeping close tabs on these individual offerings due to their respective weaknesses can no longer do that. Most importantly, competitors should be ready for a quick rollout of an integrated OpsRamp/HPE offering, as OpsRamp’s architectural inclinations should make this happen quickly.

Will HPE’s Future Ramp Up Or Go Over The Edge?

Since taking over at the helm, HPE CEO Antonio Neri has been clear on three goals: 1) simplifying HPE’s services branding; 2) transitioning HPE’s entire hardware portfolio to a subscription model (i.e., “everything as a service”); and 3) staking the company’s entire future on GreenLake. Neri stated as much when he spoke with reporters in advance of the company’s annual Discover event in 2021: “GreenLake should be synonymous with HPE.” The CEO has good reason for this, and HPE’s and GreenLake’s focus on providing unified management and enablement from edge to cloud has immense market potential. But while the company has managed to stave off its downward revenue trend from 2015 to 2021, it has only seen marginal percentage gains year over year, and its net income shows sharp declines while its year-over-year net income has fallen. Whether HPE can successfully leverage OpsRamp and its other recent acquisitions in a meaningful way remains to be seen. Just like the cloud providers, data center players, and chip makers, HPE is gearing up to win the edge. As to whether it will do so, given its history, this seems unlikely.

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