A vendor's economic health, its business decisions and its attitudes toward the channel can all make a huge impact on the loyal distributors, VARs, SIs, consultants and MSPs that live and die by the brands they represent. In this Vendor Profile, Channel Insider takes a look at HP. The world leader in PC sales and a big player in networking, mobility and managed print services, HP has a massive channel and tons of opportunities for resellers.
of
HP brought in $114.6B in revenue for FY09.
HP manages over 200 data centers, 380,000 servers, 5.4 million desktops, and 17 million IP addresses.
HP maintains a relationship with over 155,000 channel partners worldwide and 25,000 in North America.
Speculation is flying that as a result of the Palm acquisition, HP could go head-to-head with the iPad with a new webOS tablet (code-name 'HP Hurricane') by third quarter 2010.
HP will rebrand the ProCurve and the 3Com networking lines under the header of a new division called HP Networking and with product lines dubbed the A Series, E Series, V Series and S Series.
Now that the break-up is over, HP has decided to pair up with Polycom to power video and voice collaboration products within the HP unified communications portfolio.
HP is taking on Cisco, IBM, Dell and Oracle visions of integrating and streamlining data center operations with a new blade architecture for its Integrity servers that benefits VARS because it runs the same OS as the old Integrity systems. Easy transition and no learning curve.
HP announced last fall the launch of its global business unit for managed print services and has been singing the praises of managed print's opportunities to its partners steadily since then.
HP says partners can get their foot in the door with promises of up to 30 percent in print savings and also gain higher channel program status through the sale of paper and ink by running with the managed print sale.
However, these claims have effectively sparked a battle with Xerox, which tells its partners it offers better opportunity for margin and growth through its own managed print services.
Earlier this year, HP opened a new outbound call center in New Mexico that’s targeting Dell's SMB account base for displacement.
It also launched SMB Exchange, a sales strike team designed to aggressively pursue non-HP customers with specials delivered either through resellers or directly through HP.
At its partner event last month, HP also expanded the bells and whistles of its PartnerOne SMB Elite program for partners specializing in SMB sales.
18.Also big on the agenda during the partner event was the promotion of health care-friendly spiffs for VARs to encourage better penetration into the health care market.
Last fall, HP ticked off many of its partners when it sent a fax to its channel demanding that they all pay a $120 fee and go through a short compliance course on anti-bribery practices.
During fourth quarter of 2009, IDC found that HP held the number two spot by revenue in the worldwide server market. It held 30.5 percent of the market, 4.9 points behind IBM.
One out of every three servers shipped worldwide is from HP.
Gartner reports that HP has a firm grasp of the PC shipment leader board, shipping one-fifth of all PCs during first quarter of 2010.
This year the company is powering a majority of its notebook lineup with AMD chips as a part of a new deal with the chip maker.
HP says it sells two notebooks per second.
Such dominance does have its downsides -- last fall a study found that HP notebooks have the worst reliability in the market.
Intel Technology Provider Program
Intel Technology Provider Program (ITP) helps resellers better understand Intel products which power the technology they sell, and enables value-add services such as remote manageability or anti-theft tracking. Learn More
WindowsForDevices.com
WindowsForDevices.com is the comprehensive news site covering Windows embedded technologies. Visitors get news, technical white papers, opinion columns and extensive directories covering the products and companies in the marketplace. Click Here
Hewlett-Packard 
10 Key Ingredients That Have Made Apple So Successful
10 Reasons RIM`s New CEO Won`t Fix the Company
Eight IT Jobs Skills That Win Six-Figure Salaries
Social Media Best Practices to Land that Dream Job
Channel Executives On The Move: 2012
Why SOPA Is Such A Big Issue
See All Slideshows
