HP Imagine: HP Amplify Program Changes Welcomed by Partners

HP IMAGINE — HP says its decision to bring its entire portfolio under the HP Amplify partner program has been welcomed by the channel.

HP’s global channel leader, Kobi Elbaz, shared the update with Channel Futures at the vendor’s annual product showcase and leadership conference, HP Imagine, this week in Palo Alto, California.

The IT giant announced the expansion of the program at the HP Amplify Partner Conference in March. It said it would unite everything under the Amplify umbrella, including the Poly, Hyperx and HP Anyware parts of the business.

“Our channel partners like the fact they don’t need to operate and learn different programs,” said Elbaz. “It also helps us to accelerate the expansion of Poly to the legacy HP partners. Now they don’t need to learn the Poly program. We are happy that we have Amplify across all our channel partners and made it simple for our channel partners to engage and simple to operate.”

'Lightbulbs Going Off' for Partners

At the HP Amplify Conference, HP announced the industry’s first role-based artificial intelligence (AI) partner training and certification program for partners. The training is now rolling out globally in different languages.

Anneliese Olson, SVP and managing director, North America, HP, told Channel Futures that the IT giant has trained “at least 80% of our base of partner revenue so far in this series of classes."

“There are lightbulbs going off that it matters to everybody in multiple functions,” she said.

Like HP Amplify, HP Imagine this week put AI front and center of all its new product launches.

“We are creating a new category, and we’re creating it with the channel partner,” said Elbaz.

To that end, HP announced Amplify Growth Plays, a program the company built around HP’s growth categories. One of these is focused on AI data science. After a pilot, HP is now rolling it out.

HP's Kobi Elbaz

“We wanted to make sure, together with our Advanced Compute Solutions team and Nvidia, we really understand how we can help the channel partners and bring something that value for them,” said Elbaz.

“[Partners] are all curious," he added. "Partners understand that this is going to change the industry, and they must understand what it is and be curious about what AI can bring for them and what AI can bring for the customer. This is why we saw quite a good participation from different type of channel partners."

HP Deploying AI Chatbot For Partners

HP is also using AI internally, including in a new chatbot for its partner portal, which it has planned for November.

“Channel partners can go to the portal and just type what they want. And the AI chatbot will help us find what they need [for] the customer,” said Elbaz. “We are using a lot of AI to improve our operation. We’re using AI in order to make sure that we develop tools and capabilities that help us to serve our channel partners more.”