HPE reveals 700 partners now actively selling GreenLake - but warns consumption shift a 'heavy lift'
“I’m getting a lot of feedback that this is a considerable change for many of our established partners,” channel boss Paul Hunter says ahead of HPE's Partner Growth Summit
HPE has revealed that 700 partners are actively selling ‘GreenLake' as it unveiled a raft of updates to its pay-per-use infrastructure offering.
On an embargoed press briefing ahead of its Partner Growth Summit today, HPE's worldwide head of partner sales, Paul Hunter (pictured), said that partners now account for close to 30 per cent of HPE's GreenLake revenues.
That's up from just three per cent when it launched the offering into the channel two years ago, with GreenLake partner orders hiking 47 per cent annually in HP's latest quarter.
Among the roll call of enhancements to GreenLake, HPE said it has streamlined the order-to-delivery time for partners and their customers to as few as 14 days.
Other key updates HPE trumpeted include expanding the HPE storage partner ecosystem, adding more functionality to its ‘Pro' programmes for partner technology, marketing and sales staff, and plans to integrate partners into GreenLake Central software platform by 2021.
Although there are now 700 partners actively selling GreenLake, Hunter admitted that selling a consumption-based offering such as GreenLake represents a "considerable shift" for partners.
That point was echoed by HPE PointNext channel boss, Greg Stafford, who warned that the transformation workshops HPE is providing for partners looking to embrace GreenLake only work if the owner or CEO is involved.
"We are providing resources to partners that want to grasp this opportunity. The key word is ‘want'. There's a heavy lift in making this decision and they have to want to go do this," he said on the call.
"It's an expectation that the owner, CEO, president [etc] actively participates in these transformation workshops, as it's an overall look at what they do today, and what they're going to have to do to transform into a consumption-type organisation. Some of the key questions are ‘how are we going to pay our sales reps?' What's the best way to invest the upfront dollars we receive from selling a GreenLake?' But the common thread we're seeing once they've gone through the transformation workshop is ‘are we making the decision to go this way, or not? And if we are, we'll need to put more time into how we're going to get there'. The first three days of the transformation workshop are very blunt and heartfelt."
HPE's press release covering the GreenLake updates ran into five pages, but top billing was given to the quicker delivery times - namely as few as 14 days - that accompany the new generation of HPE GreenLake cloud services.
Based on pre-integrated building blocks, the new cloud services are now available in small, medium and large configurations, and are - in HPE's words - "rapidly scalable". This new this "standardised, solution-centric approach" will mean partners can more easily provide quotes to customers, HPE said.
In another trumpeted benefit, partners will by 2021 have access to their own platform on HPE GreenLake Central, a software platform that enables HPE customers to manage and optimise their entire hybrid IT estate.
Talking to press, Hunter said that HPE's partner-led consumption business was "growing faster within a fast-growing segment of our overall business".
"I'm getting a lot of feedback that this is a considerable change for many of our established partners," he said.
"They're needing to work with their sales teams in selling to different communities and on being effective at positioning consumption. It works well when consumption is the lead from the start of the sales pursuit."
Howard Hall, group managing director at HPE UK Platinum partner DTP, welcomed the improvements, stressing that currently every HPE GreenLake implementation is a bespoke implementation, "which is not a scalable model".
"So the move to a more modular and hence easily repeatable approach is a pre-requisite to scale, as is making the end user experience cloud like, which HPE GreenLake Central is evolving rapidly to be able to deliver," he said.
Hall agreed that the move from a transactional to a contractual sale takes "a total mind shift from top to bottom of a reseller, including board level mobilisation".
"But for DTP we went through that in our print business in the early 2000s when we took the same journey in the area of MPS, and took us a couple of years to get right, so we understood what it takes. I think the same will apply for traditional HPE resellers looking to make that same journey from a HPE GreenLake hybrid IT perspective, but HPE are providing the concierge type support to help resellers make the transition," he said.