HP hunts cloud partner A-team

Vendor launches Cloud Centre of Excellence programme while opening up mid-market consultancy services

HP is looking to sign up a handful of top partners for its soon-to-launch Cloud Centre of Excellence (CCOE), while SMB and mid-market resellers will be handed access to a range of cloud-centric consultancy services.

The vendor is hoping to assemble a crack team of cloud experts drawn from its base of partners holding its Converged Infrastructure specialisation. Kevin Matthews, HP's UK and Ireland channel manager for Enterprise Storage, Servers and Networking (ESSN), told ChannelWeb that he hopes "three or four" VARs will be signed up by the end of October. Ultimately, Matthews is aiming to have about 10 partners on board.

"Our intention is to create a community of partners that are real subject-matter experts in being able to sell cloud solutions based on HP technology," he said. "We want partners to make sure they are fully trained on our cloud proposition, including CloudSystem Matrix, 3Par, HP Networking and software. We also want partners to undertake sales activity and demand generation."

In return, partners will receive increased MDF, customised training and heavily discounted, or even free, demo kit, and will benefit from a close working relationship with the vendor.

"It is all about visibility within HP; this is a sales engagement programme," added Matthews (pictured).

Lower down the food chain, HP is also to open up resale access to its Cloud Discovery Workshop consultancy offering. Partners will soon be able to sell access to the two-day course for end users and HP aims to coax them into a joint delivery partnership in the long term.

"For mid-market and SMB-focused resellers, the challenge is that a lot of them do not have their own [consultancy] resource," said Matthews. "Partners can now resell a service from HP and then, at a stage in the future, perhaps co-deliver [such a service]."