Barclays taps HPE GreenLake to host its private cloud

Barclays has chosen HPE to host its global private cloud platform, the technology giant said Thursday, giving it another major customer win for its GreenLake “everything as-a-service” platform. 

The bank will use GreenLake to host thousands of apps and more than 100,000 workloads — including virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI), SQL databases, Windows server and Linux — across Barclays’ strategic hubs in the UK, USA and Asia. Barcklays has adopted a hybrid multi-cloud strategy aimed at creating more personalized banking experiences for its customers. 

Barclays is also tapping HPE Pointnext Services to assist its own team as it migrates workloads from legacy infrastructure to the private cloud. 

“Banking systems are critical national infrastructure. Resilience, sustainability and security of the underlying technology platform are the non-negotiable fundamentals that enable the provision of personalized digital experiences,” Marc Waters, HPE’s SVP and managing director for the UK, Ireland, Middle East & South Africa, said in a statement. “Given Barclays’ prominence as a UK headquartered global financial services leader, we are immensely proud to be chosen to provide their private cloud.”

HPE first launched GreenLake about four years ago. The fully-managed platform provides infrastructure, software and services — cloud services that can run on-premises, at the edge or in a colocation facility. Currently, HPE has about 1,250 enterprise customers using the platform, which has grown to $5.7 billion in total contract value. 

While just about every organization is looking at public cloud offerings, hybrid and multi-cloud remain the dominant cloud architectures, as Gartner recently noted. 

Still, major cloud providers are gunning for business in the financial services sector. Amazon Web Services, for instance, recently announced  a mainframe migration service aimed at mainframe customers like big banks. They’re also launching new, targeted services like Amazon FinSpace and the Goldman Sachs Financial Cloud for Data. Meanwhile, Microsoft recently made its Cloud for Financial Services generally available. IBM and Oracle have hybrid offerings targeted at the financial services sector.