Amid HP’s Leadership And Supply Chain Changes, Top Partner Compugen ‘Couldn’t Be Happier’

“The trend lines are all positive. Good, solid growth. And for us, it’s not just about the devices. We have a whole services lifecycle. It gets pulled alongside every device we sell. And so this is very good for our services portfolio. So, yeah, we couldn’t be happier. They’re growing market share. They’re taking share. This is all positive,” Compugen Inc. President Harry Zarek tells CRN.

HP Inc. has reshuffled its upper ranks even as it has reorganized its supply chain to move the manufacture of more North American-bound products out of China, all while in the midst of a wave of PC refresh buys.

Harry Zarek, president of top HP partner Compugen Inc., talked to CRN on Monday, saying even amid those changes it has been a great time to partner with the Palo Alto, Calif.-headquartered company.

“The trend lines are all positive. Good, solid growth. And for us, it’s not just about the devices. We have a whole services life cycle. It gets pulled alongside every device we sell. And so this is very good for our services portfolio. So, yeah, we couldn’t be happier. They’re growing market share. They’re taking share. This is all positive.”

According to the most recent data from industry tracker IDC, HP Inc. has not just maintained its number two spot, it has grown and is now inching closer to overall leader Lenovo in terms of total PC shipments worldwide.

In the second quarter, HP shipped 14.2 million PCs, growing that number 4.5 percent year over year to now represent 20.8 percent of all PCs shipped globally, according to IDC. HP now trails PC market leader Lenovo by 3.8 percent in terms of global PC share. Meanwhile it has increased its lead over PC rival Dell Technologies to 6.6 percent, up from 5 percent in the first quarter.

Amid the growth, HP CEO Enrique Lores has worked to change the company operationally as well. He reconfigured the company’s supply chain so that products shipped to North America are not manufactured in China. It has expanded manufacturing in Vietnam, Thailand, Mexico, India and the U.S.

Those moves have helped Compugen compete in the government space, Zarek told CRN.

Recently, HP reshuffled its top ranks with longtime PC leader Alex Cho announcing he would step down. Zarek said Cho will be missed.

“He really elevated, I think, the HP portfolio to the best it’s ever been right now terms of the breadth of the portfolio, the depth, the coverage, just the way he thinks of the device and how relevant it is in the world of modern work, and the whole nature of work and the role that HP is playing,” he told CRN.

Replacing Cho is chief operating officer of the personal systems division Ketan Patel. Zarek said Patel has already reached out to him, which he took as a positive sign.

“HP spends a lot of time selecting executives, and he was effective as the COO of the PC business. He got to a very deep level of understanding how that business operates,” Zarek said. “So I’m pretty confident that he’s going to bring a lot of experience with him, and he’s been with HP for a long time also. No concerns at all.”

HP also promoted George Brasher as senior vice president and managing director of its North American sales. In an email to CRN, Brasher said he was looking forward to the challenge.

“I’m honored to lead HP’s North America business and serve the valued customers and partners in our largest revenue-generating market,” Brasher told CRN via email. “Together with our talented team, I look forward to building on HP’s strong foundation as a leader in the future of work, expanding our portfolio, and delivering innovative solutions that help customers thrive while creating new opportunities for partner growth.”

CRN spoke with Zarek about the changes to leadership, the PC refresh and how AI could shape the future of the PC business.

What are your thoughts on all these kinds of high-level changes happening all at once?

I’ve known (President of HP Inc.’s Personal Systems) Alex (Cho) probably 20 years at least, as he sort of progressed through the HP organization. I remember specifically he was running the education business for HP, at least on the PC side. I think he’s been in the PC almost his entire career.

He’s a very generous person. He’s always willing to give time and engage. He’s got a wonderful combination of deep technical understanding, but a design aesthetic, and a very creative side to him.

And his ability to communicate with clarity is, I would say, unsurpassed. So it is in some respects, it’s a loss, but maybe not. He really elevated, I think, the HP portfolio to the best it’s ever been right now terms of the breadth of the portfolio, the depth, the coverage, just the way he thinks of the device and how relevant it is in the world of modern work, and the whole nature of work and the role that HP is playing.

I think, for example, the Poly acquisition was a brilliant move given the role of collaboration and how important that is in the way that business communicates today. The whole, sort of, forward momentum that I think we are now going to see with embedding of AI in PCs as well will be, I’m going to say, literally, a quantum leap, in how these devices will be used in the future. So even more relevant.

That’s why it’s disappointing to see him leave. But there’s a lot of depth of HP, so I’m not concerned about that. I wish him well, I’m curious, as we all are, about what is next. I don’t think he’s anywhere near the end of his career. So we’ll have to see what happens.

As far as George Brasher, it looks like he has some channel background. How does that strike you?

I know him, interestingly enough, mainly from the printer business. He was very actively involved in that area. I know he played a role as chief of staff for (HP CEO) Enrique (Lores). So he deeply understands the entire HP business. I think, again, a very, very generous person, and one that’s very engaging, always interested in and learning and understanding.

He’s also worked in Europe. I think for a period of time, he was living in England. So I think he brings a broader perspective to the business, just given his prior career moves. I’m excited. He’s open minded. He enjoys conversations and debates and perspectives. And it’s the biggest market right for HP, the North American market, and so putting him in charge, I think is a very positive move.

This is the year of the PC refresh, of course, that we’ve been hearing a lot about it. I saw some numbers from IDC recently about a month ago. I think it looks like HP is doing very well. They’ve taken share in this. And we always like to hear how that’s trickling down to the channel, or whatever is the best analogy.

I mean we’re seeing it. I would say the one thing that I would say that might be a little bit different is we’re not seeing the AI PC segment, at least in our market, which is Canada, doesn’t seem to be growing as quickly as it appears to be in other markets.

And I think it’s just the nature of the market that we’re in. It’s a little more conservative and not as much leading edge, but it will come without question as the core applications that businesses use get more AI embedded in the functionality they provide. It’s inevitable that we will move to effectively all PCs being AI enabled. And so we just have to be patient.

What is getting your attention in terms of the AI PCs that HP has released so far?

Their whole EliteBook Ultra product, both in Intel mode and AMD mode, so to speak.

Those are really, really wonderful devices. Again, there is a sort of design aesthetic to them.

The EliteBook Ultra is an excellent product, and one that anyone will feel comfortable with. It’s light, it’s fast, the graphics are amazing. I think it’s a winner, if they sort of continue on that.

And, I think we’re all very interested, sort of in a go-forward basis. How Nvidia gets into this part of the market? How is it going to coexist? Because those Nvidia chips require a lot of power, and it’s the one thing that in notebooks is really important, to be able to have long battery life or reasonable battery life. And so I think we’re still all trying to figure out what the trade-off is.

I get it if you’ve got sort of engineering workstation or something that requires that performance, outside of a notebook form factor, that makes a ton of sense. But as a general purpose, office, productivity tool, I don’t know yet. Think it’s still early.

One thing I wanted to ask you. Last week they introduced this Nvidia-powered HP ZGX Nano. And the thing that occurred to me when I saw this is I covered Dell and Lenovo as well. And of course, they’re talking a lot about how well their infrastructure sales are doing in a large server arrays. And it struck me that maybe this was a way for HP to kind of leverage some of that desire to pull compute closer to the data, and pull compute closer to on-prem?

Yes. I think there will be a fully functional, flexible hybrid model, where the data will seamlessly be able to move from cloud to effectively local, depending on requirements in terms of responsiveness, lag, confidentiality of data. I think we’ll be in a world where you’ll want both.

Because if you think about it, if you just pause for a moment, folks like Microsoft continuing to build these massive data centers to run Copilot-enabled Office applications, which means that everything that happens has to go out to the cloud, consuming cloud cycles tokens in the cloud. You can do that locally. Number one, it offloads the amount of cloud hardware you need, and it effectively saves folks like Microsoft money. They don’t have to build those clouds if they’re running locally.

Are you seeing demand for your customers for exactly what you described there? Do you see that in your market, the folks that you sell to?

I would say, not yet. I would say again, it’s still a little early. I think what we’re going to see is, ‘What is Microsoft going to say?’ Are they going to say, ‘Hey, we can give you a local version of Copilot, and because you’re not consuming cloud cycles, we’ll actually give you a discount.’ I’m waiting for that. Will that happen? I have no idea. But I think that would be a really smart move.

It does make sense. I mean, you’ve got all this phenomenal computing power now residing on your laptop. Why not use it? And in particular, the ability for faster response is something people want. I think it’s inevitable.

On the PC refresh, a lot of folks have said that they see this going past the end of support here in a couple weeks. They see the PC refresh extending maybe into the second half of next year at least. How are you looking at that?

I would concur with that. Not every customer has been able to get all of the projects they want done by this deadline, and so I think they will slip over. Some of them will go so far as to pay for a year of additional support.

The way to get a sense of that is to ask Microsoft, so how many of those annual maintenance SKUs are being sold as an indication of customers that will still need to upgrade? I think that’s the proxy to see what’s going on in converting the remainder of folks that are on Windows 10 over to Windows 11.

How’s business this year? How is it being an HP partner right now in 2025?

It’s great. It’s on an upswing. The trend lines are all positive. Good, solid growth. And for us, it’s not just about the devices. We have a whole services lifecycle. It gets pulled alongside every device we sell. And so this is very good for our services portfolio. So, yeah, we couldn’t be happier. They’re growing market share. They’re taking share. This is all positive.