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Q&A
PITR:
What has HP been doing to
prepare for the launch of its new A3
MFPs?
Neil Sawyer
:
Our print business is very
buoyant at the moment, particularly within
the commercial printing space – the laser
and the ink space. If we look at the UK and
Ireland, a lot of our focus over the past
year or two has been around managed
print services, because we feel that that’s
where the opportunity resides for the
3,500 partners we work with today.
The good thing about HP is that the vast
proportion – 80-87% – of our total business
is fulfilled through the channel. We’re a very
channel-friendly business and that will be
our strategy when we go to market with
our A3 products as well. A lot of the new
partnerships we're developing are as a
result of our investment in A3 technology.
My main job over the last six months
has been to ready our markets for the
introduction of the A3 product on May 1. We
have on-boarded approximately 25 partners
in the UK and Ireland who will make up the
main route to market for us when we sell
A3. Approximately 10 of them are totally
new to HP; the balance are partners we've
traded with for the last 15-20 years.
We’ve also been investing in people and
processes, making sure that the partners
we work with have the right amount of
people to help them on key managed
print service (MPS) projects. Some of these
partners are quite new to the HP brand, so
it’s important that we equip them properly,
as well as working with our main – in fact
our only – distributor in the UK and Ireland.
From day one, Westcoast will act as a
handler and an order management guide
for all of our partners for A3.
The final point I'll make in terms of our
business and new partner opportunities
is that HP comes from a very, very strong
pedigree in print. We’ve got a very good
and healthy market share, particularly in
A4 office printing. Our customers are very
familiar with our product, particularly as
we are also the leaders in the UK and
Ireland for business computing, both
laptops and desktops.
Beyond the world of A3 and managed
print services, we’ve got an amazing
product portfolio of devices, technology
and solutions, so we can help our reseller
partners unlock new markets. A good
example is what we’ve been doing with
two of our partners, Landscape Printing
and Softcat; using their knowledge of
managed print services to sell PCs and
other types of product with the same
billing and contractual terms that a partner
would have traditionally used to sell MPS.
On top of that, we’ve got 3D printing
coming into the market place. HP are
pioneers of enterprise-grade 3D printing,
and we’ve got wide format and graphics
printing, which are complementary
products to a lot of our new products.
PITR:
What for you are some of the
key growth areas for HP?
Sawyer
:
We have a very clear strategy.
Our main business is what we call our
Core Strategy – that is what we do every
day with all of our partners, whether for
transactional printing or managed print
service solutions. That’s our core business.
Where we feel we really want to grow
is with the introduction of a wider A3
portfolio and, of course, the acquisition of
the Samsung printing business. That’s where
we see growth with our print resellers in
particular – we call that our growth strategy.
Our future strategy with those partners
is looking beyond what the market
demands today to what we know they’ll be
demanding in the future. A good example
would be the investment we’ve been putting
into 3D printing; we genuinely believe that
is a game-changer for the future.
Whether with our core, our growth
or our future strategy, HP has got a very
sustainable partnership with our resellers.
We don’t stand still and we always help
them grow in areas that perhaps they
hadn't explored in the past.
PITR:
What are the challenges facing
channel partners today and what is
HP doing to counter them?
Sawyer
:
My observation is that channel
partners have a lot of new programs and
ideas thrown at them from many different
vendors and many different service
providers. It’s difficult to digest all of that
and compare all those programs, so one
of the things HP is doing is making our
programs and the way in which we work
As HP introduces its new range of A3 MFPs for MPS resellers,
PITR
caught up with Neil Sawyer to find out more about the company’s plans
HP broadens its appeal
At the beginning of May, HP introduced the new range of A3
MFPs that it first announced last September. Available to HP
managed print services providers, the range includes 13 A3
Laserjets and three A3 Pagewide MFPs with print speeds of up
to 80 pages per minute (general office mode).
In total, there are 54 SKUs, giving qualified channel partners
the ability to offer higher levels of customisation with industry-
leading security and longer device uptime via HP’s Smart Device
Services (SDS) technology.
A cloud-based, proprietary service optimisation platform, SDS
adds advanced diagnostics, device-specific troubleshooting and
remote remediation capabilities to the MPS tool sets used by HP
resellers.
HP :
A3 MFPs
