HP To Unveil Artificial Intelligence-Based Special Pricing Portal

Kevin Gilroy, vice president of HP's of Commercial Channels told Ingram Micro VentureTech partners here that the AI based pricing portal will provide "real time" special bid pricing "as fast as you can type in the data." The portal is set to be delivered in HP's second fiscal quarter, he said.

HP is going to promise a turnaround of less than two hours on the special bid pricing requests, said Gilroy, noting that is "conservative. We want it to be real time. We think it can be instantaneous." Currently, Gilroy said the "best case scenario is four hours and worst case scenario is two days."

Gilroy said that the the portal will provide partners with complex portfolio pricing capabilities. He said the portal "will be a material competitive advantage for our solution providers to compete with direct marketers such as Dell."

HP is also planning to deliver in less than 30 days new streamlined business planning processes for its partners. "You told us our processes are time consuming, costly, administrative nightmare," he said. "They will be streamlined."

He also announced a series of exclusive offerings for Ingram Micro VentureTech members including a one percent rebate on solution sales centered around document management and security surveillance solutions, special low cost financing, and a 0.5 percent financing rebate. Ingram and HP are also providing solution architects to assist partners in winning deals and providing post sales support, he said.

HP and Ingram Micro are working on additional exclusive offerings for VentureTech members. "This is only the beginning," pledged Gilroy. "Together we are trying to build out the right architecture and the right recipe to build out solutions that really address customer needs and ultimately drive business."

Gilroy said it is critical that HP and solution providers team up to deliver specialized solutions to establish "beachheads" in vertical markets such as healthcare document management and security surveillance. He urged partners to work with HP and Ingram to "get outside of traditional hardware thought processes."

"We need to get out of traditional boundaries and issues about extra discount, a point here,, a point there," he said. "We need to feel comfortable making mistakes together because that is where we are going to get the learning on how to build out the right solutions and the right architectures to take us into the Chapter two that it is so necessary to drive toward."

Dan LaManno, vice president of Entre Computer Services, a 20-year-old Oxnard, Calif. based solution provider, said that HP is playing catch up to IBM with the VentureTech community. The partnership between VentureTech and IBM on SMB services deals has won a lot of "loyalty" to IBM, he said.

"HP has to become HP again," said LaManno. "It was a reverse takeover by Compaq - HP is trying to stop the hemorrhaging. Each month goes by and they are still losing market share. They are in survival mode and when you are in survivial mode things aren't always as reasonable as they should be." LaManno stressed that many solution providers struggle with the same pressures facing HP. "There is no right or wrong here," he said.