Computing News
CEO Enrique Lores: HP’s Business Model Designed For ‘The Channel To Make Money With Us’
Dylan Martin
HP Inc. CEO Enrique Lores talks about why the channel remains a top priority for HP, why he wants partners to sell more from HP’s wider portfolio of products and services and why he’s optimistic about HP’s future with partners. ‘Different from other companies, we have stayed the course. Since I joined the company more than 30 years ago, we have been a channel company. We haven’t moved from that,’ he tells CRN.
What are your main messages to partners this year?
[There are] multiple messages, so I’ll try to summarize all of them. One is about the need to stay optimistic because we don’t know when, but we know that there is going to be an economic recovery and therefore, we need to make sure that through this period we position ourselves in the strongest possible way, also because of the progress that we have made in the last years, which is a good indication of the type of progress that we will be able to continue to make as a recovery will happen.
Also, because of the many opportunities that we have to continue to grow the business, both by modernizing our core businesses, accelerating our joint businesses in services [whether it is for small business or for enterprises], expanding into adjacencies—all this is going to create multiple opportunities for us and for our partners to continue to grow.
[We’re also showing] our commitments to them [with] the investments that we are doing with Amplify in the program itself, in tools to make it make it more efficient to grow to do business with HP, which we know is something that they really want.
Finally, [we are recommitting] ourselves as a channel company. HP does 90-plus-plus-plus [percent] of the business through the channel. We think that the channel is a key asset for us, and whether this is for our transactional business, for our service business, we always think about our businesses, our business models [and] our portfolio, as a portfolio that we’ll have to sell through the channel, and that’s a very important commitment to our partners.
What does it mean to recommit to the channel?
I think it’s to show them that whether it is in the businesses where we lead today or in the businesses where we are going to be in the future, we are a channel company. Channel is at the core of how we build and design our plans. And that we want to continue to work with them to expand our business and to grow together. That’s the key message.
