From the Trenches: Striking a balance

OPINION: Following a pretty rough 2005, HP Australia is now charged with the job of restructuring its channel rules of engagement and repairing relations with a handful of disgruntled resellers.

Confusion throughout the year over HP dropping resellers from crucial NSW Government contracts without warning fuelled ill-feeling towards the big vendor.

For any organisation with a hybrid go-to-market model, it must be quite difficult to ‘strike a balance’ between which accounts to take direct and which accounts are open slather for channel partners.

HP, it seems, is sometimes faced with this dilemma. In order to compete with the direct sales might of Dell Computer, direct sales must be a proportion of the overall business.

The problem is, you are going to step on the toes of some resellers at some point in the sales process.

Still, any reseller or integrator wants clarity when it comes to engaging with their supplier. After admitting its mistakes this year, it appears that HP is willing to provide that clarity for partners in 2006.

However, it wants something in return. Faced with the task of meeting budgets every quarter, the vendor quite obviously wants its channel partners servicing the high end of town to work harder to explore every single opportunity in 450- odd customer accounts, half of which are serviced by channel partners and the other half are ‘competitive opportunities for both’.

HP Solutions Partner Organisation director Martin Dare tried explained the situation in our story on page 4, Issue 186: "If our partners cross-sell, up-sell or attach product whenever they can in customer accounts, we will not take them direct".

It will be interesting to see next year if HP stands by this statement and whether or not there will be more clarity for resellers selling to these top accounts.

Ultimately, however, it’s up to you to make the most out of every possible opportunity in each customer account. I guess this is what HP’s Dare is trying to say. For more of an insight into how HP channel partners feel about their position with the vendor, take a look at our Special HP Feature on page 38, Issue 186.

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