HP Inc’s Australian channel chief Chelsea Rossney is calling on partners to embrace the use of data and analytics as they manage customer device fleets to be able to deliver better value.
In an exclusive interview with CRN last week, Rossney said the analytics services the vendor has developed would assist partners and HP to anticipate customer needs in terms of procurement, service delivery and particularly fleet management.
“Every good business needs to know more about the community and the customer they're serving,” she said. “I really applaud HP globally in taking on a lot for device vendor, to move into that space where it's collaborative reporting together with the partner and a lot of information we have and working together to deliver insights that will be meaningful for the partner to make market choices longer term for their customers and serve what's required.”
"Our services and lifecycle management and the predictive analytics [solutions] that are coming through [will] be important and those are areas that will pay dividends for us in our growth with the partners moving forward."
The HP Amplify Data Insights program combines protected partner data with third-party market intelligence and internal data in one platform.
The program offers a series of insights to assist partners including descriptive insights to benchmark performance and customer segment strategies; predictive insights to anticipate customer interest and purchasing decisions; and prescriptive insights to help partners up-sell, cross-sell and optimise marketing campaigns.
“Partners [are] looking at the trends of their business, specific to HP, and [seeing] what opportunities there might be within what they do today, or that they're not doing today," Rossney said.
"That could be via segments or industry and so these data insights, which are really important for us as a vendor [to help determine] how we grow in the same path together because we're a channel lead model, so we're not selling directly. It's that's why collaboration is important so that we can each workout, how we're serving that customer together.”
She said that these insights were important for the vendor as well to see where HP needed to focus as a business going forward.
“But it's very specific to the individual partners, their unique, so they're not all cut from the same cloth and that's the also the beauty is that this lens of this collaborative reporting actually gets the insights that are relevant to them and the specialisations they want to trace or the industries or the verticals that they're interested in.
"That helps them pick from a menu of opportunities to target... We have a broad offering and so each partner may choose to specialise in different avenues.
"The dashboard that can help display that [data] if the partners weren't tracking that themselves, which a lot of the probably small to medium partners haven't had the infrastructure to do."
Keeping pace
Rossney added that it was important to the vendor to stay at the forefront of delivering services to the partner community which would provide value beyond device quality and delivery.
"We need to be relevant to the partners and keep up with where they're moving sometimes quicker than us," she said.
“And for us [that] will be the heart of SMB and that hybrid workplace. So the new innovations that are going to come through that will support us, on top of the core device muscle we have, in how we continue to grow and stay relevant with the ecosystems that are required in that hybrid, workplace and decentralised working.
"You'll see a lot more of that and we need to tell that story now and show how it'll make a difference for the partners to build out more with HP outside of that core muscle."
Rossney said that while the vendor was well known for the quality of the devices it produces, for HP and its partners, it needed to go further to provide solutions to support the delivery model for customers that have embraced the new hybrid model of working.
“And also some of our portfolios [such as] services, software security, collaboration, hardware as well, bringing more to our boat that will sit in that ecosystem as well.”
Rossney cited collaboration as one of the areas where HP had made big strides.
“There's a lot of unified communications business that has been there and HP will be [focused on] that opportunity with our partners, so the SMB market will be able to grow with us there where it's much needed," she said.
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