BARCELONA, SPAIN – The recently released Converged Systems and Converged Storage products from HP will come with its own channel program called Channel First.
The Channel First program, introduced at the HP Discover conference, aims to position solution providers as sales leads in every deal specific to the Converged Systems and Storage lines.
According to Paul Miller, vice president of converged appliances, systems and solutions for HP’s Enterprise Group, when developing the new virtualization and storage portfolio the company aimed to make them be built for channel partner opportunity.
“StoreOnce was born in the channel and has lived in the small and mid-enterprise and then came out into larger systems. StoreVirtual has greater than 90 per cent business through the channel. It’s all part of the Converged Systems launch,” Miller said.
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Channel First will be rolled out in January in both North America and Europe. Since Converged Systems and Converged Storage are new channel partners will need to go through training and certification.
Jeff Carlat, HP’s director of product management of Converged Systems, said the strategy is for channel partners to extend the standard package for Converged Systems for data centres, storage, virtualization and apps.
Channel First will have a library of apps for channel partners to put on top of Converged Systems units.
These solutions will be available to the channel in less than 20 day from order to operation, Carlat added.
Channel First will also carry a set of best practices for solution providers for solution sets such as Microsoft Sharepoint, SQL and ERP.
“The other thing this does is improve the channel’s speed to market. The channel likes faster time to market and what this means for them is they no longer have their capital tied up in a few deals. They can do more deals with this and move on to the next deal faster,” Carlat said.
Channel First will be under the PartnerOne umbrella program from HP. The Channel First initiative is across the HP Enterprise Group and also involves 3Par products.