HPE recently held its Discover 2025 event, where several significant announcements were made that will benefit partners and customers alike.
Las Vegas was the glitzy venue for the HPE Discover 2025 event, but while the city is known for its multitude of gambling establishments, what HPE announced looks to take the chance out of work for partners and customers alike and make success more likely.
One of the biggest announcements from HPE was the launch of a single, unified partner program consolidating existing programs to enhance partner experiences across the HPE portfolio. All programs will combine under HPE Partner Ready Vantage, including HPE Partner Ready and HPE Partner Ready for Networking, to offer simplified enrolment, flexible participation, and comprehensive support through various program tracks. The unified program will roll out in phases, beginning with an initial launch on 1 November 2025.
HPE says the design of HPE Partner Ready Vantage has been influenced by partners, as well as the best practices of HPE’s award-winning programs. The company says this will equip partners to build their expertise as deep or as broad as they need while delivering exceptional customer outcomes. The program supports every partner, from solution providers and managed service providers to systems integrators, independent software vendors and beyond, and has been designed to increase growth opportunities across the HPE portfolio.
HPE Partner Ready Vantage has a one program framework, a single compensation model and a consistent experience. The program offers flexibility so partners can choose the relevant centres and competencies that will support their business goals and differentiation. Partners can focus on developing or integrating solutions; reselling consumption solutions or the HPE technologies and services and delivering other services under their own brand, the HPE brand, or both.
“The new, unified HPE Partner Ready Vantage reflects our commitment to empowering partners and making it easier for them to differentiate with customers and grow their businesses,” says Simon Ewington, senior vice president of Worldwide Channel and Partner Ecosystem at HPE. “This new program is simple, flexible and relevant, accelerating partners’ ability to engage with us, and deliver innovative solutions and services that provide brilliant results for their end customers.”
Everything customers need
As part of the unified HPE Partner Ready Vantage Sell Track, partners can now easily resell the entire HPE portfolio of products and services in operational expenditures via HPE GreenLake Flex solutions, and capital expenditures models through one program membership. Partners can choose where they want to focus and effectively drive growth in discrete technology areas like compute, hybrid cloud and networking, each having a dedicated centre in the Sell Track.
At the same time, partners can flexibly cross-sell across the solutions portfolio, opening new growth opportunities. Partners obtain core product training and certifications based on requirements in each centre, and through optional competencies can develop specialised expertise in areas like Private Cloud, HPE GreenLake Flex, Hybrid Cloud Operations and SASE to differentiate themselves in the market.
HPE is also enabling partners to deliver everything that customers need by ensuring partners have the training, certifications, competencies and tools to continually develop and enhance their capabilities, giving customers the assurance they are working with the most qualified partners to meet their needs. New competencies and certifications give partners access to adjacent markets to pursue new business areas and enable them to drive outstanding customer outcomes and helps promote and differentiate HPE partners in the market including:
- HPE Solutions for AI competency
- HPE Solutions for Sovereign Cloud competency
- HPE Morpheus VM Essentials Software certification
- HPE Aruba Networking Private 5G competency.
Partner benefits
HPE also announced a range of other partner benefits. For instance, the HPE CloudPhysics Plus assessment tool allows partners to provide intelligent recommendations for helping customers optimise their IT across on- premises, multicloud and cloud-native environments – including Hyper-V, bare metal, Kubernetes and public cloud environments. This will be available for free in the fourth quarter of FY2025.
In addition, a rapid migration tool enables partners to deliver high-value services such as workload assessments, tailored recommendations and seamless migrations for their customers. The tool currently supports several migrations, with the new capability of migration to VM Essentials available in July. In combination with the virtualisation alternative assessment tool, the rapid migration tool performs a comprehensive migration feasibility analysis and delivers insights to optimise and modernise environments. The rapid migration tool is available for free to partners enrolled in the HPE Partner Ready Vantage Professional Services center.
Turning to AI, HPE is expanding AI Focus – initially launched in 2024 as part of the NVIDIA AI Computing by HPE portfolio – partners’ reach to 20 countries. AI Focus partners equips partners with tools and support to build and scale their AI practices effectively. More partners will have access to AI readiness assessments, accelerated enablement, and co-investments to drive demand generation, support building their AI practice or accelerate deals.
Additionally, HPE has designed a comprehensive set of learning opportunities and workshops to further equip partners with the knowledge, tools and strategies to grow their AI practices and drive their business forward. Partners will gain access to HPE technologies, tools and technical expertise to learn and practice configuring, demonstrating and troubleshooting in real-world scenarios.
AI Acceleration Workshops have been updated to include strategies for building an AI practice and include insights into the latest AI trends and opportunities such as agentic AI and physical AI. NVIDIA will be integrated into the AI acceleration workshops including access to NVIDIA subject-matter experts and resources for AI practice building. These workshops will continue to follow the standard AI practice-building framework with the customisation needed to suit partners’ specific business models and needs.
Finally, HPE Smart Choice is now globally available exclusively through the channel, providing partners with ready-to-go data ter solutions targeting SMBs and mid-market customers. With fixed pricing, curated SKUs and structured ordering processes, HPE Smart Choice simplifies the purchasing process and results in faster sales cycles and improved alignment with customer buying patterns. Partners also benefit from comprehensive training and promotional assets to help position and sell HPE Smart Choice effectively.
The program currently includes top-selling configurations from HPE ProLiant Compute servers, HPE MSA and tape storage systems, along with HPE Tech Care Services. HPE Smart Choice is expanding with the addition of HPE Compute Ops Management and HPE Morpheus VM Essentials, enabling partners to deliver even more complete and competitive solutions to their customers.
Commvault partnership
Elsewhere at HPE Discover, HPE and Commvault announced an expanded strategic partnership.
Building on a longstanding collaboration across GreenLake cloud and the Commvault Cloud platform, the enhanced partnership deepens technology integration and joint go-to-market to deliver advanced cyber resilience, data protection and disaster recovery capabilities for enterprise hybrid cloud environments.
In addition to its own offerings, Commvault will integrate and offer HPE Zerto Software to support Commvault Cloud customers in managing demanding virtualised on-premises and cloud workloads. Leveraging sophisticated Continuous Data Protection technology, HPE Zerto delivers near-zero recovery point objectives and recovery time objectives ensuring operational resilience. Adding HPE Zerto capabilities to Commvault Cloud gives customers added flexibility to tailor their cyber resilience and disaster recovery strategy to meet the needs of their business.
“The expanded partnership with Commvault underscores our shared commitment to solve the most complex data protection challenges that enterprises face,” says Fidelma Russo, executive vice president and general manager of Hybrid Cloud and CTO at HPE.
Sanjay Mirchandani, president and CEO of Commvault, adds: “At a time when data is more valuable and vulnerable than ever, our collaboration is empowering customers to keep their business continuous by advancing their resilience and protection of hybrid workloads.”
The companies are also introducing enhanced integration between the HPE storage and data protection and Commvault Cloud portfolios to safeguard sensitive data, protect against ransomware, and ensure seamless recovery from disruptions. For HPE customers seeking a turnkey cloud-based solution that provides robust protection of hybrid, cloud-native, and SaaS workloads, Commvault Cloud SaaS is an integral part of the joint portfolio that spans from edge-to-cloud and source-to-target.
