HP is now providing channel partners in Europe, the Middle East and Africa with support to deliver its Converged Infrastructure portfolio to small and medium-size enterprise (SME) customers.
According to Manoj Bhoola, HP country manager of enterprise servers, storage and networking, this SME-focused converged infrastructure strategy allows companies to focus on innovation in their core functions, and make technology a key differentiator for their businesses.
“HP's Converged Infrastructure is the architecture for integrating existing silos of server, storage, network and facility resources with unified management to deliver a virtualised, automated technology environment,” he says.
According to Bhoola, this has become a reality with HP completing its acquisition of 3Com on 1 July. “This helps our business as we are now able to integrate networking across all our offerings” he points out.
“SMEs are benefiting from converged infrastructure, particularly in today's uncertain economic climate. HP is committed to helping SMEs while driving business growth for its partners by providing the necessary tools”, notes Bhoola.
HP says it plans to increase its sales workforce in the channel to improve its response time to partner requests, identify business opportunities and generate leads in the area of converged infrastructure.
Bhoola highlights that the initial offerings will help SMEs to improve the total cost of ownership of IT infrastructure deployed, take advantage of server and storage virtualisation, and reduce energy costs as well reduce their carbon footprint.
He says HP is putting together a strategy that will focus on the converged portfolio. “At the moment, we are employing more people focusing on this market and we are also focusing on giving our partners pre- and post-sales support as well as skills,” he points out.
In addition, HP is deploying a sales team which will help identify opportunities to be passed on to partners, Bhoola adds.
However, he says the uptake of IT in the SME space has been slower than expected, and that education is needed in the market. “To address this, we will embark on road shows as well as one-on-one customer meetings in the coming months.”
Bhoola says all businesses are looking for ways to reduce costs, and IT is one of the strategies SMEs can use to do that.
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