As Hewlett-Packard Enterprise approaches the first year anniversary of its historic separation, the new company has integrated the services program into the Partner Ready channel program at the 2016 Global Partner Conference in Boston.
But adding the Partner Ready Service Provider plan into Partner Ready was not the only thing HPE did at the show. HPE also embarked on a competencies direction that will see the company introduce 11 new competencies this year and next; starting with six today.
Those six competencies are:
- Application development and transformation for cloud migration;
- IT automation and orchestration, which includes cloud automation, virtualization and containers such as Docker;
- Incident recovery, which focuses on data back-up and recovery;
- Data management and architectures that includes SAP Hana real time data analytics;
- Digital collaboration for unified collaboration featuring solutions such as Skype for Business; and
- Intelligent workplace that includes client virtualization.
CDN has learned through a source the remaining five competencies that HPE plans to introduce in 2017 are campus mobility, risk management and secure design, threat detection and response, data discovery and assessment, and a business data analytics competency.
Jesse Chavez, HPE’s worldwide leader for indirect strategy and operations for the enterprise group, told CDN these tactical moves each have three core messages of partner growth, profitability and innovation.
“As a large company the focus was on a lot of different programs. We are consolidating all of those under Partner Ready so that we can support all business models from a partner perspective such as resale, hosting, managed services and integration all in one program,” Chavez said.
A major aspect of this enhancement is the direction some partners are taking in transforming to be a service provider. Chavez also said the Partner Ready Service program will also cover the service providers in the telco space and will feature a section called Flex Capacity that will help partners align the data centre services for a subscription model or in a pay-as-you-go scenario. This program will be launched on Nov. 1st will include at least two tiers of membership.
HPE started the streamlining process for Partner Ready approximately 36 months ago as the company realized channel partners were transitioning away from a product or solutions resale focus to a more services led go-to market approach.
Chavez said the technical services program, called Partner Ready Service Provider, needed to be integrated into Partner Ready because solution providers made their own professional services or HPE services a bigger part of their overall business. This meant HPE also needed to enhance its market development fund resources, deal registration, improve core compensation to be more predictive for partners and streamline reporting to make it easier for the channel to do business with HPE.
“From a digital marketing perspective customers are buying differently and are demanding outcomes,” he said.
In line with the competencies area, HPE partners should expect to see special branding and targeted MDF dollars for demand generation based on their expertise level. For example, if a partner has skills related to Skype for Business or in general can develop digital collaboration solutions HPE will work with these solution providers to develop targeted demand generation campaigns through MDF that exploits the competency.
Chris Ogburn, HPE’s vice president of worldwide channel marketing, told CDN customers are consuming information in a different way and more importantly are not reaching out to sales people directly. More often than not, customers have done research on their own before engaging with a partner.
“If I’m a partner I would get excited about these three things from HPE. We are going to help you with a social media centre, we have created a (marketing materials) repository (containing images, thought leadership videos, and white papers), and a digital marketing concierge service. Customers are consuming this type of content. Partners can now access all these resources directly; make them their own and roll them out on their own social media feeds. They can be customized and scheduled for the best timing,” Ogburn said.
The HPE digital marketing concierge service can be made available through email, chat and in 22 languages around the clock.
HPE also announced further enhancements to Partner Ready for Aruba Networks that includes IoT and a mobile first strategy. HPE also included an area for ISVs to integrate and validate solutions. This area also includes hardware vendor alliances. Also new to Partner Ready are online financial services tools, flash, software-defined storage for SMB, Docker ready server and a HC 380 hyper converged bundle strictly for channel partners.
