Q&A: HP's Stephen DeWitt On Adrian Jones, Windows 7 And More

As Jones transitions -- he assumes his new duties on Nov. 1 -- the search is on to replace one of the most high-profile jobs in the channel. HP promises the transition will be quick, but Jones' move is a channel disruption at a critical time, and one where the role of its channel chief may indeed be changing as HP looks to ramp up its channel penetration in verticals like health care and education and continues to push ambitious agendas across all its divisions.

Jones' current and soon to-be-former boss, Stephen DeWitt, sat down with Channelweb.com Assistant Managing Editor Chad Berndtson during the Synnex 2009 National Conference in Greenville, S.C., this week to discuss what these changes mean for HP.

As senior vice president and general manager of HP's Personal Systems Group, DeWitt caught us up on the transition and some of HP's key channel targets going into 2010.

HP's partner community obviously has questions about how the channel leadership will shift following Adrian's move. I wanted to talk a little about Adrian's impact on HP's channel and then go into what the transition will look like.

Definitely. I joined a year-and-a-half ago. Adrian came in a year before me and he began a great transformation of the SPO organization. I think you can see it in the frontline leadership and in the changes we've implemented in terms of account management. He did an exemplary job of simplifying SPO to partners, and he really went above and beyond to a level of engagement that separated the wheat from the straw. Broadly, he was very well-respected -- that's why we promoted him!

As you look at HP's overall portfolio, enterprise servers and storage is an enormously strategic area and one of huge importance to us. The opportunity came to put a new leader in charge of ESS in Asia. There was a very short list, and Adrian was at the top of that list. He's got his hands full, believe me -- he's heading into one intense, uber-competitive environment from another intense, uber-competitive environment.

Can you bring us up to speed on replacing him? Is the plan still to replace Adrian?

The search is well under way, and internally and externally. Any time you have such a high-profile leadership position change, you take the opportunity to look broadly all over the business. We're going through a structured process. We are not going to do this in a vacuum and we will solicit a lot of input from our strategic partners. We're focused on putting the right individual in this spot.

By strategic partners do you mean soliciting the opinion of your VARs, too?

Absolutely.

And in the interim, Adrian's duties go to you?

Myself and Tom LaRocca. SPO reports up to me, so ultimately the responsibility lies with me. Adrian is there through the end of the quarter so he'll be doing his thing, and we've named Tom LaRocca to drive the day-to-day operations. I don't anticipate the search will take us long. Tom is driving the day-to-day operation, and the core VP leadership team is in place. Partners should see no shift in the day-to-day cadence of our operations.

HP has made a number of executive moves this year that would suggest its individual business units are getting more control over channel issues specific to those businesses. Will Adrian's successor have the same role and the same power or is the role of HP's channel chief becoming, well, decentralized?

I think it's too much of a generalization to say we're hiring another Adrian to do what Adrian did. We are a diversified portfolio company, and we want to focus on where you do your product development and where you spend your innovation dollars. Having that focus inside of these lines is imperative to our success. But I would push back on your comment that the channel management is going more into pipes. Certainly there's a focus to make sure partners are the right partners. The key is account managing customers not managing a single point channel chief.

We want to work hand-in-hand with partners so we're talking about road maps and strategy and where things are evolving, and greater investment into more verticalized solutions designed to simplify the partner's role by market. It's not the role of HP's channel chief to be the uber-aggregator. The HP channel chief role is responsible for our engagement model, how we structure our sales and operational infrastructure. It's not designed to be the single point.

So it's inaccurate to say that channel chief leadership will go into different business units, and become decentralized?

It would be very unwieldy if we went into some kind of thing where we had 58 different channel chiefs, yes.

Adrian drove the success of many channel outreach programs, including such HP programs as Executive Connect, which is popular with VARs. What happens to those programs now? Do they go away?

No, not at all. One of the great things about Adrian is that he really pushed the company to be good at things like that. He's an awesome field leader. He drove innovation like that.

Next: DeWitt On Windows 7, Health Care And Netbooks