5 Ways HPE Channel Partners Can Seize Cloud28+ Opportunities

Cloud28+, a digital transformation-focused community of nearly 1,000 Hewlett Packard Enterprise partners, is an avenue for the channel to explore new cloud opportunities.

Cloud28+ is a digital transformation-focused community of nearly 1,000 Hewlett Packard Enterprise partners. These ISVs, solution providers, service providers, distributors, systems integrators, universities and government entities from around the world have built a global service catalog of their capabilities for building, deploying, and implementing cloud-focused solutions. Xavier Poisson, HPE’s vice president of service providers and Cloud28+ worldwide, said that catalog gives Cloud28+ members a place to explore each other’s capabilities, find new opportunities and build coalitions. CRN recently talked with Poisson about Cloud28+ and how it can be an important way to find partners and explore new cloud opportunities.

1. Immediate Reach

In Cloud28+, you have nearly 450 service providers working with HPE. So, if you are a software vendor, and you join Cloud28+ because your software is running on HPE hardware, immediately you have a reach to these service providers who are inside the HPE Partner Ready for Service Provider program. You join, you publish your offerings, you publish your articles. ... We took an outside-in approach. It’s not HPE pushing it. It is really the partners speaking about what they are doing.

2. Focused Ecosystems

Members of Cloud28+ have been asking us, ‘Can I have my own Cloud28+ for me?’ Why? Because they want to repeat for themselves this ecosystem-driven platform. [For them] we have launched what we call Spotlight pages where a partner can build their own ecosystem and [promote] their core offerings, their core partners, their mission. … We are also building that for HPE to enable partners to better understand what we are doing. For instance, in high-performance computing, we have built a Spotlight page. We recently announced at Sapphire the SAP-HPE Alliance Spotlight page. And we are also targeting new areas such as AI, where we have already published one Spotlight page. So these are places where we can repeat the ecosystem either for a technology, for a company, or for a vertical industry.

3. Qualified Lead Generation

[Cloud28+ enables] partners to get qualified leads. What does it mean? It means the leads for which they don’t have to call the customer back three times to really understand what they want. [We] have a module inside Cloud28+ that the partners can subscribe to. [A partner selects] a theme, such as disaster recovery in the Northeast of the U.S. for health care. We work with you and an industry analyst to scan the topic and build a small report on that. The partner [then develops] a questionnaire of five to 10 questions around the topic aiming at qualifying what the people will say. They can write an article on Cloud28+, and we will optimize it digitally because we have a huge, huge social media professional amplification engine behind Cloud28+. People then take the survey, and [the partner] immediately receives the first report the analyst has written. And when we close the campaign, they receive the full report. This is all goodness for the partner because the people will have spent 15 to 20 minutes, sometimes less, to answer the questionnaire. And they have insights to better engage and qualify [potential clients].

4. The Amplification Impact

When [one U.S.-based service provider] launched its Azure Stack solution … they got 10 times the market from Cloud28+ than on their own website. ... It was all the activities driven through their Cloud28+ page, the offerings they published, the on-boarding of all their subsidiaries, and so on.

5. More To Come

We are going to release a GreenLake Spotlight page, as we have done with high-performance computing and so on. ... I also want to have a Spotlight page for storage. I’m working on that to put HPE and the partners in front of the market. [For] digital e-campaigns, I am developing templates that can be used by the partners. And I want to have 10 templates such as digital transformation, or hyper-convergence, and so on before the end of the year.”