Hewlett Packard Enterprise has launched a new partner program aimed at helping resellers, service providers, and developers seize growing demand among small and large businesses alike for end-to-end, outcome-based solutions billed as a service.
Called Partner Ready Vantage, the new program is a major step in a process HPE itself commenced in 2019, when it announced its intention to offer its entire portfolio on an as-a-service basis by this year. The infrastructure heavyweight unveiled Partner Ready Vantage alongside updates to its HPE Pro Series enablement program, Partner Connect locator platform, and Partner Ready Portal on the eve of its 2022 Discover conference in Las Vegas.
“HPE is creating a new future and we want partners to come on this journey with us,” says George Hope, HPE’s worldwide head of partner sales. “We’re focused on finding new ways to put our partners first with choice, flexibility, [and] the opportunity to adapt and grow their businesses wherever they are on their as-a-service journey.”
Partner Ready Vantage, he adds, supplements rather than replaces the existing Partner Ready program, which will continue to offer resources and support to channel pros who have yet to begin adapting to IT’s as-a-service future.
“Our partners aren’t all evolving at the same pace,” Hope notes.
Tracks within Partner Ready Vantage are built around what partners do versus traditional categories like reseller, distributor, and ISV. “We’re shifting the focus away from partner types and more towards business models,” Hope says.
The Build track, for example, serves partners who offer products and IP based on HPE platform technologies. The Sell track, meanwhile, is for partners that sell as-a-service solutions while the Service track is for partners that support them. Members can mix and match tracks as suits their specific capabilities and go-to-market strategy.
All three tracks contain “Centers of Expertise” (COEs) in specific disciplines. Partners in the Service track, for example, can qualify for COEs dedicated to managed services, professional services, and post-deployment customer success. Additional COEs for hybrid cloud services, along with COEs for the Build and Sell tracks, will roll out over the next year.
Each COE has its own set of benefits and requirements. Those requirements, in turn, are designed to focus less on product-specific knowledge than on a partner’s ability to deliver complete solutions for their customers.
“You’ll see the evolution of measuring you on how good you are at our technology to how good you are surrounding our technology with other things that make a more complete package,” Hope says.
Partner Ready Vantage also seeks to make working with HPE easier. Among other things, the program provides a single home for as-a-service solutions from both HPE itself and its Aruba networking unit.
“Our partners reminded us at our partner advisory board a month ago that simple wins at the end of the day, and we need to be easier to do business with,” Hope says.
Partner Ready Vantage is HPE’s latest answer to the groundswell among commercial technology buyers toward multi-product solutions that are billed as an operational expense and remotely supported by IT providers. Indeed, 60% of businesses expect to fund line-of-business and other IT projects through OPEX budgets by 2025 and 76% of business-to-business customers want partners to take more day-to-day administrative and operational responsibility for infrastructure, according to IDC.
Changes to the HPE Pro Series include new additions to the Tech Pro offering designed to help engineers and administrators cultivate cloud and managed services skills. Sales Pro content has been refreshed, based on partner feedback, to make finding relevant materials simpler. New features include a personalized portal, curated and interactive partner learning curriculums, and “Top Recommended Training” lists offering customized views of suggested courses. New “On-The-Go Learning” features enable partners to take training via podcasts, videos, or web-based seminars.
Additions to the Marketing Pro Series include a new gateway designed to provide centralized and simplified access to marketing collateral and a revamped HPE Social Media Center with a new interface, consolidated navigation, content filtering, and more.
As has been true since the launch of the Pro Series in 2019, content for all users is identical to what HPE uses to train its own employees. “It’s essentially offering the partner community the same enablement experience that we offer our own team,” Hope says.
The revised Partner Connect locater site, which is designed to help end users find partners and also to help partners find other partners with complementary skills, allows users to search by solution categories. Enhanced self-profiling functionality will enable Partner Ready Vantage members to specify the types of solution they deliver.
The new resource consolidates what are currently five different locator tools for different global regions into one, and is more intuitively laid out, according to Jesse Chavez, HPE’s worldwide vice president of partner programs and operations.
“We’re going to make it a lot easier to navigate,” he says.
HPE will migrate its more than 100,000 partners from the five legacy locators to the new Partner Connect over the course of the next several months.
The revised HPE Partner Ready Portal, which supports both Partner Ready and Partner Ready Vantage members, features a simplified, customizable interface architected to provide centralized access to business tools and relevant content.
“It’s a lot more streamlined,” Chavez says.
HPE’s as-a-service revenues climbed 107% year-over-year in its most recently completed quarter, marking the third quarter in a row in which consumption-based sales of solutions based on the vendor’s GreenLake platform, Aruba SaaS offerings, and other products more than doubled versus the prior year period.
