Uniting HPE And Aruba Portfolio In An Edge-To-Cloud Partner Ready Vantage Program

The HPE Partner Ready Vantage program for the first time unites both HPE and Aruba portfolios in an end-to-end edge-to-cloud channel program.

In fact, the new Partner Ready Vantage portal features HPE GreenLake and Aruba offerings. What’s more, the first Centers of Expertise are based on Aruba’s customer success, managed services and professional services offerings.

Aruba, in fact, built out the Centers Of Expertise model to power the partner Everything-as-a-Service transformation. That includes offerings aimed at helping partners expand their services footprint.

“We are working with partners to really help them build out their practices around these areas, so we’re providing much more deep enablement that is more practice-building-focused versus just product- and solution-based training,” said Beth Jensen, director of worldwide channel programs at Aruba.

Partners can choose whether to deliver their services under their own brand or under the HPE GreenLake or Aruba brand going forward, she said. “We’re really enabling them to drive their own services business moving forward,” she said.

Partners can continue to participate in Partner Ready and Partner Ready Vantage, said Jensen. New partners focusing solely on services may decide just to participate in Partner Ready Vantage, she said. “They will decide where they want to engage and play based on their go-to-market and business models that they are dealing with,” she said.

The unification of Aruba and HPE under Partner Ready Vantage comes just three months after Aruba unleashed new HPE GreenLake Network-as-a-Service (NaaS) offers now available with flex-up and flex-down options.

Aruba is offering partners four primary channel models: a partner assessment and design model with standardized and modular service packs that can be configured by partners in three- to five- year subscription models; a fulfillment model that gives the partner the ability to sell the service but have Aruba fulfill it; a model for the customer to contract service levels with a partner; and finally a model where partners and Aruba team together with partners providing monthly billing and day one services for the customer.

Aruba has provided a back-end rebate structure of 11 percent compared with the HPE GreenLake 17 percent up-front rebate. But Aruba has emphasized that the more services a partner chooses to wrap around the GreenLake NaaS offerings, the higher margins they can achieve.

The Partner Ready Vantage HPE GreenLake-Aruba channel unification comes with HPE now leveraging Aruba Central as the foundation of the single unified GreenLake.HPE.com edge-to- cloud platform. Adding Aruba Central to the GreenLake platform brings more than 120,000 customers to GreenLake.