In the 1997 non-fiction book “The Perfect Storm,” which was made into a hit movie three years later, a commercial fishing boat becomes lost at sea after encountering a powerful combination of two potent weather fronts and a hurricane. Prominent technology vendors, such as Hewlett Packard Enterprise Co., are encountering a similar confluence of elements as transformation engulfs all aspects of the enterprise.

“Vendors like HPE are transforming, channel partners themselves are transforming, and customers are transforming,” said Terry Richardson (pictured), vice president of channels and alliances at HPE. “It’s all happening simultaneously.”

Richardson spoke with Dave Vellante (@dvellante), host of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s mobile livestreaming studio, at theCUBE’s studio in Boston, Massachusetts. Over two separate interviews, they discussed adjustments made by HPE and its partners to meet customer objectives, a newly-introduced program to combine technical resources, partner certification with several prominent companies, and the important future role of edge computing (see the full interviews with transcript here and here). (* Disclosure below.)

Shift from products to services

Transformation is reshaping the critical role that channel partners play in the sales ecosystem. It means that companies like HPE and its partners must be in alignment on a customer approach that recognizes the shift away from products and more toward software and services.

“Applications follow data, and infrastructure follows applications,” Richardson said. “You really need to understand what the client’s intended outcome is and what are the business objectives that they’re trying to achieve. That will allow you to focus more on workloads and applications, which ultimately will lead to an infrastructure sale.”

To deal with the perfect storm of transformation, HPE has recently introduced a new program designed to strengthen the hand of channel partners. HPE Tech Pro Community, which was rolled out globally in March, unites partners with HPE’s top technical talent in a single-pooled resource.

“We’ve created a community where we train our partners’ technical resources exactly the same way we train our own engineers,” Richardson said. “We often see our technical resources and our partners’ technical resources collaborating in front of customers to deliver real-world solutions, and that’s important.”

Watch Richardson’s discussion of vendor, channel partner, and customer transformation below:

One-stop for certified solutions

HPE Tech Pro Community adds another dimension to other key resources within the company designed to offer a strong customer-facing channel partner program. One element of this has been HPE Complete, a one-stop-shop for certified HPE and third-party partner infrastructure solutions.

HPE has been working with a number of technology alliance vendors to certify their solutions within the HPE ecosystem. Once the certification is complete, the solution is added to HPE’s pricebook of offerings.

Participating partner companies in HPE Complete include Qumulo Inc., Scality Inc. and Datera Inc., in addition to firms such as Veeam Software Inc. and Cohesity Inc., according to Richardson.

“Our value proposition to these vendors is they can tap into HPE’s global channel and get much broader scale than they could as smaller companies,” Richardson said. “They also get a selling force at HPE that’s motivated to deliver the solutions that our customers and partners need.”

HPE’s focus on its partner ecosystem comes at a critical time of change as enterprise companies increasingly deploy resources to edge computing. HPE’s chief executive officer, Antonio Neri, recently indicated that his company’s edge compute sales were growing at a 187% clip and called it a “long-term growth opportunity” for the company.

“We’ve been on the forefront of forming new partnerships with entities that have relevant business applications to allow customers to complete their edge projects,” Richardson said. “We’re starting to see partners that have historically been data-center focused, taking advantage of this redefinition of what the data center is.”

Watch Richardson’s discussion of the HPE Complete program below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s CUBE Conversations. (* Disclosure: Hewlett Packard Enterprise Co. sponsored this segment of theCUBE. Neither HPE nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE