Hurd Sees HP, VARs As Team Players

On his one-year anniversary as Hewlett-Packard’s president and CEO, Mark Hurd, in an exclusive interview, articulated his strategy to build a winning team at HP, and he’s mapped in the channel as a star player.

“We look at the channel as a strategic advantage and not a strategic problem,” Hurd said last week, adding that his intention is to quiet the debate over direct vs. indirect sales and mold the Palo Alto, Calif.-based vendor and its channel into a single team.

“I look at the majority of our partners as a very direct extension of Hewlett-Packard,” he said. “Compensation isn’t the No. 1 thing that drives our employees. You’ve got to show up with winning products; you’ve got to show up with a winning environment where partners feel like they can go to the marketplace and win.”

>> ‘WE NEED YOU. WE CAN’T GET TO EVERY BUYING POINT. AND EVEN WHEN WE GET TO EVERY BUYING POINT, WE CAN’T BRING EVERY SOLUTION. SO WE NEED HELP.’ —Mark Hurd

Hurd cited HP’s new Attach Plus channel program and a revamped sales organization that includes plans to more closely align with partners in the coming year.

“If you are a partner and you believe in what we can do to help the partner in the market and even the aggregate value proposition, if you believe in our support structure and our people, the compensation plan in the end should just be a supporter of that mission,” Hurd said. “And that’s what we are trying to do. We’re trying to put our money where our mouth is.”

HP’s solution providers said they welcome Hurd’s plan to turn his attention to the channel after spending his first year on the job focused internally. “He’s re-energized HP employees,” said Tim Joyce, president and CEO of Roundstone Systems, an exclusive HP solution provider in Alameda, Calif. “He’s taken a very good company and made it better. For the past year, he had a lot of problems to fix, but the channel really wasn’t one of them; it’s not well-tuned, but it’s not really a problem. He’s spent his time fixing internal issues. Now he gets a chance to look at the engine that drives the sales.”

In the past year, Hurd has recast HP as a leaner organization, trimming its workforce by more than 15,000 employees worldwide and eliminating the umbrella Customer Solutions Group sales organization, instead making each of HP’s business units responsible for its own sales and marketing. During his tenure, HP also has reined in its Colorado Springs, Colo.-based direct-marketing call-center, which solution providers say often tried to convert accounts long-served by partners into HP direct accounts.

But the impact of those moves has had a mixed impact on partners, most notably the workforce reductions that partners say translates into fewer HP sales people working with partners.