The winning advantage: HPE puts partners in the pole position

In racing, the pole position means a certain car gets to start the race already in the lead. This is exactly what we are doing with our partners, as explained to thousands of attendees during today’s HPE Discover Partner General Session.

When I recently spoke with our special guest at the event, world-renowned racing driver Lewis Hamilton, he emphasized the importance of partnership in winning. Here at HPE, we also believe that the formula to win is a clear vision, a powerful engine, and the right team. With that in mind, here are a few ways in which we are setting our partners up for success:

The future is edge to cloud and powered by partnership

In Q2FY21, we experienced notably strong growth with HPE GreenLake, at over 20 percent year over year, and now have more than 900 partners selling HPE GreenLake cloud services. We’re seeing that the industry is building on HPE GreenLake, and it’s why we’re working with partners across our entire ecosystem as we evolve the partner experience.

Announced today at Discover were a number of innovations to the HPE GreenLake edge to cloud platform, enabling customers to transform and modernize their workloads to a cloud operating model, regardless of location. By extending the reach of the HPE GreenLake cloud platform, our partners benefit from HPE’s hybrid cloud leadership to help customers transform their business. But we also know just how critical the sales experience is. This summer we are rolling out the HPE GreenLake Central partner experience, enabling partners to become trusted advisors for our shared customers, providing end-to-end support and enhancing the customer experience by leveraging their expertise.

Fueling data-driven transformation

Data is our customers’ most valuable asset, and HPE was the first to recognize the need to deliver a unified and consistent cloud experience, from edge to cloud. HPE Storage is now transforming to a cloud-native, software-defined data services business with a new multi-year vision and the first services and solutions that make it real.

HPE Storage is a margin-rich opportunity for our partners and—now that we have introduced our Unified DataOps vision to radically streamline data and infrastructure management—it is more critical to drive growth and business evolution than ever. With the new Data Services Cloud console, partners can offer managed services via a “virtual resident engineer”, and we are making API’s available to them to develop on top of the platform.

Creating the next-generation, open, cloud experience everywhere with service providers

Core to our strategy in becoming an edge-to-cloud platform as-a-service company is bringing the cloud to our customers, wherever they reside. And often, it’s our partners who help bridge the gap. Now boasting more than 1300 partners in more than 100 countries, our ever-expanding Cloud28+ community of service providers is focused on delivering seamless on- and off-premises cloud experiences to customers powered by the HPE edge-to-cloud portfolio of products and services.

One example of how HPE collaborates with our partner ecosystem is to create the emerging federated data infrastructure called Gaia-X.  HPE has recently announced a new set of solutions to help our partners and customers get ready for Gaia-X. By developing the HPE Ezmeral and HPE GreenLake-powered solution framework and making it available as a service through HPE Partner Ready certified Service Providers, we enable businesses and organizations to advance their ability to create value from data, tap into huge distributed data pools, and strengthen their sovereignty over their data-driven business model.

As we increase our focus on driving digital inclusivity, we are leveraging our partner ecosystem and decentralized cloud approach to help accelerate the development and deployment of national public clouds and other digital transformation projects throughout Africa as members of the Smart Africa Alliance.

Putting our partners in the driver’s seat

On race day, a good team runs like a well-oiled machine. Each day, I see how HPE partners embrace the partnership mentality to drive success for our customers, it’s important that we enable them with the best tools, resources, and foundation to make that happen:

Differentiated partner-ready offerings
We have one of the most comprehensive edge-to-cloud as-a-service portfolios in the industry, and we've built HPE GreenLake with partners in mind. Partners contributed to testing the HPE GreenLake cloud service approach through the successful Swift Sales program. As we announce the new, cloud native consoles, we give partners a foundation on which to build their differentiated service offerings, so they can lead with their own IP and bring HPE solutions to life.

Multiple places to play
We work closely with our partners up and down the customer segment. We even recently made our mid-market and SMB space “partner-led”, a great example of how we put partners in the driver’s seat. We help them develop their skills and enhance their competencies, work with HPE specialists and other partner experts, access right-sized offerings and focused incentives to best seize the SMB and mid-market opportunities.

A clear path to profitability
As partners transition to as-a-service, we pay a back-end rebate like a resale deal, enabling them to make margin on the recurring revenue stream. The consumption motion makes them sticky with the customer, so they can avoid the competitive nature of the typical three-year refresh cycle. Furthermore, we have up to 5x accelerators, and offer price protection to help partners sell strategic solutions to existing or new customers.

Industry-leading enablement opportunities
We have further expanded and enhanced our “Pro Series” to help partners embrace an outcome-based, workload-centric approach to selling, architecting, and marketing HPE solutions. This is offered through personalized learning experience, a wealth of localized content, expanded focus to include SMB and mid-market—as well as the opportunity to create integrated marketing campaigns and accelerate lead generation through omnichannel marketing.

Partnering is in our DNA and “partnership first” has been a core HPE value for over 80 years. We work as one team with our partners as they are the driving force behind HPE’s edge-to-cloud vision, and each day I see how they make that vision a reality. That’s why we’ll continue to put our partners in the pole position and help them win.