Networking News

HPE Rolls Out New Tools For Partners To Reach SMB Customers

HPE rolls out SMB bundles and unveils price cuts to its popular ProLiant server portfolio.

HPE is helping its channel partners push deeper into the SMB market with new bundles and aggressive price cuts to its bread-and-butter ProLiant server portfolio.

“HPE is taking a very empathetic approach to how a midmarket organization will use their technology, and they are building platforms to help the partners serve them,” said James Hardy, deputy managing director of CCS Media, an HPE partner based in the U.K.

Hardy said products like Nimble, HPE’s self-managing flash storage, is resonating particularly well with the midmarket along with Aruba, which Hardy said enables people to connect within organizations in new ways. To make it easier for partners to cater to the SMB market, HPE has unveiled multi-product bundles, combining server, storage and related product offerings.

“What we’ve done with this recently is announce an expansion of the portfolio solutions to cover external storage capabilities, like scalable storage, high availability, adding the strength of our portfolio and hybrid IT beyond just servers to also our storage space in addition to our Aruba on Wi-Fi networking,” said HPE’s Tim Peters, vice president and general manager of small and medium business.

The new turnkey bundled offerings, which also include HPE networking, software and cloud technology, expand on HPE's fall introduction of new offerings bundling SMB servers with Aruba networking

“Over the last quarter, we’ve seen substantial growth. The interest is really peaking,” said Peters.

The new HPE SMB bundled offerings are in addition to new pricing for the Smart Buy Express ProLiant server. HPE slashed the price by more than 5 percent—its biggest price cut on the ready-to-ship offerings in years.

“The goal is to grow our market share aggressively in the transactional server market and to continue to accelerate the growth of new logos for ourselves and partners in the SMB and midmarket segments," said Terry Richardson, vice president of North America channels and alliances at HPE. "We had been a little reluctant to meet and beat the competition on price. We are now taking a much more aggressive posture. That is good news for our distributors, resellers and customers."

For more coverage, watch CRN’s video included in this article.