HP ensures to meet the needs of partners of all sizes

Prakash Krishnamoorthy
Country Manager - Networking
HP India

HP offers a comprehensive set of rewards and benefits to help partners drive their networking revenues and profit margins.

How has been the transformation of HP ProCurve to HP Networking in the Indian market?

HP ProCurve was the name of the networking division of Hewlett-Packard from 1998 to 2010. The name of the division was changed to HP Networking in September 2010 after HP acquired 3Com Corporation.

One of the benefits of the 3Com acquisition was that the product portfolio was largely complementary to HP ProCurve products. 3Com filled a gap in the data center, which is a critical element of the HP Networking strategy. HP Networking products are based on open standards. These are compliant with products by other vendors to bring in value proposition to customers. 3Com acquisition has strengthened HP's offerings, especially in routers and high-end core switches. HP Networking portfolio offers an end-to-end enterprise product suite and is widely accepted by the market that has been hungry for competitive bids for networking equipment that help drive better quality products, increased innovation and improved pricing for clients. It also helped us expand our reach across the length and breadth of the country.

How has been the feedback of the partners and customers each? 

Today, partners can offer a simplified network that is twice as secure, two times the performance and reduce total cost of ownership by 65%. Combing this new network approach with HP’s converged infrastructure strategy, not only can partners sell networking, but also storage, servers, services, power and cooling that can be managed under one common management solution – which means more opportunities for partners to increase their top and bottom lines. This also creates customer satisfaction as partners deliver a simple, agile and smart network.

A key differentiator for partners taking solutions to market is HP’s FlexNetwork architecture, the industry’s first and only network architecture converging the data center, campus, branch and cloud. This architecture was designed with an eye on the next decade and the growth of mobile devices, collaboration, and the rise of cloud-based services. This architecture was designed bearing in mind the change in the nature of traffic from pure date to a mix of data, voice and video.

Over a period of time, we have evolved and now customers engage with HP Networking because we have great technology, world-class support and lower total cost of ownership. A few examples of unique technology we offer include: we were the first to deliver fabric technology – the Intelligent Resilient Framework – across our full data center solution – reducing latency up to 40% and reducing complexity by up to 85%. Our switches promise lower latency by up to 90% and increased throughput by 600% over comparable offerings. Not only this, we were the first to deliver new 802.11n dual-radio, three stream access points with high performance and solutions based on the IEEE Energy Efficient Ethernet Standard that lowers power consumption by 35%.

What are the top 3-5 market segments driving growth for your product category and mean potential areas for channel partners? 

Organizations in India are building data centers of the future, where IT resources are integrated into pools of interoperable resources that can be leveraged on-demand to address changing market conditions. Whenever clients consider HP data center offerings, they know that HP Networking solutions will enable them to achieve increased IT efficiency and agility. In addition, HP remains fully committed to the channel as a key element of its go-to-market strategy, and we will continue to invest in the channel and in our partners as a core element of our mutual, long-term growth strategy. Everything we have done in the past – from expanding our portfolio to streamlining our programs – has been in the spirit of driving growth and profitability for our partners. HP offers a comprehensive set of rewards and benefits to help partners drive their networking revenue and profit margin:

How do you keep your partners in good spirit?

HP Networking partner program is part of HP’s award winning PartnerONE. They can make up significant margins on deals, inclusive of program rebates and MDF (Marketing Development Fund). Channel partners have access to a series of sales enablement programs and tools – sales training, webinars, podcasts, customer qualification toolkits and sales playbooks.  With over 90% of our HPN business conducted through the channel, partners do not have to compete with HP direct sales model. Partners see the value of investing in HP networking - various reseller partners and distributors have implemented HP networking demo facilities to enable demonstration of our switches, routers and wireless networking solutions across the campus, data center and branch, as well as SMB.  

HP PartnerONE and HP ExpertONE programs enable channel partners to use the HP FlexNetwork architecture to strengthen consultative, long-term customer relationships and create new revenue opportunities, regardless of industry. By offering open and scalable networking solutions, partners can address customer requirements without locking them in to vendors and technology. The HP ExpertONE program offers partners the training and education needed to transform their customers’ proprietary environments into open, agile networks based on HP Converged Infrastructure.

How is the year 2012 going? What are your plans for 2013?  

On April 10, 2012, HP announced its two-year SDN vision – Virtual Application Networks, a new cloud functionality that speeds application deployment, simplifies management and ensures network service level agreements (SLAs) in cloud and other dynamic computing models across the HP FlexNetwork architecture. As part of the Virtual Application Networks strategy, HP also introduced new products to help the enterprise embrace BYOD. The HP BYOD solution, announced in May 2012, leveraged IMC to unify the on-boarding, provisioning and monitoring of user devices on the corporate network with application access control across the enterprise. HP also announced, in May, its Dynamic Virtual Private Network (DVPN) that promises to reduce IT complexity by 93 per cent through automation of secure site-to-site connectivity. 

Next, the company aims to provide certifications through the HP Institute, a global academic program to be available in several thousand institutions by 2014. Students can earn architect-level HP certifications through integrated hands-on experience with remote labs in a classroom environment.