HPE Partner Growth Summit Focuses on Growth with HPE GreenLake

Tuesday, at the HPE Partner Growth Summit, the vendor continues to solidify its as-a-service vision. HPE announced new HPE GreenLake cloud service offerings, an expanded storage partner ecosystem, and new learning options for partners via the HPE Pro Series. HPE Partner Growth Summit is being held in conjunction with HPE Discover Virtual Experience.

The growth of the partner-led business within the HPE GreenLake consumption portfolio to date is almost 30%. That’s up from just 3% a few years ago. More than 700 partners sell HPE GreenLake and year over year growth in GreenLake orders from partners is more than 47%.

HPE’s Paul Hunter

“The partner-led consumption piece of our portfolio is growing faster within a fast-growing segment of our overall business. So, we’re making enhancements to our portfolio and how we’re working with our partners to enable them to be more effective at selling the consumption piece of our portfolio,” Paul Hunter, HPE worldwide head of partner sales, said on media briefing.

HPE Partner Growth Summit Announcements

HPE on Tuesday announced what it’s calling the next generation of HPE GreenLake cloud services. The company is doing that with new cloud service offers, pre-integrated building blocks to speed up delivery, and a new self-service cloud platform.

The new cloud services for distributed environments include cloud services for containers, cloud services for virtual machines, storage, compute, cloud services for data protection, and cloud services for networking.

These new cloud services are available through a catalog on HPE GreenLake Central, an as-a-service portal and operations console. Also, the services can be deployed and run in the customer’s environment.

A new streamlined order-to-deliver model is based on pre-integrated building blocks or cost-optimized, performance-optimized, balanced hardware available in three sizes — small, medium and large. Delivery is possible in as little as two weeks, according to Greg Stafford, HPE Pointnext channels leader, worldwide partner sales, hybrid IT.

“With this standardized, solution-centric approach, partners can more easily right-size and propose the new services,” he said.

HPE’s new self-service cloud platform offers point-and-click capability with automated provisioning for partners. Partners can sell services via the HPE Partner Ready Program and the HPE Partner Ready for Networking program.

HPE GreenLake for Partners Offerings

When HPE first announced HPE GreenLake Central last December, the offer was only available directly from the vendor. At that time, only customers had an end-to-end view of their entire hybrid IT estate, or edge to cloud. The company said availability for partners would come in the second half of 2020.

Today, HPE is integrating partners into the GreenLake Central platform. In 2021, partners can expect to have their own access to the platform.

“At that point, partners will have a unified view of their customer’s data and further opportunities to engage with customers on different services,” said Stafford. 

Today, at the HPE Partner Growth Summit, the vendor expanded its storage partner ecosystem. Partners can now offer scalable object storage with Scality RING and consumption-based data protection with Veeam. HPE GreenLake converged data management and modern file storage cloud service offerings to date, included Cohesity and Qumulo, respectively.

HPE also announced that VAR partners can sell HPE GreenLake management services. The suite of services can be added to HPE GreenLake offers to help manage, operate and optimize infrastructure, in addition to apps and workloads in specialized environments, such as SAP HANA or Hadoop.

HPE Pro Series

At HPE Global Partner Summit last year, the company moved to promote uniform partner tools. Those tools include …

… training, resources and support mechanisms to partners and the company’s direct sales team. Today, HPE announced enhancements to three of its Pro programs: Sales Pro, Tech Pro, and Marketing Pro, sales and marketing enablement for HPE partners.

HPE Partners Core to Growth

“HPE has made great strides in the last year in making GreenLake a compelling offer for partners to take to customers,” Cyndi Privett, principal at Viewpoint Research, told Channel Futures. “The expanded portfolio and additional enablement and marketing campaign focus can fuel partner conversations about as-a-service offers. When HPE delivers the GreenLake Central platform for partners next year, I’m expecting it to be a game changer for partners’ businesses.”

HPE’s partners are core to the company’s growth.

HPE’s Antonio Neri

“The channel is important to us as a company. We are and will continue to be a partner-led company,” said president and CEO Antonio Neri. “With the new program, we’re making it easier for partners to come along in our transition to deliver everything as a service and grow profitably with us. But it’s not just about GreenLake. We have a transactional business which is very large and we’re pivoting toward as-a-service, which is our long-term future. And, we need to be able to do both and give our partners the flexibility to come along.”

Seventy percent of HPE global sales go through HPE channel partners.

“So, if we don’t grow through the channel partner community, it would be hard for us to grow our business.  We have no intention to change our go-to-market strategy,” said Neri.