Last week Intel announced a new certification specialty designation for partners targeting high-performance computing. The HPC Data Center Specialty designation is the latest in a line of vertical market partner designations rolled out by Intel in April of this year, designed to help Intel technology provider partners expand their customer base and resources.
The new designations, which so far extend to education and Internet of Things, can be seen as an evolution of Intel’s longstanding Technology Provider program, a global membership program designed for organizations that either recommend or resell Intel technologies.
The new designation was developed in response to requests from channel partners selling into HPC, said Hugo Saleh, director of Technical Computing Segment Marketing and Industry Development, Enterprise and HPC Platforms Group, Intel Corporation. Saleh described the program as a contour of collateral and training information and support.
“The HPC datacenter specialty benefits is a program that’s very much intended to give our channel partners the skills, the tools, the training, the resources, and the credibility to be able to drive their businesses and sell into HPC and meet their customers’ needs,” he said.
“When you think of the HPC business, it’s a very diverse space, lots of different OEMs, resellers, software providers, tools, hardware and software technology folks — and in the spirit of driving that diversity and a strong, healthy, robust HPC ecosystem, we wanted to make sure we satisfied their needs and got them the information that they needed.”
The HPC specialty will be launched in North America in Q3 with more geographies around the world to follow starting next year. To be eligible, partners must have achieved gold or platinum membership status and have a minimum of $200,000 of Data Center portfolio coming through Intel authorized distributors. They also need to have at least one IA (whitebox) HPC solution offer published on Intel’s solution finder portal, have at least one verified HPC deployment (minimum of 12 nodes) and have completed 25 Intel Technical Computing training credits.
These requirements might seem like they set a high bar, but Saleh makes the point that Intel has many reseller partners who essentially already qualify.
Branding, prestige and trust are cited as some of the most compelling motivators for partners, but there are a range of tangible benefits too, including access to Intel HPC specialists and resources, opportunities to participate in HPC case studies and other co-marketing activities, access to early datacenter samples, and sales incentives.