HPE Launches Elite Tech Pro Community

HPE today announced the global rollout of the HPE Tech Pro Community for partner solution architects. The program expansion follows a pilot program in Asia Pacific that started nearly two years ago.

Calling it an elite community, HPE Tech Pro is for partner solution architects and HPE presales professionals to work as one team, offering ongoing support and exclusive access to insider training, tools, resources and expertise for partners and HPE alike. The vendor made the announcement at its Technical Solutions Summit in Paris, in front of 3,300 attendees consisting of HPE field presales reps and channel-partner solution architects. 

HPE’s Brian Beneda

“The value proposition that we’re trying to create for our technical community, particularly for our channel partner solution architects —we’re inviting them directly into the HPE family,” Brian Beneda, senior manager global technology enablement with HPE, told Channel Futures. “A lot of vendors have technical enablement programs for the channel. What makes this unique is that we’re allowing partners to have inside access – exactly the same access to HPE that our presales do – and we are intentionally cross-pollinating the community of our field-services organization with our partners so that they feel like one community.” 

With cloud, software-defined, artificial intelligence (AI) and internet of things (IoT) on HPE’s radar, the vendor wants partners to know that they can yield the power of HPE on behalf of their customers in an exclusive way. 

HPE Tech Pro will be the umbrella brand for this new established community, and everything HPE does around technical enablement will reside under the Tech Pro umbrella, Beneda said. 

“It’s going to be an overarching, 360-degree enablement program which starts with community and includes training and certification; continuous learning; knowledge management tools and resources; solution maps and reference architectures; the best practices that we use internally; online communities; peer to peer and HPE; and events,” he said. 

Three key elements of the HPE Tech Pro Community include: 

For partners to get into the Tech Pro community, they’ll need minimum certification from HPE, namely, product certificated and Accredited Technical Professional (ATP) certification. That opens the door to peer and HPE pre-sales interactions, technical resources, and so on.

There are three tiers for certification based on the complexity of the customer environment that a partner can operate in: ATP (commercial and SMB), Accredited Solution Expert (ASE) (midmarket), and Master ASE (complex, multisite). 

“There are also two tracks: A generalist track is for the person that leads the customer engagement; and the specialist tract — in servers, storage, AI, or IoT. It’s modular so partners can choose as an architect which path [they] want to take or if [they] want to do a combination of things, [they] can do that too,” said Beneda.

HPE Tech Pro Community membership is open to all existing and future HPE channel partners and HPE field technical professionals, after achieving the ATP certification or higher. 

HPE has 60,000 certified individuals specifically with solution architecture skills that are ideal candidates for the Tech Pro program. Beneda expects that most of these partners will join the new program because of its strong value proposition. 

“From an HPE and partner perspective, we saw big improvements in revenue and pipeline from those partners who participated in the [pilot] community,” he said. “Partners were able to accelerate their business and then, by extension, it accelerated our business as well.”