One of the fruits of HPE’s increase investment in the Intelligent Edge is a new program designed to train partners about use cases and business cases, and which has a joint Go-to-Market component with HPE.
Dr. Tom Bradicich, VP & Hewlett Packard Fellow, Global Head of Edge and IoT CoE & Labs
LAS VEGAS – At HPE Discover here, HPE’s edge announcements included several programmatic initiatives designed to accelerate Intelligent Edge adoption. One likely to be of particular interest to the channel is the Channel to Edge Institute [CEI] artner program, which is part of the Intelligent Edge and IoT Center of Excellence and Lab.
The CEI program is run by Dr. Tom Bradicich, who has led HPE’s Internet of Things initiatives as VP & GM, Converged Servers, Edge & IoT Systems since 2015. In April, however, he was promoted to VP & HP Fellow, Global Head of Edge and IoT CoE & Labs, losing the data centre responsibilities but augmenting the Edge and IoT ones. Importantly, the new role increases the overall position of both of these area within the company.
“I now report higher into the organization, which translates into having more influence around the Edge,” he told ChannelBuzz. “It’s a sign of HPE’s increased commitment to the Edge.”
Bradicich said that that CEO Antonio Neri had architected his new role,
“It’s about a pan-HPE focus on the Edge,” he said. “At Discover this year we made a lot of announcements involving the Edge involving different parts of the company, like Aruba, our EdgeLine IoT platform, Pointnext services and our new Intelligent Edge and IoT Center of Excellence and Lab. That represented a consolidation in the approach we are now taking to the Edge.
“Last year at Discover, Antonio Neri pledged $4 billion for the edge – and we have spent most of that,” Bradicich joked. They have spent some of it on these new initiatives however.
The Channel to Edge Institute is a program designed specifically to assist HPE channel partners gain the necessary expertise to recommend, sell, implement and manage Intelligent Edge solutions effectively for their customers.
“HPE has already learned a lot about the Intelligence Edge, and had some hard times in doing so,” Bradicich said. “We now want to leverage this experience to help partners help move their businesses out to the Edge.”
Bradicich emphasized two things about the CEI – that is specifically for HPE channel partners, and that it is about the Edge broadly, not just about the IoT.
“This is for channel partners specifically, and who want to take out products or services through the edge, not just be a partner that we sell with,” he said. “We help them narrow down use cases that suit them – oil and gas, smart cities, campus branch, manufacturing – and specific use cases within the verticals that best fit their business. We moved to the Edge ourselves in 2015 with our acquisition of Aruba, and then by creating Edgeline organically. We can transfer our knowledge, focusing on those differentiators at the edge like Edgeline and Aruba. I’m confident that we can help partners be profitable and drive the highest margins in the industry by showing our differentiation.”
The CEI is a structured program designed by Bradicich, who teaches as an adjunct professor at two institutions.
“This formalizes things we are doing anyway to make them more efficient,” he said. “Me teaching a partner about a business case isn’t new. Me teaching them 50 at a time will be new.”
The CEI will teach three things – the use cases, the business cases, and the brief case – with the brief case being the go-to-market program with HPE.
“We will teach them and bring them in and they do the deployment,” Bradicich said.
There won’t be any distinct certifications awarded for completion.
“We will leverage other certifications that already exist,” Bradicich said.
He said that they expect demand for the CEI to be strong.
“I already have partners saying they want to be in,” he indicated.
The CEI is part of the newly established Intelligent Edge and IoT Centre of Excellence & Lab, which is charged with accelerating Intelligent Edge adoption among both partners and customers. The CoE designs research programs to drive rapid commercialization of Intelligent Edge technologies that simplify edge-to-cloud management and OT-IT convergence and enables new use cases.
