After bragging about the capabilities of a “huge” services division, a Hewlett-Packard executive has backtracked to say that the in-house team actually helps partner service providers, rather than compete with them.
During his keynote presentation at the Canalys Channels Forum, Bill Veghte, general manager for HP’s enterprise group, said that HP has a large services division ready to deliver solutions to the market.
However, when asked in a Q&A session afterwards what that meant for partners, Veghte downplayed the unit's prominence in front of the Asia-Pacific reseller audience and emphasised the knowledge transfer benefit.
“When you look at our ‘huge’ services business, its market position is less than 2 percent of the overall addressable service business,” said Veghte.
“But what it does is ensure that we are eating our own dog food. The services and opportunities that we see, and ask [our partners] to invest in, are the same things that we invest in.”
The HP executive said that partners could then replicate the solutions pioneered by the in-house services division.
“[The services division] means we have blueprints and experts. We will have higher quality blueprints, to help [our partners] build higher quality service practices as a result.”
x86 servers after the split
The forum audience in Shanghai also asked whether low-end servers would transition into HP Inc – the PC vendor resulting from Hewlett-Packard’s forthcoming corporate split.
“The answer is no. The server market is quite distinct [from PCs] both in engineering and go-to-market,” said Veghte.
He said that even within the server range, tower servers - aimed at the SMB market - and rack servers - aimed at the upper “service provider” market - have different manufacturing and marketing requirements.
Veghte said that HP is one of only two computing companies that had survived 75 years and that the historic split of the company into PC and enterprise businesses would provide both entities with agility.
Updates to Unison
Also during the Canalys event, the US vendor announced enhancements to its Unison partner portal. HP said in a statement that improvements had been made in the areas of opportunity management, compensation management, lead workflows, MDF tool, co-marketing and joint business planning.
CRN is a media partner of the 2014 Canalys Channels Forum APAC in Shanghai that was held on 4-6 November.
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