Hewlett-Packard named six new members to its SMB Advisory Council Wednesday and appointed the council’s new president, Romi Randhawa, president and CEO of Fremont, Calif.-based HPM Networks.
“I’m honored to be presiding over a group of incredible partners to help further drive the momentum that’s been created as a result of this council,” said Randhawa, a council member since 2003, at a press conference in Cupertino, Calif.
He said a key mission for the council in the next year would be to better communicate HP’s SMB-facing value propositions to more of the 16,000 solution providers HP estimates service the IT needs of SMBs in the U.S.
Run by Palo Alto, Calif.-based HP’s Solution Partners Organization (SPO) - Americas, the SMB Advisory council is made up of key HP channel partners who collaborate with the computing giant to address a bigger portion of the SMB market in the U.S.
HP currently assesses the total value of the U.S. SMB market for IT solutions at $57 billion, said Meaghan Kelly, vice president of the SMB Strategy Group within the SPO - Americas. The vendor currently has about a 20 percent share of that market, she said.
The 15-member advisory body welcomed new solution provider members Tom Frederick of Zeno Office Solutions, John Gunn of ISG Technology, Timothy McGrath of PC Connection, Scott Mueller of National Business Equipment and Supply, Mary Stazi of The Computing Center and Paul Whalley of Whalley Computer Associates.
They join veteran council members Randhawa, Peter Anderson of Bayshore Technologies, Rick Chernick of Camera Corner/Connecting Point, Mike Daher of Denali Advanced Integration, Sam Haffar of Computex, Bill Jacques of Networking Technologies and Integration, Mont Phelps of NWN Corporation, Kris Rogers of PCMall, and Arlin Sorensen of Heartland Technology Solutions.
The SMB Advisory Council is led by Kelley and meets quarterly to confer with SPO executives on HP’s overall SMB strategy and specific SPO PartnerONE initiatives and programs like the vendor’s SMB Elite partner designation and financing plans. Channel partners must have $250,000 in annual sales to SMBs to qualify for SMB Elite status.
HP breaks the SMB market into three further segments -- SoHo-type businesses that have one to nine employees and mostly buy at retail or online directly from HP, companies with head counts in the 10 to 99 range that the vendor hopes to grow its business with, and medium-sized organizations with workforces numbering from 100 to 1,000 that have traditionally been HP’s strongest segment of the SMB market, Kelley said.
