HPE and Nutanix dangle ‘enhanced’ partner rebates to plug combined hybrid cloud

Andrew Foot (HPE)

Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) and Nutanix have shed more light on what their joint hybrid cloud offering will mean for the channel ahead of the solution’s launch in November.

The vendor duo told a room of Australian partners their integrated hybrid cloud as-a-service solution would come with “enhanced” rebates and “other opportunities”, with Arrow acting as the joint distributor offering the product locally.

The two have already launched the HPE ProLiant DX server with Nutanix’s operating software built into it, with the latter claiming to ARN it had seen an increase in deal registrations off the back the product.

Meanwhile, the HPE GreenLake as-a-service offering, which includes Nutanix’s Enterprise Cloud OS software and AHV hypervisor, will be globally available to partners in November.

Both vendors refused to disclosed which partners were already on board with their partnership, but attendees at the Sydney launch event included representatives from Harbour IT, Qirx, Data #3 and DXC Technology, with Dicker Data also making an appearance from the distribution side.

Neither would also divulge details of the rebates on offer or any specifics on the go-to-market and marketing options available. 

According to HPE general manager for Compute-Hybrid IT Andrew Foot, the vendor will offer to underwrite the capital purchase of the HPE ProLiant DX, and instead “take the risk” so partners can “take consumption as-a-service to market on many parts of [HPE’s] product line.”

“Partners now have the ability to take capital expenditure as a model to market, and if they had to look at ways of financing that, we have the ability to underwrite that,” he explained. “It’s a huge opportunity.”

When the partnership was first announced in April this year, the hybrid cloud offering was touted as a potential hyper-converged infrastructure competitor to Dell EMC and VMware. This was later slammed by Michael Dell, who claimed Dell Technologies had “already beat the competition”.

Nutanix A/NZ MD Jamie Humphrey, however, said there was still a “huge opportunity” locally.  

“The trend is now around data centre modernisation,” he told ARN. “I think that’s a real thing, so how do we help partners around that.”

When asked about how their joint hyper-converged infrastructure will fit with HPE’s existing Simplivity, Humphrey claimed only five per cent of data centres in Australia have been “modernised”.

“There’s enough market opportunity out there for us to address it and there’s a mutual benefit for all.”