HPE’s 2024 Channel Outlook – The future belongs to innovators
A positive look into what’s to come for HPE partners in 2024 – continued growth, expanded opportunities, and additional investments
- Simon Ewington reflects on investments and advancements announced in 2023 that help partners embrace new business models, improve profitability, and deliver a best-in-class experience
- A positive look into what’s to come for HPE partners in 2024 – continued growth, expanded opportunities, and additional investments
In talking to partners and customers at recent events and forums, I was pleased to hear that—despite uneven recovery and macroeconomic uncertainty—they are generally optimistic about the progress made in the industry and the opportunities ahead of us.
According to IDC, spending on digital technology by organizations will grow seven times faster than the overall economy in 2024.1 The digital business era has arrived, and innovation is the name of the game. The future belongs to businesses who build capabilities to remain relevant and thrive in the new year. The most dangerous move an organization can take is a conservative “wait and see” approach.
HPE has always been an innovation-driven company, and our innovation engine has never been stronger
HPE’s mission is to help partners leverage innovation around the mega trends of edge, hybrid cloud, and artificial intelligence (AI), backed by world-class Compute technology, and aligned to HPE’s strategy. As we bold step into 2024, let’s take stock of key 2023 achievements and explore what the new year has in store.
Innovating to expand opportunities
Over the last 12 months, we have heavily invested in products and programs to expand opportunities for our broad and mature partner ecosystem. Leveraging organic and inorganic innovation—including the acquisition of OpsRamp—HPE has developed and enhanced strategic initiatives to help partners create demand, increase their relevancy, and deliver transformative outcomes to our shared customers.
During HPE Discover 2023 Barcelona with Atmosphere, we unveiled an expanded portfolio and new solutions that enable partners to add value as we bring AI to the enterprise. We also announced new AI-native and hybrid cloud offerings that bring together our leadership in hybrid cloud, supercomputing and AI software, as well as a new enterprise computing solution that accelerates AI model training, tuning, and inferencing. Lastly, a number of our products were also recently named as winners of CRN’s 2023 Products of the Year awards.
HPE GreenLake is at the heart of our hybrid cloud strategy and its growth is truly remarkable. As highlighted when we announced our Q4 FY23 financial results, HPE’s unique customer logo count on the platform has steadily increased over the last year. The number of partners selling HPE GreenLake has gone up for the twelfth consecutive quarter, and our service provider partners are embracing our proposition with record-breaking growth. I want to personally thank all of our partners who transact with the platform, showcasing incredible strength and scale.
In 2024, we will increase our focus on expanding opportunities for all of our partners to co-sell and to innovate with us. Building on that strategic priority, we have doubled down on HPE Partner Ready Vantage to help partners develop and sell their own branded services, unlocking margin-rich opportunities. Partners looking to adapt and grow business from the Edge to the Cloud can now enroll in the program. We’re thrilled with how the partner community has embraced HPE Partner Ready Vantage—today we have over 3,000 partners enrolled!
Innovating to drive profitable growth
According to the Technology and Services Industry Association (TSIA), next year the partner community is expecting a 56% growth in everything-as-a-service revenue and delivering partner branded services is becoming more critical than ever—with service providers generating more than half their revenue from own branded services.2 Partners who build practices enabling them to deliver their own value-added services are growing at a much faster rate than those who do not.
Profitable growth for partners will also continue to be a strategic priority for HPE in 2024. In 2023, we paved the way with a new partner compensation model, and introducing new tools and services that help partners scale efficiently and achieve faster time to market. The new compensation model available via HPE Partner Ready Vantage is simple, predictable, and rewarding for partners to sell across the entire HPE GreenLake portfolio—HPE GreenLake Flex Solutions as well as private and hybrid cloud services. Through HPE Partner Ready Vantage, we connect HPE innovation with partners’ value-added services to create solutions that deliver business outcomes for customers.
Innovating to deliver a best-in-class experience
Last but by no means least, our third strategic priority focuses on delivering a best-in-class experience that ultimately allows our partners to sell more. We have made notable progress over the past year, improving IT stability, and simplifying processes to enhance partner and customer experience.
This year we will increase our focus on delivering Compute high velocity offers and programs. This includes building on HPE GreenLake for Compute Ops Management (COM), HPE’s cloud-based management platform that enables secure automated server management from anywhere. We will also continue to optimize processes and enhance the HPE GreenLake partner experience with streamlined quoting. Recently, we have made significant progress with average order-to-delivery turnaround time and order status visibility, and we will keep that momentum going by introducing a new, simplified contract initiative—FAST 2.0.
Finally, we will enable differentiation through expertise. We will offer partners the same learning opportunities as HPE employees and connect them with the right experts to close deals faster through our enhanced HPE Pro Series — HPE Sales Pro for sales teams, HPE Tech Pro for the technical community, and HPE Marketing Pro for marketing professionals.
Innovating as a Force for Good
Just like partnership, sustainability is in our DNA. HPE was the first IT company to set science-based targets across its value chain, aligned to the goals of the Paris climate accord, and recognize the imperative to minimize the environmental footprint of our industry. We have been releasing the Living Progress Report for decades because, just as our partners and customers, we take this seriously. Earlier this year, we previewed the HPE Sustainability Insight Center and a suite of comprehensive sustainability services to help organizations reduce their IT carbon footprint. In 2024, we will increase our focus on helping partners deliver more sustainable solutions that drive brand differentiation and resource optimization.
Also in the spirit of innovation as a force for good—we welcomed the inaugural customer to the HPE Diversity Startup Program earlier this year. This program empowers women-owned and minority-owned startups with complimentary HPE GreenLake cloud services. We look forward to welcoming more underrepresented startups to the program in 2024.
Looking ahead
HPE has always been an innovation-driven company, and our innovation engine has never been stronger. In the new year, what our customers and partners can expect from us is further expansion of our portfolio and evolution of our strategy to unlock the transformative outcomes we all need to increase our relevancy, stand out, and advance the way we live and work. Our updated operating model allows for greater focus and efficiency, faster execution, and a superior, cloud-native experience for our customers and partners. Our increased focus on expertise and specialization enables our sales team to better engage with our partners and add value as we help our shared customers address key market trends. We are evolving our approach and partnerships to be order makers, hunting deals that drive value for us and for our shared customers.
1 IDC FutureScape: Worldwide Digital Business Strategies 2024 Predictions, October 2023
2 Technology and Services Industry Association (TSIA), Revenue Domain Market Performance Snapshot – H1 2022