A top Hewlett-Packard executive has reaffirmed the company's commitment to
all its channel reseller partners a little over a week after a leaked memo
revealed a deal between the vendor and direct market reseller CDW that raised questions
about potential channel conflict.
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ChannelWeb first broke the story of the leaked memo, saying that the HP/CDW
agreement called for HP to co-fund 110 new HP-only CDW sales reps to sell HP
products into accounts with 499 or fewer employees. The report says that
CDW would use a list of leads provided by HP and built using Dun and
Bradstreet's customer list against historical sales of HP products through HP
direct, HP channel partners and CDW.
HP Vice President of Marketing and Strategy for HP Solution Partners
Organization Tom LaRocca told Channel Insider that while HP creates
co-marketing plans with many partners, each plan is created with provisions
against channel conflict. And while he could not comment on any specific
deal, he said that those provisions mean that even after a plan is in place,
the deal can be renegotiated if it becomes evident that the deal is causing
channel conflict.
See the video of HP Vice President Tom LaRocca's response here.
"If we greenlight a plan and there's channel conflict, we'll stop it
right away," LaRocca said. "It's written into every single
deal. If it ends up not being incremental revenue, then there is
conflict. If there's going to be conflict there, it's not a good investment for
us."
LaRocca said that when a partner submits a co-marketing plan to HP it must
contain three components before it can be approved: incremental revenue,
co-investment and no channel conflict.
The plan has raised alarms across the reseller channel because CDW is known
to aggressively compete on price.
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Hewlett-Packard 
