Antonio Neri (HPE).
Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) is making its stance as a ‘platform’ services provider and is building partners into the core of this strategy.
This was one of the key elements HPE CEO Antonio Neri addressed during its Discover conference held in Las Vegas.
More than 70 per cent of HPE’s business globally is conducted via partners. In the Asia Pacific market, Neri told ARN this sits at about 90 per cent. He described the broad partner ecosystem including distribution, value added resellers, systems integrators and ISVs.
“We want partners to grow with us and through us. Partners have a big role to play because ultimately, as we expand our market coverage, they have unique services they can add and build on top of the GreenLake platform,” Neri said. “We’re building partners into the core of what we do and walking them through the capabilities with open APIs, so they can add their own value on top of the platform."
Neri said partners are given a choice on how they can build, resell or manage on behalf of customers.
“You decide as a partner where you want to play and add value. So if you want to be just in distribution to sell transactional products - that’s fine, although a lot of those products now are being delivered through the platform. If you want to be a true managed service provider, you can add your managed services on top of the GreenLake platform and still monetise that on top of it.
“We believe we are the only edge-to-cloud company that really gives the choice and flexibility to our partners to decide where they want to add the value and how they want to monetise it.”
Neri highlighted since 2019 when he revealed its intentions to transform towards its own everything as-a-service journey, the company has been consistent in fulfilling this strategy.
“We have achieved a significant milestone and are not stopping here. We will continue to innovate for our customers and partners,” he said.
Neri pointed out the most challenging aspect was the cultural transformation within its own organisation.
“The technology side of the equation is not as hard, although it takes a lot of effort and most of our effort is in the software and services space. But the biggest challenge is the cultural transformation - the way we think about innovation, develop and craft the value proposition all the way from product management to the go-to-market and deliver the solution in our platform-oriented approach,” he said.
“That cultural transformation has been, for me, one of the most challenging, but at the same time rewarding experiences because when you establish a clear vision and a clear mission for our people, and you allow them to rally around that and empower them, all the magic happens.”
HPE currently counts more than 900 GreenLake partners and 65,000 customers using the platform, consuming more than an exabyte of data.
“In the last three quarters we grew HPE GreenLake more than 100 per cent, and our partners that are assisting here, grew more than 150 per cent. So our partners are growing faster than our entire business, which tells you the partner ecosystem is adopting it and with the launch of our development portal that will bring partners, particularly ISVs into developing on the platform,” Neri said.
Additionally Neri pointed out 80 per cent of HPE’s GreenLake profit is recurring profit and what ever turbulence it faces in the market, it will power through it, whether that’s to do with supply chain constraints or geo-political tensions.
On the supply chain front, Neri said it wasn’t necessarily a ‘supply’ problem, rather a ‘demand’ problem.
“Capacity has not gone down, demand has gone up dramatically,” Neri said. “If you look at our results, the last four quarters, we grew bookings in excess of 20 per cent year-over-year.
In the general market, Neri said the supply system was not ready to fulfill all of the demand within both IT and consumer segments.
“It’s happening with technologies that aren’t usually considered such as low level components, programmable boards and microcontrollers,” he said.
“We expect that the consumer segment will significantly slow down, but I do expect IT spending to continue to be solid over the foreseeable future. We're taking actions ourselves working with suppliers. We're still working to fulfill demand where that is possible today - becoming more application and workload driven on the configuration of the systems.
“It is a win-win situation that we need to drive to customers and partners in HPE where we all drive the right compromises to deliver as fast as possible but there are some components lead times that go up to 55 weeks, so you have to make certain choices.
"That's another benefit of being on the GreenLake platform, is having reserved capacity that can scale up and down versus running the typical procurement process that takes a long time.”
During Discover, HPE launched its new Partner Ready Vantage program, encompassing both HPE’s hybrid cloud and Aruba portfolios.
Featuring three tracks - Build, Sell, and Service - the program recognises different partner capabilities and business models, aiming to be “in tune with how partners want to do business” whether that’s through traditional sales models or ‘as-a-service’.
Each track features focused Centres of Expertise (COE), offering tailored enablement, training, go-to-market initiatives, and sales tools.
Alongside the program, HPE also announced updates to the Pro Series, new enhancements to Partner Connect, and a refresh to the Partner Portal.
HPE also added new cloud services for GreenLake and advancements to the platform include enhanced security, a new developer portal and developer tools, and deeper capabilities to manage assets and workloads at scale.
The new HPE GreenLake for Private Cloud Enterprise was also released and provides an automated, flexible, scalable, and enterprise-grade private cloud.
Julia Talevski travelled to HPE Discover in Las Vegas as a guest of HPE.
