HP's Hurd Rallies Public Sector VARs
Mike Humke, vice president, public sector for HP's Solution Partners Organization (SPO) told more than 100 solution providers attending Everything Channel's XChange Government Integrator conference at the Gaylord National Resort outside Washington, D. C. Wednesday that Hurd met privately this week with five public sector solution providers in Boston.
"Mark told the partners the HP needs to grow the [public sector] market; we need greater share; we need expanded coverage and we're not going to hire more badged HP people to do it," Humke said. "He told the partners HP can't be successful without you."
Humke said that the five partners that attended the meeting were all focused on state and local government and education markets. He said that Hurd held a similar meeting earlier in the year with Federal government solution providers. He also said that Hurd gave the solution providers his personal e-mail and told them to contact him if they had any problems, concerns or suggestions about their HP public sector business.
Humke is the first vice president dedicated to the public sector market within SPO. During his 18-month tenure, HP has seen its public sector sales increase 20 percent and he has tripled SPO resources devoted to the public sector over the period.
While he said HP is on a mission to keep growing its public sector market share, the gains will come through selling solutions, not point products. "Customers don't want another box, they want solutions," he said. "I don't want our partners to be the preferred hardware supplier; I want them to be viewed as a strategic partner."
Humke said the change is necessary because while public sector IT spending is up, the money allocated to IT is to improve and maintain existing services and not through budget increases. To illustrate his point, Humke asked the audience to raise their hands if their public sector clients planned budget increases this year, and no one did.
"IT budgets aren't increasing," he said. "How do you sell into that environment? You've got to find a way to make money someplace."
Humke noted that even though governmental agencies don't have the IT budgets they once had, they still have to meet the demands of their constituents. Instead, Humke urged solution providers to think out of the box when going after public sector IT spending. "Do your customers know what they are spending each month on printing costs," he asked. "Document management can save them millions of dollars each year."
He said too that the explosion in record keeping related to compliance contributes to a tremendous demand for storage. He predicted that storage requirements worldwide would increase by six fold in the next two years alone.
"Disaster recovery is another opportunity," he said. "State and local governments and schools don't even think about that."
Terry Calloway, president of Data Technique, a public sector solution provider in Pittsburg, Kansas agreed with Humke's public sector market assessment. He said he's seeing growth in his business because he focuses on data compliance solutions related to student ID issues. "We don't sell hardware," he noted.
Humke too said HP plans to do a better job in facilitating cooperation between its various partners so they can jointly pursue public sector business. "Systems integrators don't understand hardware. We have to figure out how we can marry our partners," he said.
He added too that HP wants its diversity partners to move upstream and qualify for more enterprise authorizations such storage elite or blade center elite so that they can pursue more public sector solutions opportunities.
He explained that diversity partners often work as subcontractors to larger solution providers whose contracts require a diversity component. Sometimes he said the diversity company meets all of the diversity requirements such as women or veteran owned, but lack needed technical skills.
"We want to increase the quality of a diversity network," he said.
Humke also talked about the new Mini-Note, the small mobile PC designed for the education market he said that schools have already jumped on the product. "We've already had orders over 10,000," he said. "The market has taken off nicely."
Ed Franklin, AVP field sales, government programs at Synnex, a distributor in Greenville, S. C. asked Humke if the product was available through open distribution. Humke said it was, but Franklin urged HP to put more of its public sector business through open distribution.
"Primarily, it's (the Mini-Note) is done through the agent model," he said. In that model he noted that the products are sold direct to state governments and solution providers are then paid an agent fee.