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

Hewlett-Packard has a big void in its channel leadership with news this week that Americas channel chief Adrian Jones would be promoted to a new role heading up HP's Enterprise Storage and Servers business in Asia-Pacific and Japan.

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

Switching gears to a few different technology areas, you brought up Windows 7 in your Synnex keynote this morning, and of course we're all wondering how much Windows 7 is going to juice PC sales. Can you give us your take?

I think consumers are going to be very happy on Oct. 23. I think they're going to like what they see and I also think Microsoft has learned a great deal. I don't want to hang passion out there as the key to success, but they have a lot of passion around the success of Windows 7, so to see Microsoft energized like that is good for everybody. Consumers will be first over the fence. We're optimistic. I think sizing up the sales is as good as throwing a dart against the wall, though.

For business cases, I do think this is going to be a huge refresh cycle based on time and economics. In the client world, with the majority of the migration tools and things that are out there and all the managed services, it's not like there's a barrier to client evolution anymore and oh my god, you know? There's none of that happening with this transition. I look at this as a platform that enables things people have been talking about for a long time. This can be really big.

We're seeing more attention than ever on HP ProCurve. How is HP going to continue to build up ProCurve's profile in 2010?

It's a part of the portfolio piece, and you've seen a lot from the ProCurve team in the last handful of months. There's a brisk road map and a rapidly maturing go-to-market model and VAR model there. We have lots of headroom for growth, and I think it's also going to be a very competitive battle field with a lot of customer expectations.

How will you continue to position ProCurve to compete effectively with Cisco?

That will be decided by the customer. That may sound a little bit glib, but that's where the rubber meets the road. It goes back to portfolio management -- not partners-are-us, the right partners. That's where we are.

Turning back to those vertical markets you said are a major priority for HP in the coming year, let's talk about health care and education. HP is building up its health care team and how it brings health care opportunities to the channel. How do you want VARs to view HP in health care?

It may be a sweeping generalization, but if the VAR community in general doesn't have a health care practice, you're missing half the economy. That's probably wrong and I'm not an economist, but the health care industry, in all of its issues, is an enormous percentage of our overall economy. This is a segment that's huge. It's low-hanging fruit in one sense, yes, but the health care institutions are going to generally have to change. New patient care models, for example. They're going through an evolution that's as dynamic as the auto industry.

And it's not about going in and pushing boxes -- you have to understand the requirements, from notebooks to digital signage for a room. In order to capitalize on health care, it's a portfolio play. The way we make our partners successful is to SKU it up. We're seeing an aggressive ramp-up in our ISV community, and a much tighter integration of our solutions with our ISV solutions. We will grow both inside and outside health care. It's a work in progress, we still don't quite have a dedicated health care practice.

Looking at education, from the K-12 world up through higher ed we need to SKU up solutions and simplify our offering. There's a lot we're doing around education. Just this quarter we launched HP's Campus Ambassador program, and we're now on-site at a number of universities with HP people working closely with educators. We're doing everything from influence and demand to supporting the local book store and the services that partners provide to those institutions. We're very serious about higher ed and we're not willing to cede any of that to the competition.

Where do netbooks fit in to these types of verticals? Education for sure, but the concern with health care and government is still security and that a netbook, despite the need for mobility solutions in those areas, just won't cut it for what they need.

I totally disagree with that. Being able to secure the edge is not rocket science, and we've got everything from biometrics to everything else that's out there for ours. I'm not overly worried about our ability to secure the data, but your point is right in that it can be a tablet, or a slate, a lot of different client devices. Netbooks, in general, are finding their place in the market. The category first emerged, and then you've got a notebook for $299 and $399, and now we're seeing certain performance characteristics. I mean, show me any technology that in its first 12 months had all its application and usage patterns done. It didn't. That's what happening in netbooks. Two years from now, you'll have netbooks for this, and netbooks for that, and applications for this and that, and the category will settle into its value proposition.

Synnex does the largest percentage of its business through HP and you made mention of the strength of that relationship this morning. Why is the HP-Synnex relationship so fruitful?

Not to be glib again, but look at Kevin [Murai, Synnex's president and CEO] and Peter [Larocque, president of US Distribution]. Kevin's still in his relatively early days but we've had an exceptional relationship with Synnex for a lot of years, and that's completely attributed to their people. That's not a statement about other peoples' people; that's a statement about Synnex's people. This year, we've launched a number of things with them. There are situations where a relationship really works. Our relationship with Synnex really works. There's great cultural alignment -- I mean, man, you could have taken some of Kevin's comments right off the page of language from HP. Our industry is littered with companies that don't have that cultural synergy. And they're a tough distributor. We have to make a lot of calculations as you can well imagine, and Synnex does an extremely good job on things -- they're concise and structured. It's one thing to say we have a problem, and it's another to say we can solve a problem together.

From where you sit, what are those strengths? They've had a much better year than Tech Data and Ingram Micro. That's not an apples-to-apples comparison, but, still, why does Synnex succeed?

They have a good health-care business, and that's one example of how I think their strengths are in markets that have good growth. That's not to say we don't have things going with Tech in areas, and same with Ingram. But we've picked some good areas with Synnex and seen good alignment of the field. We can always do better; I say that broadly. But they have good execution. Real good execution.