HP CEO Mark Hurd: Never Enough
By Damon Poeter, ChannelWeb
April 23, 2010
Page 2 of 5
It All Starts With The Channel
"We're not just channel friendly. We're channel zealots," Hurd said to emphasize a point about HP (NYSE:HPQ)'s best path toward a greater share of several market segments. He sees "material opportunities" for HP to gain share in IT services, in sales to small businesses and in data center infrastructure.

To seize those opportunities, HP will need its reseller partners on board.

"We heavily rely on the channel. We look at them as an extension of the HP sales force," he said. These aren't mere words spun to impress a channel audience. Hurd owns this story in earnest.

The HP chief spends upward of 60 percent of the year on the road with his SPO lieutenants, meeting with HP's PartnerOne VARs and their customers as part of the computing giant's Executive Connections program. Those roundtable meetings take place as many as 50 times a year in North America and beyond.

It's an effort that has engendered fierce loyalty to HP among many reseller partners.

"I've probably met Mark Hurd more times in the last three or four years than all of the CEOs of our other vendors combined," said Simon Palmer, president of Tustin, Calif.-based STA, one of HP's fastest-growing solution provider partners in the midmarket segment.

"There's no other CEO of any company that size that's even close. He's such a down-to-earth guy. He presents the HP story in very simple-to-understand terms," Palmer said.

Hurd was scheduled to sit on an Executive Connections roundtable in mid-April with Palmer and CIOs from STA's main customers. Another HP partner, AdvizeX Technologies, had just held a similar roundtable with Hurd and other HP executives when Mark Sarazin, executive vice president of the Independence, Ohio-based solution provider, took time to sing Hurd's praises.

"He spent two-and-a-half hours with our customers. He talked in terms they could relate with, about his own relationship with HP IT. He talked about server sprawl and data sprawl," said Sarazin, whose company has partnered with HP for 25 years and holds its highest partner designation, Preferred Elite.

"He knocked the ball out of the park with our 25-plus CIOs who were in the room. One said it was the best event he'd been to in his career."

Hurd seems to see no limits to how HP's partner channel can play a role in any number of HP's business-facing portfolios. Naturally, he mentions the channel's part in HP's ongoing effort to grow its share of client PC and entry-level server sales into the SMB segment--"a $55 billion market in the United States," according to Hurd.

HP opened a new sales operation in Rio Rancho, N.M., in January called the "SMB Exchange." The exchange combines a call center with inside sales and channel sales teams--the most visible part of HP's effort to carve out SMB market share from "Dell, Cisco and Lexmark and anyone else out there," according to John Hood, the HP vice president running the show in Rio Rancho.

1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 Next >