How disties will help resellers navigate HP's $112bn split

HP will fund salary relief so that its 200 largest distributors and direct resellers can appoint a dedicated employee to help manage the impact of its split into two $57 billion companies.

HP began sharing details of the 'Partner Navigator' program with top partners around a month ago. These major partners have been asked to nominate an employee within their organisation to act as an interface with HP, to manage potential speed bumps such as connections into HP order management or its Electronic Data Interchange.

Jos Brenkel, senior VP of worldwide sales strategy in the HP Printing and Personal Systems (PPS) business, said that the while partners largely saw value in the separation, their most common concerns were around orders and rebates.

The Navigator program is HP's way to ensure partners don't hit these speed bumps.

With disties and top partners redeploying staff members to oversee the separation, HP will provide salary funding relief to lessen the impact. 

"That person's day job was not historically to focus on the HP separation, so we give the distributor or large reseller funding relief: relief on tasks they may need to execute to do with separation, such as on their systems or rebranding on their website," said Sue Barsamian, general manager of worldwide indirect sales, for the Enterprise Group.

HP will start operating as two separate companies – Hewlett-Packard Enterprise and consumer business HP Inc – from 1 August, the regulatory 90 days before the official separation on 1 November.

Some 85 percent of the top partners have already identified and nominated a Navigator, said Barsamian, speaking to CRN Australia at the vendor's Global Partner Conference (GPC), which takes place this week in Las Vegas.

By appointing Navigators months ahead of the split, HP hopes to avoid any possible fallout from broken systems.

"The focus from a risk mitigation perspective is how to ensure the separation doesn't cause any disruptions. That why we launched the partner Navigator program: to look at the 200 large distributors and partners that directly touch HP for 80 percent of the business we do though the channel, and to put funding in place," said Barsamian.

These top 200 partners represent 80 percent of the vendor's channel business; the channel as a whole represents 70 percent of HP's revenue, both in the consumer and enterprise businesses.

Australian companies will appoint Navigators, while global players may have regional resources. It is expected that group would include major HP partners such as Data#3, Datacom and Dicker Data, as well as top global HP partners such as Ingram Micro, Synnex and Avnet.

Dicker Data, for instance, has given the role to business manager Marty Simunic.

What about the rest of the channel?

For the vast majority of resellers, which buy HP solutions via distributors, the split should be scarcely noticeable, said Patrick Eitenbichler, director of marketing, PartnerOne Strategy, HP Enterprise.

Brenkel explained that HP is putting in place a shared "partner care" service to support the "broader ecosystem who aren't part of that ecosystem of direct touch".

Here, HP will task its own internal account operations managers to oversee the transition for a number of partners, according to Brenkel. "For the rest for the reseller channel, we are increasing the reseller support people to interface with the channel we don't touch directly. They will handle maybe five accounts."

HP will also expand its call centre support for tens of thousands of partners to handle any operations-related issues around the split for partners buying HP products through distributors.

Steven Kiernan is a guest of HP at the Global Partner Conference