HPE North America Channel Chief Richardson: GreenLake Flex Capacity Is A Fast Track To Higher Profits For Partners

Hewlett Packard Enterprise Vice President North America Channels and Alliances Terry Richardson calls the company's new GreenLake Flex Capacity pay-per-use business model breakthrough simply the most "significant" partner opportunity he has seen in 30-plus years in the channel.

"Giving customers the opportunity to pay for only what they consume is absolutely game-changing," said Richardson, one of the most respected channel chiefs in the business. "Those that are embracing this model are really differentiating themselves from the pack, and they are contributing to an absolute surge in our business, growing many hundreds of percent quarter on quarter. The fact is only HPE has a GreenLake Flex Capacity offering. None of our traditional competitors do."

The GreenLake Flex Capacity model is, in fact, the first ever pay-per-use consumption model "purpose-built" from the ground up for the channel, said Richardson.

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The business model innovation is taking away what has been intense margin pressure on transactional product sales from procurement offices and CFOs and putting solution providers squarely into the pay-per-use battle against public cloud providers.

"Frankly, this is a much more profitable [model] for the partner because they are not subject to all the procurement pressure to try to squeeze their margin," said Richardson. "So it really is a win, win, win all the way around. It helps the business partners build that recurring revenue stream and customer loyalty and stickiness like never before. It allows the customer to get the benefit of only paying for what they use, whether they scale up and leverage capacity that is on-site, ready to use immediately when they need it, or scale down when they are not operating in peak environments. And it is really good for us because it allows us to extend the value proposition of how we make hybrid IT simple."

John Kolimago, executive vice president and general manager of the cloud solutions business unit at Blue Bell, Pa.-based Anexinet, said the new model provides the right margin structure to drive sales growth against the public cloud.

"This makes it easy for our sales reps to sell this technology and easy for our customers to consume it," he said. "This is truly selling consumption as a service. No one else is doing what HPE is doing with GreenLake. This shows you the commitment that HPE has to partners."

Kolimago said Richardson and HPE North America Managing Director Dan Belanger do not get enough credit for HPE's market-leading channel commitment.

"HPE has the most lucrative channel programs for partners in the industry, whether that is special pricing and deal registration programs that excite my sales team because of the protection and margin opportunity, or the market development funds and rebates that are unmatched in the industry," he said.

What's more, HPE is backing up its pay-per-use model with a North America sales offensive that has more of its sales reps working with partners to capture new opportunities.

"We are seeing HPE hiring sales talent at a rate that is unprecedented in the last 10 years," said Kolimago.

The GreenLake Flex Capacity model has put partners in a position to drive on-premises solutions that are widely recognized as being priced 40 percent to 60 percent below comparable solutions running in a public cloud. It also is designed to work in a multi-cloud environment, which provides an economic benefit to customers given the cost of exiting a public cloud like AWS.

"If you are in AWS or a public cloud, you actually have hidden costs if you try to get out of that arrangement," said Richardson. "That does not exist in an on-prem hybrid solution. There are no egress fees. So it is much more cost-effective on a month-by-month basis and it protects from any kind of costs that would surprise a customer if they were to change their relationship with a public provider. So it really gives customers the best of both worlds. It gives them the most cost-effective experience today and gives them the flexibility tomorrow to do what they need to do without incurring the potential for any surprise cost."

The biggest bang from the new model, however, comes from the fact that it is providing customers with rapid new business-outcome-based solutions. That's a huge competitive advantage with every business in a race to digitally transform itself.

"This really positions the partner to look like the hero in the eyes of their customer," said Richardson.