PartnerOne Gets Face-Lift

Three years after launching its PartnerOne program, Hewlett-Packard has made some changes that the company says should make life easier for solution providers, while giving distributors a greater role.

The changes to PartnerOne took effect soon after John Thompson celebrated his first anniversary as vice president and general manager of HP's Solution Provider Organization (SPO). Much has happened during that time, starting with a tumultuous few quarters and culminating in the ousting of chairman and CEO Carly Fiorina. But now with new president and CEO Mark Hurd clearly in command, Thompson has his marching orders to reward those partners who sell the most HP products.

Among the modifications to PartnerOne, HP is bringing its distributors--including Agilysys, Arrow Electronics, Avnet, Bell Micro, Ingram Micro, Synnex and Tech Data--into the mix to generate demand and help solution providers take advantage of all the PartnerOne tools and programs, Thompson says.

"This underscores HP's commitment to all aspects of the partner, including distribution," he says. "The fact that we are joining forces in a more formal way with our distributor partners to drive the benefits of PartnerOne out into the marketplace [and] into the channel is an illustration of the importance we place on our distributor partnerships."

John Paget, president and COO of Synnex, views the move as an effort by HP to rely on distributors for more than just product fulfillment.

"It builds a closer relationship between the distributor and the reseller," says Paget, noting that HP accounts for 20 percent of Synnex's overall business. "This builds a cooperative kind of joint effort from a marketing standpoint, and it builds an interdependency between the reseller and the distributor."

Among other changes to PartnerOne, HP is realigning its storage product lines so they are designated as either commercial or enterprise. For enterprise partners, that means those who sell commercial products will be compensated the same way volume partners are. HP downplayed that margins could be cut on certain lower-end storage products, saying it will step up its effort to reward commercial partners who emphasize storage products.

"We are not saving money or dropping this to the bottom line. We are looking to invest more," says Tom LaRocca, vice president of HP's Americas Partner Development and Programs.

Rather than give margins at the rate of higher-end enterprise systems, HP will invest those funds to train and provide market development funds to commercial or enterprise partners committed to selling larger volumes, LaRocca says.

"We want to elevate the sales and increase revenue," he says. Because the number of such systems that enterprise partners typically sell is insignificant, he doesn't anticipate backlash.

Another change to PartnerOne that is unlikely to result in any backlash is the elimination of a requirement that Gold- and Platinum-level partners are responsible to conduct satisfaction surveys of their customers every quarter or jeopardize their partner status. "It just made sense that we took it internally and stopped burdening partners with this survey," LaRocca says.

Richard Chan, president of KIS Computer Center, Santa Fe Springs, Calif., welcomed the lifting of that requirement. Many of his customers are schools and don't appreciate being surveyed every quarter for 25 minutes at a time. "We had to beg them to participate," Chan says. "It was a real hassle."

HP also is promising to maintain the integrity of PartnerOne through annual audits and is providing a more streamlined deal registration with an improved PartnerOne portal, LaRocca adds.

Finally, HP has brought back Dan Vertrees to bridge HP's top enterprise solution providers with the company's large-account sales team. By tapping Vertrees, the company is returning a familiar face to work with HP's enterprise solution providers. Vertrees served as vice president of the company's Enterprise Partners Group until nearly two years ago when the company built a common solution-provider organization for both enterprise and commercial partners.

"They put it together, and now they are tearing it apart again, which makes a lot of sense," says Rich Baldwin, CEO of San Diego-based Nth Generation Computing, an HP enterprise server and storage partner. Vertrees' role will be different in that he will report to the sales side of HP's Technology Solutions Group.

Vertrees sees this move as an opportunity to build stronger go-to-market efforts between some of HP's largest enterprise partners and the company's field sales reps. "The business results will speak for themselves," he says. "We see this as a journey for success."