HPE’s Go to Market Strategy is Channel
…….. Leading with a Strong Partner Ready Program
Neeraj Sharma, Vice President for Channel, SMB and Service Providers, Asia Pacific and Japan,
Hewlett Packard Enterprise in a chat with VARINDIA shares his thoughts on HPE’s transformational
journey after the demerger and how it is serving its partners from a business perspective Where HPE’s transformation journey is concerned, will there
be a lot of changes in the strategies? What is the current strategy
for the channel?
Let me start with the high level strategy. At Hewlett Packard
Enterprise (HPE), we firmly believe that hybrid IT will win, and that
there is a great opportunity around IoT (Internet of Things) solutions,
including computing at the edge and campus networking. We have a
great set of services that wrap around these infrastructure and IoT
offerings.
From a channel point of view, it is core to everything that we do
in HPE, so it is essential for our go to market strategy, even as the
market transforms and changes. Consumption and service models are
changing. Customers are buying products differently. Some of them
buy and some of them resell; some of them buy solutions and some
of them are even buying cloud services. So we want to make sure
that we help our partners transform accordingly, through a channel
model that helps them stay ahead of their customers’ transformation
journeys.
Our HPE Partner Ready Program focuses on 3 areas – on creating
demand jointly with our partners; on making sure that we enable
our partners as the transformation journey happens; and most
importantly, we also make sure that we compensate them right. The
partners have been asking us - while we sell infrastructure, will you
enable us to support customers that want to buy as a monthly rental
or as flexible capacity? In response, we developed this Partner Ready
Service Provider Program that we are enabling with some of our
partners in India and other parts of Asia Pacific.
HPE wants to listen to its partners so there is an advisory board in
Asia Pacific & Japan (APJ) which is called EPAC (Enterprise Partner
Advisory Council). It includes 25 APJ partners, of which 3-4 are from
India. The senior most executives of HPE get together with the senior
most partner executives, and we brainstorm, give them our insight
and strategy, and then they go to market. We will take the EPAC
format and replicate that with 10-12 partners in India.
How is the merging of server and storage business helping
HPE?
Combining the server and storage teams under the Datacenter
Hybrid Cloud Group, along with datacenter networking, gives us
more synergy as new buying patterns emerge and hybrid IT is winning
in the marketplace. Essentially this will help us make sure that we are
more integrated in our solution offerings. So we have got networking
at the edge which gives us strong campus and mobility solutions
and at the core we have servers, storage and datacenter networking.
Whatever is in the datacenter from a networking perspective comes
in this group. We have a very good and well-knit sales and channel
team. Some of the large accounts are led by AGMs (Account General
Manager) and there is an ecosystem around them. Our systems really
drive consolidation at the AGM level. At the backend, we are also
geared to provide integrated solutions.
How is HPE looking at the growth of Datacenter market?
In the datacenter business, HPE witnesses a lot of opportunity as
12
November 2016
www.varindia.com
Neeraj Sharma
VP, Channel, SMB & Service Providers, Asia Pacific &
Japan, Hewlett Packard Enterprise
the infrastructure transforms. HPE is working on software defined
datacenters, the services around them, and we also have a solution
called Flexible Capacity services, which enables us to provide
datacenter services in a way that helps customers in terms of the
flexibility that they need in business economics.
Additional opportunities include Make in India, digital
transformation – which is taking place rapidly – and also the 100 Smart
Cities initiative. Smart cities are becoming a reality; the infrastructure
tenders are coming out. In next 18 months we are expecting significant
number of new tenders. A lot of the work that HPE is doing around
smart cities is in India. We are now working on tying the ecosystems
together. We have campus solutions around Aruba and our location
services; we have a strong advantage having worked with governments
on multiple HPE Future Cities projects around the world. We have
been the legacy leader in India in the server marketplace, and have
also been the leader globally for a long time with significantly large
percentage share. So this will play a role.
What has been the after-effect of demerger among
partners?
The partners are really happy because some of the large partners
who thought that we would take deals from them through services
are much more open to us today. In the case of Software, we have
kept the core software assets of software defined datacenters and
Helion cloud stack with us. We have kept the core values with us.
The partner community has liked the fact that we are clear in the go
to market. n