HPE’s Partner Ready Program Enhancements Elevate GreenLake

HPE on Monday announced incremental updates to the HPE Partner Ready program for fiscal year 2020, which began Nov. 1, with the heaviest emphasis on the consumption, or as-a-service GreenLake opportunity.

As requested by partners, HPE is making the GreenLake portfolio more affordable to midmarket companies, expanding the opportunity beyond the enterprise customer market. Whereas the average GreenLake offer for enterprise customers is about $400,000 and above, heavily services-oriented and wrapped with data-center care, midmarket GreenLake offers will be more in the $200,000- $300,000 range with reduced direct services and partners encouraged to build their own services, as required by customers.

HPE’s Jesse Chavez

“There’s a big emphasis on the continued push on GreenLake as a significant part of our overall portfolio,” Jesse Chavez, vice president worldwide channel sales and alliances at HPE, told Channel Futures. “We’re growing significantly with GreenLake – we have 275% year-over-year growth – and we’re seeing a lot of partners picking that up.”

HPE says more than 500 partners are engaged in selling or quoting GreenLake, with more getting involved every month. HPE wants to accelerate GreenLake adoption in the channel and expects partners to play a significant role in the success of its consumption-based model.

At HPE Discover in June, Antonio Neri, company CEO, talked about HPE offering its entire portfolio through an as-a-service, pay-per-use consumption model by 2022.

Other GreenLake updates partner can expect in the Partner Ready program include:

• More dedicated sales and specialist resources to help partners pursue GreenLake opportunities. Partners will get more support from HPE sales specialists across geographies and vertical industries to generate demand for GreenLake.
• HPE has introduced the GreenLake Quick Quote tool to allow partners to adjust workloads easily to meet the cost and performance needs of clients and cut the time to generate a proposal to just a few minutes.
• HPE is launching new competency curricula that allows partners to go beyond validating their solution knowledge, to developing solution mastery and building solution practices. The new HPE Master Accredited Solutions Expert (Master ASE) Hybrid IT Solution Architect certification enables IT architects to develop and validate skills to design and deploy an optimized hybrid IT infrastructure for key industry solution workloads.

Chavez also said that HPE will offer a transformation workshop for select partners that will help educate them about transforming their business to sell GreenLake.

“This means leading with GreenLake as a dialogue — or instead of starting off with a capex dialogue. beginning with an opex [one],” he said.

Other expansions to the HPE Partner Ready Program include:

• A full suite of programs and tools to help partners close deals faster, including easily accessible HPE demo capabilities, competitive and instant pricing from first request with the option for differentiated pricing via deal registration, and faster time-to-partner onboarding.
• Partners can further develop solution mastery through self-selected, progressive continuous learning paths, competency curricula and new technical certifications.
• Partners will receive special pricing from the day of onboarding and protect margins while selling across the whole HPE portfolio. Increased benefits are available to partners selling into new customers and/or selling innovative solutions to existing customers. Partners will also work toward new HPE Tech Pro Community rewards and continuous learning badges.

The significant changes HPE made to the partner program in 2018 will remain.

“What we’re doing today is to continue to streamline and make the program global in nature, so we’ve standardized Partner Ready across the world,” said Chavez.

HPE will also make an effort to better promote how it recognizes, rewards and motivates the partners gained through 15 acquisitions in the past two years, many of whom are smaller, and in the silver or business tier, or smaller existing partners, via an acceleration method that reduces dollar thresholds when they engage in activities, such as getting competencies, which isn’t mandatory, for example. These partners tend to sell more focused offers, explained Eric Loe, senior director, HPE Partner Ready Programs, at HPE.