HPE Partner Ready Portal revolutionizes partner experiences worldwide
Nobody's been able to throw anything at us that we couldn't handle. Our portal supports growing, changing business needs, but it does it in a way that we don't need to re-engineer it every time. It's pretty awesome.
In 2013, when Anne Anderson was appointed as Senior Director of Partner Portal and Experience at Hewlett Packard, she was faced with aging partner portals running on 10-year-old technology that had few fans among the technology giant’s 250,000 partners worldwide. Partners’ interactions with HP were dispersed across several disjointed portal experiences, scores of online tools, and all with different login steps.
To make matters worse, about 3,000 worldwide content owners from across the company were publishing to the various sites with few controls in place. Pages displayed up to 20 information links at a time. Further, an audit found that nearly 80 percent of the content was more than a year old.
Taking an outside-in approach
Anderson and her extended team determined they also needed to radically change their approach from ‘inside-out’ to ‘outside-in.’ They sought extensive feedback from HP’s partners and, armed with 10,000 survey comments, input from partner forums, and best practice advice from portal experts, decided they needed to invest in a new portal technology that could handle the complexity of:
- 3,000 content providers
- 650,000 users across 174 countries in 25 languages
- Diverse business units with millions of HP products
- A multi-tiered channel program
- Radically different types of partner businesses
- Variety of user roles among partners
- Global, 24x7 operations
A single global entry point
Using Liferay as the underlying platform, and for the first time in company history, HP was able to offer all its partners a single global URL and entry point to all of the services and tools available within the partner ecosystem: including a catalog of products, deal registration, order management, quoting and compensation, training and marketing support. Additionally, a customizable dashboard allows users to self-configure the business tools they use most to their homepage for rapid, 1-click access.
Through the new HP Partner Portal, partners were able to receive content in a targeted and relevant way through a multi-level set of permissions to deliver meaningful news, promos, homepage content, notifications, banners and more.
The key features and benefits of the HP Unison Partner Portal included:
- One partner portal with a global URL and single login to the entire HP partner ecosystem.
- Navigation organized by partner task rather than HP business structure.
- Clean, clear, consistent structure and search for easy-to-find content.
- Quick access to tools: one-click away from content and applications through customizable homepage dashboard.
- Improved performance using HP Moonshot Servers, customized
- Liferay extensions and real-time monitoring worldwide for rapid response to issues.
The results
Following the company separation in 2015, part of the HP Unison Partner Portal became the Hewlett Packard Enterprise Partner Ready Portal. In addition, HPE has completed eight different acquisitions and two divestitures that required integration with numerous different assets within the Portal environment. Through it all, the flexibility and permissioning capabilities of Liferay have made HPE’s Portal a success and a benefit for partners working with the company who now have access to effective tools and fast data communication made possible through the Portal. “We, on average, see about 70 percent of our active population returning multiple times a day. "We see about 85 percent multiple times a week,” said Anderson. “Which is really outstanding when you think about how this is a population that could be calling in to the help desk a lot. To see them actively self-serving is really terrific.”
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