One announcement coming out of Interop this week that hits close to home is a new program from HP to help you develop your data center skills. HP says the future lies in the converged data center, and you’d better skill up for it. The HP ExpertONE training and certification program is going to help you get there by building on what you already know with fast tracks. HP says this will “future-proof” your career and make you more valuable to your employer or customers.
Flash back to last May when I interviewed Brian Beneda, the director of strategy and business development for HP’s certification and learning program. At that time, Beneda shared his vision for changes that were taking shape within the program. (See The evolution of IT certification: broadened skill sets for converged infrastructures.) This week at Interop, HP began delivering on that vision with a major announcement that marks a new era for IT certification.
The giant tech vendor unveiled HP ExpertONE, the first professional skills development and training program to focus on the converged data center (which HP calls the Converged Infrastructure). HP ExpertONE spans the enterprise, from networking, storage, servers and software to printing and personal computing. With such broad reach, HP says it can help you gain the right skills for architecting, implementing and managing infrastructures across your enterprise and prepare you for the next level in your career.
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To understand the value of this new training and certification program, you need a bit of context on the HP Converged Infrastructure. It’s a blueprint for the data center of the future that converges servers, storage and networking with facilities, all managed through a common management platform. This infrastructure breaks down the technology silos that have dominated the raised floor for the past two decades. HP customers are buying into this blueprint because it offers simplicity through integration and automation. It allows IT to respond faster to business needs.
This high level of integration means that the people who work with the Converged Infrastructure need to have technical skills across all the technologies. But that’s not how most IT training and certification programs work today. The typical program creates experts in those silo areas — storage, networking, or software, for instance. While workers might be experts of their own domains, they have little knowledge of how it all ties together. It is this competency gap that HP ExpertONE is designed to fill.
HP training courses and certifications are evolving to cover how the pre-integrated technologies and products fit together in a converged data center. So for example, if you follow a networking certification path, you’ll also acquire a deeper understanding of new storage and video applications and protocols and how those impact network performance, and how to use HP’s Virtual Connect technology to interface the network to servers and storage in a virtualized and consolidated way.
And speaking of a networking career path, HP also announced an entirely new portfolio of more than a dozen networking certifications. These credentials incorporate the new products and technologies from 3Com, TippingPoint and H3C, which HP acquired last spring. According to HP, this portfolio offers unique multi-vendor strategies that enable you to build and maintain a standards-based networking architecture. What’s more, you can apply your certified expertise from Cisco and other networking vendors toward HP certifications, taking a fast track through training and certification. HP says you can reduce your training time by 77% and save money while attaining an HP ExpertONE certification.
These networking fast tracks are the first incarnation of something that promises to be really revolutionary in the IT training and certification business. In its white paper The people side of converged infrastructure, HP describes a plan to offer modular training that is custom-built according to an individual’s current knowledge and skill level. So, IT professionals who have some level of experience and maybe a credential or two from third-party vendors would get accelerated training and a shortened path to certification from HP. Imagine that — you get credit for what you already know and don’t waste time in training going over it again.
The flagship certification of the HP ExpertONE program is the brand-new HP Master ASE (Accredited Systems Engineer) — Converged Infrastructure Architect. This is HP’s first board-level certification, and it’s designed to deliver the advanced skills needed to architect and manage a converged infrastructure. The training and certification include an ROI component to ensure that the architect designs solutions that deliver superior business value. According to HP, this is the first IT vendor certification program that encompasses a financial and technology component.
You can get more information about HP’s new training and certification program at www.hp.com/go/ExpertONE. Also see Jim Duffy’s take on the announcement here.
