Aussies place bets on HP

HP's efforts to reinvent itself over the last year have impressed Australian resellers attending its annual partner conference this week, with many placing bets on chief Meg Whitman to restore the company’s faded fortunes.

At its GPC in Las Vegas, HP unveiled further details of sweeping changes to the way it pay its partners -  promising to boost their income -  and also announced its first partner program for cloud computing.

Its other major change to remuneration – after growing criticism from resellers – will be to pay partners from the first sale, rather than only if they passed certain milestones, and to remove payment limits.

Mark Smith, the proprietor of Perth enterprise hardware reseller Red 11, told CRN it was easy for resellers to jump ship to another vendor, given the past year HP has had.

“But I believe in long term relationships. It’s like a marriage - you have your highs and lows, you just have to ride them out.”

Smith’s business has revenues of between $15 million to $20 million, with HP making up more than 80 percent. He lauded Whitman’s keynote speech last year and said she is changing the company for the better.

“Had she not been at the helm HP today would be a very different company,“ he said. “When there is a problem, the people you respect are the ones who admit there is a problem and say we are going to fix it.

“She is not just a figurehead, she gets down and talks to people - she will come up and ask you about your business. So she is able to understand what the resellers want and need.”

Smith said he will “absolutely” make more money when the partner remuneration changes begin to take effect on May 1. 

“The changes show an understanding of the market and what partners are looking for – I see it as a positive step,” he said.

David Simpson, chief executive of value added reseller e-Volve, said HP's latest range of notebooks showed the PC vendor was finally getting back to its roots.

“They have some pretty substantial corporate products and technology."

Simpson would not reveal his company’s revenues but said his model was online only for companies with between 1000 and 40,000 seats. He sells HP PCs, servers, networking and storage and has trading entities in Singapore, New Zealand and the United States.

Simpson is not convinced HP is fully back on track, however. He said the company had “lost its way” with the channel, especially in the light of decisions such as the Autonomy purchase, mooted sell-off of the PC division and the massive writedown stemming from the purchase of EDS.

But he praised Whitman, saying she had shown much-needed leadership of a company that had changed CEOs once a year for three years before her appointment 18 months ago.

“Her commitment to getting closer to the channel is absolutely key,” Simpson said.

When Whitman announced during her keynote speech yesterday that HP would remove its quarterly cap on remuneration for its partners she drew enthusiastic applause.

Karl Sice, A/NZ head of technology solutions at Staples (formerly Corporate Express), was similarly upbeat about HP under Whitman. The company delisted from the ASX in September 2010 and declined to provide its financial figures.

“I love [her] emphasis on the channel and I love the investment and resources that are being put out into that area."

Sice said he felt Whitman understood what he described as the ‘new world” of business and technology.

“Her experience with eBay (where she was CEO from 1998-2008) is a perspective that we can relate to – we do a huge amount of ecommerce. So we are bullish on her and think it’s going to be a good journey ahead.”

Some reservations and criticisms remain. White said he didn’t know if the customer “really cared about” HP’s enterprise strategy of pre-integrating a suite of enterprise hardware from devices, through networking to storage.

“More and more we are seeing customers get fixated on certain vendors for, say, servers or switching and they won’t change,” he said.

“All these companies are shareholder driven and because they operate quarter to quarter you get this quarterly buying behaviour."

Signs of just how successful Whitman has been in stopping the rot at HP will be unveiled at the company’s quarterly results tomorrow.