Hewlett Packard Enterprise has set up a Center of Excellence (CoE) in Delhi with the help of one of its leading partners in the country, PC Solutions. Through this CoE, HPE plans to get all generation of products and technologies at one place and showcase how these work together in a customer’s existing infrastructure and understand which technology can be compatible with it by demonstrating the solutions in a real-time environment.
On the sidelines of this launch, Som Satsangi, Vice President and General Manager, Enterprise Group, and Managing Director, India, HPE, said, “Technology is advancing and moving very rapidly. We realize that when customers want to opt for a new technology they first need to understand how it is going to function in their business environment and what benefits will it provide. This is the reason behind launching any CoE. We have our own CoEs where customers can walk-in, understand the applications, run them, see how it is going to fit in their environment, and deliver to their expectations. However, the reach of such CoEs is limited, and that’s the reason why we have started working with our larger partners to set up such CoEs, through which we could have a larger reach and much better approach.”
Adding to it, Devendra Taneja, Founder and CEO, PC Solutions, stated, “In this CoE, you can find HPE’s leading products of the last 5 years such as blade systems, 3PAR, StoreOnce, etc. What we are adding to that pack is Aruba Mobility Solutions and VM Vending Machine.”
Among other solutions, the major focus of this CoE would be mobility and hyper converged solutions, as these solutions are today required for IT infrastructure across all vertical industries. And in order to give an experience of this CoE’s offerings, both HPE and PC Solutions’ teams have started talking to existing as well as prospective customers.
“As soon as the CoE was launched, our team already started discussing the possible ways of leveraging the facility and how we can continue to expand it with newer technologies. We will invite our customers and even customers of our extended partner community to experience the offerings of this CoE,” asserted Satsangi.
While this CoE is not holding any geographical boundaries and open to all the customers who want to come and experience these technologies, it is targeting those customers who are based out of the northern India. The primary reason for this is that HPE has a similar CoE set up in Bangalore, where the customers had to travel all the way to experience these solutions.
“As far as PC Solutions in concerned, if anybody from anywhere wants to come and experience the technology at our CoE, we are open to it and are not holding any geographical boundaries. It’s as per the convenience of the prospective customers whether they want to come here or go to HPE’s office at Bangalore,” pointed out Taneja.
Meanwhile, HPE is open to have similar arrangements in other parts of the country. “By ourselves we won’t be able to have and manage our own CoEs which could cover length and breadth of the country. While we have launched this first CoE in partnership with PC solutions, we can certainly leverage our channel community for many such partnerships. HPE is a channel friendly company and the offer of a CoE is open for all who have bandwidth and other interests and resources,” highlighted Satsangi.
Besides large enterprises, the company also aims to target SMB customers as well as new age companies through this CoE.
Taneja explained, “SMB CEOs have a limited time available and have to do much more multi-tasking of their resources to get to the same objective and same standards as that of a large corporate. For an SMB, it is very crucial if he gets a place where he can drive down or walk across and see what he wants to implement, because for him investment is limited. If he has more facilitation and more of his doubts are set to rest in peace, the implementation decision would happen faster. That’s the reason it gets easier for SMBs in and around Delhi to come to this CoE and experience the solutions, implement them and experience it in their own environment. Similarly, new-age companies are mostly run by young IT savvy entrepreneurs who do their own research before implementing new technologies. However, such CoEs offer them the infrastructure to try out new technologies in their own simulated environment and get their own doubts cleared before implementing these technologies.”
