Hewlett Packard Enterprise has unveiled a new technical community for solution architects.
Introduced in the Asia Pacific and Japan region close to two years ago and open to present as well as would-be solution architects both inside HPE and among its partners, the new HPE Tech Pro Community is designed to deepen the vendor’s pool of solution architect talent, according to Brian Beneda, senior manager for global technical enablement at the Palo Alto, Calif.-based company.
“By integrating the technical community across HPE and channel partners, HPE aims to magnify the power of our partner network by providing individuals with the opportunity to network, communicate, and collaborate with their peers around the world and have access to a greater pool of product knowledge and subject matter expertise,” he says.
Solution architects, Beneda continues, play an increasingly strategic role in selling and delivering solutions.
“Customers are changing the way they buy IT,” he says. “Instead of IT departments buying IT components, line of business managers are increasingly involved in IT purchases and they are much more interested in buying business outcomes. This requires an IT solution architect to translate the customer business requirements into a technical solution.”
Resources available to community members include exclusive online discussion forums, invitation-only networking opportunities, and a range of training programs designed to speed them toward certification in HPE’s latest solutions. Tailored to the needs of architecture generalists and specialists alike, those training courses emphasize business needs and value rather than products.
“Through Tech Pro Community, partners can benefit from a curriculum that helps them transition to a business outcome and solutions-led business model that the market increasingly calls for,” Beneda says.
Significantly, he continues, all members of the community, whether employed by HPE or not, share the same materials and participate in the same events.
“Many vendors have technical enablement programs for their channel. The thing that is unique about HPE Tech Pro Community is the full integration of the HPE and channel partner technical community into one family, where partners have access to all of the training, tools, resources, expertise, and support that HPE presales field employees have,” Beneda says. “This enables HPE partners to become a force multiplier of our own salesforce and extend the degree to which we can create business outcomes for customers together.”
Tech Pro Community members can also participate in a rewards program that enables them to profit individually while increasing revenue for both HPE and its partners. At present, the program recognizes architects for clearing certification benchmarks and submitting unique solution designs. In the near future, it will reward members for reaching new achievement levels and revenue targets as well.
HPE plans to use its existing deal registration mechanisms to track member progress towards those goals. “Partners often register their customer opportunities with HPE to gain preferred status on the deal,” Beneda observes. “By leveraging this existing process to capture solution architecture information at an individual Tech Pro level, HPE can reward partner solution architects for both pipeline and revenue generation.”
HPE Tech Pro Community membership will become available in the EMEA region in March, in the Americas in May, and worldwide in June. Any HPE channel partner can join as long as they have an HPE Master ASE Certification, HPE Product Certification, or ATP Technical Certification.
