Hewlett Packard Enterprise has announced new rules and offerings aimed at prodding members of its Partner Ready program to drive increased sales of products in high-growth markets.
The changes, which officially go into effect on November 1st at the start of Palo Alto, Calif.-based HPE’s 2019 fiscal year, include a new set of multipliers that allow partners to collect higher rebates when selling selected products. For example, resellers will earn three times the standard rebate on sales of products in HPE’s SimpliVity, Nimble Storage, and 3PAR families and five times the normal rebate on deals involving the OneView IT management platform and GreenLake consumption-based infrastructure offering. HPE first opened GreenLake to its partners some two months ago.
The rules governing how and when partners receive rebates will be simpler and more globally consistent going forward too, according to Eric Loe, senior director of the HPE Partner Ready Program.
“No gates, no caps, no targets,” he says. “Everything pays at dollar one, which makes it much easier for the partner to understand where they stand in meeting or exceeding the requirements of the membership threshold from a revenue standpoint.”
HPE will use the same multipliers to give partners faster qualification credit towards higher tiers in Partner Ready.
“They could sell $200,000 of GreenLake, we would credit that at 5x because that’s highly valuable to us and to them, and that would retire a million dollars of their revenue threshold goal,” says Loe by way of illustration.
To further promote sales of high-growth offerings, HPE will add them to its Engage & Grow program, which rewards individual partner salespeople for closing deals involving HPE products.
HPE acquired hyperconverged infrastructure vendor SimpliVity Corp. in January 2017, and bought all-flash, hybrid flash, and cloud storage vendor Nimble Storage some two months later.
Those and other recently acquired companies, such as SGI (formerly Silicon Graphics), brought existing channels along with them. Many of those partners sell just one portion of HPE’s rapidly widening portfolio; the new rules and rebates announced today are designed to prevent that fact from working against a reseller’s ability to advance within Partner Ready.
“They may not want to sell the entire portfolio, but we do want to recognize them from a coverage perspective and a compensation standpoint,” says Jesse Chavez, vice president for worldwide partner programs and operations at HPE.
Other forthcoming changes for partners include faster access to product pricing. Any Partner Ready member who requests a quote on a deal valued under $100,000 via HPE’s online quoting platform will receive an answer immediately, Chavez says. U.S. partners will receive pre-defined discounts based on their level within Partner Ready as well.
“Just use that and you can go to the distributor or you can come to us and you already know your price,” Chavez says.
Faster pricing, he adds, is partly an early benefit of the $800 million HPE is investing in an initiative to replace 11 different ERP implementations, many of them acquired along with companies like SimpliVity and SGI, with a single instance of SAP Hana. The new solution will go into production in Northern Europe in December or January and then roll out to the rest of the world over the course of the fiscal year.
“This is going to be much better for our processes and the ease of doing business with HPE,” Chavez says.
The Partner Ready program will add a new competency for GreenLake in the coming fiscal year as well. Selling pay-as-you-go IT requires specialized skills, according to Chavez.
“We want to either recognize those partners that have that skill set, or train the partners to build that skill set, in order to offer GreenLake as an alternative for our customers,” he says.
GreenLake is designed, delivered, and operated by the HPE Pointnext IT services organization. A simplified compensation structure for Pointnext that will reduce 14 different rebate elements down to four is also among the Partner Ready changes that will go into effect in November. Like many other aspects of HPE’s plans for Partner Ready, the new model is designed to bring global consistency to what’s today a widely varying set of rules and requirements.
“Everyone kind of has their own channel strategy around Pointnext,” Chavez notes.
Presales technical consultants play a prominent role in driving demand for back office solutions, so HPE’s final Partner Ready enhancements for fiscal 2019 are designed to provide them additional support beyond the training and enablement resources available to them before. Starting in November, presales professionals will have access to consolidated product information and new online peer communities. HPE also plans to drive more direct collaboration in the field between partner presales technicians and its own presales team.
HPE held its annual Discover partner conference in June. High-growth market and plans for the partner program in the coming fiscal year were among many topics discussed at that show.
