HP Refreshes ServiceOne Partner Program

As HP's ServiceOne channel program comes up on its official one-year anniversary, it's getting fleshed out with new components for partners.

ServiceOne extends to qualifying partners the ability to sell or deliver on HP-branded services that used to be direct-only, especially maintenance of HP equipment and software. While HP has over 100,000 partners, the numbers in ServiceOne are much smaller. There are about 2,300 ServiceOne Specialist partners and 750 partners in the premier level, ServiceOne Expert.

"We never intended it to be something like a program element to roll out. It's really for those partners that had a similar business model," said Ken Archer, vice president of Americas Channels and Alliances for the HP Enterprise Group, in an interview this week.

HP touts about 20 percent growth in partners over the course of HP's fiscal year, which starts in November. (ServiceOne had a soft launch in July 2011 before the formal ServiceOne launch on Nov. 1, 2011.)

The new components are a management tool called Rapid, a partner financial simulator and the ability for ServiceOne partners to deliver HP Multivendor Services to support non-HP technologies in a datacenter.

The Rapid tool gives ServiceOne partners visibility into their entire HP contract business. "We want you to understand what renewal opportunities exist. We're going to give you that opportunity way ahead of when that contract comes up for termination," Archer said.

The financial simulator is designed to help current and potential ServiceOne partners explore "what if" scenarios around offering ServiceOne. "We give partners a lot of flexibility on the different services -- sell HP's branded service, sell and deliver on HP-branded services, or sell their own branded services with HP inside. But the financials weren't necessarily internalized by a lot of owners," Archer said.

With the simulator, HP Partner Business Managers sit down with HP partners to walk through revenue and profit scenarios using the ServiceOne offerings in various combinations.

The final component is a new type of ServiceOne offering. While previous lines available to partners were HP-only maintenance contracts, Archer said that ServiceOne partners wanted to meet customer demands to maintain other common datacenter equipment, from vendors such as EMC or Oracle. HP added its integrated multivendor service line to the menu of services available for ServiceOne partners to offer. "They can take on maintenance and servicing of everything in that datacenter," Archer said.

Posted by Scott Bekker on October 18, 2012