Look Out IBM, EMC: HP Is On The Prowl For Your Partners

The first salvo in the all-out recruitment effort for competitors' most cherished partners came at the HP Americas Partners Conference where MSI Systems Integrators, one of IBM's top partners, revealed it was adding HP to its product portfolio.

Jim Simpson, president of MSI, said one of the reasons he added HP was because of HP's strength in industry standard servers. He said MSI was doing software solutions engagements with VMWare, for example, and the customer would want MSI to provide a complete solution including hardware. For customers standardized on HP servers, MSI was forced to send customers to competing solution providers. "As an integrator that was a tough thing to do," he said.

Top HP executives at the conference said to look for the company to add more competitor partners in either key product areas like storage or markets such as midmarket. The stepped up recruitment drive comes with HP stepping back from what some partners looked at several years ago as an HP exclusivity mandate. Now, HP CEO Mark Hurd says exclusivity is not essential but investment in key HP products and sales growth is the order of the day.

Historically, HP has tended to work more closely with partners that committed exclusively to HP gear, said Mike Larson, senior vice president and general manager of Personal Systems Group, Americas. "What you have seen in the last year or year and a half is that we are now starting to go out and recruit partners that historically have not sold any HP at all," he said.

"You can read between the lines," said Larson of the MSI partnership. "You are going to see us continue to create partnerships and relationships with partners that can help us grow."

Larson refused to single out specific competitive vendors whether it be IBM or EMC, but stressed that the push to grow sales is resulting in the new partner additions. "Anybody who we would think can be a good partner and help us grow is a potential partner for HP," he said.

The move from an HP exclusivity centric approach is a "big change," said Larson. "It's part of the evolution," he said. "It's part of continually improving. We are driven to grow this company. We are going to continue to drive this any way we can."

One of the big drivers behind the partner recruitment effort is Hurd's sharp focus on improving HP sales coverage particularly in the U.S. "The U.S. is a market where we have one of the worst coverage models," said Hurd in a recent interview with CMP Channel.

Even though HP has added some 2,100 salespeople in the last year, Hurd said that has only "cracked a few points worth of incremental coverage into our organization."

"That gives you an idea of just how many people we have to add," said Hurd. "It is not easy to find them. It is not easy to assimilate them. It is not easy to train them." Hurd said HP is doing everything it can to drive home the message to its own salespeople that "we prefer you use the channel. Why? So we can cover more market."

Hurd, however, said key to his sales mapping model is making sure that HP and partners do not fall into the trap of resorting to a team of five year olds playing soccer where "everybody runs to the ball."

"That is not helpful to us," he said. "We need players to play their position. We need people to help us create demand. We need to cover the market."