Earlier this week HP wrapped up the Dubai leg of its Amplify Executive Forum 2022, where the company unpacked its channel strategy for key partners from across the Middle East and Africa (MEA) region.
The event also afforded HP the opportunity to showcase new personal systems and printers, along with detailing where its key focus in terms of consumer hardware will be moving forward.
We were on hand at the event, sitting in on the partner session to hear precisely what the rest of 2022 holds in store the company, as well as listen to some of the areas that HP will be directing its attention in the coming years.
Pushing sustainability
Opening up the event was Kobi Elbaz (pictured below), SVP and GM for the Global Channel at HP.
One of the first things he did, was detail how the Amplify Impact program was progressing. To date the initiative, which aims to enable HP partners to drive greater sustainability into their operations, was adopted by roughly 35 percent of organisations in the 43 countries it was rolled out in.
While that was indeed an impressive figure in HP’s view, the desire is always to get that number to 100 percent, which is why Amplify Impact is being rolled out globally to every territory that HP operates in.
In order to drive engagement, HP plans to acknowledge and award those partners who place sustainability as a key objective. While there are no incentives, Elbaz explains that the value of embracing sustainability will be made abundantly clear to partners, especially as consumers are increasingly looking to spend their money with companies that are actively looking at sustainability.
To ease the concerns of cynics in the room, such as ourselves, Elbaz also noted that channel partners will monitored and assessed in terms of delivering objectives. As such, it is not enough to simply take a pledge with Amplify Impact, as there needs to be tangible action too, so we for one are hoping HP holds its partners to account.
Along with highlighting sustainability as one of its key agendas at the Amplify Executive Forum 2022, Elbaz also spoke about a platform aimed to assist sales people in the form of HP Curiosity.
Giving reps more
This platform is going to be rolled out worldwide and HP plans to have as many as 100 000 sales representatives signed up and making use of Curiosity by the end of 2023. This platform will make information about the entire suite of HP consumer products available to sales reps, with training on more technical elements also being added.
HP will be gamifying Curiosity too, in order to help drive engagement. We were also told by Elbaz that a sales rep would be able to see information on devices that may not be available in their territory and motivate to bring it there.
This could help remove some red tape, and potentially assist sales reps in experimenting with new devices to gauge interest in a market like South Africa, where the entire lineup of HP products is not always made available.
Lastly, Elbaz emphasised the fact that HP is acutely aware of the strain that the past two years has placed on the global supply chain. To react effectively to the changes, HP has invested in initiatives like air freighting where needed, and retrofitting some of its factories to assist in reducing redundancies.
In the long-term HP expects these issues to balance out, but in the short-term it says it is taking all possible measures to ensure partners have a ready and sustained flow of devices coming through.
