What is the thinking behind the new HPE Everything-as-a-Service channel ecosystem program?

As the customers evolve and we evolve the strategy to support them, it is critical that the channel program follows suit. So we need to be as innovative on the program side and build off our industry-leading Partner Ready program. [HPE Vice President of Worldwide Partner Programs and Operations] Jesse [Chavez (pictured)] and his team have done quite a bit of work over the past couple of years using the [Wayne] Gretzky term of ‘skating to where the puck is going.’

What is the clarion call for partners as you launch this new GreenLake ecosystem program?

The biggest difference here and you are going to see it start to play out in the [ecosystem channel] program conversation is: Win with our vision and your business model. And business model means something very, very different than partner type.

We have distributors, resellers, service providers and [systems integrators] and ISVs. We have a whole bunch of different partners in the ecosystem, but we are looking at the partners more around their business model versus what they are. It is more about what they do than what they are. What we are seeing is that they all have multiple business models. So you’ll see a partner that is a reseller and a managed service provider and a consultant and they do AppDev. They have multiple personas. [CRN parent The Channel Company’s IPED has said that partners on average have 4.7 different personas.] So we are building the strategy around multiple personas and the fact that there is an evolution.

There is a convergence around three things: the partners leading with their own IP. That is the stickiness. We want to encourage partners to lead with their IP, to create solutions based on our technology, not necessarily just sell our technology.

We have a partner in Germany that has their own branded offering that their reps sell. They sell their offering. Our offering just happens to be embedded in their offering.

We called it in the past Powered By [GreenLake]. It is their solution powered by GreenLake. GreenLake is the foundation that enables them to drive their solution.

Everybody is becoming a service provider. Everybody is creating managed [services] offerings in some way, shape or form, whether they are managing something owned by somebody else or they are owning it and managing it. There are a lot of different managed offerings in their portfolio. We give the partners choice.

So if you look at some of the product strategies we have like storage, the product itself can be owned by the customer, it can be owned by the partner, it can be owned by us. It can be managed by the customer, it can be managed by the partner, it can be managed by us. The solutions kind of align to those different business models.