HP to reward partners for portfolio breadth

Vendor's new EMEA ESSN boss outlines top priorities for the channel

HP's new EMEA channel boss for its Enterprise Storage, Servers and Networking (ESSN) business has vowed to reward partners for selling the vendor's full portfolio.

Klaus Rumsauer took over the regional director role in January, stepping up from a post as ESSN country manager for Germany. He told ChannelWeb that he had earmarked three top priorities for HP's infrastructure channel.

First on his list was to ensure HP financially rewards partners commensurate with how much of the full ESSN portfolio they sell. Priority number two was to "make it easier to work with" HP.

"[We want to] optimise processes, make it easier to get pricing and make specialist pricing faster," added Rumsauer (pictured). "Our certification process will also be much easier in future."

The third main objective for the ESSN top dog is to help partners with the move towards cloud, which will be "a journey that takes years".

"With the big [partners] we have to do this directly, for the smaller ones we will do this with our distributors", he said. "Every reseller knows they have to change their business model. Their customers are asking what they should do to transform their IT to be cloud ready. Every reseller knows they have to offer this to their customers.

"Sometimes it is simple like: 'here is a new Matrix system, here is a new server'. But most IT installations for customers are not cloud ready. This is not just about technology, it is also the knowledge in business process and design. It is not simple."