A look back on HPE's first ever global Distribution Partner Conference

It's an exhilarating time to work for Hewlett Packard Enterprise particularly – last month when I had the pleasure of launching our Distribution Partner Conference, HPEs first-ever event for distributors from around the globe, hosted in Dubai.

During the three-day event, my leadership team and I met with more than 200 distribution partners from 80 countries to discuss how we can continue to strengthen our partnership and drive growth within our partner community. It was fantastic to hear that HPE's global distribution strategy resonates with our partners and that our innovations make a real difference to businesses, helping them increase profitability and streamline operations.

HPE's Global Distribution Strategy is clear and simple. Our aim is to drive incremental revenue growth and improve mutual profitability, while at the same time providing an exceptional service to partners. Our company objectives can only be met with strong distribution partnerships and, as we look to next year, we want to double down on selling product lines aligned to high-growth market areas with the channel and continue to develop our partner base through distribution.

We shared with those at the conference how we are driving our partner program's global consistency as well as highlighting our position as a global technology leader, reiterated with statistics that showed we are the market leader in Hybrid IT ^[1] and voted as market leader for our Edge Servers.^[2]

Tim Peters, vice president of small & medium business at HPE, and Global SMB Channel and Sales Programs Director Maciek Szczesniak, highlighted the importance of building trust with customers. Customers want partners that they can rely on to reduce cost and risk. At the same time, partners want a vendor they can rely on, who offers simple, secure and reliable products that help them increase their revenue and margins.

Hybrid IT Opportunities

Collaborations with our partners are helping customers transition to next-generation IT solutions. Remi Gicquel, leading sales and strategyfor Data Center & Hybrid Cloud, emphasised at the conference that as we deliver new products and services faster, while keeping businesses running, hybrid IT has become the new normal. He also pointed out that there is a huge upgrade opportunity available today that our partners can take advantage of. There has never been a better time for our partners to drive the customer transition from Blades to ProLiant Gen10 – the world's most secure industry standard servers. Bob DeVita used his time on stage to articulate the value of HPE SimpliVity, helping our distributors learn more about our award-winning hyperconvergence solutions that allows them to deliver customers cloud-like agility and economics with enterprise-grade performance and protection.

Increase IT efficiency for customers

Shannah Thompson, vice president of strategy and operations for HPE storage and big data WW, demonstrated the opportunity our partners have, to enable customers to transition their storage solutions with the acceleration to all-flash systems and our workload optimized flash portfolio. She also shared our view that storage needs to be intelligent for our shared customers to gain better insights from their data. Our partners were reminded that they can deliver significantly increased IT efficiency by selling AI-driven storage with HPE Infosight.

Our company strategy is clear, make hybrid simple, power the intelligent edge and bring the services to make this happen. We live and stand by our core value of "Partnership first," so as we reflect on an incredibly successful conference, I'll finish with a final quote from a distributor who attended and highlighted how strong our relationship is with them.

^[1] Gartner Magic Quadrant positions:

• Leader in Gartner 2018 MQ first edition for Hyperconverged Infrastructure (Feb 2018),
• Leader in 2018 Gartner MQ for Operations Support Systems (Feb 2018)
• Leader in 2017 Gartner MQ for General-Purpose Disk Arrays (Oct 2017)
• Leader in 2017 Gartner MQ for Solid-State Arrays
• Leader in 2017 Gartner MQ for the Wired and Wireless LAN Access Infrastructure

^[2] IT Brand Pulse March 28, 2018: https://itbrandpulse.com/it-pros-vote-2018-server-brand-leaders