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Amer Warsi, Director Channel, SMB and Ecosystem, HPE India talks about the channel partner strategy of HPE India.
How important is the Partner Programme for an organisation to drive business?
Amer Warsi - We strongly believe that the partners have unique areas of expertise, have great customer relationships and the ability to deliver at multilocation services. Customers now more than ever, are focused on innovations that improve business outcomes, relying on partners to deliver comprehensive solutions that address their business problems and help them achieve critical business objectives. Hence, it is important for the organisations to invest in a flexible partner programme to enable our partners meet the demands of their customers.
Partners play a critical role for OEMs like us and they are critical accelerators for business. Partner programmes play a key role in achieving business objectives and facilitate healthy mutually beneficial business growth.
HPE constantly works towards building and improving our partner programs to ensure our partners get a better experience and in providing the right set of tools, and trainings, which will help them succeed with their customers. Partner programs continue to be integral to our strategy for driving partner business growth. Our partners play a critical role in multiple areas – they help us in geo expansion, in delivering complex system integration projects to customers which may involve products other than those offered by HPE to complete the solution.
Key trends impacting channel partners ecosystem in 2023
Amer Warsi - As the world continues its transition towards a digital-first economy, the business landscape around us is transforming in fundamental ways. Customers are more focused on innovations that improve business outcomes, relying on partners more than ever to help manage their infrastructure and data, drive productivity, and deliver services. This has led to new levels of customer service requirements for our channel partners to help their customers navigate and thrive in this new reality.
Increasingly customers are linking IT spend budgets to outcomes, hence IT consumption is seeing a pivot from capital expenditure (Capex) focused approaches to consumption based as-a-Service (aaS) solutions that allow them to pay for only what they need. This impacts traditional business models. The three biggest trends impacting channel ecosystem in 2023 will be firstly profitable growth and right business mix of as-a-service solutions and Capex based sales. The second important trend will be talent retention and talent enablement as that will define the future of work. The last but not the least would be to stay relevant to customers and the partner’s ability to have meaningful conversations based on solutions and not just product supply. This will involve new investments in enablement and building scale and HPE as an organization is committed for the same.
HPE’s channel partner strategy for 2023
Amer Warsi - In 2019, HPE Global CEO, Antonio Neri announced the move to everything as a service, and since then HPE has been physically restructuring the company to be able to do this. We have been developing our tools and programmes, aligning our sales to lead with HPE GreenLake, developing our portfolio and engaging with our ecosystem of Partners. Our partners are key to us and we want our partners to win with our vision and their business models, together we will be able to meet both their business and their customers as-a-service needs.
We are transforming our portfolio, with simplified standardised offerings to drive repeatable business for our partners, through a unified integrated platform. With our continuous engagement, we have been successful with more and more partner types, across our ecosystem. We have also been developing API integration to bring more automation and simplifying the ordering experience through marketplaces, as well as increasing our co-location capabilities.
We are driving a better experience in engaging and leading with HPE GreenLake through pricing tools such as Quickquote, where they can get pricing within minutes, simplifying the commercials and contracting, and making it easier to deliver assessments to define HPE GreenLake opportunities through CloudPhysics.
We strongly believe that our strategy and initiatives will help our partners stand out by driving outcome-based conversations, focusing on workloads solutions and being able to engage easier with our solutions.
Key initiatives/ programmes by HPE for Channel Partners
Amer Warsi - Our mission is to advance the way people live and work. Partners help bring this mission to life by providing unique technology solutions delivered as a service-spanning Compute, Storage, Software, Intelligent Edge, High Performance Computing and Mission Critical Solutions.
With channel being the strongest route to HPE India market, majority of our sales goes through the channel partners. Hence, we have been doing ongoing investments for our partners’ success to ensure they have easy access to the right resources that can help them grow their expertise and business. Through our program, partners can leverage our expansive portfolio of leading products, solutions and services- combined with their differentiated value- to help their customers increase business performance while providing a consistent experience from edge to cloud.
The HPE Partner Ready Programme allows partners to capitalise on opportunities and innovation. We reward our partner’s investment that is in alignment with our strategy to seize margin-rich opportunities through HPE Partner Ready compensation, that spans our portfolio from HPE GreenLake (17% rebate) to storage (accelerators) and Membership Acceleration. HPE Partner Ready continues as the traditional partner program with HPE Partner Ready Vantage offering as-a-Service focused partners with a programme designed for how they go to market.
One of the most important initiatives we undertook was launching the HPE Partner Ready Vantage program. Building upon the award winning HPE Partner Ready programme, HPE Partner Ready Vantage is purpose-built to help partners adjust to and thrive in today’s changing market, where their customers have changing consumption needs and a growing desire to consume solutions as a service. The programme focuses on partners with as-a-service practices and recognizes and develops partner expertise. The new HPE Partner Ready Vantage programme provides partners the flexibility to meet customer demands and accelerate their customers’ business outcomes. It includes three distinct tracks; Build, Sell and Service. The Build track will help partners enhance their solution portfolio so they can deliver complete solutions that solve customer challenges and expand their own opportunities. The Sell track enables partners to grow their as-a-Service business by differentiating their solutions, driving ongoing annuity streams and receiving lifecycle-based incentives. The Service track is focused on enabling partners to deliver their own services, putting partners in the best position to deliver across their customers’ lifecycles and gain greater customer insights to target the business outcomes their customers are looking for -- ultimately positioning themselves to gain higher margins and grow greater revenues. Additionally, to help partners grow their business, we have the HPE Market Development Fund (MDF) Program – an industry leading program which helps boosts their marketing and sales initiatives with discretionary investments from HPE. We make these funds available to select HPE partners for sales enablement and marketing activities that drive demand and pipeline for HPE products, solutions and services. Through this program, we also prioritize MDF investments to support partners and activities that delivers mutual growth in HPE’s strategic areas for the channel.