HPE is updating its Partner Ready Programme in an effort to give channel partners greater flexibility in how they develop their business, create market differentiation and increase profitability.
The changes, which was announced as part of its financial year 2020 update, are focused particularly on the company's Greenlake as a service platform, which has been sitting at the core of the company's overall strategy since CEO Antonio Neri took the helm in February 2018.
Channel partners will now have access to new sales resources and specialists to help them pursue new Greenlake opportunities. The company has also introduced a new Quick Quote tool that, HPE says, can reduce the time it takes to generate a proposal down to just a few minutes.
Speaking to Channel Pro, Mark Armstrong, HPE's vice president of UK Sales, said the company's pivot towards offering its products as a service had been "very positive, not just in the UK but globally".
"We've been really happy with the takeup that we've had at a UK&I level and we've seen the pipeline grow really significantly over the past six months in terms of the number of opportunities and customer opportunities that we that we've had through the channel," Armstrong said.
The focus of these announcements, he said, was around enabling the channel to close more deals faster and build up their business.
In addition to Quick Quote and the new sales resources, the company is also launching new competency curricula for FY20, including the new HPE Master Accredited Solutions Expert (Master ASE) Hybrid IT Solution Architect certification.
"The new curricula offers a variety of different competencies across verticals and gives our customers the choice of focusing on things like hybrid cloud, software-defined and allows them to build up different practices in different support areas," Armstrong said.
"The structure of the curricula also enables the people doing these technical and accreditation courses to do it in a more continuous learning way than we've had before. This enables them to develop the skills in these sorts of areas in the downtime that's convenient to them, as opposed to potentially taking them off the road for longer periods."
