- Partners benefit from HPE Partner Ready revenue threshold suspension, accelerated liquidity for distributors, as well as virtual training, demonstrations and briefings
- High-performance computing (HPC) is playing a leading role in our fight against COVID-19 to support the urgent need to find a vaccine that will save lives and reduce suffering worldwide.
I have already written about several companies pitching in to do what they can in support of people and companies impacted by the current COVID-19 pandemic. Any glance at the history of pandemics and plagues of the past compared to today unveils just how advanced we have become in corporate research and response to this easily communicable virus infection.
Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) has actively responded within its scope to contribute to the cause.
The first announcement I received related to dedicated relief initiatives for partners in support of business continuity in the wake of COVID-19.
These new interim initiatives have been specifically designed to relieve financial pressure on HPE partners and assist with business continuity planning. They join a number of new financial relief programs offered by HPE Financial Services as part of a $2 billion allocation to help customers and partners.
“Our partners are at the core of HPE, so when they are facing potential challenges, it’s our duty to step up and be a pillar of support,” said Paul Hunter, HPE Worldwide Head of Partner Sales. “Whether it’s helping them drive business as usual, relieve financial pressure, or simply giving them peace of mind during this time, our aim is to have a thriving ecosystem better able to meet customer needs”
Financial and support initiatives available to HPE partners include:
Program Changes to Support Financial Planning
- HPE Partner Ready Revenue Threshold Suspension – To provide stability for partners facing financial uncertainty, HPE has suspended the revenue targets required for partners to maintain their status in the HPE Hybrid IT Partner Ready program for 2021 eligibility, as well as the Aruba Partner Ready for Networking Program. During 2020, both of these programs will focus on enabling partners and helping them meet training and certification goals.
Providing Buying Partners with Liquidity
- Improvement in Early Pay Discount Terms – To alleviate COVID-related liquidity pressures, from May 1 until July 31, 2020 distributors and service providers in North America that do not participate in factoring programs can take advantage of extended Early Pay Discount terms to improve their working capital and cash positions.
- Improvement in Factoring Terms – Within the same timeframe, HPE will extend payment terms from 60 to 90 days in North America and Europe for participants in existing enhanced factoring programs.
- Suspending SDI Targets – To improve predictability of earnings, HPE has temporarily suspended or significantly reduced Strategic Development Initiative (SDI) targets in most geographies, thus providing a pay-out for distributors from $1 at or near the full percentage rebate target.
Hybrid IT Partner Propositions for Customers
- Free Remote Server Management – For the remainder of 2020, HPE will offer its remote server management software Integrated Lights-Out (iLo) Advanced to partners and customers free of charge, enabling users to configure, monitor and update HPE servers seamlessly from anywhere, with minimal resources.
- New Cloud28+ Spotlight Page – Today, HPE is working to support our service provider partners’ efforts by offering increased business continuity services to customers via a central Spotlight Page hosted on Cloud28+. This new site provides customers with a means to quickly find the right HPE partner and cloud services capable of supporting their needs. Business continuity services could include, but are not limited to, remote working solutions, extra IT capacity, connectivity, and/or any other complementary offerings.
- Fast-tracked HPE GreenLake Options – Partners can leverage HPE GreenLake Quick Quote and targeted mid-market offers to rapidly respond to customer business challenges such as cash preservation and planning for unpredictable IT needs. HPE has developed additional pre-configured reference architectures at pre-agreed pricing that speed time to implementation.
Continuing Partner Enablement with Virtual Solutions
To support partners’ continued learning, HPE is introducing the HPE Sales Pro Learning Center in May, a new sales enablement experience with trainings and micro-learnings, helping sales leaders develop the sophisticated skills needed to sell consumption propositions and solutions.
Partners also benefit from HPE’s newly developed, industry-first practical exam methodology – an innovative virtual delivery that won this year’s IT Certification Council Innovation Award. Moreover, partners can continue to participate in HPE events that have been converted into virtual experiences. Moving forward, as announced by Antonio Neri, HPE Discover 2020 and HPE Partner Growth Summit (PGS) will convert from an in-person event to HPE Discover 2020 Digital Experience on June 22, with a global audience.
Virtual demonstrations and Proofs of Concept are now possible via the no-cost, self-serve Demonstration Portal – including a number of short, pre-recorded lab demos for partners and customers – and virtual tours of the HPE Briefing Centers.
Accelerating vaccine research for COVID-19 with high-performance computing and artificial intelligence
High-performance computing (HPC) is playing a leading role in our fight against COVID-19 to support the urgent need to find a vaccine that will save lives and reduce suffering worldwide.
Scientists in labs around the globe rely on the massive computing power of HPC and supercomputers to run complex mathematical models, which transform vast volumes of evolving COVID-19 data into simulations of biological and chemical processes. These simulations advance our understanding of the new strain of virus and the complex interactions of the human body down to the molecular level, to accelerate the development of new treatments and preventative measures.
By combining modeling and simulation capabilities with new techniques in artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning, these simulations are now becoming even more accurate. That is why through our collaborations with worldwide leading research centers that are using our HPC and AI solutions, Hewlett Packard Enterprise and the HPC industry are supporting scientists tackling complex research that will unlock insights and bring us closer to drug discovery.
These initiatives, which represent both public and private sector investments, are driven by a global network of scientists, researchers, AI and supercomputing specialists, who in many cases are working together to share data, collaborate, and make vital contributions in the overall effort.
HPE is proud to play a leading role in supporting many of these initiatives with HPE HPC systems and expertise. For example, the U.S. Department of Energy’s Argonne National Laboratory (ANL) and Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL), and France’s National Center for Scientific Research (CNRS) together with GENCI, the French national infrastructure for HPC resources and facilities, are using HPC and AI to speed up discovery of antibody and drug candidates that can be tested for new vaccine treatments.
Each of these research teams are separately applying AI and machine learning to modeling and simulation to increase accuracy and predictions – something we describe as the emerging convergence of modeling and simulation with AI and analytics. These efforts further accelerate discovery of new antibodies, which are blood proteins produced to fight toxins or other foreign substances that induce immune response, or potential drug candidates based on existing catalogs of data. Researchers are then able to test these for potential countermeasures to the virus that can be developed into drug therapies.
Argonne researchers apply AI-enabled modeling and simulation to significantly speed discovery of antiviral agents
At the U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE) Argonne National Laboratory, researchers have taken on a mission to dramatically accelerate the pace in discovering antiviral agents to counterattack the new virus, reducing the potential timeframe from years to just couple of months.
Researchers are using the Theta supercomputer, powered by HPE, and housed at the Argonne Leadership Computing Facility, to apply artificial intelligence and machine learning to accelerate the process of simulating billions of different small molecules from a publicly available database of drug candidates. The goal is to improve predictions on how molecules in drug candidates interact with each other and bind to viral proteins. Successful binding means these drug candidates can be used for further testing for a vaccine treatment.
LLNL uses a first-of-its-kind AI-driven modeling platform to design 20 initial antibody candidates among 1040 possibilities
LLNL has already made significant progress narrowing down the number of potential antibody candidates from 1040 to an initial set of just 20! That’s a dramatic process of elimination. On top of that, this inspiring breakthrough was achieved in just weeks, compared to a typical lead time of years using other approaches.
LLNL’s COVID-19 response team, which includes researchers from various disciplines with deep expertise in vaccine and countermeasure development, used LLNL’s Catalyst, an HPC cluster powered by HPE, to improve predictions and speed up this discovery process by using a first-of-its-kind modeling platform. The platform integrates important components to generate high-quality predictions, such as experimental data and structural biology data, with bioinformatics modeling, molecular simulations and machine learning algorithms.
CNRS and GENCI offer a faster approach to perform molecular dynamics simulations
Similarly, GENCI, together with CNRS, has extended its Jean Zay supercomputer, which is installed in IDRIS, one of CNRS’ data centers, to power converged modeling, simulation, AI and machine learning workloads, to a number of research centers also focused on increasing accuracy and outcomes of antibodies. GENCI’s Jean Zay was designed by HPE in direct response to President Emmanuel Macron’s significant AI initiative to propel France’s R&D in AI with a new supercomputer.
We are extending our HPC efforts to address COVID-19 research on a greater, national scale by recently partnering with the White House as part of the COVID-19 High Performance Computing consortium.
