With over a third of founders being engineers, many will know the importance of the cloud.
Yesterday, Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) announced its Diversity Startup Program, which will provide the HPE GreenLake edge-to-cloud platform to startups owned by women and minorities.
Nearly 35 percent of Canadian founders are engineers, according to the University of Toronto Tech 2019 Founder Education survey, and similar results have been found in other regions. So, it’s safe to say that many of the people looking to take advantage of this new program will have a technical background. This means they will likely know the importance of sustainable and scalable cloud systems, to run complex computations and store Big Data, to implement tools like simulation, IoT, Digital Twins, PLM and more. This positions HPE to help grow its presence in the engineering cloud market, which has been its goal for quite some time.
The Diversity Startup Program was developed in collaboration with Alpha3 Cloud, an HPE partner service provider that focuses on implementing hybrid clouds, infrastructure-as-a-service (IasS) and platform-as-a-service (PaaS). This collaboration is a good strategy as many organizations are opting for hybrid and multicloud systems to reduce costs—something that is particularly attractive to startups on a tight budget.
“Alpha3 Cloud can now optimize and transform their customers’ businesses and investments through HPE GreenLake, while also transforming their own business,” said Alexia Clements, vice president worldwide GTM at HPE GreenLake Cloud Services, in a release. “The HPE Diversity Startup program enables cloud service providers to ramp and scale cloud platforms quickly to better meet customer needs.”
The HPE Diversity Startup Program works through a month-to-month subscription and voucher-based system. As suggested by the hybrid-cloud strategies of Alpha3 Cloud, the offering does not require vendor lock-in. The data centers are also close to where much of the startup action is, with facilities in the San Francisco Bay Area and Northen Virginia.
As companies grow, they can spin-up their cloud systems without risking the systems they produced through this program. In fact, the first expansion out of the program could cost less than a few hundred a year, ensuring it remains affordable for fledgling companies. Some of the technical aspects of the cloud being offered include:
- HPE Apollo 2000 Gen10 Plus System for compute.
- HPE Apollo 4200 Gen10 Server for storage.
“Our research has shown that in the next decade, many new start-ups and high-growth businesses will be founded by minority and women-owned businesses, and these companies face significant challenges accessing the capital and services required for success,” said Ron Sacks, CEO of Alpha3 Cloud, in a release. “Our collaboration with HPE GreenLake enables us to support this emerging business community with just-right provisioning, efficient cost management and the ability to integrate our own value-added services as needed.”
The first company to join the HPE Diversity Startup Program is Joyuus, a NIH-backed healthcare company started by Kristine Merz and Lisa Marceau. The company produces a web app to help new mothers in their postpartum journey.
“As a startup, resource allocation is critical to our success and since working with Alpha3 Cloud we have gained invaluable IT guidance and access to cloud services securely and affordably that make it easier for us to grow our business,” said Marceau in a release. “HPE’s commitment to supporting underrepresented groups through this program is something that the rest of the corporate and investment world is failing to do, and the HPE Diversity Startup Program is truly commendable.”
