LAS VEGAS – Rich, uncapped annuities for life await partners that sell Hewlett Packard Co.‘s (NYSE: HPQ) public cloud solutions, the vendor said Wednesday at its Global Partner Conference.
HP used the event to announce two new HP Cloud Builder programs that enable partners to leverage the vendor’s public cloud platform, HP Cloud Services, and introduce three new “as a service” offerings that partners can sell through to customers to enhance and improve their cloud experience and performance.
“All partners need to have a cloud strategy,” said Dan Baigent, senior director of business development for HP cloud services (pictured above). “If they have a cloud strategy that doesn’t encompass all the possible use cases of their customers they’re going to miss the opportunity.”
The key announcement is the addition of HP’s public cloud offering to the Cloud Builder program, allowing it to be sold by channel partners. Currently HP has two data centres, one on each coast of the U.S., but with plans for global expansion. The public cloud service is available worldwide.
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HP is beginning with a referral program first, where partners refer a prospect to HP and earn life-time, un-capped annuity for as long as the company remains a client and as long as the partner remains the partner of record, of 10 per cent of the first year’s revenue and five per cent for each of the following years. A reseller program with a similar annuity level, but with the partner owning the billing relationship, is expected later this year.
“Partners need to invest in training and go to market programs to get up top speed and learn how to position the solutions,” said Baigent. “They can invest in deep go to market programs but there’s no entrance fee involved, especially for the referral program.”
HP has also rolled out three new public cloud services:
* HP Cloud Monitoring helps users identify potential issues before they impact production with infrastructure metrics, alerts and notification tools.
* HP Cloud Load Balancer optimizes application response times and reduces IT management costs by distributing web traffic across multiple servers.
* HP Cloud DNS saves developers’ time and provides access to a faster, reliable global DNS service by translating domain names to IP addresses using a global network of servers.
Partners can offer these services to their clients on a referral basis, with the same annuity structure as HP’s public cloud offering.
“These are all services we’ve found are the table stakes for deploying into the cloud,” said Baigent. “Load balancing has gotten the most interest from developers as it helps simplify their tasks.”
While there are lots of public (and private) cloud providers on the market, Baigent said what he believes sets HP apart is it’s holistic approach to the market, looking at what organizations are struggling with internally when it comes to adopting cloud computing – managing and supporting existing IT services, and scaling seamlessly to the cloud as needed.
“We’re creating a comparable set of technology for private and public cloud platforms for organizations that want to do hybrid cloud,” said Baigent. “We’re enterprise-class. We talk about road maps – not all cloud providers do. It’s a combination of addressing IT holistically across the delivery models with enterprise-class delivery attrinutes that really change the game as far as addressing the options.”
The holistic approach resonates with HP partner Dasher Technologies. Al Chien, vice-president of sales and marketing for the Campbell, Calif.-based solution provider.
“It’s really important for a value-added partner like us to be able to represent a holistic approach from a one-vendor strategy,” said Chien. “It’s seamless and transparent for the customer.