Finally, an HPE AI solution that offers something for the channel

It’s been a strange Partner Growth Summit at HPE Discover 2024 in Las Vegas.

Normally, this column – or at least some news – would have been published on Monday when the summit took place. However, HPE played its cards very close to its chest this year, with all its channel announcements having the same embargo as its main announcements – hence it’s been a quiet start to the week.

That silence was broken on Tuesday, however, with the announcement of HPE’s latest AI push during Antonio Neri’s keynote at the Sphere – Las Vegas’ newest venue with surely the highest external luminosity of any structure on Earth. You can catch up with my live blog from that keynote (and CTO Fidelma Russo’s general session the following day) but for the channel the nub of it is this: Finally, there’s something in HPE’s AI portfolio for you to sell.

One of my biggest criticisms of the company last year was the lack of love for the channel when it came to the flagship announcement, HPE GreenLake for Large Language Models (LLMs). Yes, Partner Ready Vantage offered something of interest, but it’s not quite the same as an inroad to the AI gold mine.

This year is vastly different. Nvidia AI computing by HPE is all about partners – indeed the company has billed it as a way to “boost partner profitability”. On offer are workshops and certifications jointly developed by HPE and Nvidia to help partners hone their knowledge of the AI offerings announced this week, as well as new competencies around compute, storage and data services, and high performance computing (HPC).

Executives from HPE have also been talking up the importance of the channel for the company. Ahead of the Summit,  Simon Ewington, VP of worldwide channel and partner ecosystem at HPE, told assembled press that “partnering is in our DNA” and that this week's announcements would “further deepen [the company’s] commitment to partners and to partner success”.

Meanwhile, Jesse Chavez, VP of worldwide partner programs and operations, focused on the size of the AI market – a “$159 billion opportunity by 2028” – and how HPE is “best suited to the whole spectrum” of AI-based opportunities for channel partners, from AI inferencing through to HPC.

Indeed, CEO Antonio Neri contributed to the Partner Growth Summit general session alongside Ewington, saying: “We see a tremendous opportunity for growth over the next several quarters and that’s because everyone’s trying to be left behind. Nobody wants to be left behind.”

A partner-led company

It’s hard to see this as anything other than good news for the channel. Having been left out of last year’s main announcement, HPE does seem to be putting its money where its mouth is and investing in bringing partners along for the ride this time.

Summing up his feelings before leaving the Partner Growth Summit keynote stage, Neri said: “We are more than committed to the channel, more than committed to the partner ecosystem. We have been, we are and we continue to be a partner-led company.”

Of course, uptake of these new competencies and how much reselling of AI solutions, whether co-developed or otherwise, actually, will be the real proof of the pudding. For now, however, there are certainly reasons to be optimistic.

ITPro's Jane McCallion will be live on the ground in Las Vegas next week with rolling coverage of HPE Discover 2024. Keep tabs on all the latest news, updates, and announcements in our live blog.