HPE Updates Partner Ready Vantage Program, Looks to Attract More MSPs

HPE has unveiled the latest updates to its HPE Partner Ready Vantage program, which aims to better enable partners to deliver business outcomes to customers.

The updates include fully open centers of expertise, an evolved competency framework, new competencies, tools and offerings. HPE Partner Ready Vantage is now open and available to all partners looking to enhance differentiation, build stronger practices, and deliver complete solutions to support a variety of business models.

The program was first announced with phased enrollment at HPE Discover 2022 to better address customer needs and accelerate as-a-service growth across HPE’s entire portfolio, hybrid cloud and HPE Aruba Networking, under a single framework.

Collaboration with Partners on Strategy, Partner Ready Vantage

Simon Ewington, HPE's vice president of worldwide channel and partner ecosystem, said the process HPE uses when planning partner program updates is one of collaboration with partners.

HPE's Simon Ewington

"We like partners to help us adapt that strategy so that it's well received when we actually go to market," he said. "And I think that's even more true for Partner Ready Vantage and the journey we've been on in the last couple of years."

HPE's mission is to be the vendor of choice for edge, hybrid cloud and artificial intelligence (AI) solutions, Ewington said.

"And we want to achieve this by increasing our relevance and also our partners' relevance in the market," he said. "The mission actually translates into three main strategic objectives: innovate and expand, driving profitable growth and delivering a best-in-class experience. And we're going to continue supporting those three strategic initiatives by enabling differentiation through expertise and a focus on being the sustainable vendor of choice."

Partner Ready Vantage Provides Opportunities for MSPs

HPE wants to continue to enable its traditional partners, while also focusing on attracting new partner archetypes like MSPs by developing and enabling new capabilities on the HPE GreenLake platform around managed capabilities, Ewington said.

"We've recognized that the market is shifting toward more MSP-capable partners, whether or not that's our partners that we work with today developing MSP capabilities themselves, we see a huge move there," he said. "So we're already pretty well penetrated ... but we need to embed ourselves with new partner types. I'd say it's going quite well. And the thing I think we're most excited about is that Partner Ready Vantage really makes us very attractive to MSPs. So if you look at the manage track, that's the track that is really going to be a game changer for us in terms of addressing, identifying, engaging and working with partners that we don't work with today."

HPE Partner Ready Vantage enables partners to further develop their expertise in delivering as-a-service solutions through enrollment into focused centers of expertise across three tracks. Those include build, sell and service.

The build track enables partners to develop, integrate, and create workloads and solutions with HPE GreenLake, and is comprised of the solution and development, and technology validation centers of expertise. The sell track provides partners with opportunities to grow recurring revenue and is comprised of the as-a-service center of expertise.

The service track allows partners to enhance customer experiences by deepening their services and is comprised of customer success, managed services, and professional services centers of expertise.

New Tools, Offerings in Partner Ready Vantage

In addition, the following tools and offerings are available to partners enrolled in HPE Partner Ready Vantage:

HPE competencies have evolved to include a curated set of learning activities enabling partners to promote their own solutions and create better visibility of their offerings. The new framework has an increased focus on partner understanding of HPE technology and how to apply it to a variety of customer challenges.

Partner competency will now be end to end, including technical, sales, solutions and industry expertise, providing a choice to partners to develop their path based on their specific business model.

Numerous Competencies, More Coming in 2024

HPE has several competencies available for partners to participate in, which are aligned to HPE’s strategy for edge, hybrid cloud and AI. These competencies are also available to HPE Partner Ready and HPE Partner Ready for Networking partners with additional competencies being announced in 2024.

Jesse Chavez, HPE's vice president of worldwide partner programs and operations, said HPE has been conducting multiple pilots over the course of the past couple of years with partners.

HPE's Jesse Chavez

"We've selected partners that have different business models and made some investments with those partners in regards to helping them build out business practices around those business models that are unique skill sets that they had," he said. "And we took all of that information from that pilot and it really helped us inform how we build out the overall program on recognizing different business models and the capabilities that partners have. And so that's been going on for a couple of years as we've been building out the overall program. We pride ourselves on really sitting down and listening to our partners. And we hear that all the time from our partners, that we're probably one of the organizations that really sit down and listen to their partners and gain feedback."

Aruba's Beth Jensen

Beth Jensen, Aruba’s director of worldwide channel partner programs, said the "beauty" of Partner Ready Vantage is it was developed "from the ground up with a blank piece of paper."

"And from the beginning, we designed and implemented, and did continual improvement with our partners," she said. "So every center of expertise we created was based on a pilot. It started with a pilot deep with partners to get feedback from the beginning.