HPE Lines Up Partner Ready Program Enhancements

Written by Lynn Haber
August 27, 2018

The new updates and enhancements are the biggest changes the vendor has made to the HPE Partner Ready program since it rolled out several years ago.

Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) on Monday announced the fall lineup of changes to its Partner Ready program targeting bigger and better rewards for partners who focus on high-growth market areas. The program improvements reflect one of the bigger changes HPE has made in the program since launching it in 2015.

Composable infrastructure, hyperconverged solutions, storage, software and consumption services top the list of the more profitable areas that Partner Ready partners might want to target when the FY19 HPE Partner Ready program takes effect on Nov. 1.

HPE’s Eric Loe

The Partner Ready program redo is also structured to recognize, reward and enable smaller HPE partners, many of whom come from acquisitions such as Nimble, SimpliVity, Aruba, and SGI that HPE has made over the past four years.

“We’ve put together mechanisms to help these partners move up the membership tiers in our program, say from Business Ready – an entry-level tier – into our silver or gold tiers for selling our focused products,” Eric Loe, senior director, HPE Partner Ready program and channel go-to-market strategy, told us.

Here’s our most recent list of important channel-program changes you should know.

The vendor’s strategy here is to complement its leading market position in selling servers with a laser-focus on selling products of the acquired vendors, and the partners that have strong competencies in selling those offers.

But that’s not all. Taking a closer look at the fundamental updates to the HPE Partner program, the vendor is:

Rewarding partners for their investment in market growth areas with greater rebates and quicker access to higher membership tiers with accompanying benefits.
Simplifying program design to make partnering with HPE easier, including rewards from the first sale, without gates, caps or targets.
Creating global consistency across the program with visibility across the entire sales cycle, one consistent transaction process for quote configuration, and a faster pricing process.
Driving technical enablement and excellence in the channel to accelerate partner sales capabilities with new aligned training categories.

What HPE calls the “hyperconnected world” is creating an explosion of data and a swifter pace of business fpr its partners. Accompanying technologies such as data analytics and flexible IT consumption models, and the company’s financial reward structure are designed to entice Partner Ready partners.

A simplified rebate model offers greater rewards for selling HPE high-growth products and services from composable and hyperconverged solutions, such as HPE Synergy and HPE SimpliVity, to storage solutions such as HPE Nimble Storage and HPE 3Par. Software solutions that the vendor targets includes HPE OneView and HPE OneSphere, and on the services-led side, partners are encouraged to focus on HPE GreenLake and HPE Datacenter Care.

The HPE Engage & Grow partner incentive program, which rewards partner sales reps for selling across the HPE portfolio, is also embracing high-growth products and services, enabling partners and partner sales reps to …