Hurd To CIOs: HP Has Great Channel Partners
In a question and answer session with about 100 CIOs and CEOs attending a closed-door session at the HP Technology ForumExpo in Las Vegas, Hurd warned that not all channel partners are equal and urged them to work only with HP's best."We are very focused and supportive of a core group of partners that add great value and we want to reward them," he told the executives.
But Hurd repeated a familiar complaint he has with solution providers that stuff HP systems with third-party components, which undercut the value of the HP brand. "We have some partners that hollow out HP products and put in third party components and I have a problem with that. We will get very tough on those types of partners."
Hurd's comments came in response to one CIO who questioned the role of HP solution providers in the vendor's enterprise sales efforts as Hurd outlined in his keynote Monday. "We have 140,000 [channel] partners worldwide and we are not necessarily looking to grow to 141,000. We want to go deeper into the markets we cover," Hurd said in his Monday keynote at the event.
Hurd told CIOs in the 40-minute question and answer session, however, that HP's top partners are great. "The bottom line is that we can't get to all the opportunities especially in SMB in the $1.6 trillion [global] IT market. Partners are a huge part of what we do and we need great partners."
Mark Melillo, CEO and president of Melillo Consulting, an HP enterprise solution provider in Somerset, N.J., said Hurd has stepped up his channel advocacy in recent months. Just last month, for example, Hurd and HP's top executives met with several dozen solution providers in California to discuss channel relationships and strategy.
"In the last three or four months he's been talking up the channel a lot more."
And Melillo said HP and Hurd are backing up their talk with new channel investments. He cited an HP pilot program called the Account Investment Program (AIP) in which HP is funding several solution providers to place employees as dedicated HP account managers in select global 2000 companies.
"They've come up with a funding model in which they've asked us to fund people in accounts almost as if they worked for HP," he said. "They want to increase their wallet share in those accounts because they are accounts where HP has a small share of the total IT spend. That's a great statement for the channel."
Hurd said that in the past three years HP has put a lot of effort into redesigning its channel programs and redefining what role solution providers play in working with the vendor. "We are putting more energy behind our value-added partners," he said. "As a result, some partners are making more money with HP and some are making less."