Partner Ready Vantage Is A GreenLake Channel ‘Game-Changer:’ HPE Partners

“Ultimately, this is going to open the door to many more GreenLake opportunities for us, truly offering Everything-as-a Service from the edge to the cloud with our own PKASolveIT services,” said Paul Cohen, vice president of sales for New York-based PKA Technologies.

HPE’s new Partner Ready Vantage channel program is going to propel a new wave of HPE GreenLake edge-to-cloud Everything-as-a-Service channel sales growth including Networking as a Service, said HPE partners.

“Ultimately, this is going to open the door to many more GreenLake opportunities for us, truly offering Everything-as-a Service from the edge to the cloud with our own PKASolveIT services,” said Paul Cohen, vice president of sales for New York-based PKA Technologies, which has closed a number of blockbuster GreenLake deals and is hosting a number of customers considering GreenLake purchases at this week’s HPE Discover conference.

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The HPE Partner Ready Vantage program for the first time unites both HPE and Aruba portfolios in an end-to-end edge-to-cloud channel program. In the process, it recognizes the big investments partners like PKA have made in the HPE GreenLake and Aruba platform.

“GreenLake is already hot. After closing a number of deals, our pipeline and forecast continue to grow at a phenomenal rate,” said Cohen. “By bringing together Aruba and HPE into one Partner Ready Vantage program, this is really a channel game-changer. Combining Networking as a Service with storage and compute under GreenLake makes us a one-stop shop for Everything-as-a-Service for customers.”

Cohen called the “modernizing” of the HPE channel program “great news’ for HPE partners. “Partner Ready Vantage is going to propel us into integrating traditional and even nontraditional services into our already baked GreenLake managed services offerings,” he said. “That is going to allow us to be recognized for our GreenLake skill sets and the investments we are making in the overall HPE ecosystem. We are a true edge-to-cloud managed services provider through our PKA SolveIT suite of offerings. Being an Aruba Platinum partner as well as an HPE Platinum partner unites the two worlds.”

Cohen credited HPE President and CEO Antonio Neri for “laying the groundwork and road map” for the Everything-as-a-Service channel shift along with the HPE worldwide channel team and his local HPE reps working side by side with PKA to close deals.

C.R. Howdyshell, president of Cleveland-based Advizex, No. 104 on the 2022 CRN Solution Provider 500, which has closed a number of high-profile GreenLake deals, said he sees the new Partner Ready Vantage program leading to a dramatic increase in Aruba Network-as-a- Service deals.

“Partner Ready Vantage is going to be a springboard for Network as a Service,” he said. “By bringing together Aruba and GreenLake into a single program, HPE is driving a full edge-to- cloud GreenLake experience.”

Midmarket customers are clamoring for Network as a Service in the wake of the sharp rise in network administration salaries, said Howdyshell.

“These midmarket customers are losing resources faster than they can bring them on board,” he said. “Network administration salaries have gone from $150,000 to $170,000 up to $180,000. The customers cannot retain that talent. That’s leading to a big Network-as-a-Service opportunity for us.”

The Partner Ready Vantage program is a move to take HPE’s Everything-as-a-Service channel leadership to a new level, said Howdyshell. “HPE clearly understands that they get a first-mover advantage by going to market with partners,” he said. “This Partner Ready Vantage program reinforces that.”

Pat O’Dell, general manager and managing partner for Clinton, N.J.-based CPP Associates, also expects the new Partner Ready Vantage program to have a positive impact on his company’s GreenLake sales. “Our as-a-service and GreenLake business is now more than 50 percent of our pipeline opportunities, whereas two years ago it was less than 20 percent,” he said.

CPP recently closed a GreenLake deal with an international bank and expects to close at least four more GreenLake deals with customers in widely different industries by the end of this year, said O’Dell.

“With our latest GreenLake customer win, before the ink was dry on the paperwork for the deal they reached out to us to upgrade the solution and the upgrade was larger than the initial GreenLake deal,” said O’Dell. “We are seeing a lot of traction. GreenLake is the right solution at the right time. Our sales and technical team has embraced it, and our operations people are more familiar with the process. HPE GreenLake has tremendous momentum within CPP.”

O’Dell said he is also heartened by HPE’s commitment to allow partners to play in the full customer life cycle with its “land, adopt, expand or renew” go-to-market sales model. He said the new program is sure to spark more partner managed services offerings around GreenLake.

O’Dell credited HPE with making big strides in GreenLake’s ease of use and price competitiveness versus public cloud. “HPE has made it more comprehensive, more price-competitive and simpler to use in the last six months,” he said. “How often do you see something made more comprehensive, price-competitive and simpler all at the same time? Is it any wonder that it is taking off?”

The new Partner Ready Vantage program has HPE “skating to where the puck is going” and rewarding partners that have made big investments to transform to an Everything-as-a-Service model, said O’Dell.

“Changing the partner program and incenting partners to sell GreenLake as a service is smart business,” he said. “This as-a-service model is the way the world is going. HPE has made all these GreenLake investments over the last four years. It is only common sense to reward the partners who have moved to that model most efficiently.”

The move to bring GreenLake and Aruba into a single program is also a “big deal” for partners, said O’Dell. “This is something the partner community has been asking for,” he said. “This is Antonio and [HPE Worldwide Channel Chief] George [Hope] responding to the partner community and what we are looking for. It is a lot easier to manage one partner program that is consistent rather than two disparate partner programs. The fact that HPE is integrating the programs and aligning the program with partners that really buy into as-a-service is a big step forward.”

Brad Davis, owner and CTO of Cedar Park, Texas-based Green Tea Technology, a born-in- the-cloud startup that has won several million dollars in GreenLake total contract value by building out a GreenLake ecosystem model with a number of partners including data asset management ISV Viviota, said he sees Partner Ready Vantage as the rise of a new channel model.

“HPE is committed to being an as-a-service company,” he said. “The onus is going to be on partners to adjust to that model and reconfigure how they do business around that. It is perfect for us because we are just starting and we don’t have to reinvent the wheel and change our processes. We came into this doing it the way it should be done. Other partners are going to have to shift to this model and embrace it in order to be successful if they are going to be selling HPE.”