Public Cloud Partner Program from HP

At the Global Partner Conference last week, Hewlett-Packard focused on attracting VARs and global systems integrators by demonstrating its first public cloud partner. Palo Alto, California-based HP now enters a market where long-established cloud service providers like Amazon, Microsoft, Rackspace and Verizon's Terremark division have firm roots.

The announcement also comes only shortly after the news that Amazon's Redshift has set-up a unique data warehousing service to offer more affordable and big-data-ready options to traditional enterprise data warehouses from vendors like HP.

At first, it is expected that HP will be keen to ensure that VARs will be able to act as agents, and HP customers will be supported with annuity-based commissions totaling 10 percent for the first year of referred customer usage and five percent thereafter for each year. According to HP, this will continue as long as "the partner's established revenue growth goal is exceeded."

In a few months, a resale program will be provided by HP, and through this, VARs will be able to resell the HP public cloud offering, ensuring that billing and customer account management can be properly managed, and will not only refer customers.

The co-founder and chief strategy officer of San Diego, California-based Nth Generation Computing, Rich Baldwin, commented that the HP partner program is the "best in the business" and the new cloud partner program will strongly complement it. According to Baldwin, it is likely that partners of HP that sell a full collection of HP products and services (like HP public cloud) can expect to generate more income in the future.

According to the senior director of business development, HP Cloud Services, Dan Baigent, Global system integrators (GSIs) and VARs have had the program piloted for them by HP for almost a year, and it has developed interest and "significant traction" from partners.

Baigent said: "We think there is tremendous demand for this program. We think that VARs and GSIs are being challenged by their customers to be more cloud capable and savvy."

HP training is required for VARs and integrators, but this will be mostly affordable. Baigent said that "[HP wants] this to be very inclusive. We are going to include as many VARs and GSIs as we can."

Partners can benefit more from HP's annuity referral plan than competitive offerings, according to the company. Baigent said: "We have a market-leading position on that annuity-based payment. It is at a very robust level and lasts for the life of the partnership. Most competitors tail off after a certain period of time. I think we are going to find VARs and GSIs very excited by our program. It is a very generous program."

Baigent also noted that despite the fact that most VARs want to do the billing themselves, a suitable program is not yet available to them. He said: "That is one of the things they want to be able to do -- resell those public cloud services and be the partner of record for that customer relationship. The reseller program is extremely attractive to these partners. They can mark it up as much as the market will bear."

One positive point to the referral program is that complex billing systems and user management do not have to be maintained. Furthermore, tools and capabilities can be adapted to benefit partners with trusted cloud adviser status.

Baigent said: "A lot of VARs and GSIs are struggling with how to become a trusted adviser and be a pertinent vendor to their customers when this 'Wild West' of cloud is hitting them and hitting their customers. What we are bringing to them is a coherent answer for how to help enterprise customers embrace cloud in private and public cloud environments with a very compatible, very open, no-vendor-lock-in strategy." (CY) Link