Supporting SMBs to grow, with a right-sized digital transformation

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Small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs) are a large and growing sector of the business landscape in the Middle East and North Africa region. With 90% of the marketplace dominated by SMBs, there is a clear necessity for them to deliver a high-quality service, to ensure customer loyalty and to increase their reach.

SMBs need just as much support to grow and flourish as large enterprises do, but may fall to a disadvantage due to a lack of finance, knowledge or skill. There is a significant need for digital growth in all SMB verticals, from retail to manufacturing, media to healthcare. To attract new customers and grow their businesses it is crucial that SMBs increase the pace of digital transformation. This would address the digital use gap we’ve seen in the region, with individuals embracing digital technologies faster than SMBs, especially in recent months when the shift to online has rapidly increased.

The importance of digital

Successful products, services, customer experience and employee productivity all hinge on digital, and HPE works alongside a range of partners and distributors to ensure they are equipped to offer the best and most appropriate solutions to SMBs. We’ve strengthened these links with our partners, offering programmes like our ‘Get More’ tour to educate, equip and enable, as well as incentive programmes like ‘Engage & Grow’ to motivate and reward sales teams. These resources are used across our own teams as well, as we believe in a united and consistent approach to supporting colleagues, distributors, partners and customers.

Developing relationships for tangible benefits

Our channel partners deliver our HPE Small Business Solutions, and today nearly 70% of our annual sales are through our 80,000-strong partner network. Our HPE Partner Ready Programme is designed to support partners to increase sales growth, providing them with resources to differentiate themselves in an increasingly competitive market and support customers’ requirements.

HPE Small Business Solutions

We value the time our partners take to find out exactly what the customer needs, and after talking to our SMB customers, we have developed a suite of solutions designed specifically for SMBs.

HPE Small Business Solutions address the top use cases we discovered in our conversations with SMBs.

• Virtual Desktop Infrastructure was a top priority, to enable work-from-home productivity and ensure business continuity with secure remote access.
• Consumption-based cloud services ranked highly as well, with solutions such as HPE GreenLake solving the problem of over-provisioning, with a pay-per-use model.
• Making the most of IT resources was a common theme, with virtualisation another key solution, to allow multiple applications to run on a single server.
• Hyperconverged Infrastructure was also a top use case, with software-defined storage offering a reliable, affordable, scalable and secure option.

Finding the right fit

We understand how important it is for SMBs to find the right solutions for their organisation, taking into account cost-efficiency, scalability and ease of use. Getting the right fit can make all the difference in achieving key ambitions and we want to make it as easy as possible for our partners to deliver suitable solutions.

Simple solution suites

We understand that every SMB is different, with a range of business objectives, working practices and structures, so we offer a large number of multi-product solution suites to make it easier for our channel partners to identify the right solution for the right need. This reduces complexity and provides all-important guidance from our partners, offering reassurance that the solution is a good fit.

Quick customisation

Our FlexOffers programme allows our partners to quickly customise ProLiant servers from stock within 48 hours, ensuring each server is right for the organisation’s requirements. This flexibility includes customisation of hard drives, memory and other options which previously may have taken weeks to be custom-built

HPE is passionate about supporting SMBs to achieve their potential and grow in a sustainable way. We value the relationships we are building with partners and distributors, and our aim is to further strengthen these links to ensure SMBs continue to benefit from the best solutions.

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Muna Issa
Hewlett Packard Enterprise

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