Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) today announced that Kern County, the third largest county in California by geography, has selected HPE GreenLake to drive its digital modernization efforts, save costs and improve performance.

Kern County recently embarked on a digital transformation initiative to modernize its IT and technology operations and deliver a cloud experience on-premises to the dozens of departments that rely on the county’s centralized IT system. By selecting HPE GreenLake, Kern County has gained the agility, flexibility, and innovation of the cloud, while preserving the compliance, governance, cost controls, and visibility of running its applications and workloads on-premises. As a result, Kern County has saved costs, increased efficiency, standardized architecture and continued to provide vital support and services to the community throughout the COVID-19 pandemic.

Kern County, home to almost one million California residents and comprised of over 40 different departments, turned to HPE GreenLake to overcome its departmental-specific IT challenges. Previously, every department had its own agreement with an OEM, and this created an enormously complex and costly system to manage. Kern County’s vision was simple: establish a central IT platform managed by the CIO office that acts as a service provider and broker of IT resources for all county departments. The county leveraged HPE GreenLake to create one unified framework so that all county departments can benefit from the same platform and economies of scale.

Today, over 75% of Kern County’s departments are supported by HPE GreenLake, and the goal is to reach 100%. Kern County was also attracted to the robust and continually expanding set of cloud services available through HPE GreenLake – which will allow the county to continue to grow and innovate on the HPE GreenLake platform.

“HPE GreenLake is a game changer because, among other reasons, it transforms financial optics – I am not worried about managing capital spend. I am now a broker to my organization, enabling departments to innovate and operate with agility, while I gain visibility, predictability, and centralized management of our operations and spend levels,” said Mac Avancena, CIO of Kern County. “This is analogous to me getting my electricity bill – it is addressed to me, comes to my house, meters what I am using in my home. I believe that this is the secret sauce that HPE GreenLake unearths; the ability to get to that level of transparency and granularity for the business so that everyone understands the value of what IT delivery is all about.”

Amidst the COVID-19 crisis, Kern County has also leveraged HPE GreenLake’s elasticity to increase its VDI capability to meet the unprecedented demand for remote work. In a legacy model, the county would have to initiate a procurement process, receive the order, and provision equipment – which would take weeks or months. Instead, with HPE GreenLake’s elastic approach, Kern County already had the additional bandwidth available to build out capacity immediately, without disruption to service.

Running HPE GreenLake since February of this year, Kern County achieved a predictable rate of growth and spend structure through flattening its technology spend variation, allowing the CIO office to focus on solving complex operational problems. Kern County is using HPE GreenLake for composable, software-defined compute infrastructure with HPE Synergy and industry-leading storage solutions with HPE 3PAR, HPE Nimble Storage, and HPE StoreOnce VSA for speed and flexibility to drive value.

Through HPE GreenLake Central, an advanced software platform that allows customers to run, manage and optimize their entire hybrid IT estate, , Kern County can access cloud services, and has real-time visibility into its usage data, and can set budgets, create reports, and build rules-based policies. HPE also ensures that any backend issues are fully managed through HPE Pointnext Services, so that the CIO office can focus on leveraging next generation tools.

Additionally, HPE Financial Services worked with Kern County to convert its existing, owned IT assets into a source of incremental budget and accelerate Kern County’s transition to HPE GreenLake, all while retaining its IT systems' full use. HPE Financial Services also sourced 200 TB of additional storage capacity for Kern County, using HPE certified pre-owned technology, to prevent interruptions in its supply chain due to COVID-19.

“We are thrilled to partner with Kern County to enable them to do important work in continuing to modernize, innovate, and serve their community,” said Keith White, Senior Vice President and General Manager of HPE GreenLake Cloud Services. “Kern County is a terrific example of the value HPE GreenLake provides to the public sector, as well as many other industries, in combining the agility and innovation that comes with delivering the cloud experience everywhere, with the visibility, compliance, and security that comes with preserving their applications and data on-premises and at the edge.”

HPE partnered with Nth Generation to help Kern County drive its digital transformation and modernization efforts, improve overall performance and save costs. Since 1991, Nth Generation has provided industry leading consultative IT services, encompassing a suite of IT and security solutions. In 2020, Nth Generation was recognized by HPE with the North America as-a-service Partner of the Year Award.

Additional resources

• For a short video featuring Mac Avancena, CIO of Kern County, and Keith White, Senior Vice President and General Manager of HPE GreenLake Cloud Services, discussing this news and partnership, please click here.
• For more information on HPE GreenLake, please visit: https://www.hpe.com/us/en/greenlake.html

About Hewlett Packard Enterprise

Hewlett Packard Enterprise is the global edge-to-cloud platform-as-a-service company that helps organizations accelerate outcomes by unlocking value from all of their data, everywhere. Built on decades of reimagining the future and innovating to advance the way we live and work, HPE delivers unique, open and intelligent technology solutions, with a consistent experience across all clouds and edges, to help customers develop new business models, engage in new ways, and increase operational performance. For more information, visit: www.hpe.com.

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