HPE has announced a ‘channel-only’ sales motion for the standalone HPE VM Essentials Software. It contrasts with a direct model which is the more common type of hybrid cloud operating model, and which HPE has more commonly used in the past.
Simon Ewington, Vice President, Worldwide Channel and Partner Ecosystem, HPE
Today, HPE is announcing a ‘channel-only’ sales motion for the standalone HPE VM Essentials Software. It contrasts with a direct model which is the more common type of hybrid cloud operating model, and which HPE has more commonly used in the past.
“The most exciting part of this is making the channel a standalone one only,” said Simon Ewington, Senior Vice President of Worldwide Channel & Partner Ecosystem at HPE. “This made its initial appearance at VMware Explore at November 2024, where Ewington said that it created considerable excitement. We provide customers with hypervisor choice and a gateway to a hybrid cloud operating model.”
Ewington stressed that the industry is looking for choice, which is what makes this a very compelling offering, It is also approximately five times cheaper than alternatives.
“The market’s cost structure has pricing that is different from anything in the industry,” Ewington stated. “It is a new entry into the market with a very well rounded solution. The standalone HPE VM Essentials allows customers to manage VMs deployed across both existing VMware hypervisors and the HPE VM Essentials hypervisor (KVM based).
He also indicated that the VMware Explore solution was also very different from the rest of the industry,
“The main announcement that we made in Las Vegas was a private cloud with Nvidia,” Ewington said, “It was the announcement that I spent most of my time on. At that time, I didn’t talk about our focus on channel strategy or our Go Market GTM. Only here did we make essentials channel only.” It was all part of our strategy to expand our partner opportunities with a channel-only sales motion.”
Most of HPE VM Essentials software is direct and hybrid, and most also has a strong reputation for being a trusted vendor, who can provide choice to customers, with the flexibility of alternative virtualization solutions.
HPE VM Essentials also stands out from the market by the superior terms that it offers.
“One year is the more common in our industry, while three years tend to be more standard,” Ewington stated..
The support of HPE ProLiant Compute Gen11 and the newly announced Gen12 servers along with socket-based pricing for HPE VM Essentials tends to lead to unplanned cost increases in virtualization due to CPU core-based pricing and changes in product packaging.
“Our support in the not too distant future is to be hardware agnostic here in supporting HPE platforms,” Ewington said.
HPE VM Essentials Software has had a strong channel component in the past, and has for a long time, but now is led by a channel-only route-to-market strategy. Working with partners, we are leveraging existing relationships where customers can take advantage of existing investments, expand options with new hypervisor choices, and continue to reclaim control of their IT budgets.
“HPE has always built our strategy around being customer-first and partner-led so that delivering the best business outcomes for customers and partners means including the right people at the right moment for the best-fit solution,” Ewington stated.
HPE VM Essentials represents a new market opportunity for both HPE and its channel partners to help customers navigate changes in their virtualization strategy
“We are expanding partner opportunities with a channel-only sales motion,” Ewington stressed. “ We offer a flat 10.5 percent rebate,– but that’s distracting, especially as many partners wrap their own services around them.”
