Credit: HPE
Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) has revealed the latest FY20 updates to its Partner Ready Program, in an effort to give partners greater ability to customise their approach to developing enablement and establishing differentiation in the market.
According to HPE, the new program updates are also aimed, in part, at optimising the partner experience and empowering partners to further accelerate the engagement and growth of HPE GreenLake, the vendor’s edge-to-cloud as-a-service offering.
“We recognise partners as the heroes of our business and appreciate the important role they play as an extension of our own sales and technical teams,” said HPE A/NZ general manager and director channels, distribution and alliances, Marina Fronek. “Together, HPE and our partners are seizing on the unique opportunity to deliver transformative as-a-service solutions to customers worldwide.
“The HPE partner community has become a powerful force in driving the terrific growth of HPE GreenLake, and our updated Partner Ready program is designed to provide them with an unmatched combination of sales and field enablement, and financial incentives and rewards, to help them continue to serve customers and grow their business,” Fronek said.
Based on partner feedback, the updated HPE Partner Ready Program is broadly designed to deliver consistency through a stable and predictable program framework, compensation model and membership acceleration.
To help maximise partner experience, the expansion of the HPE Partner Ready Program includes a full suite of programs and tools to help partners close deals faster. These include HPE demo capabilities, instant pricing from first request, with the option for differentiated pricing via deal registration, and faster time to partner on-boarding.
Moreover, partners can further develop solution capabilities through self-selected, progressive continuous learning paths, competency curricula, and new technical certifications, with the aim of helping to enhance enablement opportunities.
The new competency curricula is intended to help partners go beyond simply validating their solution knowledge, to develop solution mastery and building solution practices.
Specifically, the new HPE Master Accredited Solutions Expert (Master ASE) Hybrid IT Solution Architect certification is designed to help IT architects develop and validate skills to architect and deploy an optimised hybrid IT infrastructure for key industry solution workloads.
Additionally, to help accelerate rewards and recognition, HPE is offering partners special pricing from the day of on-boarding and protect margins while selling across the whole HPE portfolio.
“Increased benefits are available to partners selling into new customers and/or selling innovative solutions to existing customers. Partners will also work towards new HPE Tech Pro Community rewards and continuous learning badges,” HPE said in a statement.
In an effort to complement faster and more transparent on-boarding experiences for new partners and offer predictable and automated pricing with simplified deal registration, HPE is also enhancing a demo program that provides a full set of offerings to meet the needs of partners and their customers, and help them to close deals faster.
The updated demo program is intended to give all HPE Partner Ready Partners discounts and easy access to equipment across the entire portfolio, both hands-on and remotely, and via HPE innovation centres. It is expected that this will provide customers with ample time with HPE offerings before installing full solutions.
In a bid to further accelerate the growth of GreenLake, HPE’s as-a-service, the vendor is adding a full range of resources, tools and benefits in its FY20 updates to help partners navigate customer conversations and rapidly convert HPE GreenLake opportunities.
Among these additions are new sales resources and specialists dedicated to pursuing new HPE GreenLake opportunities with channel partners.
“This will significantly increase the accessible support from HPE sales specialists across geographies and industry verticals,” the vendor said.
HPE has also introduced its GreenLake Quick Quote tool, which is designed to let partners easily adjust workloads to meet the cost and performance needs of clients, helping to cut the time to generate a proposal to just a few minutes.
The latest changes come a year after the vendor’s previous round of major updates to its Partner Ready Program, with the previous enhancements, which came into effect in November last year, all about driving channel profitability across key solution stacks.
Those changes included rewarding providers for investing in “high-growth” market areas, spanning composable infrastructure, hyper-converged solutions, storage, software and consumption services.
