HP's new channel strategy debuts in India

Shweta Khanna

NEW DELHI: Elaborating their new channel policy, HP (India), Commercial Channel Head, Prasenjit Sarkar, said that HP's channel policy was proving to be fruitful and channel partners have welcomed this new move. "We would stick to HP's two tier channel program that measures the sale outs and the channel partners of a particular partner, unlike Compaq's channel program based on sale ins only," he added.

It has realigned the incentive programs for all three tiers of its channel hierarchy--Wholesalers, Resellers and Sales Executives. For the horizontal partner accreditation, now there will be Premier Business Partners, Premier Partners and Registered Partners across the new HP. For the resellers, it will have the Final Tier Performance Plus (FTPP) in place for them. For the sales executives, it has merged the erstwhile reward schemes of pre-merger HP and Compaq, called Superstar Loyalty and e-Points, by announcing e-Points across the board.

To facilitate this, the company has invited all Compaq partners to register themselves under the new HP's Premier Partner family. "This is being done for all the product categories, right from printers to servers to commercial desktops," revealed Sarkar.

Talking about the vertical program category, he said that these programs will be product specific and all the channel partners of this new entity would be eligible for the same. Though, it has renamed few channel programs to eliminate the ambiguity.

Talking about the tactical programs, Sarkar said that now the new entity would be able to offer better programs to its channel partners as they can bundle up the products offers and create a win-win situation for it's channel partners across the board.

With this development, the new HP's four national distributors--Tech Pacific, Redington, Ingram Micro and Iris Computers--now have a standard model of credit, credit terms, and cash discounts, informed Sarkar.

The company has also put in place a regular auditing of all the channel programs by an external auditing agency, which wasn't the case for Compaq. Besides this, a new CRM function has also been introduced to look after the interests of the channel partners.

HP has also allotted user IDs and passwords to Compaq channel partners to monitor their performance online, the same way as HP channel partners have been doing so far.

Sarkar is happy about the enthusiasm shown by the new channel community in terms of acceptance of these new policies and is very happy with the fact that India has been the first country to complete the channel policy integration.

(CNS)