HP picks reseller big boys as first UK CCOE partners

Computacenter, Itex, Kelway, OCSL and Prolinx badged up as first five members of HP's cloud technology elite, vendor confirms

HP has inducted its first five UK partners into its recently launched Cloud Centre of Excellence (CCOE) programme.

Unveiled in August, the CCOE scheme was set up to find and certify about 10 UK partners to be the vendor's leading lights in deploying private cloud infrastructures based on HP technology.

The manufacturer is looking among its base of partners holding its Converged Infrastructure specialisation and wants VARs with deep skills across all relevant technologies, including CloudSystem Matrix, 3Par, HP Networking and software.

Five big-name partners have now been certified as the first UK inductees of CCOE, HP confirmed to ChannelWeb today. The quintet are: Computacenter; Itex; Kelway; OCSL; and Prolinx.

Speaking earlier this week, Kevin Matthews, HP's UK and Ireland channel manager for enterprise, storage, servers and networking, reiterated that he wants to end up with a crack team of about 10 resellers.

"It is all about customers that want to have private clouds and the CCOE partners will be the best partners in the UK," he added. "CCOE [partners] are subject-matter experts in deploying private cloud in HP technology."