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Stephen DiFranco, Hewlett Packard vice president and general manager, Solution Partners Organization - Americas, spoke with CRN about the company's commercial sales and distribution strategy for the company's eagerly anticipated WebOS based TouchPad which is scheduled to be released on July 1.
DiFranco, whose SPO organization has waged an aggressive campaign to get partners to build mobility practices with WebOS and the TouchPad, said HP's commercial distribution partners (Ingram Micro, Synnex, D&H Distributing and Tech Data) began taking solution provider pre-orders for the TouchPad this week. Below are excerpts from the question and answer session with DiFranco.
When will the TouchPad be available from HP distributors?
The distributors have placed their orders with HP. We enabled them to begin accepting pre-orders from VARs on June 19. We haven't made any changes to our planned announced availability dates (July 1) for the product in the United States. Canada will be shortly after.
Will distributors lag in terms of product availability versus retailers carrying the same product?
We are allocating delivery of units into our distributors and Tier 1 partners as well as retailers to support the release date of July 1.
Talk about availability from commercial direct market companies like CDW?
CDW, PC Connection, PC Mall, Zones and Insight will all have availability of the product as well. In fact, many began taking pre-orders on June 19 as well.
Every one of the major DRCs (Direct Market Companies) either have or soon will have their Web sites up and actively taking pre-orders.
The distributors have all purchased some mix of versions of the commercial SKUs (16GB and 32GB memory units). They will have slightly different mixes based on what they thought their customers needed. Canada will be slightly behind the U.S.
We are on track. Distributors are excited. And our VARs are excited.
Talk about the commercial channel program to help VARs sell TouchPad?
We have put together a program for our distributors to allow them to enable their VARs to afford demo units and sample units they can give to their customers for evaluations. One of our objectives is to get a lot of evaluation units out there. We worked with the PartnerOne team on a program that our distributors and VARs could leverage.
What is the difference between the consumer TouchPad units and the commercial TouchPad units?
There is no difference in the product. It will ship in the same box and have the same configuration with a commercial part number. The business model around the commercial SKUs will allow us to sell them through commercial channels. Distributors can service them through our commercial services organizations which is what our VARs use.
In an attempt to enable a more commercial buying and selling and service experience, we have created SKUs that can be serviced through the commercial service teams, supported through PartnerOne funding dollars and executed and sold through distributors.
The product itself is no different. This ensures a commercial business model that our commercial VARs could leverage. That is an attempt to provide the service that the VARs asked us for. VARs needed a way of not just buying it through distribution, but more importantly servicing it through a commercial service model.
The other difference is the commercial SKU will have Citrix Receiver (a light weight software client for desktop and application virtualization on a mobile device) on it.
You can download the same apps for both units (commercial and consumer). There is no prohibition on any apps. You can put commercial apps on the consumer unit. You can put consumer apps on the commercial unit. There is no difference in the OS. The OS is exactly the same. The hardware is exactly the same. The warranty itself is the same.
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