Channel Focus: All you need to know about HPE's partner program
HPE's partner strategy is targeting enterprise efficiency and productivity in an age of AI and hybrid environments

Then-CEO Meg Whitman created Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) in 2015, splitting enterprise products and services out from the printers and PCs of the HP founded in 1939 by Bill Hewlett and Dave Packard.
Headquartered in Texas, and led by president and CEO Antonio Neri, HPE reported $30.1 billion in revenues for its year ending 31 October 2024. It has roughly 62,000 employees, according to Statista.
Server products, server services, Intelligent Edge connectivity, and hybrid cloud categories drove the lion's share of HPE revenues last year - Q4 2024 server revenues year-on-year rose 32% to $4.7 billion. Other segments include financial services and corporate investments/other.
About 90,000 partners, including names like World Wide Technology (WWT), TD Synnex, Computacenter, Wipro, and Alphatec Solutions, drive 60-70% of HPE revenues. Global channel head is Simon Ewington, senior vice-president of worldwide channel and partner ecosystem, HPE.
Key offerings
New ProLiant Gen12 servers, featuring advanced Nvidia GPUs, continue to build technology refresh and energy efficiency opportunities as older servers become harder to manage and maintain.
"With ProLiant Gen12 launching in 2025, these drivers only become more compelling," says Jesse Chavez, vice president, worldwide channel sales and alliances, HPE.
Gen12 has AI automation as well as federal security certification in mind. HPE estimates savings of up to 65% on power costs, not least because of direct and air cooling
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capabilities.
HPE’s partnership is strong, with a big AI focus announced in June. Prior to that, the company also added further Nvidia AI Computing enterprise capabilities and "full stack, turnkey private cloud" for AI in March, as well as GreenLake cloud intelligence with a view to supporting agentic, hybrid IT.
Neri says HPE’s hybrid IT will have "agentic intelligence at every layer of infrastructure, so enterprises can realize their boldest ambitions and achieve previously impossible levels of IT operations performance and efficiency".
Recent news:
- In July, the US Department of Justice ruled to finalize its $14 billion Juniper acquisition, with potential divestment of Instant On WiFi and licensing of Juniper's AIops source code.
- June saw HPE announce a slew of 'composable' AI factory solutions emerge to simplify the building of AI tech stacks.
- The HPE Morpheus VM Essentials play takes aim at VMware; HPE claims its own hypervisor can slash VM license costs by up to 90%.
HPE for partners
At HPE's Partner Growth Summit 2025 Ewington said: "We’re only as strong as our partnerships." He confirmed doubling down on edge, infrastructure transformation, and AI, with trends like sovereign cloud also tipped for profitability through its newly unified partner program.
"We're combining 11 partner programs covering all HPE businesses, across compute, hybrid cloud and networking, all partner archetypes and all business models," he said.
Canalys research suggests partners can earn up to $4.90 for every $1 of HPE technology sold, and estimates the genAI channel opportunity alone might sum $159 billion by 2028 with the scarcity of AI talent requiring partner help.
HPE has also bolstered and redesigned enablement, competencies, and support, from new AI factory, enterprise workload, agentic AI, and retrieval augmented generation (RAG) modules to preferential HPE Private Cloud AI developer kit pricing, virtualization alternative assessment tool HPE CloudPhysics Plus, and an HPE Rapid Migration Tool for virtual machine (VM) migrations.
Chavez added: "We've been building out practices in 30 countries, and expanding that to strengthen partners' professional services practice."
Partner program, partner types and certifications
Back in June, HPE made an announcement outlining big changes to how it will work with partners going forward.
It is streamlining its partner program for skillset alignment and as-a-service opportunities. HPE Partner Ready Vantage is the umbrella structure, with the HPE Partner Ready traditional channel and HPE Partner Ready for Networking beneath. Here's a guide.
Instead of tiers, partners are organized by capability and expertise into Sell, for as-a-service expertise; Service, for customer success, support, managed, and professional services; and Build for solutions and development or technology validation.
Each center of expertise has a set of enablement, training, and sales tools, including marketing initiatives, communities, and more, such as core product training and certifications. In addition, partners can specialize in areas like Private Cloud, HPE GreenLake Flex, Hybrid Cloud Operations, and SASE. The more than 15 technology competencies include Private Cloud AI, Sovereign Cloud, which are available now. In addition, partners can expect one for Cloud IT Ops by 1st November and one for Aruba Networking Private 5G fiscal 2026.
HPE offers technical and sales certifications, with HPE Partner Restricted sales certifications only for HPE or partner employees. Technical certifications now only need a three-year renewal.
Here's an HPE video summary of Partner Ready Vantage (a 2-minute watch)
Sales certifications
- HPE Sales Certified - AI and As-a-Service Solutions
- HPE Sales Certified - Compute and Storage Solutions
- HPE Sales Certified - HPE Aruba Networking Solutions
Technical certifications
- Compute (7 certifications, including for IT Sustainability, Sovereign Cloud, and HPE Morpheus VM Essentials Software)
- HPE GreenLake Cloud Services (4 certifications)
- Hybrid cloud (10 certifications)
- Networking (17 architect, campus access, datacenter, network security, switching, and advanced product certifications)
- Software (4 certifications)
- Storage (5 certifications)
Further benefits, rewards, and incentives
- Further demand-gen campaigns, social media, and marketing tools.
- Total rewards program includes training, certification, sales incentives, co-marketing benefits, and further technical, marketing and sales resources.
- Triple Platinum plus program for Platinum status partners Compute, Hybrid Cloud and Networking, with additional growth requirements.
- Customer rebates for qualified sales.
- Maturity benchmarking - partners can have HPE evaluate their service offerings (and receive feedback).
- Potential for listing on the Partner Connect partner locator.
- Partner program guides and business tools on the partner portal.
- Certification and learning resources, also portal-based.
- News, events, and promotions on the partner portal.
- HPE Certification Advantage program - discounts available to purchase. (Full T&Cs here)
- HPE CloudPhysics Plus and other new assessment and migration tools for IT estate modernization.
- AI acceleration workshops and training to help more partners establish and grow AI practices.
- The Unleash AI program. Launched September 2024 - Handy guide here.
- HPE Financial Services financing for developing HPE Private Cloud AI
- HPE Smart Choice curated datacenter solutions for mid-market and SMB, with fixed pricing and structured ordering processes.
How to get on board
If you're ready to register as a business partner, create an account and sign up here. Explore the HPE Partner Ready Portal via this link.
Regional support is available on the same page. If you need more information, a handy guide detailing specific instructions, including on the company, its distribution, revenues, and individual user information requirements, is downloadable from this link. There's also an onboarding video.
HPE requires details on service practice and related offerings, and due diligence on regulatory compliance; compliance documentation and datasheets on various aspects of doing business with HPE can be discovered via the search bar on the HPE Resource Library webpage.
Questions on compliance can be directed to corporate.compliance.hpe@hpe.com. Sales questions can be directed via chat, or you can connect with the HPE Partners group on LinkedIn.
HPE Services worldwide technical support numbers can be found here, or you can search this page. HPE is also on LinkedIn here as well as X, Instagram, Threads, Facebook, YouTube, and there's also an RSS feed.
Fleur Doidge is a journalist with more than twenty years of experience, mainly writing features and news for B2B technology or business magazines and websites. She writes on a shifting assortment of topics, including the IT reseller channel, manufacturing, datacentre, cloud computing and communications. You can follow Fleur on Twitter.
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