Monday Morning Impact – November 16

Tech Employment Regains Momentum

IT employment recorded positive gains across four key workforce metrics in October, according to CompTIA, a suburban Chicago trade association. The organization identified these metrics as sector employment, occupation employment, the unemployment rate and employer job postings.

Citing the monthly U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) data, CompTIA says that employers in the nation’s technology sector added an estimated 14,200 new jobs in October. The total includes technical and non-technical positions on the payrolls of U.S. tech companies.

Tech sector employment has seen positive gains in three of the past four months. Additionally, IT occupation employment expanded by an estimated 142,000 positions for the month. This figure accounts for technical occupations among employers across all sectors of the economy.

Employer job postings for IT occupations were up nearly 14,200 for the month, totaling nearly 239,000 postings in October.

“It is reassuring to see consistency in this month’s data with all four metrics pointing to momentum in tech employment,” said Tim Herbert, executive vice president for research and market intelligence at CompTIA.

October job growth within the tech sector was led by the addition of 15,800 positions in the IT services and custom software development category. Job gains also occurred in tech manufacturing and data processing, hosting and related services.

The percentage of IT job openings that specifically offered remote work or work from home (WFH) as an option was 23% in October, roughly in line with the year-to-date average of 22%.

Channel Impact^®
The data suggest that employers are slowly beginning to express faith in the economy by virtue of the uptick in employment growth.

Hewlett Packard Enterprise Updates Partner Program for Service and SMB Growth

Hewlett Packard Enterprise has rolled out enhancements to the HPE Partner Ready Program with promises to deliver a profitable compensation model, access to financial resources and robust enablement opportunities.

The program updates include AI-powered proposals and robotic process automation to streamline the deals cycle, leveraging the Primary Storage Opportunity Engine (PSOE) to quickly develop a proposal containing an approved quote, sizing and performance data.

HPE will allow partners to create customized built-to-order (BTO) product configurations at bundled-discount pricing, dispatched from distribution inventory. This new capability will be rolled out to distributors worldwide starting in November 2020, and built into HPE iQuote; the company’s quoting tool.

Sales certifications in FY21 will provide a mobile-friendly and interactive experience to help partners quickly align with HPE strategies and reduce out-of-office time. “Learning checks” strategically placed within modules and an assessment at the end will enable partners to efficiently demonstrate content mastery and complete their certification entirely within HPE Sales Pro.

HPE’s updated demo program includes new demo options, easier access to the HPE portfolio and allows partners to purchase their own discounted demo equipment. Partners can also access new interactive demos on the HPE Demo Portal which offer clickable, simulator-based environments that enable users to “interact” with HPE solutions.

In FY21, HPE is extending partner enablement related to HPE GreenLake with a new “HPE GreenLake Introduction and Business Planning Workshop” to help partners assess their as-a-service strategy and become proficient in selling HPE GreenLake. The workshop is composed of consultative sessions with HPE GreenLake transformation experts who advise partners on opportunities for growth and the integration of HPE GreenLake into their service portfolios.

A number of SMB-focused incentives and support programs are also unveiled.

Channel Impact^®
HPE is attempting to optimize its partner experience with extensive enablement opportunities, strategic rewards and more ways for partners to achieve profitability.

Rackspace Technology Announces New IoT Initiative

Rackspace Technology has announced new Internet of Things (IoT) professional services capabilities aimed at helping customers across all stages of their IoT journey.

“With more than 25 billion connected devices expected to be in use by 2021, our customers are under constant pressure to bring solutions to market quickly,” said Rackspace CTO Tolga Tarhan. “Our enhanced IoT services and capabilities enable enterprises to reduce the time and cost associated with piloting new initiatives, free up resources typically allocated to navigating complexities, and ultimately, speed up time to market.”

Components of the initiative include a 5-day assessment by a team of IoT experts who evaluate IoT use cases and provide recommendations for pilot solutions, including a backlog, roadmap, and cost estimate for hardware, firmware, and cloud architecture; assistance with design and development of  tailored, scalable solutions leveraging IoT device hardware, platform, and analytics; a “Modernization” service designed for customers who want to re-platform their IoT platform to take advantage of cloud native technologies; a prototyping service that enables customers to create pilot solutions; and an  IoT Cloud offering that leverages services like AWS IoT Core, Amazon Kinesis, AWS Lambda, Amazon API Gateway, and Amazon DynamoD to help customers fast-track solution design, development, and deployment.

Channel Impact^®
By leveraging the connectivity, storage application, analytics and other capabilities, Rackspace intends to help customers quickly build IoT solutions tailored to unique use cases.