Partners Bet Big On HP's Future With Deep Investments In New-Style IT Certifications

Hewlett-Packard CEO Meg Whitman has invested heavily over the last three years in groundbreaking technology innovations, such as HP Shark Converged Systems, Moonshot servers and HP Helion, to power a turnaround.

Now partners are stepping up, showing confidence in those big technology bets by getting their top talent trained and certified on HP’s New Style of IT offerings. At the HP Discover conference earlier this month, HP trained 775 solution provider partners on various technology offerings, a 380 percent increase from last year.

What’s more, most of the training sessions at the semi-annual Discover technology gathering were completely full with waiting lists. The top sessions for partners: architecting multisite storage solutions; designing data center and cloud solutions; and creating software defined networks.

[Related: HP Unleashes 12 New Enterprise Products At HP Discover ]

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CB Technologies of Westminster, Calif., No. 290 on the 2014 CRN SP500 list, brought 19 employees to get trained on HP’s latest and greatest at HP Discover, said Kelly Ireland, CEO of the fast-growing HP Platinum solution provider.

"I wanted our sales and engineering staff to see the HP technology breakthroughs firsthand and get the training directly from HP’s top engineers,’ said Ireland, who has hired an additional 14 employees as part of a plan to double CB Technologies’ HP business by 2015. ’Being here at Discover brings to life the impact that [HP CEO] Meg [Whitman] and her team have had, doubling down on technology innovation with HP Labs. HP is leading the charge on a complete change in how companies do compute.’

Tony Burrous, director of information technology delivery for CB Technologies, said a big focus was getting CB Technologies’ top technical talent trained on HP’s Shark Converged Systems lineup and OneView infrastructure management platform. ’HP has the best converged systems approach of anyone in the market,’ he said. ’Look at all the innovation taking place. It’s a fantastic story.’

Burrous sees HP’s OneView, the product of a four-year development effort aimed at dramatically improving infrastructure management, as a breakthrough. "HP is allowing you to manage disparate systems and do things in minutes versus days and months,’ he said. "We are doing a lot of education for our employees and customers around OneView.’

Besides converged systems, Burrous said CB Technologies employees were trained at Discover on Helion cloud computing, Haven big data, Vertica analytics, and HP security offerings like ArcSight and IT automation. "We are very lucky to have executive management at CB Technologies that are focused on solving customer business problems -- not just shipping hardware,’ he said of the new-style IT training blitz at the company.

Chris Case, CEO of Sequel Data Systems, an HP enterprise partner in Austin, Texas, No. 395 on the CRN SP500, said the big advantage of getting training at Discover is the ability to tackle tough problems with HP’s top engineers. That’s just what Case and his team of five employees who received HP Moonshot training did at Discover. ’We had a customer that was having a problem and we were able to get to the heart of the matter on the show floor,’ he said. ’You can get to the right person at Discover.’

Case said he is confident his company’s big bet on HP Moonshot is going to pay off. ’We are really excited about Moonshot,’ he said. ’We are pushing it like crazy. We own a Moonshot and all our guys went to lab training on it. HP is throwing a lot of resources at this. At Discover, our team and the HP folks were bouncing ideas off one another on how to be successful.’

NEXT: MCPc Bets Big On HP Future Technology Road Map

MCPc, the $262 million Cleveland-based national solution provider, ranked No. 77 on CRN's 2014 SP500 list that is also making a big bet on HP, brought 13 of its best and brightest engineers to Discover to get them trained on HP Shark Converged Systems and 3Par enterprise storage, said MCPc Chief Marketing Officer Jed Ayres.

Ayres said he was charged up by the response he got from the technical talent, many of whom were Cisco trained and somewhat skeptical going into the conference. "These are 13 of the smartest guys in the company," he said, referring to the HP technical sessions at Discover as world-class. "Our team is really excited about how rich the technology portfolio is for HP. The product road maps for Gen8 and Gen9 servers, Shark Converged Systems and the Cloud with Helion are game-changers."

Ayres credited HP Chief Technology Officer Martin Fink for helping to accelerate the pace of technology innovation. "The $3 billion that HP is spending in R&D each year is showing up in the product lines,’ he said. "Fink is getting the technology out of the labs and productizing it. That’s a big differentitator for HP."

Mike Strohl, CEO of Entisys Solutions, a Concord, Calif.-based HP Platinum partner, No. 253 on the 2014 SP500, also sees HP's technology innovation as a key differentiator versus the competition. He brought 15 employees to Discover to get trained on what he called the big three: HP Shark Converged Systems, HP Moonshot and HP Helion cloud offerings.

Strohl said Helion has dramatically altered the go-to-market strategy for Entisys. "There is nothing to compare to it," he said. "No one else has offered a comprehensive solution like Helion. Therefore, at most, they can get you trained on their private cloud stuff, their public cloud stuff, but not total integration across all platforms like HP with Helion,’ he said. ’With Helion, you are integrating from the public cloud all the way back into the data center. That integration training is critical for us. What HP is providing is the ability to deliver a solution inside the data center all the way out to the cloud and back into the data center."

Strohl said the kind of training HP is providing at Discover is the critical differentiator for his company. "What we sell is our people and our culture," he said, touting the big training and enablement effort at Discover as the key in delivering best-in-class productivity gains and competitive differentiation for Entisys customers.

Strohl, who has been surfing the fast-moving technology waves in the solution provider market for nearly 25 years, said he has never made as big a bet as he has with HP. "This is the biggest investment we have ever made by a long shot, but we know the end result will be tenfold anything we have seen before," he said.

PUBLISHED JUNE 23, 2014