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The PC Is Profitable Again

Thirty-second TV spots with Jay-Z boasting “The PC is personal again!” might say it louder, but for the past six months, John Snaider, vice president and general manager of Hewlett-Packard’s Americas Business PCs, and the company’s Personal Systems Group have been preaching to the manufacturer’s 26,000 channel partners that “the PC is profitable again.” Thin […]

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John Hazard

Mar 29, 2007

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Thirty-second TV spots with Jay-Z boasting “The PC is personal again!” might say it louder, but for the past six months, John Snaider, vice president and general manager of Hewlett-Packard’s Americas Business PCs, and the company’s Personal Systems Group have been preaching to the manufacturer’s 26,000 channel partners that “the PC is profitable again.”

Thin clients, workstations, PC blades, “green” projects and vertical solutions like Point of Sale have made the PC a comeback story for the PSG group and HP wants VARs that gave up on PC sales or surrendered them to competitors and Dell to restart their PC practices, Snaider said.

“It’s a very different conversation to have with the customer to talk about a workstation solution with a power-supply story to it, than just a PC rollout,” Snaider said. “There’s a new value proposition here for the customer and a new way to sell PCs. Partners are making two to five times the margin [on the new offerings as opposed to] the core PC business.”

Snaider said there are thousands of accounts the company hasn’t spoken to about PCs in years, because the HP channel gave up on the line for higher-end solutions. “They bring it up to us. They might not be happy with their current PC solution, but no one from HP is talking to them. VARs have those relationships, but they didn’t feel it was worth their while to have that conversation. We want to have that conversation with them again.”

To ensure that it has the channel’s attention, PSG is rolling out incentive programs for new business — customers it hasn’t sold to in 12 months — and resources such as a Territory Sales model to help VARs reach a space between HP’s 1,300 largest accounts, or “Named Accounts,” and the SMB, what Snaider calls the “sweet spot” for these solutions. Territory managers and reps are compensated the same as for direct, HP said.

PSG also added a number of new engineers to its Houston staff to build out the technical assistance the channel may need to rely on selling the more solution-oriented thin-client, workstation, blade and vertical solutions.

The PC Is Profitable Again

John Hazard

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