Hewlett Packard Enterprise has outlined enhancements to its Partner Ready Program designed to help it capture a bigger share of the SMB market and expand sales of as-a-service infrastructure.
The updates and upgrades, which build upon plans announced in September at HPE’s Virtual Distribution Partner Conference, will unfold over the course of the company’s 2021 fiscal year, which commenced last week.
In a bid to help partners focus on growth amid uncertain market conditions, HPE stressed, base requirements for Partner Ready, including revenue targets, competency qualifications, and requirements for earning sales and technical certifications, will remain unchanged from standards established in the 2020 fiscal year.
Among the SMB-focused changes being introduced are new geography-specific incentives and bonuses for SMB deals through HPE’s ENGAGE&GROW loyalty program as well as the company’s financial services group.
In addition, HPE is expanding co-selling opportunities for SMB and mid-market partners through Cloud28+, a hybrid cloud education site and partner locater tool. In the months ahead, the company will step up existing efforts to help solution providers and service providers listed on Cloud28+ join forces on sales leads.
Partners will also continue to receive upfront benefits and price protection on SMB deals involving “new logo” companies not already on HPE’s client roster.
New and existing SMB buyers are a rich potential vein of incremental revenue for HPE and its partners, according to George Hope, who became worldwide head of partner sales at HPE in September. “A lot of our customer base is up market, but we’ve been making a ton of progress over the last few years going further down market, and we want to accelerate that,” he says. “We think there’s an enormous opportunity down there for us to take share.”
HPE is helping partners mine that opportunity in further ways not highlighted in its Partner Ready announcements, Hope continues. “We’re assigning some inside sales reps to them as well, to do some demand generation into the SMB space and help them find opportunities.”
The company is also using MDF dollars to run SMB digital marketing campaigns. A series of SMB “FlexOffers,” introduced in September and designed to let partners customize built-to-order solutions purchased through distribution to an individual buyer’s needs and budget, remain available too.
Helping partners build as-a-service businesses centered around the HPE GreenLake platform is another point of emphasis for the company in the coming year. Partner Ready members will soon have access to a new HPE GreenLake Introduction and Business Planning Workshop designed to help them forge an as-a-service strategy and master GreenLake sales skills.
In September, meanwhile, the company added entry-level GreenLake packages to its Swift sales program. Tailored specifically to SMBs, those configurations sell for as little as $70,000.
“There’s a heavy emphasis over the last half of this year and into next year on doing more to help SMB and mid-market customers and partners buy GreenLake,” Hope says.
Partners will continue earning 17% rebates and 5x sales compensation on GreenLake deals in the new fiscal year as well. A team of sales specialists will also remain available to both SMB and enterprise partners for assistance with GreenLake opportunities.
Other resources coming to Partner Ready members in the months ahead are designed to promote sales of storage solutions. Those include the new Primary Storage Opportunity Engine (PSOE), an automated tool that draws on data from HPE’s InfoSight predictive analytics platform to generate sales proposals containing configuration details and an approved quote. According to HPE, the system strips an average of five meetings from the storage sales cycle and accelerates deal registration approvals.
“Storage is a big opportunity for us this year,” Hope says, adding that the PSOE is part of a larger initiative aimed at streamlining the sales process for partners. “We’re trying to leverage AI and robotics and other things to just make it easier to do business with us.”
As-a-service solutions generally and GreenLake specifically aren’t new priorities for HPE. “We’ve had this edge to cloud platform as-a-service business vision for a while,” Hope notes.
Indeed, HPE has announced plans to offer its entire portfolio on an as-a-service basis by 2022. Based on data from IDC and Gartner, the company expects the total addressable market for onsite as-a-service solutions like GreenLake, which currently stands at over $22 billion globally, to climb at a more than 58% CAGR through its 2023 fiscal year.
According to Hope, businesses that covet the flexibility and efficiency of public cloud computing but have workloads that must remain on premises are driving those numbers.
“We have a lot of conversations with them where they’re frustrated with the ability to take more advantage of that experience because of application entanglement and legacy and sovereignty and a whole bunch of issues,” Hope says. “There’s an enormous opportunity for partners up and down the stack, and customers up and down the stack, to be able to embrace that vision, and be able to have the same experience in their own data centers that they would have if they went to the public cloud.”
Businesses are slowly becoming open to new investments in as-a-service infrastructure again despite continued economic headwinds from the coronavirus pandemic, according to Hope. “It’s starting to come back, but I still think there’s a lot of work to do in that space,” he says.
HPE extended $2 billion of supplemental credit to its partners earlier this year to help them through the worst of the COVID-19 spending crash.
