Craig Murphy (HPE)
Since its launch in 2018, HPE's GreenLake hybrid cloud offering has come to dominate the company's thinking – and its growth.
The server, storage and networking vendor's New Zealand arm is no different in that regard, but relies much more on partners to achieve its goals.
Craig Murphy, general manager of channels at HPE NZ, said since the company's split into a personal systems business and an enterprise systems business six and a half years ago, HPE has become much more agile and dynamic. The relationship with HP also remained strong informally, with both still housed in the same downtown Auckland office.
Ninety per cent of HPE's local revenue was indirect compared with a worldwide HPE average of around 55 to 60 per cent, Murphy said.
"We are not in and out of the channel," he said. "We're here and it's what we do."
Key product lines were servers, storage and networking, via Aruba, as well as services and software. Market share in servers and storage was very strong while Aruba was growing faster than the market, Murphy said.
This year, however, GreenLake was front and centre as HPE shifted its business to a service and consumption model. Growth of 3 to 5 per cent in server and storage sales and a bit higher for networking, was expected to compare with GreenLake's impressive 35 to 40 per cent growth, globally and locally, Murphy said.
HPE NZ had won the right to invest in that growth part of the business, with new headcount looking quite different from a traditional salesforce to include hybrid cloud specialists and customer success managers.
Users of core functions in compute, network and storage were being translated into "sticky" customers with freed up cash flows enjoying a great experience, Murphy told Reseller News.
We are working on ways to get that to market quicker," he said. "I've never seen a business so keen to move so rapidly, which is great. We are not resting on our laurels."
Current GreenLake customers locally included Vodafone NZ, AT (Auckland Transport), banks and commercial users, Delegat Wines and engineering consultancy Tonkin Taylor. Integration and services partner Softsource was also offering its own GreenLake consumption model to the market.
While globally much has rightly been made of public cloud growth, Murphy said 70 per cent of applications and and data still resided on-premises. GreenLake delivered the cloud experience on a consumption model across enterprise edges, co-locations, and datacentres.
Kiwi organisations were keen to understand new ways to go to market and how to reinvent themselves, and much of the partner community was jumping on board to help with that.
"If you are not doing that you are going backwards," he said. "Doing the same-old same-old is not good enough these days."
HPE organises its partners into tiers, with the likes of Spark, Datacom and Lexel at the top dealing directly with the vendor while distributors Ingram Micro and Exeed serviced the others. The likes of Spark and Datacom were also major customers, so HPE sold "to them and through them".
"In essence the resellers and the disties act as a pass through," Murphy explained. "We own the hardware and the kit and we deploy it and invoice the partner. They add their service wrap around it and invoice the customer."
HPE owns the responsibility removing the risk from the end user and the partner.
"That's a really good thing for both parties. We have the pockets to do it and the people as well."
While some partners were still keen to push servers, storage and networking in a capex model, partners who have taken consumption services on board understood it was a different sales cycle and services were more margin rich.
"If we sell a core GreenLake product set partners can do a good service wrap that we don't have the capability of – a security warp, say – we demarcate where we finish and where the partner starts. Discussion has to happen up-front about where the demarcation is."
For HPE, the aim was to lead with GreenLake and opex and to fall back to capex if necessary.
"There's a lot of enablement for partners around that now," Murphy said. "It is a new shift so we are spending a lot of time with the partner community to get them up to speed."
In a GreenLake deal, not everything has to be opex, however. Some of HPE's GreenLake solutions can be capitalised as as well.
"We will put the kit into the datacentre or on site with some indemnities, but in essence they do what they like with that," Murphy said. "We'll monitor for capacity and so on with customer success partners."
A new partner business manager, Reuben Maguire, has been hired based in Christchurch and covering the South Island "channel-out" while a different type of unfunded headcount, business partner solution architects (BPSAs), were going into the top tier of the partner community. Three were there currently in place with five more to be added.
"That's good news for us, we went to region and asked for more investment and they said yes," Murphy said.
A channel bootcamp with 80 resellers and ten of HPE staff added to the mix with intensive training.
HPE was also looking to drive its software business harder, in particular the company's hybrid data and analytics platform Ezmeral and MapR for artificial intelligence, Murphy said. The core partner community in that space was going to be somewhat more specialised.
"The overall strategy is pretty simple: protect our incumbency, evolve some of our programmes with the BPSA community, drive the channel with bootcamp and solution selling programmes and then attack the competitors where we can and as the opportunities arise," he said.
