HPE has confirmed it will merge its recent acquisitions' channel initiatives into its own Partner Ready Program on 1 November.
Over the course of the past 12 months, HPE bought up Simplivity, Nimble Storage, SGI, Cloud Cruiser and Niara, most of which conducted the majority of their business through the channel prior to acquisition.
Speaking to reporters at the company's Global Partner Summit yesterday, Jesse Chavez, VP of worldwide channel strategy and operations, said 1 November is the landmark day when all partners from Nimble, Cloud Cruiser and Simplivity will be fully migrated to the HPE Partner Ready Program.
For the other two acquisitions, Niara and SGI, the move to Partner Ready is already well under way. According to Chavez, Niara will be available on Partner Ready from August, while onboarding of partners from SGI is already underway, with products starting to appear in July.
Chavez didn't give an estimation of when migration of SGI partners to the Partner Ready Program was likely to be complete, however and said it's something of a special case. Whereas the other acquisitions did almost 100% of their business through the channel, he said, SGI's rate was much lower, at between 15% and 20%. This is something HPE will be looking to change, however.
There will also be no room for parallel partner programmes with these new acquisitions, which is in contrast to the company's strategy when it bought Aruba Networks two years ago.
Chavez said there were "a lot of reasons" the Aruba partner programme was kept separate, in particular that HPE "didn't want to kill [the] high growth" of its acquisition. This won't be the case for Simplivity, Nimble Storage, SGI, Cloud Cruiser and Niara, though, which he stated will be completely integrated.
HPE's Global Partner Conference this year takes place alongside its annual Discover customer event. For more news from the main show, head to our sister site, IT Pro.
