HP, Juniper Put Partner Empowerment In Spotlight At XChange

Hewlett-Packard and Juniper Networks Monday took to the main stage at the XChange Solution Provider conference to shine the spotlight on partner empowerment and profits.

The two vendors put the focus on new partnering initiatives and long-standing channel tenets that drew plaudits from solution providers.

[Related: XChange Solution Provider 2014 Coverage ]

HP's success in the channel starts at the top with HP President and CEO Meg Whitman, who has rallied the channel team with the maxim: "If we can empower our partners, they are going to do a better job than we do," said HP Director of Americas Partner Development Matt Smith.

Referring to Whitman as HP's top channel chief, Smith said the job of the HP channel team got a whole lot easier when Whitman put her muscle behind getting the channel fully aligned with every segment of the $110 billion computer giant's go-to-market strategy from sales to marketing to product development. It's that kind of commitment that has made the channel the fastest-growing route to market for HP, said Smith.

Among HP's top initiatives are a strategic push to aggressively align partners with HP's direct sales end user teams in every segment from SMB to Fortune 1000 to healthcare and public sector, said Smith.

Another HP improvement is more aggressive up-front pricing and an improved pricing tool that has resulted in average turnaround time on pricing quotes from HP moving from 11 hours to 7 hours with a plan to get to two hours, said Smith. "The number of opportunities that we have partners quoting on increased by 27 percent [as a result of the change]," he said.

The deal registration turnaround has also improved significantly with a turnaround time of 17 hours with an action from HP, said Smith. That provides partners with exclusive pricing and incremental benefits, he said.

Rick Jordan, director of sales and strategic alliances for Tenet Computer Group Inc., a Toronto, Ontario HP partner, said HP has made dramatic gains in making its programs simpler, more predictable and more profitable for partners. "That makes it easier for us to HP technology to our clients," he said. "HP has listened to what the partners have wanted and delivered it. They are what a vendor should be to a partner and they continue to develop the program."

NEXT: Juniper Delivers A Powerful Partner Story

Juniper, for its session, put the the focus on how its channel program was built from the customer back out through to partners. That customer-to-partner dynamic is paying off in off in bigger and more profitable deals for Juniper partners, said Juniper Vice President of Americas Partners Jonathan Belcher.

"We're trying to move away from typical vendor-based programs pushed upon partners to drive certain metrics," said Belcher.

At the heart of every successful Juniper customer story is a partner with robust technical and services capabilities and a "willingness to work with us to figure out how to solve customer problems," said Belcher.

Among the Juniper programs rolled out this year to drive those successful partnerships is a program that allows partners to take advantage of Juniper professional services training and tools, said Belcher. Juniper, he stressed, believes in partners leading with their own branded services.

"We are allowing partners to come in and take advantage of our labs, take advantage of our tools, do training with our products," he said. "We know that if partners sell their brand of professional services around Juniper we both win. What we are doing around professional services is enabling more and more of partner's capabilities."

Juniper also has a single iron-clad deal registration program that assures that any deal a partner brings to Juniper is protected, said Belcher. "You register the opportunity and bring it to us, you are the only one that gets a competitive discount," he said. "We work with you - period. End of story. We stick with you. We win or lose together."

Finally, Juniper has put together a new financing initiative that allows partners to utilize Juniper financing on an entire deal with the only provision that Juniper be 20 percent of the deal, said Belcher.

Juniper's leadership position as the gold networking standard for service providers, the most demanding customers, has made Juniper a strong partner for Signature Technology Group, a 24-year technology professional services firm in Phoenix, Ariz., said Signature Vice President of Sales and Marketing Aaron Zeper. "Juniper is technically differentiated and is solving complex scalable problems," said Zeper. "Our Juniper project delivery is up triple digits. Juniper built its products to solve service providers who have giant scale and lots of complexities. We find their solutions solves problems other networking companies can't or can't as easily or as cost effectively."

PUBLISHED MARCH 3, 2014