HPE Is Ready To Welcome New MSPs, CSPs To Partner Ready Vantage

HPE Vice President of Worldwide Channels and Partner Ecosystem Simon Ewington said HPE wants to “attract new partner archetypes” even as its works with its long-standing traditional partners.

With the HPE Partner Ready Vantage as-a-service ecosystem program fully open as of Nov. 1 to as-a-service partners globally, the edge-to-cloud powerhouse is prepared to welcome new MSPs and Cloud Service Providers (CSPs) into the fold.

“We are very, very open to working with new MSP and CSP partners,” said Hewlett Packard Enterprise Vice President of Worldwide Channels and Partner Ecosystem Simon Ewington when asked if HPE was poised to recruit a bunch of new MSPs.

In fact, Ewington said HPE wants to “attract new partner archetypes” even as its works with its long-standing traditional partners.

“We want to continue by enabling our traditional partners to evolve at their own pace, which we have been doing in the last few years, but we also want to attract new partner archetypes,” he said. “MSPs are a good example, which Partner Ready Vantage is very aligned to, and we are going to do that by developing and enabling more managed capabilities on the GreenLake platform that they need for their business.”

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HPE, in fact, believes the new Partner Ready Vantage as-a-service ecosystem program provides MSPs and CSPs with a significant opportunity to leverage company’s tools, resources and intellectual property to drive partner-branded margin-rich services on top of the GreenLake platform.

Partner Ready Vantage includes a partner-delivered services offering that lets partners lead the GreenLake customer experience and layer in their own services such as patching or maintenance updates. The program even provides the ability for partners to deliver HPE Tech Care installation and break/fix services,

“We believe that the [HPE Partner Ready] Vantage program will attract MSPs,” said HPE Vice President of Worldwide Channel Partner Program and Operations Jesse Chavez. “We have spent a lot of time with advisory boards with MSPs and once they understand the program, they are highly excited about it because we not only recognize the capabilities that they have and highlight their capabilities and their services to our customer community, but also more importantly to our field on who to work with from an MSP standpoint.”

HPE is providing partners both the ability to work hand in hand with the HPE sales force, but also to showcase their services skills in its partner connect portal, connecting them to customers looking for solutions.

“Once they recognize the fact that they are going to be recognized for their services and we are going to highlight them for their capabilities and that the margin is there because that is what MSPs care about— the services that they deliver, the margin they make on top of that, not necessarily the incentives and rebates and all those types of things. It is more about their own services,” said Chavez.

The new Partner Ready Vantage program also opens up new and expanded consulting services for HPE Aruba Networking partner practices. That includes business planning and service discovery workshops aimed at developing Networking as a Service or HPE Aruba Networking as a Service business plans. Those services are available to partners enrolled in the Customer Success or Managed Services Center of Expertise.

The Partner Ready Vantage program also includes new HPE Aruba selling resources and training, including a new outcome-based selling webinar series, a refreshed as-a-service training and playbook, and a customer success partner life-cycle campaign available in the As A Service Center of Expertise.

Beth Jensen, senior director of worldwide channel partner programs and strategy for HPE Aruba Networking, said Partner Ready Vantage opportunities depend on the “investment” the partners want to make and how “deep” they want to go in teaming with HPE and HPE Aruba Networking.

“So if they start as just a reseller, they are going to have a certain margin but as they start to stack more and more services on top the margins keep going up,” she said.

The key to “higher margins,” said Jensen, is to not just provide managed services but to invest in the “infrastructure to provide fully owned and operated managed services.”

“If they start to invest to build out a fully owned and operated managed services and they have a lot more value-add to do development services, professional services, their margins just continue to grow on top of that,” she said. “So it is up to the partners in the as-a-service space to really develop that out and move beyond just a traditional reseller just looking for rebates.”