HPE Teases New Partner Ready Vantage Program
In a Channel Futures exclusive, HPE channel leader George Hope previews the program set for rollout in 2023.
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HPE is preparing for the launch next year of its new partner program, Partner Ready Vantage. Announced at HPE Discover in June, Vantage will roll out over the course of 2023 to work out any kinks.
Vantage builds upon the HPE Partner Ready program, and will have three tracks: Build, Sell and Service. However, the Partner Ready program will remain in place, said worldwide head of partner sales George Hope.
“One of the key strategies for us is ‘evolve at your own pace.’ You decide what you want. If you want to be in Partner Ready Vantage, great. If you want to be in Partner Ready, but not progress into the Vantage portion then great, fine – whatever your customer’s journey dictates.”
Hope explained that in Vantage, partners can have multiple personas such as reseller, service provider or technology partner. These will all be managed within one partner identity and contract.
“You could be a number of things within that program and not have to have seven relationships with us,” he said. “There’s a landing spot for different types of partners.
“In Build, you could be an ISV wanting to get a technical validation or reference architecture. Or you could be an ISV wanting to get baked into GreenLake and you want to build out solutions to be in our GreenLake Cloud Marketplace. You could be an OEM; you could be whatever requires you to build some adjacency to our technologies.
“In Sell, if you just want to sell GreenLake to somebody that’s more of a self-promotion. Could be distribution, could be a reseller, could be an SI that wants to resell as well as be a service provider.
“On the service side is where we want partner competencies around professional services. That could be assessment, deployment. We want them to have capabilities around managed services. So if they want to manage the environment on behalf of the customer, they can have those capabilities. Then there’s a customer success piece, where we want them to own the life cycle of the customer. We want them not only to land GreenLake, we want them to drive adoption, expand it with other workloads, drive the renewal and own the relationships.”
In terms of momentum, Hope said that once GreenLake is in the door, it has a 96% retention rate. “We know the public cloud is only going to get you to 20-25% of the workloads. We want to get you the other 75-80%. Once we plant that flag, we can start moving the rest of the workloads onto our platform.”
Indeed, Hope said while HPE grew the GreenLake direct business around 40-50%, it has doubled its channel sales.
“Even just in Q4, we grew 71% over Q4 the previous year. We grew 16% quarter over quarter. It’s growing like a weed.”
The interesting thing about the GreenLake businesses is repeatability, said Hope.
“We’ve been tracking how many sold GreenLake, how many the second, the third, and the numbers that have sold a second one are up around 130%. But the amount of partners that have sold five GreenLake deals have tripled year over year.
“We now have to create a category around the number of partners that have sold 10. And we recently have a handful of partners that have sold 20.”
However, HPE is reassuring partners that aren’t hopping on board with GreenLake, too.
Hope said partners have no need to be “nervous about behind left behind. It’s not our intent, never our intent.”
“We were talking about GreenLake at the partner advisory board. Some of the partners came to us and said, ‘If everything is going to be sold as a service, then are you not going to sell product anymore? Our customers aren’t ready for that journey – are we getting left behind?’ And the answer is absolutely not,” said Hope.
“We’re still 90% product. We’re at 10% as-a-service and over the next couple of years, maybe 20%. But we’re still very, very strong product and we know we want to give them the right experience on the products.”
The exec said that if a partner doesn’t want to go on the as-a-service journey with HPE, “then we don’t need to hammer them with people that are trying to get them to sell. We want to support them as a team that will help them accomplish what their customers are trying to buy.”
Elsewhere, HPE’s channel operations are mimicking its direct sales organization. Chief sales officer Heiko Meyer is dividing his organization into HPE’s core business, and customers looking for long-term transformation. Hope said the channel organization will be doing the same.
“How do we drive more efficiency and create capacity in the core business, selling servers, and focus on the experience there? Buying the right product, the right price, the right availability? Versus the customer that wants the transformative experience and needs professional services, solution architects, a bunch of other different resources. That’s a very different motion. We recognize that and [are working] on mining the sales organization to figure out which customers are what,” said Hope.
“We’re looking at doing that the same way with the partners,” he added.
Elsewhere, HPE’s channel operations are mimicking its direct sales organization. Chief sales officer Heiko Meyer is dividing his organization into HPE’s core business, and customers looking for long-term transformation. Hope said the channel organization will be doing the same.
“How do we drive more efficiency and create capacity in the core business, selling servers, and focus on the experience there? Buying the right product, the right price, the right availability? Versus the customer that wants the transformative experience and needs professional services, solution architects, a bunch of other different resources. That’s a very different motion. We recognize that and [are working] on mining the sales organization to figure out which customers are what,” said Hope.
“We’re looking at doing that the same way with the partners,” he added.
Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) is giving a glimpse into its new Partner Ready Vantage program rolling out in 2023.
HPE’s George Hope
In an exclusive interview with Channel Futures, HPE’s worldwide head of partner sales, George Hope, revealed the invitation-only program will launch late next year.
Here’s our most recent list of important channel-program changes you should know. |
Hope also moved to reassure partners that they wouldn’t get “left behind” in the wake of momentum around HPE GreenLake. At the same time, he revealed how the channel organization is mimicking HPE’s direct sales motion.
Read all about the new Partner Ready Vantage program, and what HPE has in store for partners in 2023 by checking out the slideshow above.
Want to contact the author directly about this story? Have ideas for a follow-up article? Email Christine Horton or connect with her on LinkedIn. |
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