HPE Bringing Datacenter Care Services To Channel Via Easy-to-sell SKU

Hewlett Packard Enterprise on Tuesday expanded its Pointnext Datacenter Care Services offerings, and promised to turn the services into a SKU in January aimed at making it easy for its channel partners to bring them to customers.

The new SKU would make it easier for solution providers to either attach the Datacenter Care Services to an HPE product sale or to offer it to clients looking for a better way to manage their HPE and non-HPE servers and storage, said Gerry Nolan, worldwide senior director for operational services in HPE Pointnext.

Currently, channel partners wanting to bring HPE's Datacenter Care Services to clients had to do it on an individual basis, Nolan told CRN. That will change with an actual services SKU they can sell, he said.

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"So that as channel partners put together deals where they're selling, for example, servers with storage, they can now insert a Datacenter Care SKU to provide this experience for those types of opportunities," he said. "We know that the channel will be excited about this because it was the channel that was asking for this for quite some time, and we've been working on it."

HPE wants to bring that SKU to partners who have little or no services capabilities of their own, and to those with their own high-margin services businesses, Nolan said.

"If you're strong in a particular space as a partner, maybe you're strong in SAP HANA, but there may be areas where we could augment your skills," he said. "So we built a joint framework where we can partner up with a particular company, and the partner owns the customer. [The partners] can buddy up with HPE and Datacenter Care, and pick and choose the components or the menu items that they're perhaps not as strong in and deliver that to their customers."

The move to make it easier for partners to leverage HPE's Datacenter Care Services is a good one for partners who may not have a huge services bench of their own, said Scott Douglas, vice president of global sales at CB Technologies, an Orange, Calif.-based solution provider and long-time HPE channel partner.

"This is a good way to augment our skill sets, especially in the data center," Douglas told CRN. "This also helps in terms of geographical expansion to areas where we don't have a presence, especially with customers who have data centers spread across the U.S. For a channel company, it's hard to have people in every city your customers have people in."

The move is also good for HPE's services business, Douglas said.

"HPE's technical services is now focusing on its strength," he said. "They didn't have the strongest services sales force. If they can better leverage the channel, it's good for all of us."

HPE's Pointnext services business was launched early last year at about the time HPE spun off its $20-billion enterprise service in a merger with CSC to form Tysons, Va.-based DXC Technology.

Pointnext is HPE's technology services organization focused on accelerating digital transformation around hybrid IT and intelligent edge computing.

HPE on Tuesday expanded its Datacenter Care Services capabilities with a refresh of the offering focused on seven areas, Nolan said.

These include new capabilities in areas such as backup and recovery, security, and enhanced SAP HANA skills, he said.

Also new is a ramping-up of Microsoft Azure hybrid cloud capabilities, Nolan said. "We're one of the cloud service providers for Microsoft, and we also have a Microsoft Azure Stack solution," he said. "And we've built up a team of experts which we can bring to bear for customers trying to deploy hybrid cloud, either on- or off-premises with Azure. IT performance, another area where we see customers struggle."

HPE is also expanding its performance optimization capabilities, and its enhancing its automation services capabilities with a wide range of tools including Chef, Puppet, Docker, SoftStack, and Ansible. Also new is the ability to deploy EnterpriseDB Postgres as a better way to help customers manage their database environments, he said.