Seibold to Drive HPE Cloud Services Through SMB MSPs

Ulrich Seibold’s new role as HPE’s vice president of GreenLake partner and service provider sales is much bigger in scope than his previous job as vice president of HPE cloud services, Central Europe. But he’ll be back on familiar ground, working more closely with HPE’s MSPs, especially those serving local SMBs, and other channel partners to help grow and improve their cloud businesses.

HPE’s Ulrich Seibold

Before joining the GreenLake team, Seibold spent more than 10 years driving HP’s partner ecosystems.  That experience will serve him well as he directs his team to grow more partner sales through local SMBs and the public sector, including health care.

“The side of the business is not new to me,” he said, as the company gears up for next month’s HPE Discover conference.

HPE has also whittled down the list of candidates for its senior vice president worldwide head of partner sales job, vacated earlier this year by George Hope.

“I don’t know if it’s four weeks or eight weeks, but I would say that we are close to finding the new person,” Seibold said.

Some of the immediate duties of Seibold’s new global role include working closely to train, teach and enable the local HPE account reps and “transformational” teams to best serve MSPs and other partners. The transformational teams, in particular, will work with partners to help them build new cloud-based business models.

“Together, we will develop with them a journey on how they can create their new business model,” Seibold said. “As you can imagine, this is a huge step for some partners.”

New Business Models

The new business models have to focus as much on in-house operations as they do with customer service and delivery. Solution provider and VAR sales reps who are transitioning to selling cloud services, for example, might not be used to the payment structure associated with GreenLake and other pay-per-use and customizable billing models.

“As a service model, you need to have different payment schemes,” he said. “In those type of models, we are helping our partners to transform, to be long-term successful. Many customers need to go into this new world, and this is something we provide to them.”

Seibold stresses GreenLake is now a brand, opposed to the customized solution it was sold as in the past.

“Customization is not the best way to scale,” he said.

Instead, the different HPE and third-party products and services that make up a secure, hybrid edge-to-cloud platform – including backup and recovery, workload management, data management and analysis, storage and compute, AI, software development – must be integrated. MSPs can source those products and services through the GreenLake platform.

“GreenLake’s cloud platform is where we bring everything together,” Seibold said. “We’re helping our managed service providers and traditional service providers develop a new business model where they can use our platform to deploy services from us and other companies. If we’re talking about a hybrid model, we can’t just be focused on HPE solutions. So we need to integrate.”

OpsRamp Acquisition Boosting HPE Cloud Services

HPE’s recent acquisition of OpsRamp, an IT operations management (ITOM) company, will help a variety of channel partners, including MSPs, integrators, VARs and resellers, more easily integrate their different services onto the GreenLake platform, Seibold said. Many of those partners also have a hybrid model that combines different business models. OpsRamp’s solution serves as a common operating system and aims to help reduce the complexity of multivendor, multicloud environments. The technology provides discovery, monitoring, automation and event resolution for end-to-end visibility and control.

“We bring together these worlds so that our partners will be able to act as advisors to bring different worlds and different cloud portfolios together to serve customers,” he said. “If you need to manage a multicloud environment from different vendors, you need to have a common operating system. OpsRamp is one of the elements in how we help our MSPs, our service providers and the resellers to grow their business and to be able to combine different business models.”

One of the other ways HPE does that is through its Partner Ready Vantage program. The company will be making some announcements regarding the program at Discover, Seibold said. HPE is now looking for MSPs that can scale into the enterprise or specialize in industry verticals such as manufacturing and financial. The company also seeks MSPs with a strong focus on the SMB, the public sector, including health care, and multitenant environments that can easily onboard hundreds of customers.

“The multitenant environment for the SMB space is the next element we’re looking to develop together with our partners,” Seibold said. “[Through the GreenLake platform and access to ISVs] they will immediately have a service provider platform on a local scale to help grow the SMB business. The next focus we’re driving is our local partners.”