Hewlett Packard Enterprise announced the HPE Diversity Startup Program to provide equitable access to the HPE GreenLake edge-to-cloud platform for women-owned and minority-owned startups. The initiative was developed in collaboration with Alpha3 Cloud, a HPE Partner Ready service provider that specializes in offering hybrid cloud, Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS), and Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) cloud solutions to organizations of all sizes.

The HPE Diversity Startup Program provides complimentary cloud service vouchers through service provider partners to startups owned by women and minorities. Those companies are then able to consume HPE GreenLake services to deliver digital solutions to their customers more economically and effectively.

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, HPE GreenLake Cloud Services. “The HPE Diversity Startup program enables cloud service providers to ramp and scale cloud platforms quickly to better meet customer needs.”

With data centers in the San Francisco Bay Area and Northern Virginia, Alpha3 Cloud offers cloud services built on HPE GreenLake to startups with month-to-month subscription models and no vendor lock-in. It has uniquely tailored its cloud services to offer flexible and seamless provisioning that grows with the business for as little as $13 per month. Alpha3 Cloud uses HPE Apollo 2000 Gen10 Plus System for compute, and the HPE Apollo 4200 Gen10 Server for storage, to deliver its IaaS and PaaS solutions which provide high-density environments that support affordable cloud services and modularity to add capacity as needed. 

“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 capital and services required for success,” said Ron Sacks, CEO, Alpha3 Cloud. “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.”

Joyuus, a newly launched digital health innovator, is a women-owned startup co-founded by Kristine Merz and Lisa Marceau and was selected as the inaugural company to join the HPE Diversity Startup Program. The National Institute of Health (NIH)-backed startup is developing a web app that offers accessible well-being resources for new mothers to support their postpartum journey.  In addition to cloud services, Alpha3 Cloud provides Joyuus with personalized consultation, complementary IT guidance, and security and compliance support for federal privacy regulations.

Joyuus’ web app requires a multi-cloud strategy to support its business operations and enable collaboration across a distributed team of developers, clinical experts, designers, and content experts. Additionally, it required a flexible system operating in a secure, cloud-based environment to support a remote workforce.

“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. “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.”

The HPE Diversity Startup program allows customers, like Joyuus, to quickly spin up environments without requiring in-house IT management and mitigates the risk of catastrophic data loss. Underrepresented startups now have an affordable alternative to developing and managing a cloud infrastructure.

Source: HPE