HP Australia alleviates channel skills shortage

HP Australia is throwing additional resources behind its Business Partner Solution Architect (BPSA) program which will see skilled pre-sales staff placed within newly appointed Premier Business Partners.

Launched in 2005, the BPSA program provides funding, training and on-going support of HP dedicated pre-sales staff employed by eligible HP channel partners. The program was designed to facilitate an increase of pre-sales capability within HP’s reseller community. The program only covers the vendor’s storage and server products and services, plus complementary IT solution sets as agreed with HP.

“If we go back about four or five years ago, what we started to recognise the need for was an increased level of alignment between HP and our channel partners,” said Stephen Bovis, director of enterprise storage and servers at HP Australia. “More than 75 percent of our business today is transacted in some way by a channel partner. We also found that the server and storage landscape had become quite complex and we were seeing a huge opportunity where customers needed qualified people who were out there and able to help them to solve some of the challenges they were facing. If we fast forward to now, this is becoming more and more complex.”

Bovis said HP realised it needed the sales people to add skills capabiltities, whether they be sales people at HP or sales people in the channel.

“We particularly needed pre-sales people, so we required solutions architects capable of being able to design a solution for a customer that can help solve some of their challenges,” said Bovis. “Not only are we investing in our [new] Premier Partners, we also have the distribution organisations out there. Therefore partners who do meet some of the requirements can still have access to those pre-sales people [through distributors]. With the scaling we are about to do, we believe we have strong capacity and capability within the channel from end-to-end, to solve those customer challenges.”

Darrin Edkins, enterprise storage and servers partner programs manager of the solution partners organisation at HP Australia, said: “The BPSA program has enabled us to build a lot of capability around the planning and design of sophisticated solutions. Under our current investment in the program we have approximately 21 solutions architects out there in the channel. All training costs related to BPSA are absorbed by HP.

“When the BPSA program launched in 2005 it was the single biggest channel investment HP has made in many, many years. The new extension of the BPSA program to our Premier Business Partners is as big as the initial program conception. We are going to be doubling the amount of BPSAs out there in
the channel.”

Edkins said HP had made some changes within its channel recently, the most significant of which entails the launch of the Premier Business Partner Program.

“There are two ways to become a Premier Business Partner: one is to straight have a revenue number big enough and the second, more common method, is to become a ESS (enterprise server storage) specialised business partner,” he said. “Specialised partners get accelerated rebates. Upon investing and getting their individuals skilled up, we then accelerate their growth rebates. We also provide additional marketing support, as partners do not have
this capability.”

Edkins said one of the benefits of becoming a Premier Business Partner for data centre or storage systems partners is that they will get access to the
BPSA program.

“Partners today will have some kind of pre-sales component within their organisation, and the BPSA program enables them to skill those pre-sales people up. However partners can also go out and recruit someone into the program. These new recruits need to have some experience and must have completed an accredited pre-sales professional examination and that is foundation pre-sales knowledge,” said Edkins. “That all means that we have another whole suite of business partners getting access to the BPSA program for the first time. This is one way of HP trying to answer the skills shortage issue. We have witnessed that challenge and this program has been designed to try and rebuild that capability back into our channel.”