Mumbai: American multinational enterprise information technology company, Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) is very aggressive on the channel front and intends to expand its channel business from current 70 percent to closer to 90 percent. Scott Dunsire, Vice President and General Manager of HPE said that the management was under pressure to strengthen its channel and leverage the partner ecosystem for the large corporate deals.
Dunsire, who was talking at Best of Breed Conference organized by The Channel Company in Atlanta recently, reassured partners that one year after HP’s split, the company is more dedicated to the channel than ever.
“We built our business because of our partners We are not wavering from that and we are only going to grow our business through channels. I am getting a ton of pressure inside the company to take our channel business from what it is today, about 70 percent, to closer to 90 percent,” Dunsire said. (Click here to watch the interview)
“The message to partners is we are going to put a lot of efforts behind this we want to educate our end user teams to leverage partnerships”, he added.
The channel model makes sense for HPE, which has taken on agile new markets.
“When you look at just the pressure that we have in regards to margins with our field selling costs, we can’t afford to have 10,000 salespeople. But when we leverage the sales community we have the opportunity to go after much more of the marketplace,” Dunsire said.
“We’re going to be narrowly focused with our direct sales team on the top 200 accounts, that leaves a lot of business out there,” he said.
While Dunsire is betting big on the channel ecosystem, Aruba Networks CEO Dominic Orr reportedly that the networking vendor is building a new low-end product line, the move which is intended to take a bite out of Cisco SMB share. Orr said that he plans to leverage the HPE SMB channel muscle to break into the SMB market early next year. Orr expects to launch the new low-end SMB product lines for both wireless and switching in early 2017.
“We traditionally have not been very focused on SMB, so for us, it is totally a market untapped. Aruba’s product is not low-end oriented. Since the [HPE] merger, we have been working on a low-end line of products. We have to tap into the HPE SMB engine which they have”, Orr said. HP (before split into two separate business), acquired Aruba Networks for a transaction value of $3 billion in 2015.
HPE holds a strong channel base in India. The company recently announced new Partner Ready” program designed to help channel partners in the country accelerate their growth in a technology landscape. The program will deliver additional resources to partners of all sizes and specialties, including the integration of competencies designed to help partners capture additional market share, a revamped “Partner Ready Service Provider” (PRSP) Program and an updated suite of ready-made partner marketing resources.
In addition to the strategic expansion of the program, HPE introduced updated hardware and services designed to deliver on the promise of enterprise mobility.