HPE Chief Sales Officer: The Super 6 Sales Opportunities Paying Off In Big Profits For Partners

A Journey To Higher Profits

Hewlett Packard Enterprise Chief Sales Officer Phil Davis says HPE and partners need to go on a journey together with increased focus and investments on the value and growth parts of the business.

That path to higher profits means focusing on higher growth offerings like hyperconverged with SimpliVity and all-flash with Nimble and 3Par.

"The accelerated growth rates we are seeing in these areas absolutely prove it is where customers see the value," said Davis.

The Super 6 opportunities total a whopping $65 billion plus market opportunity with six major transitions facing customers where partner can drive higher margins with more services revenue.

"This focus on the value growth parts of the portfolio is great for us, it delivers better outcomes for customers and ultimately makes for a better, more profitable relationship with you our partners," said Davis.

Gen10 Transition

The HPE Gen10 server transition amounts to a $20 billion market opportunity for partners.

"The good news is we have a very, very strong position in industry standard servers and we have a great opportunity to go refresh both our own as well as competitive environments," said Davis.

The key to breaking open the server market transition is to lead with HPE OneView which delivers a dramatically improved customer experience with ease of deployment of infrastructure, and significantly lower infrastructure management costs."It is critical we change that (server) discussion and lead with HPE OneView," said Davis

The HPE OneView call to action comes with HPE recently hitting the one million OneView software license mark. "That took us about four years," he said. "Our goal is to be able to ship the next million (licenses) in one year."

Blades Plus

The server blades market represents a $6 billion opportunity that is up for grabs.

Many HPE partners are converting the Blades Plus opportunity into Synergy composable infrastructure sales.

More than 1,600 customers have already adopted Synergy making it HPE's fastest growing new infrastructure product ever. Eighty percent of Synergy sales are from partners.

Davis, for his part, pledged that partners committing to HPE on the Super 6 opportunities like Blades Plus will find unparalleled HPE commitment.

"When we partner together we will live or die on those opportunities," he pledged. "You do not have to worry about us taking that business direct like some of our competition actually does. You can expect transparency and you can expect us to invest heavily in the richest partner program in the industry."

Storage To Flash

The spinning disk transition to all flash represents a $7.7 billion market opportunity that is growing at 15 percent a year.

"Here is a very big market with competitors that are pulling back on their portfolio, it is growing at 15 percent and we have the best portfolio in the industry," said Davis. "It is kind of like the perfect storm for us if we can seize it."

HPE has refined its storage positioning around three key elements: predictive, cloud ready and timeless, said Davis.

The big differentiator for HPE is its InfoSight machine learning and AI based software that predicts and remediates problems in storage environments, said Davis.

"We are talking about predicting and remediating bottlenecks, solving problems above the array at the VM (virtual machine) layer," said Davis. "We can actually document that with InfoSight that we can predict and resolve 86 percent of the problems in a storage array before you ever even knew you had a problem."

Deals that lead with InfoSight are on average 12 percent larger, close 28 percent faster and customers spend three times more over the next three years, said Davis. "Think about that: if someone bought $200,000 of storage, over the next three years they will spend another $600,000 with you," he said.

Everything as a Service

With 40 percent of enterprise IT infrastructure spending moving to consumption as a service, it is critical that partners lead with HPE GreenLake Flex Capacity, said Davis.

"We lead with a consumption model and HPE GreenLake because it is what customers want," said Davis. "After almost 30 years in sales I can assure you that it is always easier to sell something customers want than something they don't want."

HPE GreenLake Flex Capacity is a channel model breakthrough unveiled at Global Partner Summit that brings the full force of the pay-per-use cloud model to partners selling on premises HPE infrastructure.

"We listened and made HPE GreenLake Flex Capacity simpler, faster and easier to do business with and also increased the rebates associated with it," said Davis. "This is truly differentiated versus what any of our competition is doing."

The GreenLake Flex Capacity channel compensation model provides partners with a whopping five times the rebate incentive that they would get in a traditional Capex deal.

Software-Defined

HPE's software defined capabilities goes hand in hand with the company's pay per use consumption model.

The software defined opportunity is aimed at providing a public cloud like experience on premises for a lower price, said Davis.

Like the Gen10 transition, the software defined discussion needs to start with HPE OneView, said Davis.

The key to OneView is its ability to software define the entire HPE infrastructure portfolio from ProLiant to Synergy to SimpliVity and 3Par, said Davis.

"It is across the entire HPE estate simplifying IT operations and helping customers reduce cost and increase agility," he said.

HPE's OneSphere multicloud management product, meanwhile, is aimed at helping customer easily move from public to private cloud depending on the economics. OneSphere, in fact, is providing the ability to "see the cost of running an application in a public cloud, private cloud, Azure, AWS with cost transparency so customers can make better decisions," said Davis.

Software defined is also a way to increase customer stickiness, said Davis. "Once customers go on this journey with us they are much more likely to stay on this journey with us," he said.

Intelligent Edge

The intelligent edge represents a $26 billion total addressable market, said Davis.

"This is a massive disruptive opportunity," said Davis. "Increasingly our customers apps and data won't live in the data center. It wasn't that long ago that most of the corporate data was ERP and CRM and those types of applications sitting in the data center. Increasingly the data lives and is created at the edge."

HPE, in fact, foresees customers acquiring and analyzing ever more data at the edge and acting on that data at the edge.

"If you look at some of the trends that are going on whether it is how much some of the cloud providers charge to move data around or whether it is privacy or GDPR in Europe, increasingly data is going to play a bigger role in customer's decisions as to where they ought to run the application," said Davis.

HPE's Aruba business is driving the intelligent edge opportunity with innovative software like ClearPass secure network software and Introspect machine learning software, said Davis.

HPE's Edgeline converged systems also represent a major opportunity bringing more compute and intelligence to the edge, said Davis.

"We see opportunities in every industry, everywhere around the globe whether it is smart governments, the airport of the future, the connected car," said Davis. "We believe all of the edges will be connected to a software defined, hybrid cloud environment and we want to ensure together with you that is HPE."