HP Steps Up 'Just Right IT' SMB Offensive

Hewlett-Packard Tuesday unleashed the next phase in its Just Right IT partner offensive with new flexible bundles with additional margin for partners selling a comprehensive end-to-end product-services offering for small and medium-sized businesses.

HP said the partner uplift for selling across the full HP enterprise portfolio with the Flex-Bundles are significant with the ability to make 2 to 5 percent more on the front end using HP "value-based" pricing and an additional 1 percent on back-end rebates. What's more, partners selling HP implementation and startup and support services can easily add an additional 20 percent more margin.

Among the new HP Flex-Bundle pre-validated reference architectures are offerings for Microsoft Hyper-V; VMware vSphere with Operations Management; Microsoft Exchange server 2013; and SAP HANA.

[Related: HP Intros New Just Right IT Bundles, Promos For SMB Channel Partners ]

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The HP server-based Flex-Bundles, based on HP's ProLiant and Gen8 servers, provide additional margin for partners offering them with storage, networking and HP ServiceIT offerings including HP Proactive Care Services; Lifecycle Event Services; and Foundation Care Services.

What's more, partners have the ability to add even more margin by providing HP Financial Services including flexible monthly payment options and HP Cloud Services including migration, integration and management offerings for SMBs.

The new Flex-Bundle offerings are aligned with HP's new four-tier PartnerOne channel program, which is aimed at getting partners to sell a full HP product-services portfolio. HP has developed a "Boost Your Earnings" guide that shows the additional profitability for selling a full portfolio offering with server, storage, networking and services. The company is also offering full marketing, enablement, design and deployment support for partners.

The HP offerings map the top challenges facing SMB customers with a full integrated offering across server, storage, networking, services, either on- or off-premise as a service, with financial services and cloud services options.

"This is a game changer," said Lisa Wolfe, HP worldwide SMB marketing and strategy leader for the HP Enterprise Group. "You are not going to see anything like this from Dell or Cisco. It is complete. We are helping our partners differentiate themselves and accelerate revenue and time to solution by packaging and delivering what they need to market, sell, design and deploy the top solutions to small and midsize business problems. No one is delivering to channel partners a full program like this with enablement materials to help partners market, sell, design and deploy."

The SAP HANA offering, for example, is the first tailored by HP for the midmarket with an unprecedented opportunity for SMB customers to make competitive gains based on the unstructured big data explosion, said Wolfe.

The new Flex-Bundles come just three months after HP announced its first SMB Just Right IT offerings, which included wireless and bring-your-own-device (BYOD) offerings and unified communications and collaboration based on Microsoft's Lync platform.

NEXT: HP Just Right IT Provides A Holistic Offering For SMB Customers

HP's Flex-Bundles are aimed at providing partners a "holistic" approach to the SMB market with the option of either providing services themselves and then adding services from HP to "improve their profitability and expand their market opportunity," or relying solely on HP services, said John Flowers, worldwide channel marketing manager for HP Technology Services.

"Partners can be selective where they invest [in services] and then augment them with industry-leading services from HP," he said.

HP has also made improvements to simplify its services offerings, taking its Foundation Care offerings from 15 packages to just three to five offerings depending on the product, said Flowers. "It's going to be much easier for customers to understand what services to buy," he said. "Before customers were confused. We had too many service levels and too many choices."

Not to be overlooked, said Flowers, are HP's robust cloud offerings including its Cloud Builder and Cloud Agile offerings, which are aimed at providing SMB customers with on- and off-premise cloud options.

The Just Right IT offering is a "breakthrough" in making it simple and easy for SMB customers to understand and buy a complete business solution, said Kris Rogers, senior vice president, partner and product management for PCM, a $1.5 billion national solution provider that is teaming with HP on Just Right IT.

"HP has created a flexible set of solutions that map to what small businesses need," said Rogers. "With Just Right IT, HP and its partners are talking to SMBs about business needs and outcomes. Sometimes in the channel we get so caught up in the technology and what the technology does that we miss that we are supposed to be talking about what the customer needs done. These bundles focus on the business challenges SMBs are facing right now, especially in light of the mobility explosion and the pressure it is putting on small businesses that don't have big IT infrastructures to figure it all out."

HP has essentially provided a framework for its channel partners to bring to market a competitively priced, easy solution that maps directly to what SMB customers need to be in order to be successful in the cloud computing era, said Rogers. "I'm a big fan of Just Right IT," she said. "This isn't about products. This is about solving a problem. These are solutions that go to the heart of what the market is telling us are the biggest problems and opportunities that SMB businesses are facing today. It's very cool."

PUBLISHED JAN. 28, 2014