HPE marks one year since HPE Tech Pro Community roll out
Paul Hunter looks back on the year since rolling out HPE Tech Pro Community and the continued investments in channel partners
- HPE Tech Pro Community see’s 61% QoQ growth since inception and rolls out portal in new languages
- HPE delivers on strategy for taking partners on the journey to offering everything as a service with new curriculum for HPE GreenLake competency
- HPE continues investment in partner enablement programs and initiatives prioritizing continued differentiation for the channel
This year we are taking HPE Technology & Solution Summit virtual. It’s our annual, largest and most comprehensive technical and solutions knowledge-transfer event, and this week we are delivering a digital agenda to over 3000 technical partners and internal HPE Presales specialists, including a keynote with Antonio Neri, over 100 technical learning sessions, and six certification classes.
The technical specialists and solution architects are a very valuable part of our sales process, and it’s always been a priority of mine to ensure they have the support and expertise they need to be successful. The importance of this community is growing every year. IT has become more important to business, with the consequence that technologists are increasingly required to link architectures to business outcomes. Through advocating and seeing increased expertise with our partners, we have also seen partners achieve higher margin deals and innovate services for customers.
Technical specialists and solution architects are very valuable and the importance of this community is growing every year
In the year since we rolled out HPE Tech Pro Community, we’ve seen the program experience a 61% average QoQ growth since inception. It is now a fully-fledged 360-degree community with a global, online and face-to-face presence providing our technical partners with support, recognition, and real time collaboration. We’ve successfully given the community easier access to all the relevant assessment tools, sizers, configurators, TCO tools, product and solution information tools, and reference architectures they need to win. Our enablement for this community addresses and covers their career skills training and certifications, a clear and concise approach to continuous learning, access to collaborative communities, and rewards and recognition for technical achievement and community leadership.
In my recent travels I’ve been able to spend time with partners and speak to them about their community experience, and have heard first-hand how they have built relationships, shared knowledge and been inspired by one another:
Philipp Loosli, CEO and Senior IT Consultant, Smart IT Inc. describes HPE Tech Pro Community as “not only a partnership but a family dynamic to inspire each other to become more successful engineers.”
Pascal Proulx, Business Development Manager at Virtualization Solutions, Informatique ProContact, Canada, confirmed further value of HPE Tech Pro Community as a place where “we make friends, we make new colleagues, new contacts, we can ask those people to help us and share their knowledge and we build those relationships in the Tech Pro Community Lounge and after we can build the future based on those relationships."
We are continuing to invest significantly in the enablement and experience of the technical community so they are continually best placed to deliver high value solutions based on HPE innovation. We are also driving initiatives to reward and differentiate partners for their investments. Most recently we’ve invested in new recognition for learning; rewarding ‘more for more’ as partners climb in membership levels to receive more benefits. The new reward and recognition program means partners can earn greater levels of recognition through additional digital badges, as well as gain access to exclusive tools, information and HPE field and engineering experts, and new rewards that include special incentives and giveaways.
We are always looking for suggestions on improvements we can make to our partner programs and, based on feedback, we’ve announced that partners can now personalize their experience with new localization enhancements within HPE Tech Pro Community Portal - it is now available in a set of new local languages1. We’ve also worked on our strategy for taking partners with us on the journey to offering everything as a service (EaaS) by 2022, and have shared details with partners on the curriculum for the new HPE GreenLake competency. In this new competency, partners will learn how to qualify and sell the value of an HPE GreenLake opportunity – a great chance to differentiate themselves by embracing a consultative, outcome-based selling approach.
We’ll continue to invest in the technical community to deliver high value solutions based on HPE innovation
We’ve delivered on our commitment for partners to access HPE specialists for support and be treated as part of our own sales teams, and enabled HPE presales teams to work closer with partners to validate and complete competencies, and develop solutions for specific customer needs. Our unique end-to-end approach for partner competencies develops partners from foundational career skills to building full solution practices aligned to the biggest industry trends and opportunities for growth. With this in mind, we’ve also recently developed new content for the continuous learning paths and badges that allow the technical community to specialize on a chosen focus area and keep up to date on the latest technology and give them a competitive edge in the market. These personalized paths has proved to be a dynamic way for technical consultants to stay current and competitive.
Goran Ciric, Technical Consultant at Tech Data said “I find that Learning Paths are very useful since they provide all the necessary up to date information about HPE solutions in one, easily accessible place.”
And of course it doesn’t end there, we’ll continue to invest and commit to further our partner enablement programs and initiatives prioritizing continued differentiation for our partners.
About Hewlett Packard Enterprise
Hewlett Packard Enterprise is the global edge-to-cloud platform-as-a-service company that helps organizations accelerate outcomes by unlocking value from all of their data, everywhere. Built on decades of reimagining the future and innovating to advance the way we live and work, HPE delivers unique, open and intelligent technology solutions, with a consistent experience across all clouds and edges, to help customers develop new business models, engage in new ways, and increase operational performance. For more information, visit: www.hpe.com.
1Japanese, Korean, Indonesian, Simplified Chinese, Traditional Chinese, Portuguese (BR), French, Italian, German, Turkish, Spanish and Russian.
Editorial contact:
Ella Hulbert, HPE