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HP to have new certification initiative for VARs

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CIOL Bureau
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Zia Askari

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NEW YORK: After having committed itself to make a fundamental shift from ‘printers to printing’, global IT major Hewlett-Packard is set to roll out globally a new certification initiative directed towards the value added reseller community.

As part of this initiative, billed as HP Certified Partner Program, the company is looking forward to providing certification on three levels of optimizing infrastructure, managing environments and improving workflow for its VARs.

“We are aiming at expanding the capabilities of our SMB customers. There is a huge opportunity for us as well as our partners, in this segment. We will be rolling out this certification program in about a month’s time. We already have a big global community of value added resellers, solution providers and system integrators that we closely work with. So, once we roll this out, we would be looking at having close to 2000 VARs for this certification, globally,” informed, Bruce Dahlgren, senior vice president, Global Enterprise Business, HP.

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As the company is channeling efforts towards addressing the overall printing business in a different way, certification initiatives like this will become importantly significant in order to have the whole reseller ecosystem work for the company, and also manage this change in an efficient manner.

Speaking about this fundamental shift that the company is making, Cathy Lyons, senior vice president, Strategic Change Management, Imaging and Printing Group, HP said that there is a fundamental shift happening at the company today.

“This is a fundamental shift for us. We have taken a comprehensive view of the market dynamics in this business. This is all about addressing this segment in terms of ‘pages’ and not in terms of just the ‘hardware’. We know that digital technology disrupts analog technology, markets shift. However, at the same time it also gives birth to new ideas and new companies get born,” she added.

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On the SMB focus for the company, Lyons said that SMB is today one of the most important segments when it comes to addressing printing and is fuelling most of the commerce activity.

“There is a huge opportunity in front of us. The overall hardware and software market opportunity is more than $ 300 billion for this segment and SMB is right in the middle of it,” she added.

(HP hosted the correspondent in New York)