HPE Is Eyeing More GreenLake Managed Services Opportunities For Partners

‘We are starting to pilot with partners a program where they don’t even have to buy the entire GreenLake experience,’ says HPE Global Channel Chief George Hope. ‘You can buy pieces of it. Then they can add their services to it to make it a more complete solution.’

Hewlett Packard Enterprise is piloting a program with its HPE Pointnext services organization that gives HPE partners more GreenLake on premises cloud services muscle, said HPE Global Channel Chief George Hope.

The plan is to turn more partners into service providers with their own solutions powered by HPE GreenLake, said Hope in an interview with CRN.

“We are starting to pilot with partners a program where they don’t even have to buy the entire GreenLake experience,” said Hope. “You can buy pieces of it. Then they can add their services to it to make it a more complete solution.”

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The pilot program with expanded managed services opportunities gives partner an “opportunity to lead with what they do best,” said Hope. “It could be vertical specific with partners pulling us into a specific market segment. It could be horizontal workloads.”

The pilot program comes with HPE stepping up its GreenLake partner ecosystem charge with an all out industry solutions blitz with new vertical workload optimized offerings in areas like electronic medical records, financial services, and risk management.

“We are building GreenLake in a bunch of different directions partnering in areas like electronic medical records, financial services, HPC, ML Ops,” said Hope. “There are so many different offerings within the GreenLake portfolio that partners based on their expertise and the type of customers they sell to can take some of our offerings and package them up with some of the things they do.”

Partners say HPE has established a leadership position in the everything as a service channel race, working hand in hand with partners to build workload optimized solutions for customers with partners adding their own managed services and intellectual property.

HPE has pulled together an everything as service partner program that matches HPE’s technology muscle with the reach of partners, said Erik Krucker, CTO at Comport Consulting, an HPE Platinum partner, No. 302 on the CRN SP500.

“It really is one plus one equals three,” said Krucker. “You’ve got the best of breed hardware and services with InfoSight AI that HPE brings to the table. Then you have HPE enabling partners to bring these highly flexible solutions to customers, allowing us to layer in our managed services and solutions. That has been a big win for HPE and for us. Customers are really interested in this right now. It is just a matter of partners and HPE executing.”

HPE’s decision not to do it all themselves has been an everything as a service channel game changer, said Krucker. “HPE does not want to provide everything to the customer from a services perspective,” he said. “They know what they are good at and they know where they need help from partners like ourselves. HPE has been very engaged with us and our customers. HPE knows they don’t have all the resources customers need.”

HPE, for example, has worked closely with Comport to target the solution provider’s strong healthcare customer base, said Krucker. “It’s been a a very good partnership,” he said. “The mood has changed within HPE to let partners do more and more of what they are good at. They realize HPE is not going to provide every service to every customer.”

HPE’s 100 percent services oriented model focusing on business value is paying off, said Krucker. “They are enabling customer’s business goals and business needs with services,” he said. “It’s about the services that HPE and partners can provide together whether that it is in healthcare, financial services, insurance. life sciences or any other industry. It is about a focus on providing services for business critical applications that customers need to run their business day to day to be a leader in their respective market segment.”