HP Lays Down Its Partner Line
In a QandA session at the HP securities analyst meeting in New York Tuesday, Todd Bradley, executive vice president of HP's Personal Systems Group, said HP has begun to talk to some partners about the gray market issue. In fact, he said, HP has "retooled" several partner agreements and has worked with "a lot of those people on how we recover some of the money that potentially we are due or both of us are due."
Bradley would not talk about which specific partners have crossed the gray market line. However, he noted that it's unclear that it is confined to one class of partner.
Going forward, HP has implemented a structure to assure there is "clarity around the channel and our own willingness to allow them to drive a gray market solution," Bradley said.
On the growth side, HP has laid out sales objectives for its top partners, Bradley said, noting that HP also has discussed with partners "what they can expect from us and what we can expect from them."
For his part, HP CEO Mark Hurd said the computer giant is aligning partner compensation to performance. "Not all partners are the same, and we are trying to align our channel compensation much the same way we align our internal compensation," he said. "Believe it or not, at HP not everybody gets the same thing [in terms of compensation]. And in the end, most of that revolves around performance."
Hurd added, "We look at the channel in multiple ways. There is a strong desire to make our view of the channel generic. Are we direct? Are we indirect? Are we channel-friendly? The issue for us really isn't nearly that simple. We look at multiple segments of the market, and we try to align the opportunities we see in the marketplace with the opportunities for us to partner. So we are looking for very specific types of partners. All partners are not the same. For us, it is very important to find partners that add value."
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