HPE has recently announced several key enhancements to its industry-recognised Partner Ready Program. In an exclusive interaction with CRN India, Joybrata Mukherjee, Director – Channel, SI, Alliances and Service Providers, HPE India, provides details on partner benefits, enhanced strengths, increased opportunities and more
HPE is helping enterprises envision and realise their digital future. How critical has been the role of your partners?
Organisations today have a great opportunity to adopt digital transformation to create new and compelling customer experiences, and differentiate and grow their business. However, to achieve all this, they require a consistent cloud experience for managing all their apps and workloads, the ability to innovate at high velocity, and the freedom to choose the combination of technologies that best meet their needs.
At HPE, we are focused on helping customers leverage the economic potential of their data, from every edge to any cloud. This includes our commitment to provide customers our entire portfolio, through a range of subscription based, pay-per-use and as-a-service offerings, by 2022. Of late, we have introduced several new offerings specifically designed to help companies accelerate their path to digital transformation.
HPE continues to lead with the ‘Partner First’ philosophy and views the channel as the front foot in delivering industry leading innovation to the market, through a clear strategy of collaboration, and specialist development. The channel represents HPE’s strongest route-to-market and our partners are an important extension of our own sales and technical teams, and they are a powerful force in driving growth and digital transformation projects for customers.
HPE recently announced enhancements to its Partner Ready Program. Please explain in detail about the unique tenets of this enhanced program?
HPE Partner Ready is one of the IT industry’s oldest, and profitable partner programs. Our recently announced enhancements were designed to improve our ability to partner, conduct business or improve profitability through the channel. All of the enhancements we are implementing this year and developing for the future include elements to ensure partners can be successful today and are prepared to incorporate an as-a-service model by 2022. Firstly, the enhanced program maximises the partner’s experience through a full suite of programs and tools to help partners close deals faster. These tools include easily-accessible HPE demo capabilities, competitive and instant pricing from first request with the option for differentiated pricing via deal registration, and faster time to partner on-boarding.
Secondly, the enhanced enablement opportunities allow partners to further develop solution mastery through self-selected, progressive continuous learning paths, competency curricula, and new technical certifications. Finally, the accelerated rewards and recognition will enable partners receive special pricing from the day of on-boarding and protect margins while selling across the whole HPE portfolio. Additionally, 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.
What factors were considered while introducing these enhancements in the program? Please highlight the feedback given by the partners?
The HPE Partner Ready Program is based on continual partner feedback and is designed to deliver consistency through a stable and predictable framework, compensation model and membership acceleration. Locally and globally, we spend time listening to our partners and take on their feedback when making continual improvements. We receive feedback in three areas, which we deliver through the enhanced program. These were, need for stronger skillsets to meet customer demand, improvement in partners’ executive customer conversation, and personalise their journey to as-a-service. HPE promised programmatic consistency for FY20, and we have delivered. Partners will enjoy a consistent framework, compensation and membership acceleration.
Please explain the benefits of the enhanced HPE Partner Ready Program that partners can leverage?
The FY20 HPE Partner Ready Program enables partners to personalise how they engage and leverage resources with HPE, in order to best meet the needs of their clients and continue winning in the marketplace. To complement faster and more transparent on-boarding experiences for new partners, and predictable and automated pricing with simplified deal registration, we enhanced a comprehensive demo program that provides a full set of offerings. To provide customers with ample time with HPE offerings before installing full solutions, the updated demo program gives all HPE Partner Ready Partners discounts and easy access to equipment across the entire portfolio, both hands-on and remotely, and via HPE innovation centers.
Also, in June 2019, we introduced the ‘Pro’ series to deliver channel partners the solutions, skills and programs to further develop their teams, transform customer experiences and drive business growth together. By focusing on global consistency in three areas – Connect, Learn, and Grow – the ‘Pro’ series expand opportunities for partners to work with HPE teams, gain visibility, enhance their skills, grow profitably and enjoy an increased ease of doing business.
The HPE Sales Pro Community approach drives sales excellence for HPE and partner sellers through effective sales communications and sales enablement initiatives. The HPE Tech Pro Community initiative for solution architects introduced a new reward and recognition program as well as two new industry leading certifications and a full suite of continuous learning paths for technical expertise. Additionally, the HPE Marketing Pro Academy expanded its offerings through a new online Digital Marketing Partner Learning Center, and new Accreditation Program.
Please explain how these program updates optimise the partner experience and empower them to further accelerate engagement and growth?
The enhanced HPE Partner Ready Program allows partners to customise their approach to developing enablement, achieving profitability and establishing differentiation in the market. These program updates specifically optimise their experience and empower them to further accelerate engagement and growth of HPE GreenLake. We will continue to invest aggressively in as-a-service opportunity, to capitalise on our market leadership, leverage our channel and partner ecosystem, and deliver our entire portfolio, from edge to cloud, under the HPE GreenLake portfolio.
How has been the growth of HPE GreenLake business in the country so far? How will this updated program further push the growth in 2020 and beyond?
HPE GreenLake re-sets the digital opportunity for customers by providing a robust as-a-service portfolio that provides flexibility and speed to market. It gives customers a choice of subscription-based, pay-per-use, and managed IT as-a-service offerings, providing them with a consistent cloud experience for managing all their workloads. Earlier this year, Infosys adopted HPE GreenLake to help enterprises accelerate their hybrid cloud transformation providing them increased agility and reduced total cost of ownership.
Building on the momentum of HPE GreenLake, we launched HPE GreenLake Central, offering customers a simple, unified, digital experience across public and private clouds, the data center and edge workloads. HPE GreenLake Central also provides CFOs a real-time view of technology spend across the hybrid IT estate, to understand spend by users, teams, and business units, and within public and private cloud, data centre and edge environments.
To personalise the as-a-service journey, HPE Preferred Service Providers who complete the HPE GreenLake competency, among others, can reduce their revenue threshold by 10 per cent as part of the skillset expansion membership acceleration benefit.
How will enhanced rewards program, rebates, and sales enablement tools accelerate and expand partners’ revenue opportunities in the coming year?
Going forward, our key channel priorities are to recognise and reward the value add of our partners, enable them via competencies, certifications, learning paths and access to demonstration equipment. This is to ensure we are effectively serving the partner ecosystem, including all the differing types of businesses we partner with today. HPE Partner Ready gives partners direct access to all the critical business tools and information they need to do business with us. In FY20, partners will benefit from alignment across Partner Ready for solution providers, services, service providers, international partners, distribution and Aruba – one program, one communication plan, one core set of assets.
