HPE Data Center Hardware: Partners Gain Pay As You Go Options

One of the top reasons businesses are moving their infrastructure to the cloud is that they can scale up and down easily and only pay for what they are actually using. It also typically eliminates large upfront costs for hardware and equipment.

Still, companies are still reluctant to embrace public clouds amid lingering concerns about security or lack of control. In a potential "best of both worlds" situation, you could have on-premises hardware -- delivered in a pay-as-you-go model.

That's exactly HP Enterprise's latest partner strategy. The effort involves GreenLake Flex Capacity for partners -- a new offering that makes it easier and more profitable for partners to sell HPE’s on-premises consumption solution, the company claims.

The new offering allows channel partners to help customers adopt a pay-per-use model and access new on-premises technologies – such as software-defined infrastructure, all-flash storage and private cloud – without a significant upfront investment, HPE asserts.

The offering is being launched with specific packages for seven of HPE’s most popular products, specifically:

These products will have feature configurations that are pre-defined, pre-approved and price-banded, so they are easy to quote and sell, HPE says. In addition, they are designed to empower partners to earn increased margin and can build an annuity revenue stream with a projected 25 percent year-over-year growth rate, the company claims.

HPE Offers Marketing Help to Channel Partners

HPE also wants to help MSPs with marketing. A new HPE Partner Ready Marketing Pro Academy features educational resources to help partners improve their digital marketing proficiency and effectiveness in support of generating additional leads, pipeline, and revenue. The Marketing Pro Academy will grant HPE authorized partners full access to videos, whitepapers, presentations, and guides designed to educate them on the latest digital marketing topics and trends, the company says.

HPE is also introducing the HPE Digital Marketing Maturity Assessment, which enables partners to better understand their digital and social capabilities through a structured online survey and assessment framework to evaluate digital marketing maturity. The assessment provides personalized reports with steps and recommended actions for improvement across five key areas including Digital Identity, Organizational Commitment, Analytical Framework, Customer Relationship Management, and Campaign Planning & Execution.

Generally, highly technical MSPs have a hard time with the marketing side of the business. When vendors make an effort to help take some of that burden away, MSPs are paying attention. It is a great way to differentiate your product from the competition.

Additional Competitive Concerns

No doubt, HPE and many of its hardware rivals are introducing pay-as-you-go models to combat public clouds like Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud Platform and Microsoft Azure.

The tricky part for hardware vendors involves matching or counting many of the cloud's greatest capabilities, including the cloud's:

Vendors are making progress with specialized financing programs that, in many cases, allow customers to keep standby hardware on hand -- at little or no cost -- for rapid scale-up needs.

Additional insights from Joe Panettieri.