HPE’s Top 1,000 Partners Make Up 80 Percent Of Partner Business: Channel Chief George Hope

‘Over the past three years, we have invested $2 billion dollars in partner (sales and technical) enablement, activation, and progression,’ says HPE Worldwide Channel Chief George Hope. ‘As a result, we are seeing more and more partners turn HPE GreenLake into repeatable business. Recent examples are the inspiring joint success stories with our partners Advizex, CBT and PKA Technologies.’

With everything-as-a-service reshaping the channel landscape, Hewlett Packard Enterprise’s top 1,000 partners – who have invested in leading with the groundbreaking HPE GreenLake pay-per-use cloud service- now make up 80 percent of the company’s partner business, said HPE Worldwide Channel Chief George Hope.

Those top partners – which include Advizex, PKA Technologies and CBT – are seeing their consumption business grow by 50 percent quarter over quarter, said Hope in a blog post on LinkedIn.

“Over the past three years, we have invested $2 billion dollars in partner (sales and technical) enablement, activation, and progression,” said Hope, who was rated as the No. 1 most influential channel sales leader by CRN in 2021 for his everything as a service channel leadership. “As a result, we are seeing more and more partners turn HPE GreenLake into repeatable business. Recent examples are the inspiring joint success stories with our partners Advizex, CBT and PKA Technologies.”

In the most recent quarter, HPE CEO Antonio Neri told investors that GreenLake sales were up 114 percent with 300 new GreenLake customers added during its fiscal year ended Oct. 31. “Overall I would say this has been a home run,” said Neri. “We believe we have years of advantage [in lead time over competitors].”

Neri also singled out PKA, No. 423 on the 2021 CRN SP500, for its impressive GreenLake win with Sutter Home, the second-largest family-owned winery in the world. He said 25 percent of GreenLake orders in the most recent quarter were new accounts like Sutter Home.

Sutter Home adopted the GreenLake on-premises cloud service to gain additional “flexibility and scale,” with increased automation powering the winemaker’s warehouse where 60 different types of wines are packaged and prepared for shipping, said Neri.

HPE is years ahead of competitors in the edge-to-cloud everything as a service, hybrid IT market, said Paul Cohen, vice president of sales for PKA.

“Going back over eight years with Flex Capacity, evolving into GreenLake in the past three to four years, HPE remains far ahead of their competitors in the Everything as a Service market,” he said. “The development of their tools and the technology that can be wrapped into it including hybrid IT, networking, AI (artificial intelligence), data management and security continues to evolve and lead the industry. “

PKA has already closed a number of GreenLake opportunities and has a robust pipeline for 2022, said Cohen. “For us, as we wrap this into our PKA SolveIT Solutions managed services, we have seen incredible positive reactions from our customers and prospects who are excited at the possibilities to leverage GreenLake,” he said.

GreenLake Central, in particular, is an impressive tool that is helping to win over customers, said Cohen. “Honestly, once we can get the customer to a GreenLake Central Demo the deal will close,” he said. “I remain impressed at the investments and the evolution of GreenLake.”

Cohen also praised Hope and the entire HPE partner organization for moving the channel forward to the fast growing pay per use everything as service model. “HPE has put together a very channel friendly program for everything as a service,” he said.

Advizex, No. 153 on the CRN SP500, has made a bold bet on everything as a service that is driving big gains in services sales for the company. Advizex – which was named HPE U.S. Service Partner of Year in 2021- has even put one of its top executives, Joe VanPatten, a 30 year tech sales veteran, into a new role as vice president of cloud consumption.

Advizex CEO CR Howdyshell said the appeal of a single bill and single point of accountability for IT infrastructure and services is driving momentum with a 360 percent increase in the everything as a service sales pipeline.

“We are seeing more and more customers looking to outsource their IT to us, asking us to provide a single point of accountability,” said Howdyshell, who was named one of the 100 most influential IT executives by CRN in 2021 for his everything as a service leadership. “Customers want to get out of the data center business, but that doesn’t mean it is going to be public cloud. It is going to be with providers that can do everything as a service for infrastructure, IT services and managed services.”

Among Advizex’s recent everything as a service wins is a deal with a biosciences startup that opted for an Advizex everything as a service solution rather than public cloud, said Howdyshell. “The customer was looking for Advizex to run IT infrastructure while they managed the business,” he said. “They want their IT organization to focus on their business requirements, namely to support doctors and scientists.”

Besides the big net new opportunities for HPE GreenLake, Advizex has had 100 percent of its GreenLake installed base customers add significant capacity, said Howdyshell. “That just reinforces the fact that if you give customers the opportunity to build as they grow versus buy as they grow they will take advantage of everything as a service,” he said. “Customers are taking advantage of single point of accountability that we provide with everything as a service.”

CBT, No. 232 on the CRN SP500, has also been singled out by HPE CEO Neri for its intelligent edge market leadership with its “refinery of the future” project with Texmark Chemicals Inc., a family-owned chemical processing plant in Galena Park, Texas. That CBT refinery of the future offering includes the HPE Aruba network as a service offering.

With just 30 percent of total GreenLake sales going through partners in the last fiscal year, the global channel community represents a huge “untapped market opportunity” for HPE GreenLake, said Hope.

“As we enable more and more partners to take advantage of our consumption offering, we will further accelerate our edge-to-cloud growth,” said Hope.

HPE continues to help partners embrace its edge to cloud vision at their own pace, said Hope. “As a testament to our focus on driving HPE GreenLake business with partners, we continue to offer a 17 percent HPE GreenLake for partners rebate, one of the highest in the industry,” he said. It’s worth noting that partners still get to participate in the recurring revenue stream from the monthly billing process, too.”

Partners of all stripes working with HPE can launch their own managed cloud services with limited upfront investment to elastically scale services in line with demand, said Hope.

“Leveraging white-label cloud services and our network of service providers across the globe, all HPE Partners can offer their own branded cloud solutions and retain the customer relationship end-to-end,” Hope said. “In the coming years this market will see significant growth, with data sovereignty, security and compliance as some of the key drivers.”

Partners can also benefit from preferential pricing and deal protection through incentives aimed at helping them protect their margins while selling HPE GreenLake, said Hope.

What’s more, he said, HPE Financial Services “offers are available for businesses of all sizes to help optimize investment capacity, move to everything-as-a-service faster, or even double down on transformation.”

As HPE continues to transform as the edge to cloud market leader, said Hope, the conversation for partners should focus on customer choice.

“In a world where customers are transforming their business models, too, giving them options means gaining a deep understanding of the outcomes they need and want to achieve,” he said. “That, in turn, should translate into helping them leverage cloud offerings, ecosystems, process automation, and economics to afford the digital transformation they need to differentiate themselves and thrive.”