HP's New Channel Chief Outlines His Five Big Goals

Hewlett-Packard's Americas channel chief

Speaking with VARBusiness Monday at an HP media event in Houston, Jones highlighted a handful of the key areas where he'll focus his energies in the coming year.

1 Grow HP's storage channel sales.

Jones, who previously held executive sales positions at McData and Quantum, is no stranger to the storage market, so it was highly expected that this would be a key area of focus for him. Plus, HP CEO Mark Hurd has already singled out HP's storage business, which grew only 3 percent in the first quarter because of declines in HP's high-end storage array and tape businesses, as a key area for improvement.

Jones' initiative to grow storage channel sales will include adding new partners as well as evaluating current sales and marketing approaches.

"Storage is definitely an area [where] we need to get more focused. We have great partners in storage, but we don't have all the right partners. We have to look at NetApp and EMC resellers and see if we are attacking those in the right way, and we also need to look at whether we have the right plans for our partners to go after that business," Jones said. "I think we have great products, but we need to get better at how we focus with the customers and we need to get more marketing."

"NetApp did a good job of reinventing itself in the channel, but NetApp has some areas of weakness. And we're going to attack wherever we can, whether it's NetApp or EMC, and I see further consolidation in that space as well," he added.

2 Enable printer resellers to become more profitable.

"We need to make sure our partners profit in the IPG [ImagingPrinting Group] business on hardware and supplies," Jones said. "We've done great things with PSG [Personal Systems Group], and we need to leverage things we did well there into other areas."

HP is already making adjustments to its partner programs to change some elements that weren't working well in its Technology Solutions Group (TSG) and ImagingPrinting Group (IPG) business units. For example, this week the Palo Alto, Calif., company said that starting in May it will alter the way it rewards TSG and IPG partners under its Attach Plus program, which is aimed to reward partners for sales that combine products across HP's various product lines.

Though HP said that approach has worked well for its Personal Systems Group (PSG) business, it found that rewarding partners for selling enterprise storage and servers at the same time wasn't as effective, with partners saying that these sales often are made through different divisions of enterprise businesses. Instead, HP set up new incentive plans to reward partners for sales independent of each other.

As for IPG, HP now will reward partners with additional rebates for selling supplies and services along with its hardware. It previously only rewarded partners under the program for selling products in the high-growth areas of color printers and multifunction printers.

3 Grow government and education channel sales.

Jones said a major recruitment effort is under way at HP to bring onboard more VARs serving education and state, local and federal government markets. As part of that initiative, Jones will also hire more staff to recruit those partners.

"There's a huge opportunity out there, and an IT company doing the federal business well should be getting about 15 to 20 percent of their revenue from the federal space. We don't have that, at least not in the channel space," Jones said. "We need to get a lot better in that whole space, but we also have to be careful in how we penetrate and gain market share because in the education area you can lose money pretty quickly if you don't plan well."

A recent reorganization within HP channel group has also brought the HP unit dedicated to growing government and education sales directly under Jones' watch, which he said should help expedite the effort.

4 Grow the smaller guys.

"We need to make sure we are also focused on the smaller regional partners, these small guys with a $500,000 opportunity here and a $200,000 opportunity there. Those all add up. We need to not be ignoring those guys," Jones said.

In this area, Jones said he would focus on working with distributors as well as creating more alliances between ISVs and local resellers.

5 Last but not least ... simplify.

Jones said driving "simplicity" for partners is going to be a personal mantra of his that will permeate all areas that he focuses on.

"I came here because I saw an opportunity to take it to the next level. We have great partner programs, but we can make it simpler and easier to do business with HP," Jones said.

But first, Jones said with a laugh, he still has to memorize all of the acronyms in the HP alphabet.