Las Vegas – Services and solutions will be the mantra for HP Enterprise, as the vendor works to help partners prepare their customers for what it’s calling the new style of IT.
Speaking to partners on Tuesday at Hewlett-Packard Co.’s Global Partner Conference, Sue Barsamian, senior vice-president and general manager of worldwide indirect sales with HP’s enterprise group, said the goal of the new HP Enterprise after it splits from HP Inc. in November is to bring together the solutions for what it’s calling the new style of business and the new style of IT.
“Your customers have to run IT operations now at a speed dramatically faster than in the past, and new threats are emerging,” said Barsamian. “You’ve got customers that need significant help in order to transform, and they’re looking for a partner to help lead them on this journey to the new style of IT.”
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Traditional IT isn’t going away, said Barsamian – it’s increasingly about reducing costs in the core so you can run IT more efficiently, approaching a utility model. This business is still important and, in fact, is still growing. What’s exciting for HP though is this new style of IT, which is about building a more agile IT infrastructure using cloud computing, automation and other dynamic models that can more easily adapt to a changing business landscape.
“Our shared opportunity is to help customers bridge from where their IT infrastructure is today to where it needs to be tomorrow,” said Barsamian. “We have the infrastructure that builds the foundation not only for optimizing traditional IT, but building the foundation for the new style of IT, with analytics that can turn data into insight and insight into action.”
Just as the customer journey won’t happen without transformation, Barsamian said the partner journey also won’t happen without transformation. The new style of IT news a new model of partnering, and Barsamian encouraged partners to emphasize services and build services practices around four key areas: hybrid IT, big data, security and the digital workplace.
“Transformation won’t happen by showing up and installing a box,” said Barsamian. “It will be services-led.”
HP announced a number of partner program changes designed to help partners move to a services-led business model around these four focus areas, allowing them to add more value to the customer while generating loyalty and driving up margins.
One initiative is helping partners to develop their own, partner-delivered consulting services said Patrick Eitenbichler, director of PartnerOne strategy with HP, in an interview. HP will be passing intellectual property developed by the vendor over decades on to partners to sell as part of their own services business.
“It really opens up a host of new opportunities where, in the past, they had to walk away,” said Eitenbichler.
HP Enterprise is also changing the way it does certifications, moving from product-focused to a single sales certification across the enterprise services business. Eitenbichler said this will help a reseller sales rep ask the right questions of a customer to find opportunities in relation to the four transformation focus areas.
“We’re 100 per cent focused on opportunity identification,” said Eitenbichler. “We’ll given them a lot of pointers to identify the clues that come for customers to bring to the pre-sales team.”
HP is also launching the Helion Cloud Services Marketplace, which will help partners deliver a hybrid IT solution. Partners can determine the price and markup on services they decide to provision and cross-sell, while maintaining a single face and trusted advisor status with their customers.