HPE Partners Get a Deep Dive on the Vendor's Strategic Road Map

HPE Partners Get a Deep Dive on the Vendor’s Strategic Road Map

Written by Channel
September 13, 2016

Meg Whitman's keynote covered a wide range of topics.

HPE GLOBAL PARTNER CONFERENCE — Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) CEO Meg Whitman and other executive leadership on Tuesday probably answered many questions on the minds of the 1,300 partners in attendance at HPE Global Partner Conference (GPC) 2016, being held this week in Boston.

In the keynote session, Whitman homed in on the company’s partner-centricity, its vision to be a leading provider of hybrid IT built on the secure next generation of software-defined infrastructure to run customer data centers today, bridge them to a multi-cloud environment tomorrow, and enable the emerging intelligent edge that will empower campus, branch and IoT applications in the future.

Then, partners heard how HPE would align its portfolio to achieve its strategic vision. That discussion not only included several new product announcements but also targeted acquisitions and trimming pieces of the portfolio – also referred to as spinoffs and mergers.{ad}

Here are the key highlights of HPE’s message to partners:

Partners are the face of HPE. Seventy percent of core infrastructure revenue flows through partners and as Whitman said, “There’s no HPE without you and we wouldn’t want to do it without you.”
Focused R&D efforts resulted in the launch of new products across servers, storage, infrastructure management, converged systems and cloud.
The company announced targeted acquisitions, such as SGI to strengthen its position in big-data analytics and high-performance computing; and strategic partnerships with companies such as Microsoft for Azure, Docker, Mesosphere, a data-center software startup, and General Electric.
It also announced the spinoff and merger of the company’s non-core software assets with Micro Focus in an $8.8 billion deal; as well as the spinoff and merger of HPE’s $20 billion Enterprise Services business with CSC.
Whitman set out to reassure partners who’ve made investments in HPE’s software business that the company would keep its commitment to them. “We have a year until the transaction [Micro Focus] closes and our commitment will not waiver,” she said. The CEO stressed that the company’s new partnerships are designed to strengthen the opportunity for partners, by making it more compelling and competitive.
HPE is not getting out of services. Through its Technology Services (TS), partners have options to how they want to work with the organization that builds customer solutions from the ground up, delivers consulting services and support. TS is now a part of the Partner Ready program to better showcase TS.
HPE’s four digital transformation areas: hybrid IT/hybrid infrastructure; security and protection woven into the fabric across apps and data; empower the data-driven organization with big data analytics and IoT; and, with an intelligent edge to empower workplace productivity/Aruba is the company’s edge play.
HPE announced six new hyper converged bundles, expanding its Hyper Converged 380 offerings. The bundles include hardware, support and startup services.
HPE’s partnership with Docker has resulted in the delivery of a HPE Docker-ready Server: a ProLiant Server with Docker CS Engines pre-configured.
And, HPE discussed some details of its enhanced Partner Ready program.