Opening the doors to the second HPE Distribution Partner Conference

HPE’s second Distribution Partner Conference gathers nearly 300 partners to discuss channel strategy

Today marks the opening of the second HPE Distribution Partner Conference where I’m delighted to be welcoming almost 300 distribution partners to Munich. After a successful inaugural conference last year, our three-day global conference remains as a great opportunity to discuss how we can continue to strengthen our partnerships and win together.

The channel business represents HPE’s strongest route-to-market, with an average of 80% of our indirect business going through distribution partners, as well as plenty of markets where 100% of the indirect business is channeled through distributors. So this week, we will also be celebrating the growth that our distributors helped us drive within our HPE Partner Ready Silver, Business and Proximity (SBP) partner community - a community of over 80,000 partners. This translates into over $500M¹ investment in distribution, pivotal to enable, help grow and take care of the over 2,000 new SBP partners onboarding every quarter globally. In addition, we’re enabling partners through dedicated training and incentive to better showcase our commitment.

This year our partners are seeing a new version of HPE, transforming and moving aggressively with new innovation and channel enablement. We remain driven to deliver the right experience so partners can evolve their businesses at their own pace, and the right programs to help partners sell, invest and expand skills to differentiate themselves. This conference, once again, allows us to continue to highlight the key role played by our distributors in helping our channel partners to accelerate their expertise, growth and differentiation.

Through the conference keynotes and breakout sessions, our partners will hear specifically how HPE is helping businesses transform technology to power the enterprise of the future in an edge-centric, cloud-enabled, data-driven world - through technology, people and economics. We’ll be taking a deep dive into our channel priorities and how solutions within HPE’s technology offerings deliver mutual opportunities for growth. Specifically we’ll be looking at:

• Accelerating consumption-based sales and leveraging the newly announced HPE GreenLake offerings for mid-market.
  
  
• Gaining traction in the SMB market via right-sized solutions and initiatives.
  
  
• Winning Storage and Compute market share and capturing the Edge opportunity.
  
  
• Transforming the way we work with partners by continuously developing our channel strategy and programs based on partner needs and feedback, working together as one team.

Delivering enhanced programs and benefits together

HPE has invested $1 billion in the HPE Partner Ready Program this year, to improve how we work together, to help boost partner growth, and to train the marketing, sales and technical professionals of the future. It’s always been important to support and develop the opportunities for our partners, and we do – through a number of fantastic channel enablement initiatives and partner programs. Working closely with our distributors, we are enabling our channel partners to take advantage of the following program enhancements and benefits:

• Protected margins while hunting for new business through our automated process workflows and simplified deal registration process and preferential pricing program, delivering a 15% faster approval turnaround time².
  
  
• Alternative financial models via HPE Technology Refresh programme that replaces customer infrastructure ownership with predictable monthly or quarterly payments and provides for a shorter, routine refresh cycle every 24 to 48 months.
  
  
• A personalized and progressive approach to continuous learning and opportunity to develop skills with higher industry recognition for solution selling competencies.
  
  
• Access to the same learning and collaboration opportunities as HPE teams, via HPE Sales Pro, HPE Tech Pro Community, and HPE Marketing Pro Academy, initiatives and programs.
  
  
• Better customer assessments with CloudPhysics to explore customer environments providing a shared view of compute and storage resources and their performance in the datacenter.
  
  
• Faster speed to price and quote through significantly lowering the number of escalated quotes, reducing complexity by moving to a single, global pricing model, and enhanced partner experience by providing predictable and automated pricing.
  
  
• Streamlining the partner onboarding process to maximize experience and enable distributors to offer continuous sales and enablement support to help partners close deals from day 1.

Innovation Delivered as-a-Service

Today, over 400 partners sell HPE GreenLake, contributing to it being the fastest-growing business in HPE. In fact, the HPE GreenLake channel business has grown over 275% year over year and now offers SBP partners another opportunity to significantly increase profits. In fact, HPE has introduced several new offerings through HPE GreenLake in the recent months to help accelerate the path digital transformation. This includes new right-sized offerings and services specific for the midmarket such as virtualization and containers-as-a-Service, storage, database, and backup as a service, private cloud as a service and more. This week our partners will be hearing more about our commitment to making everything we offer available as-a-service by 2022³ looking specifically at the impact of offering everything that HPE delivers – from edge to cloud – as pay-per-use or subscription-based and fully managed.

Through the this week’s keynotes and breakout sessions our partners will hear specifically how HPE is helping businesses transform technology to power the enterprise of the future in an edge-centric, cloud-enabled, data-driven world. We’d like to showcase our investment in innovation and our channel strategy through our partners, as we help them evolve their business at their own pace, wherever they are on their digital transformation journey.

I can’t wait to get the conversation started as the doors open to HPE Distribution Partner Conference 2019.

¹ MDF+PfR (contras)

² Measured in North America

³ HPE Announces Plans to offer entire portfolio as a service by 2022, Press Release, June 18, 2019

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