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LAS VEGAS Hewlett-Packard is opening the channel doors of opportunity a bit wider for its value-added resellers.
The world’s largest (by sales volume) IT products and services provider announced Feb. 13 on the first day of its global partner conference here at the Cosmopolitan that it is offering significant new sales and marketing options for its thousands of resellers worldwide, thanks to the new servers it is launching.
The news was announced in tandem with the company’s refresh of its ProLiant server lineup into Generation 8, which now includes 24/7 monitoring, autonomic configuration and repair capabilities, and other converged infrastructure-type features.
HP is trying to accelerate the sales-to-delivery process for resellers along with the launch. Thanks to a new proactive monitoring system in HP’s ProActive Insight server architecture, the server life cycle is now automated while providing intelligence on diagnostics, including overall health and power usage, Tom Joyce, HP vice president of marketing for StorageWorks told eWEEK.
This active monitoring also serves as a direct lifeline to HP or channel partner support professionals, providing customers with 24/7 server and/or storage information. Thus, the new servers now enable channel partners to develop and sell new revenue streams using HP’s existing sales and marketing channels.
Specifically, partners now can expand their service portfolios with HP automation features that increase partner interactions, improve remote technical capabilities and create new consulting-type opportunities over the life of the customers HP server/storage package, Joyce said.
“With our system health features, we can see problems before they happen, and we can predict when peak workloads are going to happen, so we can enable the users to be more productive and less involved with the regular operation and maintenance of the server,” E.J. Bodnar, an HP global marketing director, told eWEEK. “When they’re spending less time on routine operations, they can spend more time on innovating and preparing for other solutions.”
“I’d summarize it this way: In our ServiceOne program, the channel partners would sell the product [first], then sell HP-branded and delivered services and support. We also had offered them the option to sell HP branded services, but to deliver it themselves,” Joyce told eWEEK.
The new partner service-level agreements are available now, Joyce said.
“So effectively, they’re the subcontractor for doing some of those services. The news here today is that they can now sell partner-branded, partner-delivered [HP products]. So a channel partner now can sell our product and then add their own branded support and other offerings with that product,” Joyce said. “This gives them the opportunity to establish their own brands, which many of them want to do, gives them the ability to develop custom service offerings that [HP] might now deliver, and it positions them to be the primary partner in the transaction.”
Chris Preimesberger is Editor of Features and Analysis for eWEEK. Twitter: editingwhiz