But adding the Partner Ready Service Provider plan into Partner Ready was not the only thing HPE has done to enhance its offering for solution providers. HPE also embarked on a competencies direction that will see the company introduce 11 new competencies this year and next. The company has already introduced six.
Those six competencies are:
- Application development and transformation;
- IT automation and orchestration;
- Incident recovery;
- Data management and architectures;
- Digital collaboration; and
- Intelligent workplaces.
Jesse Chavez, HPE’s worldwide leader for indirect strategy and operations for the enterprise group, said these strategic 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 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.
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.
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 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, said 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, 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,” Ogburn said.
The HPE digital marketing concierge service can be made available through email, chat and in 22 languages.
