HP channel reorganisation adds cross selling bonus and more services

The firm is also ‘productising’ some of its enterprise services such as power and cooling projects for resell by its channel partners with delivery through its professional services units.

According to Kevin Matthews, channel manager for HP ESS, the firm has recently increased the number of its partner account managers, while the re-organisation has made HP more “focused and organised,” in its dealings with channel.
Behind the scenes, Matthews claims the firm is more agile in dealings with its partners and better able to allocate budgets now that each operating division is able to execute an independent go to market strategy.
SMB
HP has also created a new telemarketing team based in Scotland that is actively contacting end users within the SMB space with the aim of bringing in more projects for partners. Allocations of projects to partners will be based on the matching skills and certifications held to project requirements.

Matthews believes the total number of HP channel partners has stayed the same since the reorganisations last year but the focus for his team now is to drive more share of business towards HP within the existing community.  He points to “proprietary” vendors like Sun, Cisco and IBM as key targets for HP to win market share from.
The changes to the HP deal registration portal will offer increased margin when a project comprises of HP servers, storage and networking. According to Paul Early, channel manager, for HP TS in the UK, a greater percentage of HP partners are now adding service to the portfolio with “convergence and virtualisation” of particular interest.
Calls
HP will be productising a number of its services, traditionally offered by its own professional services arms, into packaged resalable items for channel partners. One of the first of the services available to partners is access to support and maintenance call handling generated by end users from the HP Insight remote support software tool. At present, HP handles calls from end users generated by Insight but Early believes that allowing access to this information could allow partners to take over SMB support and generate good recurring revenue.

Although Early see services as a big growth areas, overall HP service revenue decreased by one percent to $8.7bn over its last fiscal period. From this total number, HP Application Services posted the biggest downturn of minus eight percent compared to the prior-year period although overall profit for the HP services arm was up mainly from its outsourcing business.

In terms of the news that HP had lost its Cisco accreditation, both Matthews and Early believed that it makes very little difference in terms of its channel partners and the news would have no effect on its UK channel strategy moving forward.