Partner First has been the strategy at HPE

Phil Davis, Global Sales Officer- Hewlett Packard Enterprise speaks about the relationship it shares with its partners and the strategies it has employed to grow its channel -

As digital transformation continues to disrupt every industry, customers have turned to HPE as a trusted partner to help them navigate this new world. By partnering with HPE, one partners literally with a company that was founded with the strategy ‘Partner First’ and it runs through its DNA.

“We are very proud of that and committed to continuing,” said Phil Davis, Global Sales Officer- Hewlett Packard Enterprise.

He further continued, “Look at digital transformation; it's not always the first mover company that wins. So we are going to see pressure on organisations. Channel partners who are able to have that discussion with customers and help them innovate quickly are going to be differentiated.

Our strategy is very simple and it's been very consistent –

# One, we make hybrid IT simple.

# Two, we power the intelligent edge.

# and three, we drive that through our services expertise.”

To make hybrid IT simple, to power the Intelligent Edge and to provide the services to make it all happen, Phil added, “As I talk to customers, a lot of them have moved very aggressively into the public cloud, and that will continue. The challenge with that is as they have moved into the public cloud and have found it to be more expensive than they expected, they have also found it's not just about where does the application live, but more importantly where does the data live. Because moving a bunch of data into the cloud and pulling it out can be very expensive, and there's a lot of lock-in with different cloud vendors once you get all of your data into that cloud.”

However the key challenges that needs to be addressed are -

# How to help customers be more thoughtful in terms of where they want to run a workload?

# How to help them be more thoughtful in terms of where they reside? and that's going to get worse.

Talking about the enterprise of the future, Hewlett Packard Enterprise believes that to understand as channel partners of what customers are thinking about, the whole concept of hyper connected at the edge is very important. Pointnext is core to HPE’s strategy; the incredible HPE team work with three guiding principles driving the program Pointnext. First, the customer is a priority as everything it does has to help benefit the company and partners. Second, HPE needs to be focused in terms of the markets and the portfolio it develops. And third, it is all about simplicity.

“We believe by simplifying everything - from business processes to organizational layers, we will become closer to our customers and partners, easier to do business with and better to work for. We also need partnerships from various angles, not just with the partnerships in this room, the distributors, but also SIs, software partners like SAP and Microsoft, and investing heavily to bring that entire ecosystem to bear,” said Phil.

HPE seeks the help of customers on the journey to the multi-cloud environment. The next area where the company is investing very heavily is in flexible consumption and HPE had major announcements at Discover.

“We have branded all those products under Green Lake, and the ability to consume technology as you want to, to be able to scale up or scale down depending on how your business changes. One of the feedbacks from our partners is that it should be easier to sell consumption- oriented services. One of the things we announced last week serve as build building blocks by which partners can resell without the need for custom configuration from HPE and then the next is advice and expertise,” said Phil.

In the last 30 days, HPE has taken two layers out of the organization. With Meg stepping down and Antonio stepping up, that has sped up and pushed more decision-making. Speaking on acquisition, the area of innovation is something HPE calls path finder. “If you look through HP's history, it's done some bad acquisitions. We have, but I think we have got better under Antonio,” observed Phil.

HPE is acquiring a lot of new technologies to enable the Channel to sell technologies. So there are opportunities to continue to partner closely and innovate around how to work together.

“Lastly, when we win, the customer wins. We will continue to focus on the growth parts of the portfolio that are important to us,” concluded Phil.

Things like the universal IoT platform that can sit on premise or in the cloud that allows you to do analytics and make better decisions, will power the intelligent edge. If we look about security, security doesn't just exist in your data centre.

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