HPE Formalizes 'Complete'

After a couple years of being in what HPE calls beta mode, the vendor on Tuesday officially announced HPE Complete, a program that delivers integrated HPE and third-party solutions that are preconfigured, integrated, tested and validated.

If you think you’ve heard the HPE Complete name before – you have – mostly from the company’s vendor partners, of which HPE says there are about three-dozen.

Zerto, for example, joined HPE Complete in June 2017. Joint customers and partners can leverage the Zerto IT Resilience Platform and recovery solutions for private, public and hybrid clouds to ensure continuous operations of critical applications running on servers, storage and networking products, according to the vendor.

More recently added vendor partners include Commvault, Nvidia and Mellanox.

HPE’s Marty Lans

Considered a resell model,  the company has spent several years refining the program.

“It’s a channel distribution-based program where HPE becomes a VAR enabling third-party ISV and hardware vendors to put offers on HPE paper to sell to customers,” said Marty Lans, HPE Complete designer and general manager of HPE’s storage connectivity engineering and global interoperability global business unit.

Complete benefits include: one HPE purchase order or one-stop shopping for both HPE products and third-party branded products and support; solution validation for compatibility and interoperability; and troubleshooting to resolve customer issues.

Building HPE Complete isn’t Lans’ first rodeo. As senior director, product management at EMC, where he worked for five years, he initiated and developed the EMC resell business unit and portfolio called EMC Select. Today, the Dell EMC Partner Program for Tech Connect Select Partners helps customers acquire pretested, third-party “solution completers” that can be purchased with any Dell EMC hardware, software and services.

HPE uses distributors such as Tech Data, Ingram Micro and Arrow to reach partners worldwide.

Comport’s Jack Margossian

For partners, HPE Complete takes the mystery and risk out of the solution-selling equation, Jack Margossian, president of Comport Consulting Corp., told us. Comport, a provider of IT infrastructure, and professional and managed service solutions, has been selling the HPE Complete integrated solution since 2016.

“There are new products coming to market all the time. Customers look at us and see we sell HPE products, but they also need applications and other technology. Who is going to be responsible for making sure it all works together?” he said. “If they’re looking to me to do that, I’m a good-size partner, but I’m not that big a company so I’m not going to say that I’m going to put my whole business based on what [vendors have] done. That’s not going to fly.”

HPE Complete packaged solutions give Margossian confidence because the solutions are tested, running and have an HPE part number.

“It makes it significantly easier for us to sell new technologies to customers,” he said, adding that many partners are limited in their resources and aren’t able to support all of the new products coming to market.

HPE’s Lans noted that the company is not out to undercut the channel, but to …

… offer the best and lowest price for the SKUs. Partners, on the other hand, earn higher margins and offer services.

With today’s coming-out party for HPE Complete, Lans said the company can now scale it, adding 10-15 new vendors per quarter.

HPE on Tuesday also announced additions to its M-Series Ethernet storage switching line, including new orchestration automation software, the HPE Smart Fabric Orchestrator, and the M-Series SN2010M, a smaller and more energy-efficient switch. HPE introduced its M-Series portfolio last September.

“It’s very easy to manage because it has all of the orchestration automation software is on there to address the challenges of storage, so it’s a much easier experience than it has been,” said Lans.